3D 3- Creating sphere's using Sculpturis

During today's lesson we made craters and moons for our game using a new piece of software called Sculptris Alpha 6.

Screenshot of the program.

We began by editing our sphere. To do this I mainly used the draw tool (Clicking 'X' to make it make an indent rather than add a new shape) and the smooth tool.

Rough sketch in Sculptris.

Tool's in Sculptris.

I then saved the file and exported it and imported it into Maya. To make the crater look more realistic and to get multiple versions in hi and low resolution we created a new sphere and positioned and changed the size to fit our current crater we made in Sculptris. 

To blend the two hi and low res shapes together we clicked the spacebar and clicked on lighting/shading and added a 'normal' map to the shape made in Sculptris. We then exported this and did the same for the sphere made in Maya, however we selected 'Ambient' instead.

We then baked the maps and saved them as TGA files so it could be recognised in photoshop, which was the next part.

This was the 'Alpha' and 'normal' export from Maya and I edited out the triangles from the UV map and saved it. We then added a 'Blinn' material to the normal sphere and the sphere made in Sculptris and added our edited photoshop file to it.

Before 'Blinn' input was placed on the normal sphere

After

This was the final version of my crater. I went back into Sculptris and added more holes and lumps to the crater. It was a long process however I enjoyed making a realistic looking crater.

Edited crater and asteroid in Maya.