Adventures across the 3rd dimension

The latest IFX issue dropped through my letterbox today and the front cover is a fantastic CG sculpture that looks exactly like real clay. Unfortunately there was no video with that workshop but there must be a way to make a shader/texture like that in Blender.

*googles*
And there is!

*watches YouTube video*
*slowly follows tutorial*

And my version looks absolutely nothing like clay.
In fact it looks more like a moon than my ... moon.

*goes away to think a bit more*

Recently saw some interesting videos by Marco Bucci about combining 2D and 3D techniques in Blender. Sadly I don't have the skill or patience to do it myself but I had fun learning about it.

Sculpty portrait "scribble" thing.

 

Looking good to me!

The other day I tried to do some "proper" texture painting using Blender's Quick Edit function like this...


...but obviously using ArtRage instead of Krita/Gimp/whatever. Painting within Blender is never much fun so I thought it'd be better using brushes/tools that I'm more comfortable with and painting from a view rather than a distorted UV thing.
I exported the view successfully, did a quick scribble to test it but couldn't get Blender to reapply the texture.
Has anybody else tried this with ArtRage? I'm wondering if the traditional painting options are messing up the layer or if there's an extra step I'm missing.

I just paint the textures in ArtRage to begin with and then apply them in Blender... Sometimes I have copied an image showing the UV-mapping so I know where to paint stuff in ArtRage (by fitting the UV map on it's own layer and then hiding it before exporting the texture).

After a bit of experimenting I've worked out that it didn't work because ArtRage doesn't automatically save the file in the correct "Temp" folder.

More sculpty stuff...

 

 

 

I did quite a bit of this one on my tablet (finger sculpting! )using Nomad Sculpt after paying the necessary coins to unlock the import/export options of the full version and it really is rather good.
But obviously the texturing, hair and lighting were done on PC afterwards.

A quick "Dino" base extruded with the skin modifier...

 

Some sculpting may happen at a future time/date.