What is a good / user friendly program for making organic surfaces? I have a customer who wants a design based on a chicken, but modeling surfaces in PTC Creo for the purposes of “artistic modeling” is tremendously tedious…
With all these cool artistic models people print, I must ask - how do you design them?? I would think there’s a program out there that makes surfacing easy, which I could then export and import into my design to build upon (treat it like a standard imported surface, add all mechanicals, engineering features, etc.).
Or better yet, anyone have a surface model of a chicken!!??
Well, it’d seem that you need a sculpting soft like sculptris Meshmixer also has sculpting capabilities and both are free.
Of course you’ll need to learn how to use, so the fastest way for this job would be to get the chicken model.
This is what I’ve found in a quick thingiverse search
Thanks for the quick replies! I would definitely rather learn a new program than grab a file so that I can add this capability to my knowledge base!
I managed a pretty good looking chicken in Creo, but it took entirely too long and resulted in a very heavy file (~300 features in the model tree). It also looks a bit too rigid… My customer is happy with it, but I am a perfectionist and think something more organic would look a LOT better.
One problem you might find with sculpting software is that it works with meshes rather than surfaces or volumes so importing them into Creo would involve a good bit of work. I don’t have any experience with it but I guess it’s similar enough to Solidworks, so I guess it’s doable.
If it can output .obj files then I should be able to import them directly to Creo. Whether or not they import successfully is the big question. Hopefully I can try this afternoon.
Check out Fusion 360 (by Autodesk). Its $40 a month if you do not need the 3 axis CNC portion of it. It has an organic sculpting enviroment side by side with a more standard parametric modeler. They offer 30 day free trials.
By day, i am a SolidWorks user, but I am looking at getting Fusion 360 to use at home for running my CNC router. Not an expert by any means, but I see potential, especially in the organic/sculpting areas.
Interesting, I have to check it out. At a glance looks closer to very advanced and complete free form deformation tool rather than a sculpting app. Very powerful tool to have in a parametric environment anyway. Thank for the heads up!
Well, these programs are very cool. I am able to successfully import the .obj models into Creo, but they come in as facet models. That won’t fly for what I’m doing, so back to the drawing board I guess.
I haven’t given up yet, but looks like I may need to stick to shaping natively in Creo… which isn’t THAT bad, it’s a lot more capable than Solidworks, that’s for sure.
Zbrush, zbrush is the best 3D modeling program I have used, I absolutely love it. I don’t even use maya to make the base meshes anymore, with the dynamesh program you can do anything which includes hollowing out models easily. the same company makes sculptris (its free) I havent tried it but people here seem to like it
