Hi, I'm not sure whether I should have posted this here or in animation but oh well here goes.

I'm trying to make a custom miniature for my dungeon and dragons character. Geeky beyond reckoning I know but I need advice. I want to custom sculpt him and pose him, then add armor and weapons and have a company print him out so I can paint him.

I'm wondering what the best way is to go about doing this. I'm an art student so I have access to 3DS Maya, Mudbox, and some other programs. I have DAZ studio 4, and sculptris. It would be fantastic to find a premade character base to work from, as the character is not human. I could sculpt him myself but if the work could be half done already I would be ecstatic.

I need to know how to sculpt a character that I can add weapons and armor to and pose, then send to a company to print. I have the company picked out, unless anyone has any suggestions or experience on the matter.

Thank you in advance for any advice!

ZBrush and its ZSpheres will let you model your character and pose it as you want. For printing you'll probabely need a model with dense mesh to have all details so I see no sense in modeling and then rigging it.

Okay thanks! I don't currently have access to zbrush but I'm working on that. Thanks for the advice!

You can also pose 3d models in the latest versions of Mudbox.
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Andyba, 3d artist
skills: 3d modeling, texturing, rendering, 3d character animation, compositing
3d software experience: 3ds max, Maya, Softimage XSI, Deep Paint 3d, Body Paint 3D, Wings 3D, Z Brush
2d software experience: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After effects, Macromedia Flash, Freehand

Zbrush bought out Sculptris a while back--it was distributed freely and works pretty much the same as Zbrush--you might want to hunt around on the net for it and see if its still available.

Ah, I found it--its owned by Pixelogic which owns Zbrush and it's still free:

but you have to google as this is my first post and I am not yet grown up enough to have links in my message. Anyway, its out there if you want it.

Hi Jayd,
Welcome to the 3d forums
Here is the link you probably wanted to post.
http://www.pixologic.com/sculptris/

On the topic, does sculptris allow posing characters?
_________________
Andyba, 3d artist
skills: 3d modeling, texturing, rendering, 3d character animation, compositing
3d software experience: 3ds max, Maya, Softimage XSI, Deep Paint 3d, Body Paint 3D, Wings 3D, Z Brush
2d software experience: Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After effects, Macromedia Flash, Freehand

yea, mudbox you can do this in for sure. It has a human base model you can start with and you can pose in there as well. Not as advanced as Zbrush, but it will do the job