3D sculpting lets artists directly shape highly detailed digital forms, making intricate models without restricting them to planes and spheres. section 12.5
Sculpting software commonly uses a hybrid representation: voxels support fast operations, while boundary voxels retain surface data such as exact points and normal vectors for precision. section 12.5
Practical trade-offs shape how sculptures are used:
- The representation consumes substantial memory and renders relatively slowly. section 12.5
- A sculpture can generate multiple triangle-mesh levels of detail, from coarse to highly intricate, for downstream use. section 12.5
From sculpture to usable model
A detailed game character may begin as a sculpture, then be converted into several triangle meshes so different levels of detail can be displayed efficiently. section 12.5
