Some minor improvements I was thinking of

[Guedin]

Hi guys,

Before I started to work on my last project, I had the idea to keep a notepad open during all the project, which I would fill with all the little thing that I think somehow annoying with 3DCoat.

I did this because I really like 3DCoat. The soft is becoming more and more part of my workflow.

Also, it seems that Andrew is really close to the community and listen every suggestions that are made to him. This is the kind of thing I wouldn't be able to do this with Autodesk or Pixologic for exemples, so I take the opportunity with 3DCoat .

The other main reason for this is that probably some of them are already implemented and I simply didn't find them and if some people around there could just explain me how to reach it, I would be very grateful, and maybe it could be useful for some other people.

Also, some of the "improvements" could just be bad ideas, or doesn't worth to try to implement it, and I think it would be a good thing to discuss about it.

So here's what I've got so far :

Retopology :

- For now it seems symmetry is acting global for every group of retopo. Every group works with symmetry, or none of them. It would be cool to switch the symmetry on or off for each group

- Right now, when we are working in symmetry, the polycount displayed at the bottom of the screen doesn't seem to take it into account.

Also, the polycount is only for visible group. It would be nice if the polycount for visible and total triangles was displayed, as well as for each group (maybe displayed right next to the group name in the group window

- The most annoying thing in the retopo for now I think, happens when you have the high res overlapping himself, and when you move vertice along the mesh, sometimes it slipped to the layer beneath the one you wanted and keep moving on this one. For exemple if my high res is a body with clothes on it, sometimes, vertices will snap to the body, even if I wanted it to be snapped to the cloth. I noticed I don't have this issue in 3DSMax, where it seems the vertice snap to the first surfaces seen by the user camera, and I think it's more comfortable,

- One feature I would also love to see is to be able to push vertices along its normal, with the brush tool, by keeping ctrl pressed for exemple. It would be extremely useful with convex shaped high res and very low poly retopology, where I would need to push vertices to keep the same proportions.

- It would be nice if the brush size for the add/split tool wasn't the same of the brush tool. Since the brush size of the add/split tool determines the radius for the snap to vertices, when I play between the two tools, I have to re-adjust the size each time, wich is annoying somehow

- Instead of clicking each time to cut between two edges or vertices with the add/split, it would be maybe more faster to just keep clicking and draw around the mesh and cut each time the brush run across an edge or vertex

- The extrude tool is cool, but I think it would be even better if we were able to select in one click the border edges. For exemple, if I did my torso and want to extrude the arms, right now I need to select the edges one by one, but I would love to click one time to select all the border edges.

Texture room :

- When I export textures in TGA, the alpha of the file, instead of being black and white to do quick mask, is gray and white right now.

- When tweaking material for photo projection, it would be really helpful to be able to place a pivot point for scale an rotation transformation. Let say I want to project a picture of a face onto my mesh, I would first align the tip of the noise of the picture to the tip of the noise of my mesh and then place my pivot point on it, then I would scale the picture until the eyes are aligned.

- I'm really missing the photoshop's magic wand in 3DCoat

- Hue/saturation adjust dialog : I would prefer if the value were reseted each time we open this window.

Voxels :

- I like the merge without voxelizing features when I merge obj into my scene, and I would love to see the same feature when I merge spline object with the curve tool.

- Right now, it seems like we can work with symmetry only on one axis at the same time. It would be cool to be able to work on the x and y axis at same time for exemple. And work with radial symmetry, as Zbrush do. Comboed with the power of voxel, it would be awesome to create pattern or jewelery for exemple.

That's all I've got so far, I hope it will be useful

[Javis]

All very excellent thoughts and ideas.

[spacepainter]

Radial symmetry should not be so hard to implement. It seems Andrew does not know the concept , as used in ZBrush, or does not see the benefits of it yet.It opens up a new way of creating complex shapes in realtime.

[Wizardkiss]

I would consider the lack of radial symmetry the one single most glaringly obvious thing still missing in the workflow of 3d Coat compared to the other big sculpting apps.

There is a separate thread about it here:

http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=4256