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My own Personal David



My initial thoughts on sculpting within Maya 2018 are as follows.

Why Is this so unwieldy to work with?! What am I doing?! 
At least with a mouse the control feels clumsy and imprecise. This can make it difficult to get the exact shapes that I’m looking for.  It feels like more of an afterthought than a dedicated ‘feature’ of Maya at the moment. I imagine it could be used for light sculpting on smoothing but if I needed to get larger things sculpted or more detailed projects then I would probably turn to alternate software once the basics had been mapped out in Maya.
That being said we do have a range of tools available, raise, smooth and so on- the brush control is fairly good allowing to customise a number of different options via the interface- such as strength and size of the brush.
The performance of sculpting in Maya seems fairly limiting. To get the right amount of subdivisions to carry out more detailed sculpts is difficult while keeping the sculpting moving at anything above 10fps- causing lag when it comes to trying to sculpt more detail into the mesh itself.


The range of tools seems fairly limited vs a dedicated sculpting toolkit like Z-brush.
Overall I think a lot of tools Maya provides for sculpting can probably be covered off by very careful vertex editing which would be far easier and manageable. I also have a couple of quick images of some of the ‘progress’ I made throughout the session- but again just to re-iterate- I wasn’t overly impressed with the toolkit for sculpting that Maya provides as a whole.
I think it’d be a choice I would only really consider if I didn’t have an alternate software available and I absolutely had to sculpt a model. I would have to add that my experience inside sculpting with Maya is incredibly limited so who knows? Maybe I missed something as part of the experience.

To talk about sculpting in more general terms I think that it’s a very useful tool for capturing high-poly details, like rivets in a gun or the leather grip of a sword that then you could potentially bake down and use to aid texture creation. It also depends on how you like to model in some instances- there are plenty of folks who will almost start sculpting right away.
From a games point of view most games as a whole will use sculpting as part of the pipeline to get the models looking good, then work through some re-topology to make them more suited for real-time rendering via a game engine.

Will I use sculpting for my ‘prop’? Probably not.  I think I’d like to keep the model geometry simple and try to capture the detail in the texturing process, like dials.

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