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Let me understand the "live clay" thing


ozukaru
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Let me understand this thing called live-clay and this new bool operation for surface mode...

all this are no improvements for voxel modeling, and instead are attempts to pair the competency of surface modeling to other apps in the market?

first when I heard about live-clay I though it was a way to do "high frequency" details using voxels at a low performance cost... but it seems is not so

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@ ozukaru

you're starting an interesting discussion.

My tests so far using zbrush, sculptris, 3dcoat, blender.

when we read in zbrush "8M points' = 16m quads faces = 32 M tri faces. And it's not all as some parts can be more dense than others. This explains why 3dc voxels don't look so crisp. Voxels at 32 M density?

A ~1M tris mesh of sculptris: to capture these details via reprojecting a decent retopo cage you have to subdivide it around some millions (dynamic tessellation, or UC of Raul).

I'm not sure what gonna really happen with UC and voxels either.

But I;m facing this issue: when reprojecting a sculptris mesh on a retopo cage after subdividing it, it captures all this ugly triangulated effect of dynamic tessellation, especially on low density parts. I can use smoothing and resculpting details in zb but I do the whole job again and losing this fresh and spontaneous first result. Anyway.

Dropping this sculptris mesh to voxels - hi density. The same tri ugly effect again, resculpting in voxels then.

This tri effect is captured by any baking system, unfortunately. So I have it on normal and displacement maps.

My opinion, I wrote it so many times... A after retopo surface sculpting is the only way I see. Why do I have to sculpt and resculpt details? Or even paint them as bumps?

Here, 3dcoat isn't the best. Still waiting for a mirrored from voxels sculpting room.

(BTW the article that chris_solo posted was right on this point)

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Live Clay is really nice in concept and seems to work fairly well in this initial stage. However, I have found trying to bake details from surface mode to be nothing but problematic. I get either huge spikes in the mesh or lots of errors in the resulting normal maps. Once I notice that the voxel model was in Surface mode when I baked/merged the model to the Paint Room, I would switch to Voxel Volume and all the errors were gone.

What does this mean, in regards to the discussion about LiveClay? It means it's cool to PLAY with, but there is no ability to switch to Voxels without losing the detail LiveClay gave you. It's like being given Monopoly money to shop with. This is why I think it's imperative to first tackle the issue of dynamic resolution in voxel volume mode, before booleans in Surface mode and such. This way LiveClay and booleans would be more than toys.

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I'm a little confused with these booleans... we have voxels right?

I think Andrew is trying to invest a lot of time in beefing up the Surface mode side of sculpting, but the problem still remains, that Voxels are pretty much the doorway into and out of sculpting in 3DC. Maybe he's not aware of the problems that occur when merging into the paint room, with a model that is in Surface mode. It was problematic before and still is.
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Remember that Live Clay has only just recently gone into beta though. I think you might be judging/thinking about what is currently there too early in, i am guessing things like switching to voxel mode and keeping details won't be much of a problem later into developments.

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I'm a little confused with these booleans... we have voxels right?

If you watch the new cut-off tool, you will see that tris concentrate on the edge of the cut part. This means better definition on the edges and therefore clean cuts, where voxels were very mushy unless you cranked up resolution very high. It's the counterpart of zbrush clipping brushes.

cutoff.jpg

cutofffull.jpg

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I see, now after this fine cutting, drop it to voxels ( a 30 M tri density could work lol) , smooth a few times (it helps) and do re topology.

I'm still confused, this explanation was't convincing, sorry.

I simply don't understand. Or I should say, I do understand?

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I see, now after this fine cutting, drop it to voxels ( a 30 M tri density could work lol) , smooth a few times (it helps) and do re topology.

Why would I do that exactly ? I've got a clean mesh, quite light (I used a large sphere so polycount is very high for what it is) and I can retopo directly on top of it, why would I need to put it back in voxel to lose details ?

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I wonder if voxels become obsolete beyond rough sketching then. You have these nice hard edges, a working pinch brush, live-clay details and so on - when switching to voxels most of this nice details get lost... am i wrong?

When reduction brush is in and the main bugs in liveclay surface corrected (i got hole VERY often but that's only the second beta so I'm not worried), yes voxels will be ok for making your majors shapes on a medium resolution and then quickly switching to liveclay for details and fine details.

That's VERY promising the only drawback I see (and you've understood it too) for now is not being able to go back to voxel after sculpting fine details in surface(detail loss if vox resolution is too low), but that i'm not sure it will not be possible after a few versions and with dynamic subdivision/reduction that's not too bad already, we can still make major changes with liveclay just less quickly..

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Remember that Live Clay has only just recently gone into beta though. I think you might be judging/thinking about what is currently there too early in, i am guessing things like switching to voxel mode and keeping details won't be much of a problem later into developments.

I'm not saying LiveClay has missing features. I know it's still early in development. But the problem is that releasing it to Beta at this stage is somewhat hitching the cart ahead of the horse. You CAN retopo on top of a Surface mode model, but when you merge the model, it has major baking problems that are not present when using a volume mode model. This makes ANY work done with LiveClay currently of no practical use.
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I'm not saying LiveClay has missing features. I know it's still early in development. But the problem is that releasing it to Beta at this stage is somewhat hitching the cart ahead of the horse. You CAN retopo on top of a Surface mode model, but when you merge the model, it has major baking problems that are not present when using a volume mode model. This makes ANY work done with LiveClay currently of no practical use.

I don't want to annoy you, but I tried to bake a small (so that could be why I didn't have problems) part and it worked ok. I guess it's another bug, dont worrry it will be fixed I'm sure.

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I don't want to annoy you, but I tried to bake a small (so that could be why I didn't have problems) part and it worked ok. I guess it's another bug, dont worrry it will be fixed I'm sure.

That's fine. I've had issues with Surface mode in the past, and all the baking problems I've had in recent days were related to merging with the model in Surface mode. Again, the moment I switched it to voxel volume mode, the baked textures and normal maps came out near perfect. Testing a small shpere or something might not show any problems, but try it with a character or moderately complicated model. The difference is night and day.
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I don't expect merging to work in any time soon for LiveClay. I think that that is going to be one of the hardest job for the team to make it work. The reason for saying

that is because you can make so dense mesh. But I have faith that it will be done in the end. Right now it would be nice to fix "export mesh" button from LiveClay. I think that would

be easy way to take your work to other 3d apps for now. Now it just crashes. But there is no hurry with this. I'm quite sure that everything walls into right places in the future.

Only thing that dev teams needs is time and a nice holiday in the sun. Andrew, hope you nice time there :)

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Radial symmetry!!! Awesome! :D

As for Live Clay, I really wouldn't mind if the entire workflow in 3dc were based around working with dynamic meshes instead of voxels. It seems like Live Clay could potentially do everything and more that voxels do, and it seems like keeping the focus on voxels would be counter productive, especially since they seem to be getting in the way with merging and memory use now that the meshing sculpting has advanced. Merging was always somewhat clunky of a concept to begin with. Voxels would still be great to have as a feature (for importing a scanned data and cleaning up voxel work for example), but it seems like they hinder the potential that 3dc has by remaining at the center of its functionality.

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Radial symmetry!!! Awesome! :D

As for Live Clay, I really wouldn't mind if the entire workflow in 3dc were based around working with dynamic meshes instead of voxels. It seems like Live Clay could potentially do everything and more that voxels do, and it seems like keeping the focus on voxels would be counter productive, especially since they seem to be getting in the way with merging and memory use now that the meshing sculpting has advanced. Merging was always somewhat clunky of a concept to begin with. Voxels would still be great to have as a feature (for importing a scanned data and cleaning up voxel work for example), but it seems like they hinder the potential that 3dc has by remaining at the center of its functionality.

I disagree. They work and feel a bit different, and I tend to use Voxels far more than Surface mode. I find it FAR more forgiving and works better in many cases. The pinch tool is one good example. If I want a really crisp, harsh pinch, I use Surface mode. If I want it to be a bit softer, I stick with Voxels. They are still pretty darn fast. Both modes compliment each other very well, and I like the flexibility.

I'm just waiting for dynamic voxel resolution because without the ability to get decent normal or displacement maps out of Surface mode, LiveClay isn't very practical at this stage. If those baking problems can be resolved, that would help a great deal too

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I agree with AbnRanger at low resolution and medium res voxels are the thing, you can sculpt shapes in no time with great ease, but I'm kinda thinking with Gilded on replacing standard surface tools with liveclay tools. Right that doesn't seem like an obvious choice but wait for 3.5.21 and refinesteps and you'll see the surface is so much more effectively used by liveclay, besides turn details to 0 and you've got surface tools with the advantage of the new smooth algorithm which produce very clean surfaces not stretchy polys without affecting surface curvature much (think zbrush new smooth algorithm when you let go of shift while still applying pressure on the surface).

Really if liveclay get all the little subtleties of surface tools (pinching for instance) you have best of both worlds without the software taking a hit in terms of complexity. We are living exciting times lads !

BTW AbnRanger: I've not encountered the baking bug but after playing a bit with sculptris yesterday I found out that you can't export a liveclay mesh in surface mode it crashes the software, you have to revert to voxels first: probably related to your issue.

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Live Clay is very new right now though as i said before and apparently there is some big news on the way, so i think that what we have currently been able to try is just a sampler of something amazing on the way. The devs probably don't want to reveal any major tech until it is nearly finished because 3DC is now at the stage where other major 3D company's want to copy what it does.

I doubt Andrew would want Live Clay to replace Voxels either as it has been the main technology in 3DC and Live Clay and Surface mode will probably all merge together much better in the future. I just don't think things are at that point yet which is why there is often discussions about which would be better to use for sculpting here at the moment.

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Is it possible to have dynamic tessellation in a voxel space? Is this in my imagination, or I read it somewhere here? I mean, I can understand the benefits of UC but dropping it to voxels OK but no way back.

Still confused with this implementation. There must be a dipper reason. Not just another mode.

BTW all my testing using sculptris and 3dc were much more interesting than this GoZ thing. IMO the reducer of the direct voxels exporter needs some more love.

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Is it possible to have dynamic tessellation in a voxel space? Is this in my imagination, or I read it somewhere here? I mean, I can understand the benefits of UC but dropping it to voxels OK but no way back.

Still confused with this implementation. There must be a dipper reason. Not just another mode.

BTW all my testing using sculptris and 3dc were much more interesting than this GoZ thing. IMO the reducer of the direct voxels exporter needs some more love.

I think I read Raul (or was it Andrew ?) talking about vox subcell for translating local tesselation to voxels. But maybe it didn't work, or maybe it's in the pipe and it takes a long time to get it working (more likely).

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It seems like Sparse Voxel Octrees are the future for engines like id Tech and Unreal, so I guess keeping with voxels makes a lot of sense. I just wish the voxels we have now were a lot less clunky, gave cleaner edges, and took up less memory :/.

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It seems like Sparse Voxel Octrees are the future for engines like id Tech and Unreal, so I guess keeping with voxels makes a lot of sense. I just wish the voxels we have now were a lot less clunky, gave cleaner edges, and took up less memory :/.

UE use SVO ?

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UE use SVO ?

Not yet, but supposedly both of the next engines (id Tech 6 and UE4) will have some type of a voxel focus and are a long ways away. I don't see UE3 going anywhere anytime soon since they just updated it substantially, but given cloud gaming is now on the market, I wouldn't be surprised if the next advances came sooner rather than later.

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Not yet, but supposedly both of the next engines (id Tech 6 and UE4) will have some type of a voxel focus and are a long ways away.

No for both affirmations for ue that is,id tech 6 will indeed use svo but that's no secret. I was asking if you knew something I wasn't up to date with, apparently not :)

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I agree with those think that surface tools can`t replace what voxels can do, I mean if were a way to get a very hi voxel density with a "normal" computer then the need for surface tools would be minimal. Because voxels (and I think this should'nt be a secret for most people here) are the closest thing to real clay, and is the envy of others like z-brush or mudbox. So why to drop it? just in a few years there'll be computers as powerful as to allow voxels densities of about 10x believe me! :drinks:

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I personally think the sculpting in something like zbrush is better feeling and has more fidelity, probably since it doesn't depend on marching cubes. The main advantage to using voxels is that there are no topology restrictions and booleans can be done naturally. Both of those issues are being solved for the surface mode in 3dc, which is why I feel that surface mode would be the way to go. No dependence on marching cubes and need for high density and lots of memory, and hard surfaces would be much easier to achieve.

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I personally think the sculpting in something like zbrush is better feeling and has more fidelity, probably since it doesn't depend on marching cubes. The main advantage to using voxels is that there are no topology restrictions and booleans can be done naturally. Both of those issues are being solved for the surface mode in 3dc, which is why I feel that surface mode would be the way to go. No dependence on marching cubes and need for high density and lots of memory, and hard surfaces would be much easier to achieve.

That's why dynamic voxel density will be just as big as LiveClay in Surface mode, if not moreso. I think it will be the breakthrough we've been waiting for with Voxels.
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Dynamic voxel density is like zip and rar, it will get less and less needed as everything flows quicker and quicker...

The principle of voxels is just another way of describing space, it can be replaced by polygons, but will never be the same, just as apples won't be oranges, even if you pack an apple in an orangepeel.

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