This ugly little critter unlocked a new bit of Blender that I hadn't really paid much attention to up till now.
Blender features a 'sculpt mode' which is like a 'nicer' version of the infamous ZBrush tool that has been kicking around for a couple of decades now. I remember trying out the education version of ZBrush once and the UI was so unintuitive I just couldn't get along with it, despite my jaw dropping at the results others were somehow wringing out of the thing.
Blender's sculpt mode relies on fairly complex underlying geometry so I made the classic mistake of setting up a high poly primitive to begin my sculpting work on. Wrong, wrong, oh so wrong - as the first thing that happens is your computer begins to protest - very quickly making any normal sculpting operations very laggy, let alone doing anything 'standard' like rotating or panning your view.
So back to square one and a lower poly count, and then things began to make a lot more sense.
Digital sculpting (of any kind) is remarkably like using clay in a lot of respects. The 'tools' you use to make marks and deform the geometry in a pleasurable way are entirely different though, but there is a huge similarity between the two when it comes to that point in a sculpture where you know the damned thing's irredeemable and you're just not going to be able to 'repair' the damage, no matter how many clay strips or fine lines you use.
Most of the time when I've been noodling around, I've come up with stuff like the header image above fairly easily.
Cheating by using geometry mirrors, and generally teasing those polygons into something recognisable is extremely soothing and I think it's more testament to how intuitive Blender feels compared to other "3D Clay" packages that I was able to do anything at all.
I took Nomad (iPad app for doing this kind of thing) for a test drive, and £12.99 later and a lot of frustration and I ended up having to get a refund because I just could not get on with it at all. So back to Blender!
The other thing I did fairly early on in my sculpting journey was swapping my mouse for my old Wacom Intuos Pro M (which amazingly still worked after years of being consigned to the 'old gadget' shelf). This thing was a real game changer on two fronts: Drawing or etching lines far more accurately (and even using the custom control setups to replicate all the stuff I'd been doing with keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures) and pressure sensitivity (which is a good / bad thing with some of the sculpting tools).
It's been really interesting to try and figure out Blender's sculpt mode and how it differs from the more traditional primitive-modelling geometry-based stuff I'd been doing up to now, but now and again I'd find myself with holes in my meshes, or just weird underlying geometry that wouldn't let me add or remove 'clay' to my model in key places. Even so, it's definitely the part of Blender I'll be using if I need to do anything more organic or natural than I had up to now (you'd be amazed at how quickly you can turn a humble loop-cut cylinder into a tree trunk using this mode). But remember to keep your poly count low at first, subdivide later and if you really must (at risk of totally buggering your model up) use remesh and soon you'll begin to fall in love with sculpting just like I have (though given a workshop and the space to do it all in I'd happily swap digital for real clay, wood or stone again at the drop of a hat).
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