74 replies to this topic

[randomguy_j]

If you are making hard surface objects in 3D-Coat, I recommend using other 3D-Coat tools instead of brushes. For example use Boolean type operations such as the Carve Tool with "Invert tool action" checked and then use the rectangular selection method in the E panel or the curves method. You can get very clean straight cuts on your model this way. I also recommend creating object shapes on one voxel layer and then right click on the layer and choose "Subtract from..." or "Merge to..." from the pop-up to get clean additions or subtractions from your model. Kitbashing techniques are also good for hard surface

In general I feel the brushes are just not very good for hard surface stuff (although they are improving as time goes on).

Hey thanks for the tip! I recently have been getting more comfortable with the carve and various curve options. I do agree that for the most part the brushes are not very good with hard surfaces. However, the flatten clay brush seems to be pretty good at times.

Wouldn't it be cool if we had a sort of "revolve" option for some of the curves for the carve tool? I noticed you can save and edit curve points on the "closed spline" option. A revolve option would be cool if someone wanted to create lets say a scope for a gun or an hour glass.

[Calabi]

Well IMO, there's too many brushes.
But I honestly can't say which one should be removed. The two you mentioned are radicaly different for instance, you may not see the practical use but build extrude continuously as airbrush just build surface by increment with a limited cap per stroke.
You see that's why I'm not sure removing tools is the right way to go as some user may not see an use for some of them but they still hold value to others.
What I do believe though is that some brushes could be merged with others with options. And some could be made invisible by default for clarity(reminder: you can do it manualy right now).
That way the user can choose, which is not possible with complete removal.
I also believe that at some point Andrew will have to choose how he wants the brush toolset to be used. We could definitely go with a fewer set of brushes and offer premade preset to fill the gaps. I think in the end the current tool tray could be some kind of tool repository and the preset panel be the user tray for weapon of choice

I used to use the build quite a lot when I did use this, but it doesnt seem to behave the way it used to. When I use build now it shoots off miles above the model. Cant see how that is very useful.

I mostly use Sculptris now though because I prefer its behaviour and simplicity. The move tool doesnt behave as good as in sculptris, you have to pick the right alpha. Thats another thing I think the brush's should all work without the alphas.

Giving people tons of options doesnt help new people to learn the software. I dont know though Zbrush has tons of brush's. Maybe the names could be more descriptive and tooltips explain better.

I want to use 3D Coat but its confusing, the behavours of brush's dont feel as good as sculptris.

[AbnRanger]

Hey thanks for the tip! I recently have been getting more comfortable with the carve and various curve options. I do agree that for the most part the brushes are not very good with hard surfaces. However, the flatten clay brush seems to be pretty good at times.

Wouldn't it be cool if we had a sort of "revolve" option for some of the curves for the carve tool? I noticed you can save and edit curve points on the "closed spline" option. A revolve option would be cool if someone wanted to create lets say a scope for a gun or an hour glass.

Create the profile of the scope or object you want to create (using Splines, for example and hitting ENTER to make a voxel object from it) and use the Warp tool to to make it wrap around a center pivot. It works just like a LATHE tool/modifier would in a typical 3D App. Great for creating tires with tread, too.

[TimmyZDesign]

Create the profile of the scope or object you want to create (using Splines, for example and hitting ENTER to make a voxel object from it) and use the Warp tool to to make it wrap around a center pivot. It works just like a LATHE tool/modifier would in a typical 3D App. Great for creating tires with tread, too.

Genius idea!

[randomguy_j]

That is a good idea. Thanks for the tip!

[digman]

I also noticed the zig-zag behavior of some of the LC brushes Michalis talked about. In fact it effects all brushes, voxel, surface and LC.
You will not really notice the behavior till you have a large falloff set and a slower brush speed. It is like the stroke is flip - flopping direction. Faster strokes seem not to be effected by it.
Video coming in the next week..

It could be tablet related hand jitters in that at a slower brush speed an input is sent from your tablet that you are changing stroke direction and 3DCoat starts to flip the stroke to follow what it thinks is a change in direction and then flips back as you continue the straight slower stroke. Some improvement if possible in how the inputs from the tablet are handled at slower speed strokes so the flip-flopping is minimized.

Now we have a form of Lazy Mouse (Zbrush) with the Interpolate feature to help with hand jitters and It does help your slower brush speed work but maybe some refine improvement to the interpolate routine could be made for you slower speed fine detailed brush work also...

[herve_bis]

Hello...

sorry to use that thread... but for the paint room, when using the clone tool, no matter what brush or the falloff value, I always get hard edges... is there something I am missing.. or is it mandatory to use a pen and tablet...?
Just curious..

h/

[Andrew Shpagin]

Look at color opacity value. Maybe it is too big? On my side clone works correcly.

[3dioot]

UI improvements tempted me to give 3D-coat another spin. May as wel post some of my findings.

I am finding the surface brushes themselves like draw and rapid2 to be very fast and smooth (no remove stretching enabled obviously) even on heavy subdivided geometry.

I am liking rapid2 quite a bit although tweakable parameters are lacking. I am surprised there are four hardcoded brushes that all seem to be based on the same principle. Rapid, rapid2 (smooth version), mud (rapid with inbuild noise?), mud2 (smooth verison). Why not create a brush Type instead and have these variations as presets. The differences between these brushes are presumably in settings anyway.

Did notice the "flatten" curve and it being different for the rough and smooth versions respectively. Could use a bit of explanation on that one since its not completely clear to me how it functions.

I feel like rapid2 is very close to the clay in zbrush but it probably needs a tweak on brush embed which currently is not exposed. Currently it looks like its exactly in the middle and this means it sticks out alot when used on sharp edges. This is counter to the clay brush idea which should give you the ability to easily "refine" and "clean" surfaces (while building them). Look up imbed value in Zbrush. Rimmason actually drew it out for you back in the v3.0 days (2008):

http://3d-coat.com/f...findpost&p=9088

Do these brushing improvements apply only to the surface brushes or do they also extend to liveclay? Even when I set the detail value to zero (which toggles liveclay off as far as i can see) and turn of a few other settings I cant seem to match the speed of pure surfacetools. Is the liveclay general brush profiting from these improvements? Also I hope to see a rapid2 equivalent for lc in the near future. The liveclay brush itself does not cut it.

Regarding liveclay in general. I hope you are not leaving the development of liveclay up to Raul with no internet in Cuba. It has been months since any serious additions have been made to it and its nowhere near finished. Please dont let this sculpting tech remain unfinished and unpolished. Please...


3dioot

[BeatKitano]

Dam, I never saw those I think. This small graphic just explain exactly what we need to make a complete flatten/raise brush (currently it eats the surface, you can't "cut below a certain level" or "raise to a certain level with invert". It's called inbed in zbrush and it's extremely useful.

Zbrush inbed in action on a flatten/raise brush. 3dcoat has an almost working of the primary function: flattening surface by eating surface. But you can't raise surface like here:

[artman]

Dam, I never saw those I think. This small graphic just explain exactly what we need to make a complete flatten/raise brush (currently it eats the surface, you can't "cut below a certain level" or "raise to a certain level with invert". It's called inbed in zbrush and it's extremely useful.

Zbrush inbed in action on a flatten/raise brush. 3dcoat has an almost working of the primary function: flattening surface by eating surface. But you can't raise surface like here:

Yeah in Flattenclay it is called "pull faces",this brush is result of interaction between me and Raul..it works well but on some angles or if there is a bump on the surface sometimes it will create a V shaped dent that is impossible to flatten...
it also works by "massaging" the mesh instead of actual strokes,so its less intuitive
...also performance gets very bad at higher level,even at low details values.
Once he gets back I will try to get it improved.
But really with a low value MUD2,Fill and Tangent smooth any sort of Flattening can be acheive on any sort of surfaces...I will make tutorial on flattening once preset switching is fixed.

[BeatKitano]

Yeah in Flattenclay it is called "pull faces",this brush is result of interaction between me and Raul..it works well but on some angles or if there is a bump on the surface sometimes it will create a V shaped dent that is impossible to flatten...
it also works by "massaging" the mesh instead of actual strokes,so its less intuitive
...also performance gets very bad at higher level,even at low details values.
Once he gets back I will try to get it improved.
But really with a low value MUD2,Fill and Tangent smooth any sort of Flattening can be acheive on any sort of surfaces...I will make tutorial on flattening once preset switching is fixed.

Pull faces just doesn't cut it for me (and not because it's bad it just needs an imbed function in there). Here's a simple example in both zbrush and 3dcoat, look at the result:

FlattenClay (see the bumps):


TrimDynamic (very mecanical but very uniform):


As for using the mud2, fill (which looks much more like trimdynamic with invert on) and all, yes I agree, but those are workaround. In zbrush I only need Trim Dynamic and smooothing for cases when the stroke is not clean enough. It's MUCH quicker.

[Edit] Lot of banding in the zbrush gif, the final result looks like that:

[artman]

yeah,its a "massaging" brush you need to make circular motions with it,not strokes.
I recon its not really convenient
.Also you must not set higher depth values...it works best at 10-20% otherwize it add/remove too much matter.
But as you can see I didn't put it in my presets
I still think Raul was going in the right direction tough,its hundred times better than previous LC flatten..

I really use Tangent smooth+Reduce to do all my flatten jobs Im starting to get really good at it,I will show tutorial once preset freezes are gone.
I pinch the borders then TS smooth again little inside the flattened area to get rid of Pinch stretches

To me actual SF Flatten and TrimDynamic are exactly the same...they are both really violent clipping brushes.

my dream is to get Polish D brush in 3Dcoat(especially in negative mode)
...it was what i was trying to do with Raul on the Flattenclay...but I think its gonna be a little harder.
Its better than before but it nothing like Polish D brush.
I'll wait once he gets back i will try to be more descriptive and send him a good "problem" file to flatten.

[bisenberger]

Look forward to your tutorial artman.

[jdoublej]

Hi,

I feel that since 3d coat is so flexible, there is no reason why it can't be the go to program for hard surface sculpting. So, there is this program by sensable technologies, I'm sure you've heard of it, its called freeform, that appears to be a voxel based program, but oddly enough requires a haptic device. Because of this I'm sure most people have and never will try their software. 3d coat is a much more refined in almost every way, but there are some tools for hard surface, that I'd like 3d coat to emulate. They are curves that force the voxels to conform to their contours and can be seen in this video:

I'm not sure to what extent these tools can be emulated in 3d coat, but something to this effect would be great,

thanks,

-Josh