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The Foundry rise


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damn.. this looks sweet.

 

thats a lot of reading though.

 

i think it will take a while before this can approach 3d coat.

 

Andrew is pushing 3d coat forward at crazy speeds.

Edited by Aleksey
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...haha,so it seems Tomas is no longer with Pixologic.

Really cool stuff,it seems tough to have the limitations of voxels with smoothing creating holes and thin surfaces ect...

but it seems less resource consuming than voxels.

 anyway, implementing this kind of stuff is one thing getting solid brush behavior is another.....

(although he did nailed the essentials tools needed in Sculptris) 

 

We'll see...but Im not really worried for 3DCoat,

 

(just realised this thread is really NOT at the right place...Javis I think you should move it )

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Keep in mind that application isn't a full realization of the ADF algorithm. It's a first pass. As it gets refined it will be able to handle infinite resolution. Perfectly sharp edges, paper thin shells. The possibility for an application based on ADF to take the lead in CG sculpting is very real and very much a threat to every current player in the field. Since ADF is locked down with patents the only real hope of competing is something like OpenVDB.

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Keep in mind that application isn't a full realization of the ADF algorithm. It's a first pass. As it gets refined it will be able to handle infinite resolution. Perfectly sharp edges, paper thin shells. The possibility for an application based on ADF to take the lead in CG sculpting is very real and very much a threat to every current player in the field. Since ADF is locked down with patents the only real hope of competing is something like OpenVDB.

We'll see. Voxels, as nice as they are, seemed like the Holy Grail for a time, but then it's limitations made it more and more impractical to do high-detail sculpting. It still has it's strengths, but focus in 3D Coat has long shifted away from voxels (to surface mode sculpting and LiveClay).

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Voxels were never a holy grail. The limitations of them have been known for a very long time. Recent technology only allowed some of those limitations be nearly met. 3DC is a great example of that.

 

 

ADF is quite different. Try painting something in Mischief and you will see. :)

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Voxels were never a holy grail. The limitations of them have been known for a very long time. Recent technology only allowed some of those limitations be nearly met. 3DC is a great example of that.

 

 

ADF is quite different. Try painting something in Mischief and you will see. :)

Voxels were viewed by many, whether you agree with it or not, as "the next new thing" in sculpting. It wasn't the Holy Grail many thought it was. This includes ZBrush's Dynamesh implementation. People initially thought it was a new direction for Pixologic. It wasn't. Just another useful tool. Likewise, initial conceptions about ADF are wholly premature until it can be more fully developed, to see where it's strengths and weakness lay. You'll see. :)

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I heard about most of this, but not everything.  As soon as I got wind of Mischief, I downloaded it and tested.  I was impressed enough to buy it at $25, but having used it more, since, I can honestly say it's needs A LOT of work.  It appears to be a very young, underdeveloped version of Sketchbook, while presenting some features it doesn't have, like nearly infinite zoom.  The help menu simply points to a webpage with nothing on it.  There doesn't appear to be a way to save custom brushes (as far as I can tell).  I also noticed that zooming in and out of big drawings does seem to affect the speed of the app and, perhaps, how it's handled in memory.  Anyway, it's hard to say if the $$ I put into it was worth it for me, but I do hope it gets developed further and that this information helps others make more informed decisions about whether or not to purchase it.

 

As far as Tomas Pettersson, I've always wondered by Pixologic bothered to hire him and have Sculptris in their slew of offerings, when it almost never got any further updates past the point of his starting to work there.  The only thing I could come up with was that Pixologic felt threatened by it and hired him to keep him out of the competition, while gaining recognition for having some semblance of a Voxel offering.  I hope he gets to take his tech much further now.

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I heard about most of this, but not everything.  As soon as I got wind of Mischief, I downloaded it and tested.  I was impressed enough to buy it at $25, but having used it more, since, I can honestly say it's needs A LOT of work.  It appears to be a very young, underdeveloped version of Sketchbook, while presenting some features it doesn't have, like nearly infinite zoom.  The help menu simply points to a webpage with nothing on it.  There doesn't appear to be a way to save custom brushes (as far as I can tell).  I also noticed that zooming in and out of big drawings does seem to affect the speed of the app and, perhaps, how it's handled in memory.  Anyway, it's hard to say if the $$ I put into it was worth it for me, but I do hope it gets developed further and that this information helps others make more informed decisions about whether or not to purchase it.

 

As far as Tomas Pettersson, I've always wondered by Pixologic bothered to hire him and have Sculptris in their slew of offerings, when it almost never got any further updates past the point of his starting to work there.  The only thing I could come up with was that Pixologic felt threatened by it and hired him to keep him out of the competition, while gaining recognition for having some semblance of a Voxel offering.  I hope he gets to take his tech much further now.

Is he officially on board with the Foundry in this "Mischief" ADF development? If he is no longer with Pixologic, then perhaps Andrew can "contract" him to work on Auto-Retopo...to improve it to the level of ZBrush's new ZRemesher? It still leaves a lot to be desired, in it's current state.

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Some might expect ADF or paint technology to appear in MARI rather than MODO, given the texturing program is already a layered Photoshop-ese program.

Bill Collis, however, does not see that as inevitable. “MARI does a very particular thing very well, and Mischief is a very different product,” he explained.

 

For Collis the point of the Foundry’s tools is storytelling and most visual stories start with a sketch.

 

Mischief then is the logical start but more of an expressive experimentation and design tool, than the much more prescriptive and precise end texturing tool that is MARI.

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Voxels aren't dead. Like, at all. We'll see if history repeats itself and the "hardware-cheaper" polygon based alternative take hold and keep the voxel to fringe tech but voxels aren't dead.

I use voxels at work everyday with sparse voxel octree tech and for now there's no comparison with polygon based tech regarding limitations. It needs beefy machines and lot of disk space,but that's nothing that can't be accommodated with a few years and the prices going down.

Besides there's ton of benefits to it, in the polygon world you need to resort to middleware to get some specific render passes while you can get most of them almost for free with the very nature of voxels (i'm talking about sss/ao/gi/multilayered materials), you also get lods for free without someone actually making them, and sometimes you can get a few instructions off physic engine because it's not shells but actual content.

 

As far as Mischief is concerned: V2 is much nicer but there's still that issue with tablet pressure not handled well (can't make very fine lines unless zooming a lot) and it lacks a blender type of brush. With that it could be awesome.

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