BUILD AR CREATURES ON YOUR IPAD

AR is all the rage, and you don't even need a desktop computer to join in

- Glen Southern

NOMAD SCULPT (IPAD) PROCREATE (IPAD) 

Augmented Reality (AR) enables us to overlay our digital creations onto the real world and have them stick in place on a floor, table or work surface. It's all the rage currently and you will have probably seen many Instagram or Snapchat filters utilising it. As artists, we can get all kinds of benefits from seeing our creations in the real world, and unless you 3D print something that isn't always easy. Using Nomad Sculpt, we will make a basic creature and texture it in Procreate, all on an iPad.

The great thing about this workflow is that Procreate now has its own AR feature, so once you are done you can view your model right there on your desktop or floor. You can do the sculpting, UVing, painting and texture creation between Nomad and Procreate, but if you want to get your model game ready you would need to use another program like CozyBlanket to retopologise your mesh before going to Procreate.

The basic rules of modelling and optimisation still apply with AR, in that you need to keep the polygon count low enough so that it doesn't impact the performance of the device that is using it. The same applies to the textures, so you need to always keep that in mind.

Let's get started making a little stylised crab. 

01A BALL OF FUN

Start with the basic sphere that opens when you launch Nomad Sculpt. It is too high resolution, so in the Topology panel at the top change the Multiresolution level to a lower setting. We are going to use this sphere as a carapace (the body) of the crab, so we will be editing it quite a bit. Go to the material tab (bottom right) and change the colour to red.

02 SPLIT OR TRIM