Plopp goes the sculptie

Tuesday, October 16, 2007 / by

I came across a fun little program (free!) for those of you who want to make simple sculpties without learning Blender or any other 3D software. I'm talking about PloppSL. Creating sculpties was never so easy before.

Basically you have a canvas, where you draw your object (in 2D, just like you did as a kid). Then you flip it, and paint the other side (or just use the same picture for both sides). And then you "inflate" it. Sounds weird, so I'm actually going to make a sculptie and show you what I'm talking about.


Let's say we want to create a sculptie heart. This is what we would draw:

Plopp 1

I actually didn't draw it in the program itself. With Plopp you can import pictures (draw them in Photoshop for example) and that's what I did. The program then "inflates" the picture into 3D:

Plopp 2

Now you can save the sculptie shape and the texture and upload those into Second Life. The shape you get is not perfect, but these sculpties are great to use as seasonal decorations (hearts, pumpkins, Christmas stars). Here I made Mary Poppins style ballon flight helper:

Mary Poppins style ballon flight helper

Just think outside the box and I'm sure you'll find creative uses for these.

The good news is, according to the website, that the program will be developed in the near future, and this includes better conversion to sculpties, adding sculptie preview and support for sculpties with holes. Neat!

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4 comments

  1. Great find I'm going to have to try that out. Oh and great picture too, keep up the good work :)

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  2. Thanks :) BTW, after further playing with the program I can say, this thingie is good for making pillows. I'm still looking into other possible uses.

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