HOW DO I POSE IN NOMAD SCULPT ON THE IPAD?

Posing a model implies creating a rig in most cases. Rigging is a very specialist skill and can take years to master at a professional level. Sometimes we just want to pose a character or creature to see if the anatomy is working, or maybe to see how a certain action pose might look. Nomad Sculpt is a feature-rich ipad sculpting app, but it has no rigging capability. Often, you can achieve what you need by masking off part of the model and then moving and rotating the unmasked area. This method is great if you have a lower-polygon model to work with but as the model gets larger, the masking doesn’t yield the results you might need.

Another method is to simply use the Split tool, chop your mesh back up into logical parts and just move them into place. You can adjust the pivot point for each body part and that means it will rotate in a naturalistic way. You can also select multiple parts, a thigh and calf for example, and move them together.

It isn’t the cleanest method of posing but it can certainly help you to work out proportions, anatomy and scale without investing time learning to rig. Once you can move the body part around independently you quickly see where you need to add volume or improve form. It helps you with things like centre of balance or the ‘weight’ of a character in the environment. By that I mean if you had a character in a very unnatural, relaxed pose (T-pose for example), you can’t really judge how his body would react if he raised a leg or bent forward. Splitting the body up allows you to play with all these things. You can solve issues early on in the concept process by trying out different poses and looking from different angles.

Once you have found a pose you can voxel-remesh the whole model back together and just clean up the seams. You will have some clean-up sculpting to do at the joint but nothing major. If your model is going to be rigged in another program you will have to export it in a neutral pose, but you can rest assured that the design is good if you tested it first by splitting it up.