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Parel Hard Surface Sculpts


parel
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I am still trying to get a hold of the tools. I am an industrial designer so am probably not the core customer. However 3Dcoat is by far the best sculpting app for hard surfaces I have tried (I have not tried Claytools though). Carving into your sculpt to create a through hole is impossible with Zbrush and Autobox. I look forward to your advice going further. I will post more works in progress in the future, so that you can crit my technique. These goggle tests started with some extruded curves. I really wish that some of the curve creation tools in Ilovesketch were incorporated into the VSculpts. So many possibilities with this software.

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I am going to restart the sculpt tonight, but I had some questions for you guys. Please see attached image.

Also is there any way to carve away at a surface with a view or construction plane dependent cut? Right now all the brushes seem to start based off surface normals.

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Welcome Parel!

Yeah - Claytools are used for production design a little, but the software works only with that clumsy manipulator - you can't use it with tablets

Cutting view dependant chunks - use ctrl+rectangular margue (E menu) - it will cut through so be careful. 2D Paint tool+ctrl does something similar

Transpose has Selet with Pen selection - select what you need then transform or scale along normal to flatten

Also i suggest not to use a material with cavity shading(bronze) for industrial design, since it shades voxel skin stepping

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Here is an update. I think that I will do some 2D sketches, or find some Evangelion concepts to model to. That way everyone can knw what I am modelling to and suggest techniques. I feel like I dont have real control of what the surfaces are doing.

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I suggest not using flatten and pinch to do your hardsurface,experiment with E panel possibilities for a day or two

for a mecha pieces like evangelion stuff you'll have a blast :brush:

You just have to figure out the thinkining process to translate your hardsuface ideas in 3dcoat action sequences.

ex:make a copy of a cube,cut throught cube sideways with closed curve then doing substract from the cube copy you get nice shapes.

You can also blend and merge your hardsurface parts but it's tricky,you have to figure out the good resolution that will allow you to

smooth the seams between parts and that will give the less "smoothed" look possible.Kinda difficult

here are a few moves,practice each two or three times with arbitrary E panel cuts

and you should be able to make a crisp mecha after that without any problem B)

MOST OF UNDERLINED ARE VOXTREE RMB MENU COMMAND

steps in order to get endshape

BOOLEANS=merge to, substract from or standard merge

EXTRUDE= clone object, extrude cloned object,cut cloned object with E panel, merge to source object

SUBSTRACT= clone object, skin extract on cloned object,cut cloned object with E panel,substract from source object

LATHE= create base shape by cutting trough cube with e panel(surface must be thin) ,activate axial symmetry,select Z axis,

move gizmo at center of model until they are all jammed together tightly ,now at axial symmetry order setting set a

crazy value like 120 ,move gizmo at center of model,at this point the polycount will be really ,don't worry press enter.

it will go down a lot.Voila 3dCoat lathe!

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I agree with parel. The smooth should be much stronger when you work with heavy sculpt. But you can avoid this behavior when you try to keep your

resolution quite small. I have noticed when I'm working that too often I increase resolution too early and then It's much harder to do big changes to your sculpt.

3c-coat can do quite a good job detailing your sculpt even with lower resolution. If I'm not happy where the scuplt is going I'm using "Clone and Degrade"

option and start smoothing again.

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GED and Prayas: Thanks. It is better than when I started, and I think that I can cover up a lot of the imprecision with a good paint job :) I was pretty satisfied with the progress. Hopefully more practise will result in m,ore precise forms.

I shudder to think what a slower computer would do. I have 12 gigs of RAM on an i7 processor, and this still chugs a bit. I didnt really feel that way in the z-brush demo. zbrush felt more speedy, but personally I didnt get the kind of control that I was looking for. 3Dcoat is a lot closer to my preferred workflow.

Thoughts on improvements in the workflow:

I wish that the lasso tool would work more like Photoshop where I could add and subtract selections. Even more than that I wish that I could move and scale the voxels with a triad like in Maya or Silo. It would be so cool to extrude the selections in and out like in a poly modeller. Is this possible in 3d-coat?

I wish that curves would snap to a construction plane or symmetry plane if the user is in an orthographic view like Left, right etc ie normal to the viewer on a predictable plane. Ilovesketch has some great ideas there regarding sketch creation

I wish that I could sketch out a section that I could extrude out.

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The triad could work something like this. I think that it might be pretty good for massing forms ie- if there was no selection it would do a global transformation, move scale etc:

Have you tried Transpose tool? I made a small video to show that: http://screencast.com/t/hPHgeUki

:rolleyes:

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I assume you've watched the video in my previous post, still don't know? :unsure:

didnt see that video till now as it was at the bottom of the page I mustve missed it, you should put it in the tutorials section its a handy tip :) thanks

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Eric- thanks for the compliment. I am using Evangelion concepts from Weta as a springboard.

General Question: I think that I will be done with the feet tomorrow. What would you guys do? retopo and create a clean mesh and then sculpt over again, or just quadrangulate and paint..or..?

I am itching to start painting, but was not able to get any detail in the mesh when i quadrangulated. I am not planning to animate facial tics or anything so any ideas on next steps?

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