Guys, what we have found is that Sculptris (or even Blender’s Sculpt Mode) is great at producing Hi-Res “Baking Sources”. As long as the Lower-Res Baking Target’s topology is pretty strong, you can have very clean projection and zero increase in the number of vertices and not worry about rigging issues. As a “Baking Source” the Sculptris/Blender Sculpt result can produce any maps and you don’t have to think about .OBJ anymore. All you have to do is import the Sculptris mesh.
You must also be very very meticulous about what details are Actual Topology in your original model (and thus won’t be sculpted) and what does become sculpted. Good design is key. Random and ill-planned abuse of Sculpting (either in Sculptris or Blender) will result in bloated sculpted meshes that will cause slow-down and hang the system.
The main difference, though, right now between Sculptris and Blender is the speed and convenience at which you can produce really fine “chips in armor/engraved script lettering” style sculpts to make a good “Baking Source”.
In Blender 2.49b and the current 2.50 versions available it takes a lot of workarounds using applied black-and-white Displacement Maps with the sculpting brushes and GIMP-ing over maps to get a very nice, economical result.
In Sculptris (and similarly Mudbox), it’s just a very organic process and you’re finished quite quickly.
The next part of the current workflow for us is to use the heavy sculpted model as a Baking Source like I mentioned. And using Bake “Selected To Active” you can then project that high-detail on the original model with much lower vert count.
My main question about this work by Farsthary and the GSoC is “What is the Time-to-Promise?” As a small fyi, some of us are in Production right now and we need our own “current solutions” while these features have not yet been implemented in a current Blender release. Like someone asked above: “Is this for 2.60?”
