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Couldnt resist making something again. Budha seemed appropriate for some rest and piece after monday at work. :)

budha sculpt

Have to say my hand hurts though (and thats with a tablet). Really looking forward to basic brush functionality and overal improved brush behaviour.

New bug:

Sometimes when i start making brushstrokes the stroke gets locked in the first direction i make it in. Then i can still move it but it will just move in a straight line. Like the first direction i made with the stroke set a line which i now only can move over. Its very weird. And no it doesnt happen on the symmetry line.

Also sculpting at an angled surface gives very unreliable depth. Very often its too deep like the brush will just gauch full depth (or more creating holes). I have the feeling that the holes/spike bug is closely related to this one.

Now a good thing. Smooth brush is actually perfect! I had it set to 1 when i wrote my previous reply and it turns out that slider actually works. You can really finely tweak how strong it is. I use it on .5 to .7 now and 1.0 when i really have to smooth (i wish i could set it to more then 1 sometimes) Its very nice. Ofcourse still very slow with a big brush size. Also id still like my flatten brush (which is NOT the same as the smooth brush turned to 1).

I hope this inspires you andrew. ;) I could have done this much faster in Zb but its more fun in 3dcoat. Cant wait till voxel sculpting matures.

GrtZ 3dioot

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I'm redoing my ear since I didn't save the last one and I noticed that the Smooth function seems to look at the depth of the geometry as well as the "X & Y" if you will. For example I carved out my ear lobe and so I had some pretty thin geometry. As I smoothed it the tool was seeing the back of the ear as well as the front, so as it smoothed both it started tearing holes in the ear (ouch!).

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I actually hope there wont be too much focus (at least initial focus) on these cad/cam like requests. Sure id like it to be that good (in the end) but as for geo_n's example. Thats what surface modelling, i.e. nurbs, excels in. Trim and fillet with infinite precision. There are specialist packages that excel in those allready (like rhino3d and formz). Assuming you dont like nurbs modelling i think currently zbrush would be more up your ally. It is so efficient with polysculpting that with the right hardware you can divide to insanity and use alpha's to pretty much stamp out or in any form you like in supercrisp detail.

Voxels wont ever give you that detail (id love to be proven wrong by andrew). As Andrew has said before though a pure voxel solution will not really be able to mimic the pore and wrinkles sculpting that you can get nowadays in zbrush. Perhaps a hybrid form, where big transformations are applied to the voxel structure that forms the base of the sculpt and small detail work gets applied to the polygonal skin or to a normal map or something to that extent could offer a "complete" freeform sculpting solution. But i have no idea wether thats even possible. :lol:

The big(gest) difference between voxels and polysculpting is this. With the -right- hardware you can sculpt freaking statues out of a box with zbrush just by dividing indefinitely. With voxels; you can always sculpt a statue out of a box since the resolution of the sculpt works in a completely different way. Voxels are, in a way, more form efficient. In zbrush you would have to constantly retopo to get what 3dcoats voxel sculpting offers you now.

I do hope the resolution will be good enough to shape stuff like folds in clothing, well defined facial features (like nose ears lips and eyes) and stuff like that. If it is you can really rough out your sculpt, tweak the surfaces till they look nice and clean and use retopology tools to get a good mesh for final detailing in zbrush (or perhaps 3dcoat). What worries me the most at the moment is just one thing. I expect the performance to increase with new releases and with that the detail/resolution of the voxel sculpts. The brush(es) really need to shape up though. Smooth strokes, working falloff, working alpha's, depth sampling. It has to feel right and give enough control to really make the most of the resolution that you have. The fact that you cant sculpt in wrinkle detail (which would probably dissapear over time as hardware improves) would not be a big deal since when you get to that state the overal form (and a bit more i hope) will be well established through your voxel sculpt.

Im glad were talking about volumetric sculpting again though. The exporter request for game engine "X" really doesnt belong in this thread imho. :huh:

Hopefully ill have a new picture to add to this thread at hte end of the evening. :)

GrtZ 3dioot

Not cad precision. Just precise enough maybe like silo. I like silo's poly and sculpting concept. But since I've started with 3dc and with painting tool, etc, that are in 3dc, I'll stick with 3dc.

I've seen what zbrush can do in terms of modelling something for industrial design products and it is impressive but unfortunately zbrush is too expensive for me. And I really couldn't get the interface or rather personally don't like the interface. 3dc is so easy to pick up. :)

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Hello. I've been lurking here reading about the new voxel modeling and I find it very interesting. Looking at the current models they all seem to suffer from the same 'blobbyness' that plagued the first polygon sculptured models back when ZBrush was introduced. That was often the result of people subdividing to a very dense mesh before sculpting rather than defining the broader features at appropriate subdivision levels, and I'm guessing that the mesh density is pretty much the problem here. So in my opinion an option to atleast iterate (if jumping up and down has some technical problems) the voxel density is a necessity in order to work efficiently. With that the great advantage of voxels (being that they offer a uniform resolution across the entire mesh which means you don't have to worry about fighting the polygon flow or suffer from lack of available geometry) can really shine. And I also agree with what others have said that extreme detailing if not feasible in voxel mode, can certainly be regulated to post polygon conversion without voxel modeling losing any of it's appeal.

I should state that have not yet tried 3D Coat, so maybe I'm way off in my comments. I have the current (pre voxel modeling) toolset of 3D Coat pretty much covered by other apps and has thus not been very interested in it. But the current development in voxel modeling has really changed that, particularly given the great expertise and speed of it's developer. On that note, do these beta releases run in some demo mode?

Anyway, very impressive work. I'll keep oogling this thread!

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Thanks philnolan3d, I can imagine having a library of horns, teeth, scales, etc.

I've been playing with some of the hlsl (DirectX) shaders in 3DC, especially the one for voxel sculpting (mcubes.hlsl)

These are a few that i have come up with so far, I thought i would share in case anyone was tired of the gray.

(backup your original mcubes.hlsl first, then copy this to the Shaders folder in 3DC)

To change the different colors, use the Ambient control. (0-30 is green, 30-60 is white, and 60-100 is red)

Also, if the Brightness control is around 95-100, the sharper spec appears.

The code is not pretty for anyone that wants to look, I just try stuff until i get something i like.

Andrew, if it's not too difficult and would not take much time, could you add reflection and fresnel variables to the mcubes.hlsl like in obj_sel.hlsl?

I hope that makes sense.

I can see how custom shaders with ui controls would be beneficial, but that's probably for another post at a later time.

Thanks for an awesome program!

post-631-1221541831_thumb.jpg

mcubes.zip

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Hello. I've been lurking here reading about the new voxel modeling and I find it very interesting. Looking at the current models they all seem to suffer from the same 'blobbyness' that plagued the first polygon sculptured models back when ZBrush was introduced. That was often the result of people subdividing to a very dense mesh before sculpting rather than defining the broader features at appropriate subdivision levels, and I'm guessing that the mesh density is pretty much the problem here.

Hello, Actually part of the problem right now is that the mesh is not dense enough. You can't get any real fine details in. The blobiness problem I have is that I would need a really large brush to smooth them out, but if the brush gets too large it starts freezing up while using it. Like it will get stuck in one spot for a good 10-15 seconds or more and just keeps on smoothing that spot until it becomes free again. If you let go of Shift before it's done it makes a normal brush stroke there.

One more thing that needs work is Undo. Every undo takes a good 15-30 seconds here.

On that note, do these beta releases run in some demo mode?

From what I understand yes you can use them for 15 days in demo mode, then after the 15 days it will still work but you cannot save or export.

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  • Advanced Member
Voxels wont ever give you that detail (id love to be proven wrong by andrew). As Andrew has said before though a pure voxel solution will not really be able to mimic the pore and wrinkles sculpting that you can get nowadays in zbrush. Perhaps a hybrid form, where big transformations are applied to the voxel structure that forms the base of the sculpt and small detail work gets applied to the polygonal skin or to a normal map or something to that extent could offer a "complete" freeform sculpting solution. But i have no idea wether thats even possible. :lol:

Umh, are you sure ? Theoretically if voxel is of the dimension of one pixel or lower, you can add all the detail you want.

The trick (I think) is having super faster performance in voxel sculpt mode

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@ rimmason

Am i right in assuming your THE Francois Rimason?

http://pagesperso-orange.fr/rimasson/contr...pages/birth.htm

If so im honored to have you in our midst. On the smoothing. Its easy to do in zbrush but 3dcoat alpha currently simply lacks the tools/finesse to do it properly and/or with speed. :mellow: Have you tried the alpha yourself? With your skills you should be able to whip up far more impressive stuff then what has been show in this thread so far (if you have the patience). ;)

@ bluEgo

Im talking about whats possible on current hardware. Polygons simply have the edge. As hardware improves you could argue that anything will be possible in software alone but for now that isnt the case. At least this is how i interpreted Andrews explanations of it up till now and i could be wrong ofcourse.

@ 3dartist

Those viewport shaders look awesome! Yes the grey has been bugging me. :lol: All we need now is the option to add one or two lights and position them and stuff will be much more pleasant to look at/work with (three point lighting setup ftw). I cant wait to try these out when i get home from work! I have been using DX and OGL interchangably but could you also create an OGL shader just in case DX gives me problems?

@ philnolan3d

Nice tools. I experimented with that aswell but its much to slow to use on my system. I really hope alpha's will be faster and or we get a curve like zbrush has to tweak the brush profile. This is probably easier to optimize for andrew then a geometry brushtip or an alpha aswell.

Cool to hear your working on an ear again. :) Cant wait to see what you come up with. I know what you mean about the smooth tool affecting backfaces. I think the problem is its a true 3d brush (a sphere). Certain brushes should not be 3d but should be projected and i think smooth brush is one of them (flatten would also be one) Also, in general, masking would really come in handy in so many ways.. (must be patient.. breath.. count to ten) :lol:

GrtZ 3dioot

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Thanks philnolan3d, I can imagine having a library of horns, teeth, scales, etc.

I've been playing with some of the hlsl (DirectX) shaders in 3DC, especially the one for voxel sculpting (mcubes.hlsl)

I am glad to see result :)

Btw, to reload shaders realtime (without exiting) press CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+Q

If there is some error in shader - look log.txt

You can get reflection vector using

float3 refl = v.VDir-2*N*dot(v.VDir,N);

and calculate specular term using

float S = max(0,dot(refl,LDir));

S = pow(S,16);

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I made some simple tools for working with the voxels. They're not perfect, but just something to play with. Hopefully they will be more useful with the coming updates.

Very good! Rally, it could be very cool to have library of body pieces / industrial details like it was mentioned.

I will make a palelle in merge tool to switch between different objects quickly.

Also, I will make possibility to quickly place objects using space navigator.

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@ rimmason

Am i right in assuming your THE Francois Rimason?

<a href="http://pagesperso-orange.fr/rimasson/contr...pages/birth.htm" target="_blank">http://pagesperso-orange.fr/rimasson/contr...pages/birth.htm</a>

If so im honored to have you in our midst. On the smoothing. Its easy to do in zbrush but 3dcoat alpha currently simply lacks the tools/finesse to do it properly and/or with speed. :mellow: Have you tried the alpha yourself? With your skills you should be able to whip up far more impressive stuff then what has been show in this thread so far (if you have the patience). ;)

@

Yes, it's me. :)

I've tried the alpha, but i'm waiting for more advanced tools, and the ability to do some retopo on top of the voxel sculpting :)

Actuallu, i'm mainly use 3d coat to do retopo, to paint details on some of the models i'm working on, but i'm i don't use 3dc to do some pure sculpting...

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Fruits of tonights "labor". Im quite tired now. :lol: I cant get over how cool it is to just sculpt away but im really missing all the usual tools from mud and zb. I really have to resist writing down a huge feature list plus some voxel specific tools that would just rock. Must restrain myself. :unsure:

On the sculpt. I dont find it visually very pleasing. Id love to change some proportions and bend his "straight" leg more towards the inside but hey.. i cant. ;)

Did not want to deny it you folks either. Viewport shader is from 3dartist ofcourse; thanks buddy! :) Sculpted from a single sphere in one go without ever having to deal with subdividing or retopoing... Weeeeeeeeh \o/

sculpted snoopy

@ Andrew

Glad you like the sculpt. As you can imagine i cant wait to see the progres your making. :) Ill probably buy it anyway on what ive seen so far (trusting ofcourse you will go all the way with voxel sculpting)

@ francois rimmason

Cool! :) Well i cant wait till the toolset matures and you decide to do a full project in 3dcoat. I just realised this today. 3dcoat is allready highly regarded for texturing and retopo. Not so for sculpting but with volumetric sculpting perhaps you get one package for everything. Sculpting, retopo and painting. I really wonder how much detail well be able to sculpt in the final version. :)

3dioot

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Fruits of tonights "labor". Im quite tired now. :lol: I cant get over how cool it is to just sculpt away but im really missing all the usual tools from mud and zb. I really have to resist writing down a huge feature list plus some voxel specific tools that would just rock. Must restrain myself. :unsure:

On the sculpt. I dont find it visually very pleasing. Id love to change some proportions and bend his "straight" leg more towards the inside but hey.. i cant. ;)

Did not want to deny it you folks either. Viewport shader is from 3dartist ofcourse; thanks buddy! :) Sculpted from a single sphere in one go without ever having to deal with subdividing or retopoing... Weeeeeeeeh \o/

2008-09-17_0020.png

@ Andrew

Glad you like the sculpt. As you can imagine i cant wait to see the progres your making. :) Ill probably buy it anyway on what ive seen so far (trusting ofcourse you will go all the way with voxel sculpting)

@ francois rimmason

Cool! :) Well i cant wait till the toolset matures and you decide to do a full project in 3dcoat. I just realised this today. 3dcoat is allready highly regarded for texturing and retopo. Not so for sculpting but with volumetric sculpting perhaps you get one package for everything. Sculpting, retopo and painting. I really wonder how much detail well be able to sculpt in the final version. :)

3dioot

Very nice sculpting!

Mudboxy tools are coming soon, I hope today.

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  • Advanced Member
Fruits of tonights "labor". Im quite tired now. :lol: I cant get over how cool it is to just sculpt away but im really missing all the usual tools from mud and zb. I really have to resist writing down a huge feature list plus some voxel specific tools that would just rock. Must restrain myself. :unsure:

On the sculpt. I dont find it visually very pleasing. Id love to change some proportions and bend his "straight" leg more towards the inside but hey.. i cant. ;)

Did not want to deny it you folks either. Viewport shader is from 3dartist ofcourse; thanks buddy! :) Sculpted from a single sphere in one go without ever having to deal with subdividing or retopoing... Weeeeeeeeh \o/

2008-09-17_0020.png

@ Andrew

Glad you like the sculpt. As you can imagine i cant wait to see the progres your making. :) Ill probably buy it anyway on what ive seen so far (trusting ofcourse you will go all the way with voxel sculpting)

@ francois rimmason

Cool! :) Well i cant wait till the toolset matures and you decide to do a full project in 3dcoat. I just realised this today. 3dcoat is allready highly regarded for texturing and retopo. Not so for sculpting but with volumetric sculpting perhaps you get one package for everything. Sculpting, retopo and painting. I really wonder how much detail well be able to sculpt in the final version. :)

3dioot

Man your way to patient :) nice dog!(i love that cartoon) Hopefully alot..if not i still might buy it just to use to sculpt forms(not detail). BTW, Mudbox 2009 will be release on October 6.

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For anyone that is interested, I've updated the shaders, now with fresnel. I also added a copperish color (ambient 90-100)

3dioot:

I'm glad you like them! I've only played with DX shaders, but the OGL shaders look very similar. If i get a chance to make any OGL shaders, i'll upload them also. Multiple lights each with its own color would be nice. Something like ZBrush Matcaps possibly (looks cool, never used it)

Andrew:

Thanks for the code! I got the reflection working i think, it shows garbage though. Does 3DC need to pass the texture to the shader?

I'm using "sampler s_Sampler3;//Environment map;".

btw, CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+Q makes things so much easier.

Looking forward to the next beta!

mcubes.zip

post-631-1221623462_thumb.jpg

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For anyone that is interested, I've updated the shaders, now with fresnel. I also added a copperish color (ambient 90-100)

3dioot:

I'm glad you like them! I've only played with DX shaders, but the OGL shaders look very similar. If i get a chance to make any OGL shaders, i'll upload them also. Multiple lights each with its own color would be nice. Something like ZBrush Matcaps possibly (looks cool, never used it)

Andrew:

Thanks for the code! I got the reflection working i think, it shows garbage though. Does 3DC need to pass the texture to the shader?

I'm using "sampler s_Sampler3;//Environment map;".

btw, CTRL+ALT+SHIFT+Q makes things so much easier.

Looking forward to the next beta!

thanks man, i like the new shader..now if we could have some sub surface scattering lol..that would be awesome!

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@ Andrew

Thanks! I cant wait to test them out.

@ sonk

Im also a great fan of the series. This was actually modelled after a piggybank thats standing on my desk (childhood relic ;) ). Glad you like it. and yeah the most important tool i use on this sculpt is patience... :lol:

Im curious about mudbox's performance. While i have an upgrade planned its hw requirements do worry me. Also im really digging the freedom of voxel sculpting compared to polysculpting. Ill definately try it out though.

@ 3dartist

Have to say directX worked fine. I know this is an alpha but i have not had a single crash as of yet. Its amazing. I have one request though (or two in fact). Could you put some comments in your shader script? Especially a comment near the slider values you use and the final values for stuff like rgb, specular intensity and falloff strength and spread would be much appreciated. Then i can easily tweak it till andrew incorporates them properly. Also, if your up for the challenge. Do you think you can hack in realtime shadows? :lol: I dont care if they are a little fuzzy.

For your information. Matcaps in zbrush (while they work) are a big hack. They dont use real lighting information but a gradient (a 2d image) In fact they are oblivious to lightchanges in zbrush; only -normal- materials (which look more or less like 3dcoats default) react to light. Same goes for the shadows. They are also a hack and not proper shadows.

@ philnolan3d

light ambient 35

brightness 97

Glad you like it. ;)

Time for work now so it will be a while before i can play again. <_<

3dioot

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Nice sculpting Juan!

I have updated ALPHA to version 07. There are:

1) Many surface tools (but still not full toolset)

2) Possibility to increase mesh resolution (object grows, I will improve it)

But exchange volume<->surface still takes some time. I am working over it, it is complex task but it will be done.

I will improve shaders operating in next update to be able to make interesting effects.

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Very good! Rally, it could be very cool to have library of body pieces / industrial details like it was mentioned.

I will make a palelle in merge tool to switch between different objects quickly.

Also, I will make possibility to quickly place objects using space navigator.

This is great news for me as the first selling point that got me to look at 3D Coat (thankful that I did) was my spacepilot.. I'll be happy to test it's features for you if there are any specific things you'd like me to try. I am very impressed by the work done and displayed here by everyone. This program, community and developer are quite an amazing find. I can report that thanks to this tool I have effectively reduced "DAYS" worth of work down to a single day when dealing with character design, from modeling to texture mapping and this is coming from Zbrush 2.5 (was going to upgrade to 3.1 but 2.5 will suffice with 3D coat as the finishing tool afterward.) Still having issues with exporters but that is nothing to do with 3D Coat. Yet I was able to get very pleasing results through out my process. I may still find myself fine tuning a texture now and again in photoshop but the raw power this tool puts in my hands for texture mapping is amazing.

My single biggest request regarding the paint modes is in the darken / lighten mode can you add an equivalent to the "Multiply/Subtract/Overlay" options found in photoshop? In essence taking the current color and in an additive method apply that color plus the existing layer content color to get a darker color (multiply) lighter color (subtract) or direct blend (Overlay). I prefer to not change colors often when airbrushing detail and usually will pick a single color as my main color and then a swap color I use for white/black and typically use the base color + Multiply/subtract for highlighting and shadowing on a surface while maintaining the natural tone already being used without changing colors.

eva-face.jpg

eva-face-shaded.jpg

eva-face-quads-shaded.jpg

This is a very low poly model as you can see from the topology.

www.invisionary.com/images/eva-back-shaded.jpg

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My single biggest request regarding the paint modes is in the darken / lighten mode can you add an equivalent to the "Multiply/Subtract/Overlay" options found in photoshop? In essence taking the current color and in an additive method apply that color plus the existing layer content color to get a darker color (multiply) lighter color (subtract) or direct blend (Overlay). I prefer to not change colors often when airbrushing detail and usually will pick a single color as my main color and then a swap color I use for white/black and typically use the base color + Multiply/subtract for highlighting and shadowing on a surface while maintaining the natural tone already being used without changing colors.

If I understand correctly, this is already available in the Layers palette. The top drop-down button where it says "Standard Blend" has options for Multiple, Hard Light, Color Dodge, etc like in Photoshop.

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If I understand correctly, this is already available in the Layers palette. The top drop-down button where it says "Standard Blend" has options for Multiple, Hard Light, Color Dodge, etc like in Photoshop.

Ah.. you mean it applies to the entire layer? I was referring to working on a single layer with a variable brush function such as the darken/lighten modes. Sometimes creating a new layer is an ok solution.. other times it simply isn't effective.. but good to know this works that way. Thanks :)

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