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This is a 2 part post:

First Part.

DX version.

Voxel Mode:

The Voxel Clay brush appears to suffer from some lag still compared to the airbrush and build brush on faster strokes.

First three strokes are with the Clay brush,

The second and third set of brush strokes are with the Airbrush and Build brushes.

500,000 tri sphere.

Now this might not be as noticeable on a powerfull computer.

Second Part is a polishing suggestion (picture inculded, voxel clay brush on the left, surface clay brush on the right)

The voxel clay brush lays down it's strokes in what I call a wormy fashion which makes it hard to build the voxel surface in a clean fashion

The surface clay brush does a good job of laying down it's strokes so they blend together as you build.

Polishing suggestion:

Make the voxel clay brush lay down it's strokes closer to how the surface clay brush lays down it's strokes.

Future Suggestions:

Once you are done fixing the current set of brushes plus polishing them including both voxel and surface mode, consider adding some more voxel brushes as they are falling behind the surface and LC brushes in having a wider range of different kinds of brushes.

If possible have a general voxel brush where we can make our own voxel brushes as you can with the LC general brush.

All these suggestions are based on the great quality of strokes we get now. Thank you!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9R28nsqF7Jc&feature=youtu.be

post-518-0-58885100-1336749451_thumb.jpg

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@Digman:Voxel clay brush rely heavily on Smoothing value,changing smoothing values will dramatically change effect you can get with it but of course it will never be as cool as SF clay brushes tough.Also activating Cuda smooth boost should give it a very noticable kick.

Absolute brush seems to be works correctly over Remove stretching stokes now.

I just found out "Remember pen shape" in preferences,thanx Andrew i didn't know we had this option,I guess I missed a few updates.

Invert on/off seems to be remembered correctly now.

Interpolate does not tough ,Remove strecthing and smoothing value is also not remembered when switching between brushes.

Also it seems only LC brushes can be duplicated and renamed,this should be applied to all brushes and we need also way to save/load those brushes externally for sharing.I have made some very cool hard surface brushes for 3dcoat users,much better than MahcutA and MahcutB Zbrush brushes..

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@ Artman, you are right,

The tool tip that pops up by the selection box saids that smoothing is enabled when you hold the shift key down. I thought it was just for smoothing out a stroke after you completed it or your smoothing amount when using the smooth brush.

Now, I see that if you increase it pass 100% that it directly effects the strokes too. Nice...

If it is a feature it is not clearly documented and I missed that one...

Yes, cuda enabled would boost the clay stroke but I just wanted to show Andrew without cuda there is still some lag...

Edit:

It looks like Andrew fixed the saving of created LC brushes settings when changing the general brush settiings in the lastest beta. I will post if I find it overwriting them again. 3.7.11B

post-518-0-51719500-1336754196_thumb.png

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Off topic but useful infos: I remember one of you (Artman or Digman, sorry I can't remember) saying that he was using only a proven set of brush in liveclay to avoid tears and mesh explosion. Would you care to post a list here ?

I'm pretty sure the issue i've been having lately are related to the use of some bugged brushes (I suspect wrinkleclay since I added it as my default pinch before going back to normal pinch). Posting a list to narrow the field would help.

not me..

I hardly get tears and explosion unless I use resample,clean up memory or any of those weird new options,sometimes also if I use Symm copy in Sf mode but as far as brushes go I dont get any and I use mostly MUD2,Pinch,Absolute,Creaseclay,reduce +Tangentsmooth,

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That was me, BeatKitano...

I started using only a small set of brushes because of tears or possible tears in surface mode. It would happen the most often when switching between using LC brushes then using a surface mode brush. Sometimes there was no going back and fixing them unless you save the file every minute.

I posted a mantis bug report about the Rapid2 Brush a few months ago tearing the mesh but Raul left back to Cuba. The Rapid2 and Clay brush both tear the mesh in version 3.7.10A, not right away but you stroke over the same area and then ouch there is the tear.There were others but I can not remember now.

I would have to test each brush again to see if I can get it to tear the mesh with the new brush routine for version 3.7.11B

Which ones tear with you now?

The below I use 90% to 95% of the time.

A brush created with the LC general brush with custom alphas. The brush is duplicated each with it's own name and alpha for different types of sculpting.

Formbuilder, HeavyCrease and Smoother. I'm working on creating other brushes as Artman is doing as well...

Pinch brush (custom alpha) It works great with a large falloff (65%)

InflateClay, but it needs some fixing now in the current brush routine.

CreaseClay (custom alpha). I used the pinch brush to clean and tighten the edges, very similar to the video you posted.

I think Surface mode Flatten is ok too but I will test in the new version.

I'm with Artman using the clean memory and others are well, like rolling the dice. Sometimes LegacyFix will save a mesh in the current version, but as the label said use at your own risk...

I have been having some problems with mesh explosions as well, which will need to be documented. We all can test at times but know one wants to test all the time... :unsure:

To Andrew, you are busy so the above is not a refection of your desire to have a clean running program, you are only one man handling a large complex program.

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GeneralBrush is creating errors in the mesh shown in the video.

Settings are in the included picture.

Using Dx version 3.7.11B

No falloff.

No focal shift.

Depth 50%

Brush (second brush in the e-panel)

Last Alpha on the top right

Radius 7, though I sure you could choose another size.

250,000 tri sphere

This error happens on parts of the mesh surface that are not very thick. Once the mesh reaches a certain thickness you no longer get the error. (see video)

In Linux version 3.7.10A 64 bit non-cuda there are no errors using this brush or created brushes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax3tho7v1YY&feature=youtu.be

post-518-0-99853400-1336771252_thumb.png

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Finally downloaded and tested 3.7.11b Windows 64 DX Cuda sculpting! These improved brushes are a lot of fun to work with!

Mud2 brush with NoiseDegree at 0% is very similar to feel of Zbrush Claybuildup brush! Yay!

I did this quick test sculpt from a sphere in about 45 minutes. I did everything with "brush pressure only affects draw depth" activated.

I used:

Voxel: Grow, Smooth, Clay, Extrude, Move.

Surface: Draw, Smooth, Pinch, Extrude, Mud, Mud2, LiveClay, CreaseClay, SmudgeClay, WrinkleClay, Move.

All tested brushes worked very well except SmudgeClay which had a very big lag.

post-3260-0-16735200-1336812482_thumb.jp

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I set that mode to be default - when only depth depends on pressure.

It is more suitable for sculpting, especially when someone do it first time.

Of course you may set other mode..

@Taros:

Please show screenshot.

Hi Andrew. Strange. I had the problem at my clients workstation at their office.

I tried to reproduce the dotting with the current DX version at my workstation here at home, but all worked very well in DX mode and also in GL mode.

Maybe it is an graphic card issue? I use an old GeForce 8800 GT at my clients pc and an GeForce GTX 460 at my homeoffice here.

I will try to reproduce the dotting on monday, when I am back in the client office.

Best wishes

Chris

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First off,great work and improvements,brushes are really much better,only smooth brush in MHO needs more work.

I lost the latest development,so I don't know if somewhere you have improved this(in this case,sorry for asking),but here is my thoughts about the smooth brush.

Smooth shouldn't be so dependend on point density(few points,huge strength,a lot of points,really low strength)

And depth should be averaged better,I don't know how to explain in a clear way but for example if you do some strokes that add or remove depth on a sphere and later you use the smooth brush for a long time what you want to do is erasing the added and removed depth,so you should have again a sphere,currently the region where you worked with the smooth is never as perfect as before(the curvature change locally).

Also an option to smooth along the path of the stroke could be great.

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Smooth shouldn't be so dependend on point density(few points,huge strength,a lot of points,really low strength)

Its not that it is "dependant' on point density,its that smoothing higher polycount is just harder for cpu/gpu to work so of course it will always feel slower/weaker,there is option in Voxel menu made especially to adress this issue and increase smoothing strength at least 2x on denser objectx,its called "Cuda smooth boost" but you need a Cuda enabled card for it to work.

what you want to do is erasing the added and removed depth,so you should have again a sphere

Not everybody wants that,some people like the smooth brush to just have a smoothing action over details,like in real clay sculpting....

What you are asking for is a Restore brush or Eraser brush(in Mudbox) so you can bring your sculpt back to like it was

before strokes were done.

Andrew could probably do that but that would have to be a Surface mode brush because of the nature of voxels.

Edit:Ok,you can do that.But only if you are working in surface mode.

-Bring your sphere to surface mode

-Do some strokes with whatever surface brush you like

-Now pick absolute brush and set depth to -1%...now brush stokes restore the sphere to whatever state it was when entering surface mode. :)

(it does not work if you pick a LC brush tough because it will change vertex count and destroy the original morph target)

here is what i do . ..when removing "added" depth I use those brushes:Reduce+smooth( orTangent smooth)

and when removing "substracted" depth I use those brushes Fill(sf mode)+Reduce+smooth( orTangent smooth)

Reduce brush is cool because it allows you to bring point density back to a level where smoothing is fast.

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Artman,you completely misunderstood my post(probably it's my fault :) ).

When I say that smooth is too dependent on point density I'm not asking stronger effect on high polycount,but mainly low effect on low polycount.

Currently I have always to put in on low values(10,20 percent)and of course when you go upper in res you have to increase it because it's doesn't give much effect(anyway this work the same in every application,the difference here is that with adaptive polygons like in surface mode you work with less polygons more often,so the so stronger effect on low res it's a bit annoying for me)

About smooth,I don't want an eraser,but a smooth not bumpy/noisy,like it happens with real clay(and zbrush),the smooth should help me to average the depth when I'm doing complex shapes,but currently it adds and removes some depth(I mean that at the end of the smooth strokes you haven't really a smooth region,but one with a slight bump,really hard to avoid)

If I do a stroke on a sphere with live clay or another brush with the new improvements recently done I have a constant depth added(or removed) across the surface(a delta factor),but If I use in that region the smooth brush the depth locally it's not more constant,it's noisy(a side view or the region where the stroke is shows it)

I have done the eraser example only to try to explaing my thought better,anyway thank you for trying to help about it :) .

Bye

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That's basicaly what removeclay is doing, but it's broken currently, it eats the mesh with noise, and doesn't care for symmetry. It's a pity really, cause that brush could help tremendously to cleanup surface for hardsurface stuff (for instance).

Thant brush is ESSENTIALLY unfinished, Raul works over it. In theory it should remove piece from surface and fill it with ideally smooth surface.

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First off,great work and improvements,brushes are really much better,only smooth brush in MHO needs more work.

I lost the latest development,so I don't know if somewhere you have improved this(in this case,sorry for asking),but here is my thoughts about the smooth brush.

Smooth shouldn't be so dependend on point density(few points,huge strength,a lot of points,really low strength)

And depth should be averaged better,I don't know how to explain in a clear way but for example if you do some strokes that add or remove depth on a sphere and later you use the smooth brush for a long time what you want to do is erasing the added and removed depth,so you should have again a sphere,currently the region where you worked with the smooth is never as perfect as before(the curvature change locally).

Also an option to smooth along the path of the stroke could be great.

When density is varied a lot, smoothing could not be uniform - it is smoothing between vertices. There is solution - reduce tool. It reduces dencity and then performs smoothing.

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Thanks Andrew,but in this way you lose crispness,in theory smoothing(or maybe it's better to refer to is as polishing)shouldn't degrade the resolution,anyway I understand that technically is not easy/feasible at all.

Thanks for the answer.

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@Andrew:

I've checked the problem about dotted strokes in version 3.7.11B DX64 this morning.

The attached shot explains all.

I guess it is an graphics card problem or a driver issue. I will check the driver version and will update it eventually.

Best wishes

Chris

post-955-0-17967100-1336979514_thumb.jpg

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OK. Updated to the latest nVidia drivers for the 8800GT here. No changes. All the same, still dotted and the fps rises up to 350 fps while painting (new drivers).

The GL version works great, the fps freqency keeps stable at 50-60 fps there.

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I thought I take my work from version 3.7.11B to my linux version 3.7.10A to do some brush work there as it is my faster computer...

Wow, what a difference in brush flow and smoothness of stroke the new beta version has compared to the older version. Night and Day difference. I can not used the old versions for brush work any more as 3.7.11B has spoiled me.

I hope to make some videos soon on the mesh tears and mesh explosions to show Andrew when, where and how the happen to help hunt down the source of the problems. Once these are squashed, then we got a lean mean brushing machine... :yahoo:

Oh, by the way, Linux version soon? 8)

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Andrew's Twitter Post "Fixed tiny holes problem in "Remove stretching" mode.

I'm looking forward to testing this out as I think it might solve some problems we have with surface mode meshes and brushes in general. I will wait on making any more troubleshooting videos till we get the new beta and I test the surface mode brushes and LC brushes ( LC brushes had a few problems as well).

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Version 3.7.11B win 32 non-cuda

I am restating these two problems as I have not seen any statement about them, though they could be in the process of being worked on.

The inflateClay brush does not stamp the alpha clearly with the new brush routine and you lose detail as the brush gets smaller. This brush was a major brush for stamping small details into your model. Picture is again shown.

Second is the LC brushes have a pulling negative effect on thinner parts of your surface mesh. Shown in video, third post from the top on this page. This problem makes it very hard to use the LC brushes in thinner areas of your mesh.

Some LC brushes are effected more some less... The general brush seems the most effected by this problem.

post-518-0-92688200-1338314306_thumb.jpg

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  • 4 weeks later...
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Hey guys,

I am trying to sculpt a flat surface but I am met with brush issues. First off most of the LC brushes sometimes will have a bumpy "dirty" trail after a stroke and the smoothing still seems to have a hard time with small bumps. I am also met with an issue I cant really explain so I am going to post some screen shots of it. Its almost as if the brushes are treating my flat surface as a round surface. I also noticed (you may notice it in the shots) that the radius of what the brush is affecting seems to be muuch wider then what I am seeing from the display. In the shots I am using the Flatten Clay brush. I am also seeing on the bottom of my screen "NonUniform". Not sure what that means or how to fix. I have tried cleaning memory and a few other options but nothing seems to make that go away. The model I am working on is made from 3D coat primitives.

I am using v3.7.13 GL NON CUDA 64 bit (DX did the same thing)

post-3521-0-05987300-1340688586_thumb.jp

post-3521-0-53964100-1340688591_thumb.jp

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Non-uniform is no good, its a warning, the reason for the red color...

What causes it is that you have scaled a model along just one axis, This is fine too do but under the vox tree you must select "To Global Space" once you complete your transformation.

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Voxels are based upon a marching cube order. Voxels are closer to pixels than polygons as they are a 2d repersentation of a 3D object.

A photo pixel is square so is a voxel cube. If you stretch a voxel cube along one axis it is no longer a square cube. (non-uniform space)

That is the reason when your importing a model for voxels, you want to increase the resolution for more details.

A 4000 x 3000 pixel photo is going to have much more detail / color information than a 640 x 480 pixel photo. Same with voxels...

Now since surface mode is polygons, I do not know the reason it effects it there. A guess would be since voxels need unifom space and we are jumping back and forth between them, we need it to stay uniform... Part of the internal workings of 3DCoat...

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Aethyr,

BeatKitano has just posted a reply to a topic that you have subscribed to titled "Stroke over Cavity/Hole - Advanced Off Axis Controls - Advanced Interpolate Options".

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

Do you mind reposting this in the brush improvement (http://3d-coat.com/f...opic=9792&st=60) thread ?

Useful comment.

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

The Original topic can be found here: http://3d-coat.com/f...view=getnewpost

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

Stroke over Cavity/Hole - Advanced Off Axis Controls - Advanced Interpolate Options

This would provide an option to tell 3dcoat in it's various modes that I don't want the brush/vertex to "Jump" from a near surface to a far surface and would save me from breaking my undo button if implemented. An example is a hair voxel sculpted object (see attached movie) where the hair is volumetric. I draw hair follicles with the muscle tool. When painting on the outside front and then passing over a "cavity/hole" it will draw a line from the front to the inside back.

I've messed around with the paint on a plane option and it simply does not offer enough "tolerance along the off axis" to allow my stroke to still move in and out and behave as it should. Let's say for example I want to allow the stroke to move inward/outward when it hits the slope or a cavity/gap but only by a small margin or strictly adhere to the existing nearby surfaces sloping. This would greatly enhance the control over the off-axis (3rd axis not available with a 2D input device). This could be achieved as an advanced interpolate option by using an sampled average of the nearby vertices/voxels surface causing the brush to maintain an average location along the surface.

Here's how I think it could work:

Beside the Interpolate settings put a small icon button that opens a rollout. (This rollout will allow you to customize the options for this feature.)

The possible options on this rollout include:

  • Auto-Averaging (Samples nearby vertices/voxels inside the AoS for "off axis" values. [Checkbox which enables the AoS options and disables Custom Tolerance options.])
    • AoS "Area of Sampling" (This would be a sphere, not a circle, in terms of what is sampled. The sampler when in automatic mode would test nearby vertices/voxels within the AoS and adjusts the "off axis", to match the average of the sampled nearby surfaces. This would allow for the off axis of the stroke to match the curvature of the nearby hair follicles but ignore the far side since it would not be inside of the sphere sampler area. [Brush Radius Sphere Preview in work area at last strokes location and slider with numeric input on menu the same as a normal 2D brush but an independent value from the actual brush allowing for a larger sample area than size of the brush.])
    • Fall-Off Slope (A setting to allow the AoS to have custom fall off values for controlling whether samples from the center or from the outer edge have a greater impact in determining the final slope of the brush stroke. [A bezier curve with numeric input much like Photoshop or standard fall off curve.])
    • Offset (A setting to allow a positive or negative value to determine how far in or out the stroke should be from the absolute center/middle of the averaged surfaces. This would allow to paint on, outside or inside more when sampling a thicker or thinner object such as in my hair example below. I may want the follicle to follow the closest surface and sit on top of it or below it rather than at the absolute center of the nearby surfaces.) [-100%/+100% slider with numeric input.])
    • X-Squash/Y-Squash/Z-Squash (Changes the size and essentially the shape of the AoS to sample across a wider area, deeper area or taller area. [Sphere icon with arrows pointing along each axis with 3 input fields with a range of 0-100%.])

    [*]Custom Tolerance (Value from 0-100% where 0 means no movement along the "off axis" much like how Draw over a plane works currently and 100 means no limit to the movement along the "off axis" or the way it behaves currently by default as shown in the video. [Slider with numeric input on menu.])

    [*]Sensitivity (Sampling rate adjustment for a performance/quality enhancing option. [Slider from Course to Fine using what ever values are deemed appropriate.])

    [*]Smoothing (Smoothes the sampled values to provide a cleaner curve to the stroke this would be your basic interpolate value if you wanted to group it within the menu [Current Interpolate Option.])

The other feature would be to ignore backfaces in retopo mode when using the "add/split" tool. For example often I will be clicking out a face and have it actually put the vertex along the wrong side of the voxel surface when doing double sided objects that already have one side of faces and the other side only the voxel work area. Essentially the same feature as above but customized just for vertex mode of retopology tab to keep the sampler from going crazy with what part of the surface it decides to sample.

There should be a video above this line. It has vanished twice from this thread I don't know why. If it is not here please refer to the above linked thread for the video example.

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Hey guys,

I am trying to sculpt a flat surface but I am met with brush issues. First off most of the LC brushes sometimes will have a bumpy "dirty" trail after a stroke and the smoothing still seems to have a hard time with small bumps.

If you are making hard surface objects in 3D-Coat, I recommend using other 3D-Coat tools instead of brushes. For example use Boolean type operations such as the Carve Tool with "Invert tool action" checked and then use the rectangular selection method in the E panel or the curves method. You can get very clean straight cuts on your model this way. I also recommend creating object shapes on one voxel layer and then right click on the layer and choose "Subtract from..." or "Merge to..." from the pop-up to get clean additions or subtractions from your model. Kitbashing techniques are also good for hard surface

In general I feel the brushes are just not very good for hard surface stuff (although they are improving as time goes on).

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Stupid question but is there any need for so many brushes? I mean in the voxel menu is there a need for the build and airbrush. I dont really know what the difference or why you would use one over the other. Its the same with some other brushes in the other menus.

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Maybe we should look at this a little differently then. If we break the tools down into there most basic forms, Brush, Move, Muscle, etc, etc. We could then have several diffrent options for how these tool will behave that can be saved as presets. Exp: the Brush tool would have several modes, airbrush, build, clay, mud, etc etc. There would have to be a base set of presets available by default but it would condense functionality and would lean more on the preset system to organize the different tool functions. Not sure this would make a huge improvement but it would be a nice step toward modularizing the different functions that make up the current brushes.

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