Gilded

I don't think there is a tool that can make holes, but if you make something asymmetrical and mirror it then I believe you can make a hole. http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?93767-how-to-pierce-holes-into-a-sculptris-model

WOW! Amazing work! Right when I thought things were getting bad for 3DC with 4R2 coming out, you release this and I'm completely blown away. Can't wait for what's to come with 3DC!

I really like how the snake brush follows the direction of the stroke and reorients itself. It's something that I feel most move brushes would benefit from. This build is actually running pretty solidly for me. Right now the only problem I've run into is that the sketch tool doesn't work with the pressure on my pen, but when I switched to a mouse it worked fine.

My workflow's been Sculptiris (to make a sculpt obj), 3dcoat (to make a retopo obj with UVs), xNormal (bake any maps I need based on the two objs), 3dcoat (do any final details, texturing, etc with maps). A little bit all over the place but, I'm getting more reliable results (artifacts in 3dc bakes were becoming frustrating). I'd rather bake with xNormal as of now because there are a lot of settings and control. So far my results have been very smooth, but I mostly do normal map work and I believe you are looking for displacement, so this may not be a fruitful suggestion (but who knows). I've generated displacement maps and they seem to take the triangulation into account (there may be a setting to get what you want though).

So far this is less than UDK which is 25%, but that amount is after the first $50k (which they don't cut from). Interesting so far, and very promising for potential projects. Not to mention they are much more forgiving with sharing the code.

Looking at the sculpting itself, the details are actually incredibly clean and the navigation seems intuitive. I'm not sure what the mesh is technically doing, and I don't have an iPad to try it out, but for the people who do, the app was free at the time I posted it. As of that time I don't believe obj export was possible, but if the app is any good then it's only a matter of time for that. To be honest I am neither a fan of Apple nor of Autodesk, but having an on hand sculpting app to draft down basic, clean sculpts could be very useful. I could imagine working on things while traveling or while at a meeting or while working on ideas with a group of people. It could be like a sculpting sketchpad.

The CryENGINGE 3 SDK has been released for free use. I haven't found details on the licensing plans yet for actually releasing a unique game with it, but for now it seems like they are aiming toward more of a UDK approach. http://www.crydev.net/dm_eds/download_detail.php?id=4

I thought this was interesting, an Autodesk iPad sculpting app. Very Sculptris-like. Very clean too. No idea how it works (especially with the texture painting).

It's been a while since hearing anything about this project, but they just posted an updated video recently. It seems to be a voxel game engine, which while not being as new of an idea as he makes it seem, actually seems to perform well on current hardware. I wonder if they are using SVOs and if the data is deformable/changeable (like digging into the ground). I can't imagine animation working particularly well yet, but it's still pretty cool.

Well if you changed the topology then you've changed the verts and the UVs, so you wont have the same UVs as before the retopo. If you are saying that you already have the high-poly mesh textured and would like that transferred then you can project the texture onto the new, retopo'd mesh using the 'texture baking tool' under the 'Textures' menu. As far as having the same UVs (if having the same UV locations is important), the best I can think of at the moment is going in and manually removing geometry (that doesn't make UV seams) on the high-poly mesh, but even that isn't a good solution. Someone else might know something better, but you should be able to meet all of your needs when you make a new layout for the low-poly. I even think you can adjust the texture UVs after the fact with the 'texture UV editor', but I'm just speculating because I haven't used it. Oh and you'll probably want to get the latest build, 3.23 if you don't have it because there are baking improvements.

I'm returning to this sculpt after a while because I would like to finish it (I got pretty side-tracked). After some experimentation I've decided to use a mixed workflow with Sculptris and 3dc to get cleaner results. Here's the start of the female figure. If there is anything with the general anatomy that seems off please let me know!

The CutOff tool in surface mode absolutely blew me away! Awesome work! The only thing is the detail is lost when merging to voxels. It would be really helpful if the voxels had some type of octree structure or something so that there could be detail where it's needed. I also can't wait if there is some type of reduction brush like there is in sculptris. Anyway I mostly wanted to say great work.

I personally think the sculpting in something like zbrush is better feeling and has more fidelity, probably since it doesn't depend on marching cubes. The main advantage to using voxels is that there are no topology restrictions and booleans can be done naturally. Both of those issues are being solved for the surface mode in 3dc, which is why I feel that surface mode would be the way to go. No dependence on marching cubes and need for high density and lots of memory, and hard surfaces would be much easier to achieve.

Not yet, but supposedly both of the next engines (id Tech 6 and UE4) will have some type of a voxel focus and are a long ways away. I don't see UE3 going anywhere anytime soon since they just updated it substantially, but given cloud gaming is now on the market, I wouldn't be surprised if the next advances came sooner rather than later.

It seems like Sparse Voxel Octrees are the future for engines like id Tech and Unreal, so I guess keeping with voxels makes a lot of sense. I just wish the voxels we have now were a lot less clunky, gave cleaner edges, and took up less memory :/.

Radial symmetry!!! Awesome! As for Live Clay, I really wouldn't mind if the entire workflow in 3dc were based around working with dynamic meshes instead of voxels. It seems like Live Clay could potentially do everything and more that voxels do, and it seems like keeping the focus on voxels would be counter productive, especially since they seem to be getting in the way with merging and memory use now that the meshing sculpting has advanced. Merging was always somewhat clunky of a concept to begin with. Voxels would still be great to have as a feature (for importing a scanned data and cleaning up voxel work for example), but it seems like they hinder the potential that 3dc has by remaining at the center of its functionality.

I'm not sure if this was posted, but apparently the CryEngine SDK is being made available for free in August. http://www.crymod.com/portal.php?news=68064&sid=4be3a09bc87d62a4c2a69c7a917cfe09 I guess they'll be competing with UDK

Thanks for the response. It seems to have that as an option (LMB+RMB to Move in screen space) but for it doesn't seem to be working with my tablet. It might be that the drivers don't do multiple commands at once like the spacepilot. Edit: Nevermind, I figured things out. Thanks!

Yeah, I have no idea what to do with the boots. They are just kind of blobs right now since I'm not sure how I should design them.

Trying to get some portfolio work done. I'm working on this exclusively in 3dc. I still need to figure out what to do for the boots and the arms. Advice, criticism, ideas, anything would be helpful. Edit: I'm returning to this project with a mixed workflow in order for things to be cleaner

I just got this: http://www.amazon.com/Yiynova-Tablet-MSP19-19inch-1440x900/dp/B004CUT6NG It works well. The only thing I don't like is that the surface is reflective (glass), and the MMB can't be mapped to the pen buttons (Edit: it can but it is called "scroll" instead of MMB). It has 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity, but it doesn't have buttons on it like the cintiq. The latest drivers are on their website. Oh and it isn't an ips so the angle does make it darker/brighter, and the surface is a little bit above the actual screen so the pen does not touch the exact spot that you draw on (since it's slightly above the surface). Both of these things are minor to me but figured I'd mention them. As far as the pen goes, I actually like it better since it has a bit of weight to it and feels solid. The buttons are more responsive feeling as well. The tip of the pen is plastic (replaceable), but doesn't come with the variety of tips that the wacom has. The tip itself presses against the surface and feels more responsive (with the wacom tip there was a slight amount of give before the tip pressed into the pen, but this pen's tip is taut and springy which helps me to gauge the pressure I'm applying better). The pen takes a AAA battery (which is where it gets its weight), but I believe the battery lasts a very long time.

Does anyone know how I could change panning from the MMB to RMB+LMB, or in other words holding the pen button while pressing down on the tablet?

In this particular example the face is something that has very subtle spacing differences that change a lot about the look. It is not unusual or "against the rules" to shift facial geometry throughout the entire process or at the end to get a certain mood etc. Now as for the topic: In a world of infinite resolution and performance, then the ideal you have stated (that you should put all of your detail in the voxel sculpt) may apply. The truth is that users can't afford to continually raise the resolution on a voxel sculpt high enough in order to get all of the clean nuances and details that are typically required (and even if they could, it's a very demanding and inefficient way of doing things). That's why a lot of the detail work is often reserved for after the retopo (for the normal details etc). If I could effectively sculpt all of the details in the beginning then I would certainly do that and be on my way. Voxels are not an optimized system for getting the most out of surface details. Increasing the resolution on an entire chunk of voxels takes up a lot of resources (the higher the resolution gets, the more the difference between voxels and subdividing increases). Not to mention that sculpting through voxels does not have the fidelity of sculpting along a subdivided mesh (independent 3d coordinates versus connected tangential surface planes). Not to mention the file size gets out of control for even approaching moderately detailed scenes (like in the range of gigs, hopefully you don't mind waiting 5 mins for a scene to load and a minute switching between rooms if you don't have an ssd). So in reality what ends up happening is that users tend to make the main forms and the main details with voxels and then add and refine the rest post retopo (with the normal/disp map painting). As far as the mesh showing in the sculpt room, I'm mostly referring to displacement details using Ptex. This isn't really a major point and it wasn't meant to be, the main point here is that the program would benefit from making the post-retopo work contained in one room. There is no reason why a user should have to load between two different rooms to turn on and off the visibility of the meshes they are working on or to do very basic mesh adjustments/manipulations. I'm not even talking about something more complex like posing (which shows how poorly featured the sculpt room is on its own), just very basic mesh management.

Currently when using the clay brush on the side of an object (based on view) there is less pressure applied than when using the brush directly on the font of the surface (facing the view). Is there a way to make it so that the strength of the brush is not dependent on the view?

Meshmixer is cool, didn't know it was available for use already. I played around with it, and while it's not at the point where I'd use it for art, there's a lot of potential. It'd be cool if 3dc had mesh mixing and mesh booleans after getting dynamic subdivision. Merging to voxels could be avoided altogether and the performance/detail ratio could be optimized (maybe smaller file sizes too?). Edit: and another thing, dealing with a mesh instead of voxels could allow for masking and possibly some type of poly paint