Skaven252

Good to know. I won't bug you about it then, I'll just wait patiently.

That's OK. I mainly posted this thread so that the request becomes 'official' and documented. There wasn't a previous thread on the subject, although the request has shown up here and there.

It would be nice to have more transformation options for the Fill Object command. Currently the fill cannot be rotated, and scaling (Anisotropy) can only be applied to one axis. Being able to rotate and scale the mapping plane / cube by all axes would make the Fill Object command much more powerful. To make it easier to use, the plane / cube could be visualized as a wireframe object that scales and rotates as you adjust the settings. Plus, Reset Rotation and Reset Scale buttons to make things easier. Cylindrical mapping could be good to have as an option, it tends to look better on cylindrical objects (like tree trunks) than blended cubic mapping, if the used material is a texture (ie not volumetric).

It occurred to me that it can actually be done with the Fill Object command afterwards. But to utilize this feature, there would only need to be a way to transfer the textured voxel material's settings to the Fill command, so that the texture is applied with scale and UV positions similar to the vox material. And since the new top/bottom blended material (as demonstrated by the moss / bark Tree material) works so well in vox mode, the Fill Object command would need to be enhanced with a similar option. And also the Materials (that can be box mapped and painted onto the object). (PicMats obviously won't work with this, because they're based on environment mapping - there's no point in baking shiny, moving chrome reflections onto a diffuse texture - but I guess you could just apply the average color for those) Top/Bottom blending would also be useful for Freezing, to easily mask areas to paint onto. There are many applications for this, such as: - Snow on the top surfaces of a stone object - A wooden statue whose top has faded from sunlight - Moss on a tree (as demonstrated by the Tree material) .... and so forth. Can freeze masks be operated on one another? You could multiply a Top/Bottom mask by a Cavity mask for further detailing. I can pay more for 3D-Coat.

Tested the newest build after a bit of a break. The new textured voxel materials look awesome! :lol: (this is the first time I saw them). I especially like the way the "Tree" material works, as it seems to have some kind of Top/Bottom blending applied to it (moss appearing on horizontal surfaces and bark on vertical ones). I shall presume users will be able to build their own, similarly working materials in the future (like it's already possible with the box texture mapped materials). Also, will the texture be projected to the object when Quadrangulating it for painting? That would be totally awesome. Just wondering.. what is the plan / status on dual dislpay support? I'd find it very useful to be able to move some of the tool windows (especially the 2D view) to my secondary display. I thought this would have come as a part of the interface overhaul... but that's still in progress, right? One little comment... in voxels with the Increase tool, Smoothing works when you press Shift. But there's no way to adjust the strength of the smoothing, other than by switching to another tool (like Clay or Fill). Should the Smoothing slider also be visible in the Increase tool?

Finally got to test build 77. Crashed a few times, but this is work in progress. I sent the bug reports, hope they help. The dockable windows are cool. Suggestion: when holding down CTRL while dragging the windows the auto-docking could get disabled. Sometimes the windows are too eager to snap into position I don't want them to. No dual monitor support yet? Hope it's coming up. I'd love to always have the 2D view open in a secondary monitor. The Stamp mode (E menu) in voxels is cool, but there's one little problem: if you drag the stamp so large the mouse cursor goes outside the model boundary, the stamp disappears. I would sometimes like to apply a stamp larger than that. Found an Undo-related bug in vox sculpt mode: Go to Voxel mode, sculpt something Activate Curves tool, draw some curve Check "Apply to whole curve" checkbox and move the curve. Undo. The curve's scale drops by half. [*]Speaking of Curves, it would be cool if the Curves tool had a special "snap to surface mode" that works like the "Draw with splines" tool in paint mode. I mean that in "snap to surface" mode the curve would snap to the surfac of the sculpt, and when moving, the curve nodes would slide along the surface. If "Apply to whole curve" is on, it would slide / rotate /scale the whole curve along the sculpt surface (just like the special buttons do in Paint/Spline mode). This would allow the user to stroke long, controlled curves along the sculpt surface. [*]Another small curve bug: Go to Vox mode Draw a curve Switch to Retopo. The curve is still visible (it serves no purpose in retopo mode, does it?)

This in two days ago: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/zbc/showthread.php?t=070082 No specifics of any kind mentioned. So we can only speculate what kind of new tools and features they've decided to come up with. Is this a reaction to the popular emergence of 3D-Coat and increasing competition from MudBox?

It works if you have at least some bump texture on the model, but it currently doesn't work on (for example) the outer edges of a cube, like it does with subdivided models. Andrew said it's going to be implemented later on. The heights and cavities are going to be calculated by interpolating the normals in DP. (if I got it right; Andrew correct me if I'm wrong) I suppose the smoothing groups could also be taken into account when doing cavity painting in low poly DP?

Srsly? Well, try going directly to http://www.hantech.ca/ , there seems to be a Tablo ad right on the front page.

Interesting concept: a sensor pen attachment that turns any LCD screen into a pen operated touch screen. It's like a poor man's Cintiq. Hantech Siso Tablo Pros: - Affordable! - Can be used on other surfaces too (like a notepad) Cons: - Does not have real pressure or tilt sensitivity - Apparently does not support all mouse-operated software out of the box, but requires custom support. And the list of supported programs looks kind of measely for the moment. But it's pretty interesting nevertheless.

Or maybe we could have specialized automatic functions to "Remove Floaters" and "Fill Cavities"? The former would remove all non-contiguous bits of volume below a set size threshold, and the latter would check the volumes for "bubbles" that sometimes occur while sculpting, and fill them.

Cool... but wouldn't freeze volume have the same resolution problems as negative volume?

Just a thought that occurred to me. I searched this forum if anyone else had had the same idea, but couldn't find anything so here goes: Would "negative layers" work for Volumetric Sculpting? They would be like normal volume spaces, but instead of being additive, they would subtract, ie make holes to the other volumes. This way you could keep cavities and holes in a separate layer if needed. Sounds useful to me. Some thoughts: - If the negative layer has a parent, its volume would get subtracted only from the parent volume. If the negative volume is parented to the root, it would be subtracted from all the volumes. - Currently selected negative volumes need to be visualized, maybe as a semi-transparent hull - Possible problem: different volume densities need to be taken into account. - Also, how slow would this be to process in practice? The subtractions would either have to be updated to all the volumes they affect whenever they get updated, or maybe "masked" when making changes. .. which leads to another idea: what if you could also create "freeze volumes" which would allow you to mask in, or mask out the other volumes to protect parts of them from editing?

It's quite straightforward. Just activate the Curves tool create a curve of a few points. Then click and select one of the points in the middle of the curve and click outside the curve to create another point. The curve actually branches out from the middle node, instead of from the end node. See:

I tested the recently added "branching curves" tool. It's showing a lot of potential, as in, it is shaping up to be very potential competition to ZBrush's ZSpheres tool. Wow. I ran into a few issues. Maybe these are already known, but I'll put them here just in case: - After drawing a branching curve, scaling the "parent" node does not scale the "child" curve's thickness accordingly. Actually I don't know how I can scale the child curve's thickness at all - If you try to draw several nodes in sequence, the "currently selected node" sometimes changes to the first node, causing the first node get connected to the most recently drawn one. Of course, when I tried to reproduce this to make a screenshot, it didn't happen - If you activate "Apply to whole curve", it still only works on the "master" curve. This is otherwise OK, but if you Move a curve with the "apply to whole" flag on, the curves will be pulled apart and the hierarchy breaks. - Undo works inconsistently. For example, if you try to Undo the "apply to all" move due to the broken results, the undo doesn't restore the state prior to the move - Symmetry works to some extent, but like with ZSpheres, it would be nice if there was a "snap to symmetry axis", and any nodes drawn at the symmetry plane would be merged into one. Also, it appears that the symmetry's preview geometry's normals are inverted (one curve is shaded normally, the symmetric curve is shaded "inside out"). Thank you for your time.