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Spiraloid Voxel Experiments


Spiraloid
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what tools are you using at the beginning of the video where it almost looks like you draw on a mask, refine it and then start to pull that shape out to create panelling etc.? Can't figure out for the life of me how you're doing it.

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what tools are you using at the beginning of the video where it almost looks like you draw on a mask, refine it and then start to pull that shape out to create panelling etc.? Can't figure out for the life of me how you're doing it.

that't the copy tool on a new blank vox layer.

-b

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Thanks Spiraloid, appreciate you shedding light on that for me. Unfortunately I can't get anything that resembles clean results, no clue why though. Everything I do seems to paint a blob to roughly match the surface of the reference voxel layer.

Love seeing these experiments of yours, truely shows what this program is capable of.

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Thanks Spiraloid, appreciate you shedding light on that for me. Unfortunately I can't get anything that resembles clean results, no clue why though. Everything I do seems to paint a blob to roughly match the surface of the reference voxel layer.

Love seeing these experiments of yours, truely shows what this program is capable of.

res+ the voxel layers. the blank vox layer should be the same resolution (i.e. 2x) as the other vox layers I'm copying from. then I'm transforming or bas reliefing the new vox layer that I drew into with copy.

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Wow! Very original and clean character.

I like the round bum and the way you built the glasses.

You seem to have tons of materials. Did you made them by yourself.

Will she have arms, and a dog robot companion or something like that?

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  • Advanced Member

Is this Bay Raitt ?

What happened to your sculpting forums man?

They where great and what is you process for using 3d coat?

Hey, yep. It's me. The spiraloid forums' look like they have finally died. I got too busy after I left NZ. I should email the folks at ATT if the machine is still there. They were nice enough to host the forum for me back in the day, but I didn't have permissions on their network so I couldn't really upgrade it as the forum as it started to bitrot. I may start them up again, maybe with a broader scope just digital sculpting. Think it'd be useful?

as for 3D coat, I still use everything from wings3d, maya, zbrush, etc. but this voxel sculpting is new. Thanks to Nvidia cuda and andrew it's neat to see it emerging as a new sculpting medium. 3D coat is still very slow after every operation as it converts from mesh-->voxel space, but the workflows I'm discovering are mind bending for me as a sculptor. it's like a weird hybrid of what the guys do at the weta workshop and what digital zbrush/mudbox/etc sculptors use. some of my models must have thousands of unplanned "boolean" operations stamped onto them by the time I'm done. I find I'm having to "un-learn" a lot of old habits.

some handy concepts I've been pondering while I experiment with 3D coat if you're interested:

-learn the amount of surface details you can get on your machine with each of the default sphere, cube and cylinder. size matters in a voxel volume, so you need to learn what the defaults sizes can do creatively. also, learn how detailed you can get size wise from the default primitives. it helps to know this when setting up new blank vox layers. I always ask myself "how detailed does this layer need to be" before I ever draw into it with the sphere, carve, primitive or copy tools. think of it like the first time you learned how to set the pixel size of an image in photoshop. same thing but with an extra dimension added in.

-name and shade your vox layers as you go. a good model has lots of them.

-get used to using the hide, copy, "split hidden" tools with new vox layers.

-get in the habit of coloring your vox layers as you go. it's a good idea to setup a "base" shader that bakes out textures perfectly tuned for your final renderer. I use the marble2 shader with all the textures reset to 50% gray. once I was happy with how this base vox layer shader bakes down into texture maps, I setup some common surface textures as cube maps with diffuse, spec, normal texture sets. for complex (vertical gradients) I use the super shader. then with each new layer, I color it using the color modulator in the vox layers shader.

-experimentation. there are very different behaviors with all the tools. they aren't variants of a single theme. fill is very different than grow. to learn them as andrew invents them, I've been trying to primarily only using ~4 tools at time. trying to work them off each other in tandem. primitive, carve, mud2, smooth. grow, smooth, move. curve, snake, toothpast, smooth

-learn to use the smooth tool. voxel smooth is like sculpting with heat in physical terms. but as it melts, it changes the volume like an eraser. it's amazing. I'm just starting to get the hang of it. I recommend using it with grow like you'd use dodge and burn in photoshop.

all my snapshots I post here are rendered in 3Dcoat btw.

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Your Videos are very inspiring, I want to sculpt more and more after watching. The way your sculpts are blocked out and I must try and employ these tech's more. Thank you!!

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here's a muckabout. I made for someone. thought I'd share it.

@andrew. I wish I could have hit alt-enter with the strokes and it would make autotopo poly's instead of just the intersections mesh it currently makes when I hit enter.

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Nice works!

I've noticed issues with the turntables too. They all render fine but something halts the upload process sometimes. Havent been able to figure out what :P

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