Sculpt on an ipad with Forger

We’ve been sculpting digitally on our PCS and Macs for years now, but what about sculpting on an ipad?

Learn the basics of sculpting with the Forger app

Digital sculpting is now well established in many industries including game design, TV and film production (pre and post), medical imaging and in all kinds of advertising. One of the granddaddy programs is Zbrush and that started life in the mid-1990s soon to be followed by Mudbox, 3Dcoat and even open-source programs like Blender. Where a project requires highly detailed organic assets such as creatures, characters, monsters, aliens, environments, rounded or intricate vehicles and buildings you will see artists using digital sculpting, but not so much on mobile – until you look a little deeper and come across amazingly powerful sculpting apps that can run comfortably on an ipad. In this tutorial, we can take an initial look at what sculpting on the ipad is like and what you can actually do with it. The Forger app has been around for a few years now but in recent releases, the toolset has expanded to a point where you could feasibly use it to work on commercial projects like blocking out or basic character designs. In these steps, we will look at how to take a primitive shape and sculpt out a cartoony head, add some eyes and teeth and then paint the whole character. It doesn’t end there as the end result can be exported and used in a range of other software.

01 FIRST, YOU NEED FORGER

Forger is available on the App Store from your ipad. I use a 2018 ipad with a 256gig SSD and 4gig of RAM. Apple doesn’t really publish their RAM specifications openly so you may need to dig around to see what your ipad has under the hood (or if you are looking to buy one). You also need an Apple Pencil and that can be either the first or second-generation version.

02 OPEN FORGER AND LET’S GET GOING

When you launch Forger for the first time you won’t see anything in the ‘open recent’ dialog that pops up. After your very first session, this area is where you can launch your masterpieces from earlier sessions. Along the top edge is a line-up of templates for you to start with. There should be a Plane, Cube, Sphere, Bust and a Body. Click on the Sphere and it will load into the main window.

03 THE FORGER LAYOUT

The sphere will appear in the middle of the document window. My screen is set up for a left-hander, so if you are righthanded choose Preferences from the side menu. In there you will see an option to switch to left or right-handed and the menu will relocate to whichever side you favour. The screen contains a document window where all the 3D work will be done and you should see a grid surrounding the sphere. There is a toolbar which can be moved around and also the drop-downs that give you access to most of the tools and features.

04 GET USED TO THE MENUS

Next to the toolbar is a panel with sliders to make your brush larger and make the effect stronger or weaker. The sphere comes in with Symmetry already turned on, but if you didn’t want that there is an icon at the top with X|X to control this, and this is also where you can duplicate models across an axis, which is useful when we get to things like eyes. From the side toolbar click the Move tool. Use this tool to pull in the mouth area as shown. Change the brush size with the slider.

05 SHAPE THE HEAD

The Move tool is one of the most-used brushes in Forger. You need to try and use the Move tool to pull your geometry into the required shape. Just focus on the overall silhouette of the head you are designing. Keep rolling the head around and look at it from different angles at regular intervals during the modelling process. Remember just focus on the overall ‘form’ for now.

06 ADD EARS

Still using the Move tool we can start to add ears. For now, we are looking to just create the volume that will eventually become the ears. Pulling out the ear shapes you will notice that the more you pull them out, the geometry underneath starts to look blocky and fractured. This is normal and it is why we are only focusing on the overall shape of an ear, not how good the surface looks.

07 WIREFRAME

At the bottom of the screen, you can find a little rendered sphere that is where you access the Display modes. Click on this and you will see that you can change things like the Grid visibility, colour on and off, shaded mode, faceted mode and Constant. There is also a button to turn on the Wireframe mode. Click this now and take a look at the model you have created. You will see the problem immediately – the ears are clearly an issue because the underlying polygons are stretched out and are warped.

08 REMESHING

To solve this we need to remesh the entire model. Go to your side panel and make sure that you are in the Mesh dropdown. You can use this panel to manipulate the Subdivision levels in your model and more importantly you can remesh it. The remeshing function rebuilds your model and averages out the polygons across the entire surface. You can change the slider to increase or decrease the number of polygons in the model depending on your need at the time. Try about 70 for now.

09 REMESH A NECK

Remeshing is the single most important thing to master in this tutorial. Next, pull out a neck as shown in the image. Pull it down and back and use the remesh feature. Now pull it some more and remesh again. Once you are comfortable with what remesh is doing turn the wireframe back off. We can keep remeshing without being able to see what it is doing to the geometry.

10 SUBDIVIDING

You can of course just subdivide (from the same panel) and that will give you a high-resolution mesh to sculpt on (each subdivisional level will times your polygon count by 4). If at any point you want to start adding more detail you can subdivide once, do the sculpting task and then remesh as per the last step. You will be doing this constantly for a few stages now. Shape the overall head a little more and then we will start using new brushes.

11 CLAY BRUSH

This brush is the equivalent of adding clay on a clay model, and in reality what you are doing it raising or lowering the surface of the model to ‘simulate’ adding clay. Work around the head and add muscle volume around the fatty areas like the ears, the nose, eyebrows and lips. It will look blobby but we are simply adding clay that we will manipulate next. Remesh if needed.

12 ADD EYE FOR REFERENCE

Sculpting the eye areas is hard with knowing the size of the eyeball. Add a sphere by going to the Object dropdown and hit the + symbol. Choose a sphere from the options. At the bottom of the brush menu, you will see a Transform button. Hit that and then you can change the modes to either move, scale or rotate. Scale the eye and move it into the correct position for your model.

13 TWO EYES, PLEASE

The simple way to duplicate the eye is to look in the Object menu and locate the sphere that is your first eye. If you slide left on the Eye object you get options to Duplicate, Rename or Delete it. Renaming is good practice at this stage but what we really want to do is duplicate it. Using the Transform tool again you can slide it over to the other side of the head. This method is inaccurate for this type of job so a better way is to go to the X|X button and mirror it. It is useful to know both ways.

14 ADD MORE DETAIL

Make the Clay brush smaller and start adding detail around the eyes and nose. Use reference if you need to and try to make the eyelids and the corners match a real-world look. To smooth an area down click the Wave button at the bottom of the sidebar. When it is activated and blue you will be able to access the Smooth tool. You will find that this works with most tools.

15 FLATTEN

The ‘blobby’ look needs to be addressed now. Use the Flatten tool to add planes and angles to your sculpting and reduce the childish blobby look to the overall head. Flatten off the edges of the lips to make them more realistic. Work around the head and anywhere that needs a little reducing in volume instead of smoothing use the Flatten tool. Work over the edge of the ears and the eyes in the same way. Switch back and forth between the Clay, the Flatten and the Smooth function.

16 INDENTING BRUSH

You will want to indent into the mode at some point. To do this you can simply invert the function of any build-up brushes by activating the -/+ button at the bottom of the sidebar. Using the Clay brush for example, make the brush size small and click the reverse button. To gouge in a more severe crease use the Crease tool with a very small brush size.

17 CREASING

The Crease brush is very useful for things like eye wrinkles, creases at the corner of the mouth and adding detail inside the ears. Be careful not to use a large brush size with the crease tool as it can be quite destructive in the way that it drags the surface of the mesh inwards. If you remesh now be sure to increase the slider size or you will start to lose surface detail. The flip side is that you don’t want your model to become so high poly that it is unmanageable.

18 ADD TEETH

To add teeth we can add a Cube primitive in the same way that we added the temporary eyes. From the Object menu hit the + sign and add the cube. You can, of course, use any of the primitive shapes but the cube is useful as we can scale it down into a rectangular tooth-like block before we begin sculpting. You can alter each of the X, Y and Z dimensions by choosing the correct colour block on the manipulator. Make a flat tooth-like shape and scale it down to suit.

20 PLACE THE TOOTH

Now using the Transform tool position the first tooth into the head front and centre. Use the Move brush with a small size and make sure the tooth is seated well into the underside of the mouth opening. Duplicate the tooth and move that next to the first one and that gives you your two main incisors. Add more details with the Flatten and Crease brushes.

21 ADD MORE 19 SCULPT THE TEETH

Now use the Clay, Smooth, Flatten and Crease brushes to enhance the look of the tooth. The Move tool is useful to shape the overall look of the tooth before you start adding score lines and flattening the edges. Make the tooth look visually interesting and remember we will be duplicating and changing each tooth later. Widen it at the bottom and narrow it at the top like an incisor tooth.

Rotate the head around to ensure that you have positioned the teeth correctly well under the upper lips. Keep duplicating and adding more teeth as needed. Where you want different types of teeth, rotate the duplicated ones around and then flatten off the end to make them into molars or canines as you like. Try not to let anything look like it has been repeated by adding or removing details with the brushes you are now familiar with. If you feel the need make a whole new tooth from scratch and add it in.

22 MERGE OBJECTS

The teeth now need to be merged into one single object ready to be painted. To do this go to the Object panel. At the bottom is a little icon with two diagonal arrows which indicates the Merge button. Hit this and then select each of the teeth one at a time. When you hit the top button, the selected items will all be merged into one and the others disappear from the Object menu.

23 PAINT JOB

You can start adding paint next. Use the Colour button on the tool palette and pick your desired colour from the Colour icon at the top. You will be presented with a colour wheel. For this project, we want to use a lot of blue, so choose a blue colour and with a large brush size paint the entire model in that colour. You can add a more reddish colour inside the mouth if you wish.

25 COLOUR THE SKIN

For painting the skin, start by laying down darker tones and work lighter as you add details. Put lots of redness around the inner ears, the mouth and the nose area. Add some nice details around the eyes and even enhance the wrinkles a little with darker paint. If you make some cool skin brushes you can really work up something wonderful in no time here.

26 PAINT THE EYES

Once you have the skin looking great, move onto the eyes. Make sure you go to the Object panel and switch to the Eyes object. Merge them together as you did for the teeth and you can paint them both at the same time or even better, delete one, paint one and then duplicate it again to save time. Make them a little demonic to give the little imp some character. Go to the Material dropdown, create a new material and make that more specular just for the eyes. •

24 ALPHA BRUSHES

Using the default painting tools will only get you so far. You really need to use brushes with some detail and character to them. You do this by making your own black and white alpha brushes in your software package of choice like Procreate or Photoshop. You can then add them to Forger in the resource section and they can be used to add details like skin and wrinkles, pores, hair, feathers etc.