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[Solved] Amplify sculpt ?


Werner_Z
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Is there a way to amplify the existing brush strokes you made in 3d Coat? I'm working on something and had a shader with high cavity values. This made it look like I'm sculpting deep and high enough, but as soon as I realised this it was too late. I really don't want to go over all of my strokes again as it is very detailed.

In Mudbox you could just overdrive the sculpt layer.

Something like this...  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_vSfR97ZJA

Edited by Werner_Z
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This is in the sculpt room, and no the angulator brush does not help. I just hope we get proper sculpt layers with opacity sliders in the next big version.

I will submit a feature request for this. Strange that 3d Coat does not have this simple feature.

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4 hours ago, Werner_Z said:

This is in the sculpt room, and no the angulator brush does not help. I just hope we get proper sculpt layers with opacity sliders in the next big version.

I will submit a feature request for this. Strange that 3d Coat does not have this simple feature.

Sculpt layers is something I've been lobbying for, for over 4yrs now. Something else always seems to take it's place in line. There are requests on both Mantis and Trello, for it, with lots of user support. But it keeps getting passed over for some reason.

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12 hours ago, Carlosan said:

There was a paper about layers in sculpt mode. I dont know if reference to sculpt layers or if this development is still active.

Sculpt layers in ZBrush and Mudbox are basically LAYERS PER OBJECT. The VoxTree panel is more of a hierarchy panel. As Tony mentioned, we actually have Sculpt Layers in 3D Coat, but it's done via IMAGE-BASED Sculpting in the Paint Room.  The problem is, it forces users to split their sculpting work into different stages of the pipeline, and that isn't very convenient or practical. You typically don't want to wait until the texture painting stage to do high frequency level sculpting.

Andrew could basically lock the mesh/vertex order of each VoxTree layer, when a sculpt layer is added, so that dynamic tessellation doesn't mess the vertex order up. In this sense, Sculpt Layers would merely be a Sculpt History container, and adding a Masking feature would allow that history to be manipulated in a localized fashion. Just like the Magnify and Reduction brush, in the Paint workspace.

 

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What you just wrote (Don) makes a lot of sense.

But since its not there already there , there  must be something that stops Andrew from implementing it (coding wise) .

 

Personally i do all high frequency sculpt  in the paint room (normal painting) where i can use the paint layers , opacity etc extremely easily as you previously wrote , plus it keeps

my sculpts clean and produces better auto retopo results.

 

You already know , (better than everybody else) that changing one thing in 3D Coat , changes many other things in a raw (even not related to the eye of the user , but coding wise there is a link for sure , otherwise features would broke almost randomly , i see this why my intense and everyday experience with my softwares).

 

But again , what you just wrote might be the solution to the sculpt layers.

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The sculpt layers must mean rewriting some deep underlying code which could mean a lot of possible breaking of the software but now I will explain my reasons at some development time, we need sculpt layers. AbnRanger for good reasons has been lobbying for a few years now the need to have sculpt layers in 3DC.

Other 3D software like Mudbox, Modo and ZBrush have sculpt layers. MayaLT I believe will have sculpt layers at sometime as they keep integrating more and more of Mudbox into Maya and Maya LT. 

As AbnRanger said not much development on Mudbox itself...   At the moment you can have a live link between Mudbox and Maya LT.  

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Maya LT----- 250 dollars a year. Maya LT is for creating game content so if it does get more Mudbox tools intergration, the software becomes more of  drawing card to subscribe to. You will be able to do regular polygon modeling, or model a base then sculpt on it or start from a primitive.  I have subscribed myself, though not for sculpting as I have 3DC, Mudbox and ZBrushCore.

Mud box --- 80 dollars a year and with sculpt layers, true vector displacement, Subdivision levels, Autopo etc etc. Of course it does not have advance sculpting features as 3DC

ZBrush -----Appox 800 dollars.

Modo--------Appox 1800 dollars for a license or 600 dollars for year .

3D Coat---- Appox 380 dollars. 3DC though has no sculpt layers or true subdivision levels.  

The above is my opinion and reasons for adding at least the sculpt layers to stay in the game... 

 

 

Edited by digman
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If memory serves me correctly, Mudbox locks the Subdivision level on a given sculpt layer, once you begin to sculpt on it. To add more subdivision at a later point, you add another sculpt layer and increase the SubD level your desired amount. I think this is how both Sculpt layers and SubD levels might work in 3D Coat. By default, 3D Coat would lock the SubD/Resolution level (and vertex order) once you begin to sculpt on a new sculpt layer. All Dynamic Tessellation and Boolean tools would be grayed out (inaccessible) while a Surface mode object has a Sculpt layer assigned.

So, for example, if one wanted to sculpt very fine wrinkles in the face/neck region, and wanted dynamic tessellation applied in the process, they would need to apply the dynamic tessellation before adding a Sculpt layer. This way they ensure they will have a more optimized distribution of polygons in the process, even though Sculpt layers will lock the mesh order per layer. All one can really do with Sculpt layers is deform vertices.

Once a layer for wrinkles is done, let's say they want a separate one for skin bumps and pores. If needed they could add some more resolution/subdivision to the new layer, but as soon as they start to sculpt, no more resolution can be applied to that layer. Adding masking to Sculpt layers would effectively adjust the deformation value of a given group of vertices and location in 3D space. I'm sure Andrew has some ideas of his own, but I think that is how it would work. You have SubD levels and Sculpt layer + layer masking functionality in one combined effort.

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I had a similar problem with one of my models. I used one of the PicMat shaders during sculpting and it emphasized the details which simply weren't there. It's a problem that is also not unknown to ZBrush artists with its MatCap shader (MatCap Gray anyone? :)). Ever since I've made that mistake I mostly try to sculpt in a neutral lighting and PBR shader, or at least switching to it from time to time to inspect the sculpture.


Anyway, this thread gave me a push towards finding a workaround for amplifying the details in 3DC without having to re-sculpt my old model. I do have a ZBrush license and I could import the model and use the macro shown on the video from OP's first post, but I don't like easy solutions. :) So I watched the video a couple of times, noted that it's all based on a base mesh (SubDiv 1) and MorphTargets and managed to reproduce it in Houdini.

https://youtu.be/vLQi_oOVgAE

3D Coat doesn't use SubDiv levels, so I'm using a decimated and smoothed version of input geometry as a target surface for raycasting points of a highres geo. Raycast highres mesh then becomes the new base mesh. This is important because a perfect topology match is required in order to move (using linear interpolation) points of the base mesh to their corresponding positions on the highres mesh (point numbers must match). With linear interpolation I can overshoot their positions on a vector that goes from the base mesh to target mesh, and this is when the amplification happens. Regions to be affected by amplification (or reduction, which is also possible) can be painted out with a mask.

Sometimes I have wet dreams of 3D Coat adapting Houdini Engine. :)

Edited by ajz3d
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Another way to check the depth of your strokes with variable lighting directions is to enable Shadows under the Geometry tab. That gives you the ability to rotate the lighting not normally available now in the Hdri lighting of 3DC. Works with the default shader and others but not all shaders.  

You can see if your strokes are creating the silhouette you need.

Edited by digman
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The main reason I wrote my post for is to let@Andrew Shpagin know that most likely everything that is required for this functionality to work in 3D Coat is already in it. All of the retopo stuff is most likely based on some sort of raycasting algorithms, and the decimation and smoothing are available in the sculpt room. So reproducing the HDA shouldn't require much of devs effort.
Of course, the approach I took is naive and I tested it only on a couple of meshes, but I didn't run into any problems so far. It might be a good starting point.

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15 hours ago, ajz3d said:

I had a similar problem with one of my models. I used one of the PicMat shaders during sculpting and it emphasized the details which simply weren't there. It's a problem that is also not unknown to ZBrush artists with its MatCap shader (MatCap Gray anyone? :)). Ever since I've made that mistake I mostly try to sculpt in a neutral lighting and PBR shader, or at least switching to it from time to time to inspect the sculpture.


Anyway, this thread gave me a push towards finding a workaround for amplifying the details in 3DC without having to re-sculpt my old model. I do have a ZBrush license and I could import the model and use the macro shown on the video from OP's first post, but I don't like easy solutions. :) So I watched the video a couple of times, noted that it's all based on a base mesh (SubDiv 1) and MorphTargets and managed to reproduce it in Houdini.

https://youtu.be/vLQi_oOVgAE

3D Coat doesn't use SubDiv levels, so I'm using a decimated and smoothed version of input geometry as a target surface for raycasting points of a highres geo. Raycast highres mesh then becomes the new base mesh. This is important because a perfect topology match is required in order to move (using linear interpolation) points of the base mesh to their corresponding positions on the highres mesh (point numbers must match). With linear interpolation I can overshoot their positions on a vector that goes from the base mesh to target mesh, and this is when the amplification happens. Regions to be affected by amplification (or reduction, which is also possible) can be painted out with a mask.

Sometimes I have wet dreams of 3D Coat adapting Houdini Engine. :)

For those who enjoy a good conspiracy theory....one of SideFX's execs has followed 3D Coat's Facebook page, recently. One can only wonder what that entails. :) One of their webinars mentions using 3D Coat and Houdini, together.

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  • Carlosan changed the title to [Solved] Amplify sculpt ?

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