60 replies to this topic

[philnolan3d]

I'm really looking forward to 64 bit! Also curious about object tree. I'm guessing auto-degrade is a method of polygon reduction.

BTW Arkanis said he's working on the curve editor as part of the GUI upgrade.

[StereoMike]

Puuulease don't forget support for painting directly on low poly models (without altering geometry)

mike

[tayotain]

64 bit! Great!
And i too think that some brushstrokes are messy. needs improving. extrude brush seems to work ok. use it for making scraches (extrude+sharpbrush+lots of depth)...
but things seem to get better and better.

[jedwards]

Sorry but I have to disagree with some of the posts here.



Texture painting? Well there's already the retopo -> UV -> regular texture painting route, so what's the point.

Disagree with you there. Texture painting on low poly objects is probably more important to me at this moment even than voxel sculpting. This is a feature that doesn't work as it should yet and for games work it is very important. 3dcoat could very well displace the need for bodypaint, modo, and mudbox if it actually gets proper texture painting. That means more customers and a solid push into studio use. As much as I like the voxel sculpting I'm still not convinced I want to use it in place of say zbrush yet. I want to see it replace zbrush too but I also want texture painting that actually works just as much, if not more so. It was promised for 3.0 and I purchased the software in good faith, under that promise. Zbrush polypaint isn't exactly the best solution for all texturing needs. It's pretty much useless when you need to make tweaks or changes on texture assets that are already in game. With 3dcoat being able to paint accurately in pixels AND edit normal maps there will be no other competition from 3d painting apps at any level. None of them can do this.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Disagree with you there. Texture painting on low poly objects is probably more important to me at this moment even than voxel sculpting. This is a feature that doesn't work as it should yet and for games work it is very important. 3dcoat could very well displace the need for bodypaint, modo, and mudbox if it actually gets proper texture painting. That means more customers and a solid push into studio use. As much as I like the voxel sculpting I'm still not convinced I want to use it in place of say zbrush yet. I want to see it replace zbrush too but I also want texture painting that actually works just as much, if not more so. It was promised for 3.0 and I purchased the software in good faith, under that promise. Zbrush polypaint isn't exactly the best solution for all texturing needs. It's pretty much useless when you need to make tweaks or changes on texture assets that are already in game. With 3dcoat being able to paint accurately in pixels AND edit normal maps there will be no other competition from 3d painting apps at any level. None of them can do this.

I know that direct painting is one of the most desired functions. And it will be done. I panned how it should work, all algoritmical part was deeply thinked. But of course one part must be finished before starting next. So, don't worry. I know how is it important and even commertially desirable.

[Frankie]

Disagree with you there. Texture painting on low poly objects is probably more important to me at this moment even than voxel sculpting. This is a feature that doesn't work as it should yet and for games work it is very important. 3dcoat could very well displace the need for bodypaint, modo, and mudbox if it actually gets proper texture painting. That means more customers and a solid push into studio use. As much as I like the voxel sculpting I'm still not convinced I want to use it in place of say zbrush yet. I want to see it replace zbrush too but I also want texture painting that actually works just as much, if not more so. It was promised for 3.0 and I purchased the software in good faith, under that promise. Zbrush polypaint isn't exactly the best solution for all texturing needs. It's pretty much useless when you need to make tweaks or changes on texture assets that are already in game. With 3dcoat being able to paint accurately in pixels AND edit normal maps there will be no other competition from 3d painting apps at any level. None of them can do this.

I was referring to texture painting in relation to the voxel sculpting (the subject of this thread). I know low poly painting is missing right now in 3dcoat, but as Andrew mentionned, it's coming.

I myself use Maya 3dpaint tool for low poly painting work. And frankly even if it works ok, it's a bit outdated (no layers etc), and I can't wait to do it in 3dcoat.

Franck.

[philnolan3d]

I may be just crazy here, but I would think poly painting on game res object would be easier to code than the painting we currently have. There's less calculations with no subdividing. Of course I'm no programmer so I could be wrong.

[Frankie]

As promised here are some screenshots of voxel painting in Claytools. Unfortunately I don't have Freeform Modeling, which allows to paint color.
Here in Claytools the painting tool is only available for selection and masking purposes. Nevertheless, as you can see below it is very powerfull and you can imagine how cool the color painting would be with proper brushes.

I'm very much looking forward to having voxel painting for selection and masking as well in 3dcoat.

First I enter the selection paint tool with a rather large spherical brush:


Next I paint and I change the size of the brush along so you can see later the effect of depth.
As you can see at the bottom of the screen, there are various tools where you can fill selection, deselect all and invert selection. There is also a 'select lump of clay' in the main toolbox on the left which enable to select with one click a bunch of isolated voxels in space.


Next I use the cut button to remove the selection from the main sculpt. Now you can see the effect of the brush size on depth.


Then I paste the selection and move and rotate it to another place. From there I could add it to the main piece or substract it. Or paste it to another piece (separate object in the tree view).


Here I choose to add it to the main piece.


Next I increase the resolution to paint some masking. I start with a spherical brush, then I add a custom brush pattern to the brush, a grid for instance (any bitmap could do).


I click and you can see the brush has been applied with the pattern.


Now I can carve with masking. Notice how the depth of the maskin brushes protect the carving.


Hope this helps to visualize the power of true 3d voxel painting when combined with sculpting.
Cheers,
Franck.

[rimasson]

Looks very interesting

[Andrew Shpagin]

Thanks for interesting samples!

It is interesting, how is performance in comparison to 3DC?

[Frankie]

It is interesting, how is performance in comparison to 3DC?

It is much slower on the rendeing side. They have point rendering and a kind of hierarchical LOD (or they just skip points I don't know), that can help a lot but it becomes a bit abstract when working on huge models.

On the brush side, it's ok up to say 10 millions, then it's becoming very slow (laggy brushes create straight lines). But it is a bit hard to compare to 3dcoat because the accuracy is so much more limited due to the Phantom device.

The great part is the ability to split your work into pieces and merge them later. So the brush performance limitation is less damaging.

Memory management is great in 64bits, never hit the ceiling. Still workable with objects of above 100m. I've used it to assemble pieces that I did in mudbox 1.0 last year, and then generate a single object.

Once all features are in, 3dcoat will surpass them in every area, except maybe the fast blocking-out of initial shapes. That's where the Phantom device is very handy.

So My future pipeline will probably be blocking out stuff in Claytools then bring them asap into 3dcoat for further detail and painting... isn't that the whole point of 3dcoat

Cheers,
Franck.

EDIT: Just did a quick test at 35m. Actually the brush doesn't get much slower if it is the same size. However as the resolution increases, you might need to use a much larger brush for rougher adjustments. In that case it becomes very slow because it has to move more voxel. Normal thing then. Knowing this, at some point it will become too slow to work with anyway. Like 100m or above, you can't sulpt past that limit as the carve brushes are definitely too laggy.

[Mantis]

Frankie you are saying that it is easier to blocking out your form in Claytool because of the phatom.
Can you explain it better?
Are you used to block your form in Zbrush or Mudbox and what is the difference between 3Dcoat or Mud/Zb vs Claytool and its haptic device for this?

I never used Claytool and I didn't find the way of blocking out the shape in Zbrush slow, but because I don't have any experience in Claytool I would like to hear your point of view.
At least if it doesn't help 3DCoat I will be smarter than now

Btw the voxel painting you presented is really interesting.
Thanks.

[Frankie]

Frankie you are saying that it is easier to blocking out your form in Claytool because of the phatom.
Can you explain it better?
Are you used to block your form in Zbrush or Mudbox and what is the difference between 3Dcoat or Mud/Zb vs Claytool and its haptic device for this?

I never used Claytool and I didn't find the way of blocking out the shape in Zbrush slow, but because I don't have any experience in Claytool I would like to hear your point of view.
At least if it doesn't help 3DCoat I will be smarter than now

Btw the voxel painting you presented is really interesting.
Thanks.

3dcoat's voxel with an haptic device would work pretty much the same way as Claytools does. Mud/Zb however are surfacic and in essence not capable of sculpting any shape from scratch. You need to start with a shape and then can only deform its surface. There lies the surfacic tools' topology constraint.

There are several advantages in the use of the Phantom in combination with a voxel tool. The device reads your 'pen' position and orientation in space at the same time. You're not working in a plane, or along a surface normal, that means you can carve and extrude matter in any direction at once.

With the Scraper tool for instance, you can cut the corner of a cube with a single stroke, without even tumbling the view to align. It's pretty much like if you had the tool in hand, you can rotate it the way you like and then touch the object.

You could even carve on the back side of the object if you wanted as you feel the surface with the force feedback of the Phantom, not that it makes much sense :P

I find it very cool for carving and scraping hard edges such as for creating rock formations.

Navigation is very easy as you control the camera position and orientation at the same time.

The disadvantage comes from the precision of the input if you compare it to a wacom tablet for instance. It is great to create rough shapes, but if you need to precisely detail a surface, it's not accurate enough.

Hope this helps,
Franck.

[Mantis]

Yes it does, thanks.
I thought you were talking about the roughing tools.

[h11533858]

Something like this has probably been suggested already, but: Maybe instead of storing the color value for every voxel you could just store a material reference. The materials in turn could then be projected in a few different ways, like planar, cube etc. (and be masked/blended by alpha) Just my two cents there anyway, I have no technical background so I'm not aware of performance issues.
Thinking about this further.. how's this:
For every voxel you store the information wether it is affected by a certain material (So for every Material you need 1 bit). Then, for every material you should be able to create multiple projectors that you can move around and for every projector there should be an alpha map so you can mask out and blend (this alpha map, ideally, should be modifiable just by painting on the surface).

[SonK]

Andrew,

i found a interesting paper that might help you out, its call mesh colors:

http://www.cemyuksel..._techreport.pdf

[NinjaTaco]

I don't know if this has any relevance. Mudbox 2009's Polypainting is somewhat superior to zbrush's polypainting. Subdivision level doesn't need to be raised to get a better resolution for the texture. Video link demonstrating this.

http://www.dashdotsl.....20tut SM.html

[SonK]

I don't know if this has any relevance. Mudbox 2009's Polypainting is somewhat superior to zbrush's polypainting. Subdivision level doesn't need to be raised to get a better resolution for the texture. Video link demonstrating this.

http://www.dashdotsl.....20tut SM.html

Mudbox 2009 does not have poly painting like ZBrush, whats being shown in the video is just projection painting.

[renderdemon]

Really interesting paper SonK.

[SonK]

Really interesting paper SonK.

Yeah, i'm just reading it now..its like Zbrush polypaint but it also stores color value for edges and faces, I hope Andrew implement this into 3.0.