4 Tips for Sculpting in Blender for Beginners

The Four Tips to Better Sculpting!

The main 4 things to remember when sculpting as a beginner are:

• Keep it simple
• Use big brushes
• Keep moving the camera
• Use references!

These are universal regardless of whether or not you are using Blender, ZBrush, 3Dcoat, Mudbox or something completely different. These 4 tips will help you be a more effective 3D sculptor.

But let us expand upon these a little more.

Tip 1 - Keep it simple

It is very important to keep your polygon count low while you are blocking out your 3D sculpt.

This will ensure that you can have more control over the larger shapes, which is essential when starting any artwork. (Shape and form is the most essential part of the process).

If you have too many polygons, you will find tools like smooth will no longer work as effectively.

This is because the smooth essentially acts like an average between faces. The more faces. the more quickly that average is reached and thus it will not smooth as effectively.

Tip 2 - Big and Bold!

Keep your sculpting brushes LARGE. This will help you focus on the larger shapes and not be tempted to focus on the details too early.

A checky extension to this tip is to also keep your camera zoomed out. This will force you to only make big and bold brush strokes as creating detail while zoomed out will be more hassle than it is worth.

Tip 3 - Keep moving!

To ensure that you are focusing on the complete model, be sure to continually move your camera around and switch in and out of orthographic. I see a lot of artists that stay in orthographic and wonder why their work looks different when they are viewing it in a render. (We see the world in perspective, and therefore we should model to perspective too.)

Tip 4 - Add References

References are very important, as they give you a guide on the shape and form you require before you move on to more details.

I hope that they 4 tips help you and your sculpts. If they do, be sure to let us know via Twitter or YouTube!