Paintstop like add-on?

[b33nine]

So, I hate to suggest something that would further spread out the thin resources at 3DC, but I would love to see a very simple painting app built into or with 3DC technology. Basically, the smoothing tool in the paint room is something that you can't really find in any other painting application on the market, at least with how easy and incredibly fast it is to use, and I can see where being able to use it in a 2d painting application would be incredibly beneficial. Only thing I'd like to see that isn't already in 3DC is masks/selections like photoshop instead of 3DC, and a couple features added to the brush engine like texture and dual brush.

I understand this would probably never happen, but if you don't ask you'll never get what you want.

[AbnRanger]

What I would like to see is a mask selection just like PS, as was suggested, to include thumbnails in the layer...just like Photoshop. Seeing that there are 3 channels/layer, having the ability to make the alpha (mask) affect all 3 globally or individually would work EXACTLY the way it does in Photoshop, when you have multiple layers in a group. So, in this case, each layer would effectively be treated as a Group, and the channels (color, depth, spec), sub-layers.

Basically just copying what is done in Photoshop. This would add a lot of power to the Paint Room, which needs to get some attention. It's falling behind applications that didn't even exist 2 years ago (Mari) or didn't have painting at all (Mudbox). I'm glad for all the advancements in the other areas of the application, but Painting is 3D Coat's legacy. It hasn't had any real new features for a few years now.

[Digital777]

Paintstop is the painting thing in ZBrush right?

If so then i also think it would be good to have a decent 2d painting mode in 3DC also because as said it could be great for that. I mean there is already the tools for 3d painting so rather than needing to paint on a 3d plane as a workaround it could simply offer a way to switch to a 2d canvas where you can then export the results to a image.

As well as painting with shaders another interesting idea would be HLSL/GLSL effects which you could apply to layers or better yet selected/brushed areas. That would add a lot of power because coders could easily make new effects and there is lots available online already in those code formats.

[Digital777]

Another thing i was thinking is that as 3DC has vector curves it could have more illustrator style vector features for paint mode and also allow any used to be exported in various formats like SVG. I am not talking about 1 curve shape but rather complete vector artworks also.

And as 3DC is often called a all-around 3D program it could have some useful tools built in to save us from the need for all these 1-task apps. Like for example there is things like nDo2 or Crazy Bump to make normal and depth maps from images which you can sort of do but 3DC could have the same as a built in tool where it's easy to preview the result on a sphere or cube without having to start a new project then apply the maps.

If you don't know what i mean see what nDo2 does with a sphere, from the layers you could simply select a layer and then right click and preview on Sphere etc and have a visual result. Or in a similar way apply it to a voxel surface and then bake the normal to a actual mesh, if that were possible it would be great for things like terrains where you apply a rock texture and could bake it and then sculpt the results after. I know normals are used in a way to apply to low poly to get details but you could turn them into a powerful sculpting workflow also with a feature like that.

[Javis]

I recall requesting such a thing a early last year, though Andrew got busy with many other things after that. I'm glad to see renewed interested in such tool set. I'm going to point him to this thread, hopefully he'll take it under consideration.

[Digital777]

I suggested vector features before, today i looked at the post about the CUDA compiler going open source and found that Nvidia recently released a GPU vector path rendering SDK -

http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9083

So hopefully the new SDK/source codes will be useful to Andrew, i think things like SVG textures, text and curves etc run on the GPU with CUDA would be really cool.