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Twitter discussion: What Andrew is currently doing.


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I am working over big speed-up of surface tools. They have really great potential.

That's really interesting. "surface" is a generally word, so I hope he means the voxel surface. :)

By the way: You are invited to use this thread to discuss all running twitter posts from Andrew. :)

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At least my system recovered. Really strange situation - windows downloaded update -> out of space -> crash -> unable to boot....

Never forget to make a periodic image copy of your system. This can save your job life fast and clean. :) I know what I say...

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By mo means the main problem of voxel sculpting is speed.

So, I tried to speed up voxel tools in surface mode because they have big potential to be improved.

It opens good workflow - work with voxel objects up to 4-6M/object, then make tiny details with surface tools on bigger resolution.

Speed improvement is useless if you dont get rid of dots/streaks artifacts problem first . :)

(Speed is already pretty cool...but if you get a dot artifact on a model at its final stage and there is details around that dot well...you cannot smooth over it, otherwise the details underneath get destroyed.In my opinion that is the main problem with surface tools right now.(especially SF Pinch))

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Speed improvement is useless if you dont get rid of dots/streaks artifacts problem first . :)

(Speed is already pretty cool...but if you get a dot artifact on a model at its final stage and there is details around that dot well...you cannot smooth over it, otherwise the details underneath get destroyed.In my opinion that is the main problem with surface tools right now.(especially SF Pinch))

I don't agree. Speed and bugs with pens belongs tightly together. If you spend all your cpu speed for calculating voxels, which speed you will have at the end for correct brushes?

No, I think this is the right way for optimisation all voxel elements.

Keep going on Andrew! :good:

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Speed and bugs with pens belongs tightly together.

DotsNStreasks artifacts after voxels-to-surface conversion have nothing to do with speed. :)

Because in surface mode all surface operations gets converted without any disturbance from the brushes operations,it got the cpu all for itself :)

:the problem is the conversion itself in relation to the precision of the surface operations applied.It clearly manifests when doing precision work with SFPinch.

My point was just: even if it takes you a nanosecond to sculpt a Rodin ,

if there is artifacts on the endmodel you cannot use that mesh to bakes normal maps or displacement maps or get any render out of it.

And you cannot smooth the artifacts either because there is some details under it.

Thats all that I meant.

I dont care, Im just an amateur doodlist.

But professionals need the end model to have no artifacts.It is ground base simple.

Even if performance is superfast the end result needs to be usable...Otherwize its the whole use of the surface tools that is compromised even if they get very very fast.

Andrew is already working on fixing this ,but the ideas he has to fix the problem are

much harder to implement and will take longer time(he wrote about this)and Im aware of that,

so my post was stupid because I know the answer.

Speed imrprovements are probably much possible and also very welcomed.

Andrew seems to do what is the best+most possible at all given time which is best way to work.

And Im sure all very hard problems are given a lot of thinking time.

Im a SfClay/SfPinch addict so news about speed improvements are great. :)

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DotsNStreasks artifacts after voxels-to-surface conversion have nothing to do with speed. :)

...

I haven't known this. I am not a programmer, just a professional user (as some people says this about me... ;) )

But I agree the rest of your post. Come on, let's see what will happen. I am shure the programmers are listening and know what is important and what not, and what is feasible or not.

The users are the same everywhere: They would like to see all functionality now and immediatly... ;)

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trying to solve one of the most complex problems - artifacts after pose tool... It takes some time...

I hope with this solution the move tool artefacts will disappear too. That would be really great.

I guess, if Andrew really removes the artefacts in the posetool, a lot of other similar problems will disappear too.

Be creative

Chris

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Woohoo! At least after 3 days of terribly complex work I got rid of pose/move tool artifacts (sometimes long lines and dots appeared).

It is the second principal problem of voxel sculpting (the first is speed of course).

Yes yes yes!!! :yahoo:

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Masks already work with surface tools. Are they not working for you?

Sorry, I meant paintable masks. Masking areas for sculpting.

It's already there for the pose tool so i was hoping that it would not be too difficult to bring that over to the surface tools.

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Great improvements! Freeze tool in voxel surface mode, full support of rectangular selection mode in surface tools, all works very fast.

Great news guys: Freeze tool in voxel mode. I hope it will fulfill what I expect. :yahoo::drinks:

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Will the surface and voxel toolsets eventually be unified? do the surface tools produce different results or are they just faster implementations? It seems to me like maybe the app might feel a bit tighter if they were all the available at the same time and the switching happened automatically behind the scenes.

Think about it - we currently have a button on the VoxTree which 'magically' switches the toolbar into using a restricted set of functionality that also works a lot faster. Doesn't this seem a bit secretive and unfriendly at face value?

Just a suggestion and I realise that it's none of my business what direction this app takes! 3D-Coat is crammed full of features, and I suppose that's ultimately better than a feature-light app with a clear UI. I just hope that some day there's a tear down and rebuild of the UI layout on a level comprable with Blender 2.5, IMHO it'll really be worth it!

Keep up the good work Andrew!

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Maybe the surface and voxel tools can be combined but then add an option (checkbox and/or key modifier) for the pen to work in voxel or surface mode.

Andrew,

Looking forward to new surface tools!

PS Do the surface tools (draw tool) respect the grow on pen motion option now?

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Some tools do switch automatically but this proved to be problematic because there was a slight delay every time you lifted up the stylus,it's also caused some artifacts if I recall correctly. That's why the Surface mode was implemented so there's only one slight delay and minimal artifacts due to the switching.

I'm very excited to see what comes of this. I'm almost afraid to continue working on my current sculpture until I see what the new tools can do.

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Sorry, I meant paintable masks. Masking areas for sculpting.

It's already there for the pose tool so i was hoping that it would not be too difficult to bring that over to the surface tools.

Ah yes, I see what you mean. :)

Looks like we're getting it sooner rather then later! I just found out lastnight. It's great news.

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It would be nice if there could be a shortcut key (tab) to toggle between modes.

The problem with that is that right now you can have many layers like my current sculpture and choose to only switch one of them, which is very fast compared to switching all 9.8m triangles that my model currently has.

2009-12-02_1655.png

Well now that I think about it I guess a keyboard shortcut could just switch the current layer you have selected.

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