I have freelanced bas relief sculpting models for many years to various Mints around the country. Within that time the process of creating sculpted models has remained pretty much the same. You use clay, you make plaster casts, you detail the casts, you pull a positive and send it off to an engraver who reduces the model onto the face of a die. Since going digital with my illustration efforts I have wondered how long it would take for the 3D realm to catch up.

Of course, there is a very vibrant and rich set of 3D tools out there. Maya, Blender, Zbrush, But most of these tools are made for animators and movie-type character production. The tools in general are hard to use and with minor exceptions they are not very intuitive for your average clay-guy to grasp.

I found a new tool yesterday called Mudbox made by Autodesk, that really made me sit up and take notice. I have used Sketchbook Pro (from Autodesk) for years. It also has a very intuitive interface that leans on a graphic tablet for what it does best. Mudbox also works with a graphic tablet and a mouse, and I found it very close to my actual analog working method — with an undo key. This little nose sample took me 30 minutes. It’s not ground breaking, but the proof is not in this end product, the proof is in the tool set that got me to this end product. It was very intuitive for me. I think with an investment of some time I could really break through into some digital bas relief sculpting. The real problem of course is what do you do with it then? Can you export it out to a die engraver? What is the interface for that?

So many questions. But for the first time I can actually see it happening in the near future.