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DavidF

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  1. I use it a lot since 2.49b. I've also used it professionally a lot. It's a great program, I would love to use it in all productions.
  2. I understand. 3d-coat's aproach is simply not subdivsion level friendly. I find it awesome as it is, however I still say that sometimes it is really relaxing knowing that you can go up and down subdivisions, cause as I said, diferent levels contain different aspects of your model, and somehow my mind is adjusted to organize these "detail levels" in "subdivision levels". I'm sure this happens to many digital sculptors, so if loop subdivision in surface mode is already implemented, I think many people would appreciate the possibility to go up and down. Proxy mode is different, it is not a progressive, "macro to micro" way of working, it's more like a posibility to edit faster. Not the same thing. Edit: I must say that about the "base mesh quality" I no longer have complaints, cntrl+shift smoothing and "smooth all + tangent" options are good enough for this . I still thing it would be nice to do a "projected quads" thing directly in the viewport with no need to export/import
  3. Psmith, I understand what you mean in general, however I don't see why implementing subdivision surface sculpting while "locking" geometry would be a bad thing. There can be a thousand reasons why a program should do this or that, but I think in this case it's also very important that artists can choose between modes that in many cases may be more comfortable with. I've done lots of voxel sculpting, and although you say it is very good performance, it isn't the case on full high detailed characters, in fact, it's very hard to work. On the other hand, voxel's freedom can also be a problem when you are in the "finishing touches". For example, what if you have lots of muscles in your character, and you want to inflate them so much that they almost get over each other, but while leaving the small cavities between them. In voxels this would simply merge the muscles, and these base structure would be hard to maintain. So there is when Subdivision sculptin comes very handy as well, cause it's good at generating and maintaining "structure". You can inflate them in surface mode of course... that's why I'm proposing a better base mesh when doing the switch. On the other hand, sometimes "reaching" certain sculpt can be easier when you can go up and down levels, cause these levels rule different aspects of your character, for example: Level 1: Structure Level 2: Base for smaller detail structure (musles, armor, for example) level 3: macro details (expressions, tension) Level 4: detailed defenition of all the character parts level 5: Micro detail (veins, wrinkles). That's just an idea, the thing is that you can go up and down and smoothing certain levels details, and smoothing always maintains a very good feeling and is very useful through all the process, cause it never kills the underlying structure. I'm not saying it's the only option, I'm saying that this method should be an option, specially since performance in 3d-coat is so good already.
  4. digman: Thanks. I tried it and it actually improves the quality of the base mesh, however it does smooth out a little too much the model and there is still some unevenness in triangle distribution. Call me exageratted but I believe every sculptor could benefit from a fully even quad mesh. The trick you mention actually helps me a lot for now but a full conversion to projected quads I think could be even better. That with subdivision levels and topology "locking" would make a great addition... TimmiZ: Oh god! I actually didn't know about cntrl+shift smoothing. Does quite a good trick. Still, what I was proposing here is more like a different workflow... Good base mesh + topology locking with subdivision. I don't know, many artists are comfortable with this and there are many cases that it's really useful, like clothing, control over different detail levels, etc...
  5. Hi everybody!! I wanted to share some thoughts about how to improve sculpting quality for the artist in 3d-coat. As a 3d-artist myself, and as I've seen from many 3d sculptors, smoothing is one of the most valuable tools, in fact, many many things can be done only by drawing, moving, and smoothing. I've seen the latest updates to brushing, which are very good!! However, I think we still lack a good smoothing, and not because the algorithm is bad, it is because in 3d-coat the base mesh that comes from voxels comes in bad quality. Here is an example: I think this should be given attention, perhaps by having the posibility of "resampling in projected dense quads" or something like that directly in the viewport. I think most sculptors spend at least 30% of their strokes on smoothing... however, right know, this can be a little unreliable in 3d-coat. On a broader thought, I've seen the new ability to "loop subdivide" that, with a descent base mesh and the ability to go up and down subdivision levels, may be all 3d-coat needs to be "full featured" in the sense that you could do all your sketching and precise sculpting here. I think that if one enters subdivision levels mode, options like live clay and voxels should be greyed out, and then users should be able to break this whenever they feel like it (for example if they want to sketch again, or add very very tiny detail with live clay). Subdivision levels are very useful for the same "smoothing" reasons as of the base mesh quality, cause you can always "smooth back" to a clean surface and produce nice and soft results at any level of detail... And, lastly, you can of course smooth big details in a level while maintaining the smaller ones in a higher subdiv level. However, this "broader thought" I know is a bigger feature that cannot be implemented in a day or something, however I do feel like we can improve base mesh quality by having the option to "resample" in a quad/even manner. What do you guys thing? Side note: there is no problem with base mesh in voxels, of course, cause it changes all the time...
  6. DavidF

    -IP- works

    Sculpts of David Fenner (intentionalpixel.com)
  7. In fact it's gonna be a teaser for a videogame that I want to give it a shot in kickstarter. It's not a cyborg game though, this is only a chapter in which a character thinks he is a cyborg in his dreams.
  8. This one is kind of finished and unfinished. It's a finished sketch that I decided to render, but it's not a finished project. I want to make it production ready and not only a one mesh sketch. But time will tell if I find the motivation to do so XD. Anyway, sculpted in 3d-coat in about 2 afternoons, I love 3d-coats speed, designing is freedom here. Hope you like it.
  9. that's great farsthary!! All we need now is a flattening/polish tool for surface mode that is precise (like trimadaptive and trimdynamic from zbrush). :P
  10. thanks, i'm gonna give it a try
  11. yeah but what if in the voxel room you decided to change the face proportions tremendously, and sculpt the ear a lot to find different shapes (not only by moving around and posing, which works in both retopo and voxel rooms), taking into account how delicate the ears topology is, you would then have to adapt manually the retopo mesh into the new voxel mesh cause just snapping it would make a mess. Besides, what michalis says is that this subdivision adaptation works great on some cases, and can even be more useful than voxel-retopology workflow, depending on the case, and it would be useful to have the chance to do it that way. On the other hand, subdivision baked displacement maps are much more trustworthy than raytraced ones, at least that is what happens in mudbox. I agree with michalis in that is generally easier to work over a mesh with good topology already, but the downside of that is that you can't skecth and design a character without having anything in mind, which is in my opinion one of the things 3d-coat shines at... and also, another downside of subdivision sculpting is that you can come short of polygons if you want to add, for example, a horn in the head, and you may get to insane cuantities of memory usage, and that horn may have troubles with higher subdivision levels if it's added by booleans (I don't know very well how boleans work over meshes with subdiv levels in zbrush though). Even with this downsides, there are many upsides that have been posted along this thread, and it would be more than helpful to have the chance of doing it the subdivision way, like when the mesh has many folds and tiny holes that is a nightmare to retopology and bake maps with raytracing.
  12. Some ideas about this were posted in this Thread: http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9281 , that maybe didn't get enough attention. This is an important thing that would expand the workflow tremendously, making 3d-coat a nicer pipeline tool, since you could sculpt without loosing topology and uvs from an existent model. I love creating things from scratch, but to be honest, it is very very frequent in the industry the usage of preexistent models with goods uvs and topology and then get to something unique, to speed up the workflow. Sometimes these preexistent models can even be rigged already.
  13. I don't know people... I read a little too much pessimism here. First of all, neither Zbrush or Mudbox is as good for painting as 3d-coat. Mudbox is nice for painting cause its clean and easy, but then lacks some basic features like smudge, has an awful clone tool that basically takes a picture of the whole screen (including the grid) and then "clones" that, the Blur tool is awful too since it makes an awful mess along seams, and of course it can't project along splines, paste and copy parts of the surface, etc. Yet mudbox has a big share of the market, companies like naughty dog or quantic dream buy this 1000 dolar software and mainly for painting, which is really sad to see. This is mainly because of marketing, interface, and good strategy (little features but well presented, easely accesible and very short learning curve). I believe that what makes mudbox a winner is not the software's features themselves, but the fact that when a new guy uses it he gets what he wanted done and without frustrations and without learning the software at all since is so clear, even if it could be done faster with fancy features... This can be improved in 3d-coat... by seeing consumers as the lazy assholes they are. And zbrush doesn't have many painting features, in fact I believe it doesn't even have layers. There is no other program (besides mari maybe, haven't used it), that can adjust the hue, brightness, etc of single layers like photoshop, even sharpen and blur them altoghether. 3d-coat is the best 3d texture painting and editing tool I've found. So that about painting, then there is sculpting. Sculpting needs maturity, that's all. I think 3d-coat is going to a very good direction, when liveclay is finished and stable. Then I have to agree that what 3d-coat needs is bugfixing and a better presentation. I think that a good marketing desicion would be to finish liveclay as fast as possible, since is quite probable that zbrush does something like that in the future, and invest as much as possible in marketing that release with videos that show EFFICIENT and EASY workflows, so people can see it's a different take on sculpting, much more DIRECT than zbrush. This is the stronguest point in 3d-coat's sculpting in my opinion, how direct it is, and it has to be exploited. Sculptris has it too, but then you can't achieve the same things that in 3d-coat, and is very easy to get into a mesh that is too problematic to work with. No other software can glue shapes togheter, separate or erase them in REALTIME while you brush, and this has to be exploited from a marketing perspective, that's why I say REALTIME. Zbrush can do anything with dynamesh, but if you put REALTIME with bells and whistles next to it suddenly Zbrush users feel like they don't have something others do, which is good for the program. If a first experience with 3d-coat is good, nicely guided to what the user tries to do, then 3d-coat could grow a lot. The problem is that to have than nice experiencie, you first had to fight with the brushes you thought that did something and did something different, and after lots of frustrations, you find the settings that let you use them. 3d-coat has to make an effort in making things work their best right away, to a point that no added knowledge learned from trial and error is need at all and a new guy can feel empowered by the software right away. Not a software powerful in theory, but in practice. Then, the hidden qualities of brushes and features will only add to the experience and speed as they are discovered by the user.
  14. Hmmm I in fact find the rooms a good thing. I personally dislike very much the way zbrush has every single thing clumped up in a single space. So many menus make me dizzy. What should be improved in my opinion is the way a retopology mesh adapts to a voxel/surface mesh. Andrew already made some improvements with the pose/move tool so it adapts, but we need further adaptation to brushing so we can use a mesh that already has uvs and good topology as base. This communication between the retopology room and voxel room would be perfect (perhaps to even have the retopology mesh as a "ghost" in the voxel room). Thinking it more deeply... I would leave the paint, retopo and voxel rooms untouched (with more connectivity only), but maybe the sculpt and uv room (which are the least used I believe), could be definitly discarded and merged into a more robust and organized retopo room.
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