Your CG problems solved
Dan Torres, Manchester
Pro artists tackle your queries
Glen Southern replies
ipad sculpting has become very popular lately with apps like Forger and Nomad Sculpt. There seems to be two main groups of users, and they are often people just starting out exploring 3D sculpting, or existing 3D artists that just want to sculpt on the go. Nomad Sculpt is a very capable sculpting program and it has a lot of painting tools and features. Once you’ve sculpted your character or creature you can use the paint tools and a range of alphas to bring the surface to life, just as you would in a program like Zbrush or Blender.
There are several options to get decals and tattoos onto the surface, so let’s start with a simple one. You can simply take the paintbrush and apply it to the surface as if you were working in Photoshop, or more accurately Substance Painter. There are lots of options that you can change when it comes to both the colour and shape of your brush, but you wouldn’t want to spend time creating an entire tattoo with a simple brush. The second method is to create the tattoo artwork in another program, for example if you want to stay on the ipad just use Procreate, which is a very good mobile painting and drawing app. You need to draw a white tattoo on a black background and then export that as a JPEG. You can then import that into the alpha section of Nomad and switch to your paint tool again. Simply drag the tattoo on with the correct colour and the correct orientation as shown in the
walkthrough section. There is an option to reverse the paint tool and at that point you are actually removing the ink, which can give you some really cool effects.
I find it a great way to create very specific shapes and it’s especially useful because the model can be exported with the vertex colours and then converted to a texture map in another program like Zbrush or Blender. It gives you a very simple and convenient way to make complex artwork right there on your ipad. Nomad is available on Android devices too, which gives you even more flexibility. You can also apply paint to different layers and dial them in as you need them, so your tattoo designs can get really complex really quickly.