A small tangent for those inspired to sculpt by this. The free 3D-suite Blender recently got support for dynamic topology sculpting (that is adaptively change the mesh density as you sculpt). Cross-platform, quite capable and it's a ton of fun to play around with.

http://blender.org http://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/04/29/intro-dynamic-topolog...

If you're interested in the Geometric Modelling part of sculpting, Freestyle is a good starting paper - http://liris.cnrs.fr/Documents/Liris-5391.pdf

It doesn't like it when you try to drill holes through the sphere. Try it, it's fun.

It seems to "like" it here. I can also do other topology changes: make two projections and join them, drill a hole to an existing hole.

I did get it to mess up (holes in the surface) by clicking "Symmetry".

Use "Adaptive" instead of "Subdivision" and it drills through just fine. You can even zoom inside the sphere and see how it made a nice little channel.

Amazing! Working great on Win7/Chrome 28.0.1500.72 m.

Initial load gives a prompt 'Shit happens: context lost' and the sphere is not loaded.

Refresh says WebGL hit a snag, but provides an option to reload. After reload it works fine.

objects load well but I can't seem to find any more movement controls, just wasd/arrows. Still this is great and could serve as a step towards mudbox etc!

right click and drag works.

Yes it does, thank you.

ridiculously fun to play with, made a pretty bad looking boo from mario bros http://pastebin.com/baGry3NF

and a silly render http://imgur.com/23U99Ab

Very impressive, especially the adaptive topology feature, I don't believe even Mudbox has that.

Adding some sort of collaborative features would would be plausible and really cool (keep perspective and settings local, sync model updates).

Is this open source? I would love to poke around adding some real time collab features.

Github link: https://github.com/stephomi/sculptgl. License is MIT. This is from the main page (http://stephaneginier.com/).

I can not see anything in my Chrome 28.0.1500.71 Linux. Here is the error:

sculptgl.min.js:138 Uncaught TypeError: Cannot set property 'viewportWidth' of null

Same error here; 28.0.1500.71 Chrome on OS X 10.7.5. All other webgl demos seem to work fine.

Same here, Chrome Dev on Linux (Version 29.0.1547.18 dev), same error.

Proper 3D acceleration support ==> Mac OS X or Windows.

Works fine on Intel Ivy Bridge /Mesa/Linux here

Most of the time, but you're stuck with GLSL 1.40 while the rest is enjoying 3.30

Linux Nvidia GTX-460 binary blob drivers, works fine.

Works fine on Gentoo amd64 + Firefox.

Linux has proper 3D acceleration.

And me, 28.0.1500.52 on Debian

This is very impressive but the "skin" shader is pretty gross if you've made a particularly deformed shape..

This was very interesting! Was the OP the author? Care to share a bit about how you made it?

No, I found it on twitter, but it wasn't tweeted by the author either. In fact that website appears to be the only place on the internet the author exists, except for his github profile: https://github.com/stephomi

Connect this to the Shapeways API and you've got one helluva powerful toy...

Was just thinking the same thing :) could make some really nice stuff in Ceramics.

I'm running into issues. After a while it starts tearing holes in the sphere. Also the performance seems to die off. But I don't know much about 3D sculpting so maybe I'm abusing it.

Running on Chrome under Arch.

Wow, that's beautiful.

I may have made the world's saddest slug.

Incredible work, this is great. These are exactly the kinds of projects we need to advance technology on the web.

This is Z-Brush on browser hehe

That's badass. Gracias.

i have made cool things in sculptris previously, this is awesome on my pc. gotta try it on the tablet now!

bugger, did not work on ipad under safari or chrome. still pretty awesome on pc

Awesome work.

This is... awesome!

What is more important, it is actually usable.

Impressive.