Using different materials

Sculptris comes with a variety of materials that you can apply to models, but you can also create your own custom materials. In this movie, I'm going to use Photoshop and a picture of a real object to make my own custom material. If you don't have Photoshop, you can use pretty much any image editing program. There is a really great one called Pixlr. It's free and you can run it right off of its website; go to pixlr.com/editor. In Sculptris you can change the material by clicking on the Material swatch; this brings up a gallery of options.

Feel free to experiment with the various materials. I like to sculpt with the Material8, let's just scroll down here and get Material8. This one does a good job of showing the form of my sculpture, so I usually like to work in this one. There is a few of them that are a little bit on the fancy side; let's try this one here. Materials like this may look cool, but I don't like to sculpt with them because they can become distracting with all these reflections. Materials like this are better applied when you're done sculpting and you just want to show something off with a material that's appropriate for whatever you've sculpted.

It's really up to your preference which material you use. Now let's make a custom material. I'm going to go into Photoshop. Don't worry if you don't know Photoshop; we won't be doing anything even close to complicated. I'm going to open this image I have of an ornament. I've picked this image because the ornament has a nice material quality. If you use your own image, it works best if the object has a uniform surface quality. In other words, just a simple surface with no color variation or other shapes on its surface.

This ornament will work great because we can see the whole spherical shape; there is no other object blocking it. I want to make sure we've got the Crop tool active here and I want to hold down Shift while I draw out a crop box. This will make sure that we have a perfect square to work with. Once we've drawn that out, I just want to hold down Shift again and just size this until the edges of the crop box are right up against the ornament. Let's just move it around a little bit until it's perfectly aligned.

Alright, pretty good! Now I'll hit Enter. Now let's resize the image. Go up to Image>Image Size and I'm going to input 256 by 256--make sure it's set to Pixels--and click OK. Now we need to save this image to the Sculptris Materials folder. Now we need to go into Applications and actually find the location where the Sculptris is installed: Sculptris Alpha Six in the Applications folder, and the Materials folder, great, and I'll just call it Ornament and save it.

The default settings are fine, just click OK. If you're using a PC or a Windows computer, the location where you want to save this is in C:\Program Files(X86)\ Pixologic\Sculptris Alpha 6\materials. Okay let's go back to Sculptris now. Let's go into our Materials and notice that it's not in here yet; we just need to hit Update to refresh the list of materials. Let's scroll down and it's right here; it's in alphabetic order. Let's click Ornament.

Alright! Now we've got a material that has the same surface qualities as the ornament. There is a lot of other ways that you could create a custom material. You could paint it by hand in Photoshop. You could take your own photos of spherical objects or you could even do a Google image search for sphere or ball. I've found a lot of images that are usable as materials that way. Materials in Sculptris are fun to play with, but for the most part I just stick to Material8. I find that it displays the sculpt very well without being too distracting.