What are best practices for creating sculpting stencils?

[blank...]

Hello everyone

I'm trying to sculpt an old, run down, rustic, stone wall. I was hoping to make my life easier by utilizing stencils but however I try to use it i get a nasty jagged result. I tried editing several images in Photoshop, playing with levels, brightness, contrast, desaturating them... But nothing gives me at least somewhat clean result.

Is there some "correct" procedure of preparing images to be used as sculpting stencils?

Thanks in advance!

[MI66 · Accepted solution]

Sculpting stencils are essentially black & white masks which let white areas pass through 100% and block the black areas completely. In order to create good stencils from photographic images you have to keep this in mind. For example, a basic desaturation + contrast will most likely not provide the correct height information you're after. Good stencils are basically height/bump maps.

There are some tools that give you different algorithms to do this based on photographs. You can use Photoshop, but you can also check out for example CrazyBump or Knald or most recently the open-source, free Materialize.

The most accurate stencils are, however, not created in Photoshop or the like but are based on actual height data that is either sculpted or 3D scanned and then baked into a 2D map. This can be done in Mudbox too by sculpting something detailed on a flat plane for use later as stencils. Image-based generation is basically a fast hack but in my experience it still gives relatively good results relatively fast.

[blank...]

Sculpting stencils are essentially black & white masks ... CrazyBump or Knald or most recently the open-source, free Materialize.

---

I see, thanks for the explanation, I already stumbled on Materialize before but completely forgot about it. Thank you!