For those of you who don’t own Mudbox or 3DCoat but would like to, at the very least preview your model in a smooth shaded view. This quick tip will not only help you achieve that goal but will also give you a little insight to a button known as ‘Quick’.

Unfortunately you will not be able to sculpt with this feature disabled with relative ease, but nevertheless you will still have the opportunity to preview what you model will look like in low resolutions in your current 3d package.

Zbrush Smooth Poly Preview from Andrew on Vimeo.

This video was made in association with cgPipeline.

Hope this helps.

-andrew

NurbsAndPolys.com has republished the original subdivision modeling primer originated by Glen Southern and is open for viewing at NaP wiki. As a wiki resource, this publication should flourish and be maintained with current techniques.

http://wiki.nurbsandpolys.com

For all you modelers out there, Nurbs And Polys recently opened a modeling forum that plans to be an open and informative modeling community. Based on the idea of community driven support, it would be a great place to start posting suggestions for topics to support it’s resource forum and soon to be built wiki. With the demise of a couple of popular modeling forums it definitely would be a good place to move to.

I do have two articles in the draft that are coming, but in the interim I had to pass this along. My good friend Andy (Phrenzy84) is blogging the progress of modeling and simulating a bee (fur and all, and I suspect it will be done in Houdini). Check this out, and be sure to hit up his blog.

Evolution of the Bee from Andrew on Vimeo.

As development ensues, Autodesk posted an interview with Dave Cardwell on AREA with a sneak peek as what is to come with Mudbox 2. In a lot of workflow we use sculpting programs like Mudbox to create normal maps to define low polygon models.

Within the demo, Autodesk is boasting 25 million polygons on screen with HDRI lighting, GPU ambient occlussion and other goodies. Check it out.