This month Josh Ferguson will lead a tour of Sculprtis, a free digital sculpting tool by the makers of ZBrush.

Sculptris provides an excellent gateway into the exciting world of 3D. It’s features are easy to learn, even for someone with no experience in digital art, yet robust enough for creating base models that can then be refined in other applications, such as ZBrush, 3D Studio Max, or Blender.

There will be 2 parts to the demo – first, how to use Sculptris in a general sense for sculpting and painting in 3D. Second, how to incorporate Sculptris into a game art pipeline by using it to create hi-poly models for the generation of Normal Bump maps and Ambient Occlusion textures.

Josh Ferguson is the lead artist of local indie game studio Chaosoft Games and an instructor in graphic design, game design, and 3D animation.

The meetup will be held at the Technology Cooperative locating in the Knoxville Old City at 130 W. Jackson Ave.  As always we will start at 2PM and open with a Show ‘n Tell where everyone can show a bit of their in progress game, favorite tool, mechanic they love in another game, or anything they find helpful and want to share with the group.