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Quick sculpting/painting challenge


Frankie
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Hi guys,

The other day we setup a small sculpting/painting challenge during the open day at the university college I'm teaching in. I had a small day (about 6-7 hours) to create a small island with a tree that was intended to be exported and rendered in realtime on a ps3.

Unfortunately given the pressure of visitors constantly asking questions, it was hardly enough time to sculpt and roughly paint the thing (not even the specular), so I didn't go as far as exporting the thing. Anyway here's the wip, and hopefully I'll finish it during my spare time and show you the end result someday.

I used Claytools to sculpt the rough shape, then I moved to 3dCoat to finish it up. I used automatic UVs generation as it was intended to be baked onto a low poly version with proper UVs later on, something I have yet to do. I have to say 3dCoat is a joy to use for this kind of organic stuff.

Cheers,

Franck.

First Claytools sculpt:

post-497-1211900463_thumb.jpg

Then detailing and painting in 3dCoat:

post-497-1211900519_thumb.jpg

post-497-1211900703_thumb.jpg

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Frankie,

it looks great! I guess your using a wacom tablet for painting in 3DC? I think Andrew plans on adding voxel's in 3.0.

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Wow! Looks very great!

What is Claytools? It looks like volumetric sculpting...

Thanks for your coments guys. Yes Andrew, Claytools is a volumetric sculpting application. Unfortunately it requires a special device to sculpt that makes it a bit expensive for individuals.

I wrote an article about it some times ago:

http://www.infographie-sup.be/publications...ools-1.3-3.html

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Awesome! I see that I should make volumetric sculpting fastly... like I planned in 3.0

Andrew, here's an article you might like to check with some Carmack comments about the future of rendering, and some thoughts about voxel representation and access through ray casting. You might not agree with him on everything but he's certainly a mover in the gaming space and always interesting to listen to.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532&a...xpert&pid=4

There's also this nice approach to on-the-fly volumetric to surfacic conversion using a GS (geometry shader) implementation of the marching cube in the gpu gem 3. Although this particular example uses a 3d volumetric function as the initial data source for surfacing, this could easily be using voxel as the initial volumetric database. Since G80 class gpu can now write into 3d textures, 3d hardware textures could be used as a voxel cache for local tools modification and rendering while storing the main database in main memory. This approach is nice as it suits current rendering hardware, including PS3 which can generate surface geomtry on the fly from a voxel representation. At least for opaque surfaces.

Can't wait to see your first work on version 3.0

Cheers,

Franck.

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AI also can't wait to start volumetric sculpting :)

It seems to be very easy to implement (surface mathemtics is much more complex then volumetric).

I plan to make hashed 3D array of bytes arranged into cells 16x16x16 and produce surface using marching cubes. It is not new to me, I was making something like that 3 years ago to produce fractal surface for game landscape. Also I used volumetric representation to recover 3D-surface from several projections. In last game that I have mado when I worked in GSC, HAOE all buildings was made using volumetric technology.

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AI also can't wait to start volumetric sculpting :)

That sounds great! I was also about to mention Sensable. For me not volumetric sculpting was in the foreground here, but

its inbuilt options for 3D-curves import(which serve for deformation) and precision alignment of objects.

Holger

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Reminds me of a modeling program from a few years ago called Organica (I was part of the beta test team)... The developer has since left the market and the program was never refined enough for my needs, but it was great fun. I believe it used a marching cubes method to create the surface after the volumetric stuff was assembled. it was like building objects from basic shaped and used surface attraction to smooth the shapes together into a surface... like the old blobby technology of a decade ago.

Here are some pics of the screen and objects I ...

http://www.2bitstudio.com/gallery2/native01.jpg

http://www.2bitstudio.com/gallery2/org-dragon.jpg

http://www.2bitstudio.com/gallery2/native08.jpg

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This looks more like metaballs to me (implicit surfaces). They used to be popular in the mid 90's.

Although the mid image shows some aliasing artifacts that could be from volume sampling. Maybe they used an hybrid method.

One problem with the metaball was it required to tell wich primitive would blend/not blend with another. I can see the problem arrising between the legs.

You did a nice job with the modeling. Metaball was known to be pretty hard to work with.

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Frankie: Nice work, I like it a lot.

That volumetric sculpting app looks so cool, I'm been interested in claytools a long time but it's seems that you must buy their special input device with it and it's not cheap.

If 3DCoat will support volumetric sculpting it could be a really nice way of sculpting/building objects from scratch. Looking forward to this feature.

Organica was made by Impulse,inc the same company that made Imagine a great 3D app in the 90's. Organica uses metaball technology to smooth the general shape built by primitives.

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Frankie: Nice work, I like it a lot.

That volumetric sculpting app looks so cool, I'm been interested in claytools a long time but it's seems that you must buy their special input device with it and it's not cheap.

If 3DCoat will support volumetric sculpting it could be a really nice way of sculpting/building objects from scratch. Looking forward to this feature.

Organica was made by Impulse,inc the same company that made Imagine a great 3D app in the 90's. Organica uses metaball technology to smooth the general shape built by primitives.

Wow, I wanted that program forever, probably long after it had been abandoned. I switched from Amiga to PC in 2000, and Organica was one of the programs I was eager to try. What interested me was that the meta prims seemed to have different varieties aside from just the balls and cubes I'd used before (in Tornado3D). I also liked that each had its own colour so you could easily tell how they were blending. Also, it looked to me like maybe there was a heirarchy allowing you to choose which forms blended and which did not. I always thought that someone could do a nice Poser-type program that way, for example by allowing the forms used in a figure's arms to blend together, but not blend with parts of its body, and then producing an exportable mesh from that. If it could UV map in the same process it would still be useful today.

BTW, I actually bought that Digimax 3D digitiser from Impulse. I never used it for anything and still feel that to be one of my biggest abuses of my parents' artistic support. I was just getting into 3D from stop-motion photography and it turned out everything I wanted to scan was just too small for it. I also feel bad for making them buy me Real-3D when I should've known I didn't know enough yet to begin to understand it.

(Andrew: I had to request a password again, as once again the most recent one sent to me didn't work a second time. Is there a place I can go after log-in to set my password to something I can remember?)

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What do you mean: forum password or program serial number?

Heh heh... I have had problems with both I guess. This time I'm talking about the forum password. It may have been something I did wrong, maybe I used my e-mail instead of user name perhaps.

But yeah, is there any place I can go to change my log-in to something I can remember?

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Heh heh... I have had problems with both I guess. This time I'm talking about the forum password. It may have been something I did wrong, maybe I used my e-mail instead of user name perhaps.

But yeah, is there any place I can go to change my log-in to something I can remember?

I am not sure that you can change log-in, but you can change display name and password at "My Controls" at the top. Other way - recover password from log-in form.

To get new serial you can mail me to support@3d-coat.com

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