Thursday, August 16th, 2018 Posted by Jim Thacker

Neat tool Mush3D lets you sculpt on animation caches


Originally posted on 26 July 2018. Scroll down for updates, including the new product name.

Former Double Negative 3D modeller Luiz Elias has released Shot Sculpt, an innovative tool for sculpting corrective shapes or applying cloth or jiggle deformation to animation caches generated in other software.

The software looks to provide a quick, intuitive way to fix artefacts in character animation, or to generate secondary motion without the need to set up a dedicated cloth or muscle system.

Edit Alembic animation caches using an intuitive brush-based workflow
Shot Sculpt imports geometry caches generated in other DCC software in Alembic (.abc) format.

Once imported, users can sculpt on top of the cache on a per-frame basis using a small set of ZBrush-like brushes (Standard, Move, Inflate, Clay, Crease and Flatten, plus an Erase brush to reverse the effects).

The intensity of the corrective shape can then be keyframed in the timeline, with Shot Sculpt automatically generating a smooth transition curve.

It’s possible to mask out parts of the mesh to confine the area affected, and to move the light around the scene or to switch to a wireframe view to help check the result.

As well as sculpting corrective shapes manually, it’s also possible to mask out a part of the mesh and apply a Delta Mush, jiggle or cloth deformation effect.

That provides a quick way to generate plausible-looking muscle or skin deformation for organic characters: in the video above, you can see the cloth deformation used to generate skin folds on an elephant.


Updated 16 August 2018: Elias has now officially renamed the software Mush3D, and launched a new product website with online documentation and new video tutorials. You can find it via the link below.


Pricing and availability
Mush3D is currently available for Windows. According to this thread on BlenderArtists.org, a Linux version should follow shortly.

You can download an export-disabled trial version of the software from Elias’s website, and buy the commercial version from a menu inside the software. A node-locked commercial licence costs $450.

Download the trial edition of Mush3D from the product website