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XRA sketchbook


XRA
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I'm really impressed by 3D Coat, it is a very inviting program and has motivated me with 3D again (beyond sticking to low poly). I'll be posting random WIP images as I experiment, most of my assets are intended for game use.

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this was the first thing I tried with 3D Coat, I already had been modeling this low poly spacesuit, but I brought it into 3D coat for voxel sculpting and was impressed with the results for simply adding a bit of detail and baking normal maps. I didn't quite finish this yet ;)

post-6346-0-67156700-1305794753_thumb.gipost-6346-0-08141100-1305794776_thumb.gipost-6346-0-26359000-1305794798_thumb.gi

Then I was messing with hard surface sculpting in 3DC, just making fictional computer equipment intended as low poly assets, I still have more to make...

post-6346-0-99197800-1305794893_thumb.pnpost-6346-0-29494000-1305794924_thumb.pnpost-6346-0-17252300-1305794965_thumb.pn

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thanks!

working on this currently, it is great how you can smash shapes together. I'm using the cube to make jagged steps, it started with a solid curve made in sketchup that is being used as a guide.

It would be great if when the Transform gizmo is visible, the 4 Arrow keys on the keyboard could move the selection relative to the camera, like in screen space: (left right up down) the shift key could act as a modifer for away / towards. That would speed up repetitive tweaking of the gizmo :)

bridge1.jpg

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I dont know, screen space movement is so error prone, seldom does what you want. But i see what you're up to.

yea that's true, I imagine that while moving the selection with the arrow keys I'd be able to rotate the camera at the same time to help with alignment. I started to use click-and-drag for moving the object though, which seems to be somehow relative to the camera, and then you can hold down Y to adjust the object's elevation if it starts to sink into the sculpt too much, works pretty well.

I realized now that I could have done the step shapes much faster if I first made a step 3D object (a basic box) and used the Merge tool set to 'On Pen'. Although it seems like the Merge tool needs a quick way to adjust brush rotation while adding shapes with 'On Pen' mode enabled, similar to how you would hold [ or ] to adjust the brush radius.

...maybe I can bind it.. will have to check. Would be great if in Merge - On Pen mode I could use up and down arrows to control depth, and left/right to control brush rotation. Then of course next I'd want scaling controlled by arrows with a modifier key... :)

bridge2.jpg

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Nice I'll be following your progress, I've always wondered if 3dcoat was suited for medieval type enviros. I've never tried thinking I would hit a wall with performance, but that was before instancer, maybe it's possible now.

Anyway, nice work so far !

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thanks! it does remind me of Moria now that you mention it haha..

When I imported the curved mesh I had to scale it down when converting to voxels, I might not be too clear on how scale and voxel density translates in 3d coat. At first it was pretty bad performance (at around 19 million tris) But after scaling it I've been working at 2x res with about 9 million tris.

I probably wont use Res+ any further since it is a large object, and I also found myself getting sucked into fine details far too soon, but that is because the new LiveClay is really fun.

I was adding a lot of surface details using it with Masks, but started to realize my larger shapes weren't very interesting/developed and the detail would be better for a normal map..... so since then I've just been getting used to working looser/large while trying different brushes.

here is another WIP, most of what I'm focusing on currently are the flat shapes far in the back, and then figuring out a good solution to reduce polys to bake and do normal map detail for the step surfaces.

Are there any good methods for getting autoretopo to preserve hard edges? I haven't used it much, maybe I can manually do the steps so their shapes remain sharp and let autoretopo do the rest?

*edit* Also I figured out that the keys 9 and 0 rotate the brush, though I still think having the arrow keys for adjusting the 3d object in Merge On Pen would be great, so you can keep the pen on the surface and tweak the alignment without constantly going back between the tool panel and model (adjusting yaw, pitch, roll, shift XYZ)

bridge3.jpg

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