nathan

yeah the new options are very cool Andrew. love the gradient background and all of the new interaction controls. I've got it set to some kind of hybrid between zbrush and silo and some of your defaults. it's the best of both worlds. I hate having to hold alt all the time and being forced to use the side buttons with some other key combination :P excellent work. the UI for that "Customize Navigation" window could use some work though. it took me a while to figure out how to use it properly and how to add new items. the settings themselves are great, but the way they are presented is confusing.

awesome. I've been waiting for those options, thanks Andrew!

Andrews current tabs along the top are the way to go. or at least some variation on that theme. I guess you could do something like XSI or Maya's dropdown, but I like this approach better, it's more pleasing to the eye and it's always in view so you don't forget that "oh crap, I'm in Animtion mode...". with your vertical tabs located inside the toolbar, that would mean you are only switching the toolset displayed in that toolbar. with Andrews setup, when you switch modes, you are changing the entire interface and toolset. that means you can have a totally custom layout just for 2d painting, and another just for voxel sculpting which is how you want it. there are so many different tools now that don't work together that you definitely want this method of switching, and you don't want to have to turn 10 different little floating windows on and off when you go back and forth between modes.

3DClay? could stick with the 3DC initials that way, but I don't know if the name really describes everything it does. although I guess 3DCoat doesn't really convey that too well either. how bout a simple one word name that describes pretty much everything it does to a certain extent... Maquette

and the ability to toggle all the menus and toolbars on and off, so we can work with just the 3d viewport, but not lose our layout.

correct, there's no way you could create uvs for the mesh, because it's dynamic. as soon as you change the volume in any way the mesh is completely different. for painting on voxel sculpt, it would have to be a system like polypaint in zbrush. except instead of each polygon containing a color, each cell in the voxel grid would contain a color and the display mesh would simply inherit that. that way you could at least rough in color, and if your sculpt were dense enough you could probably get fairly detailed. then when you retopologize over the sculpt, you would need some way of projecting the paint along with the mesh details onto your new topology and it's uvs.

For the airbrush tool or option it should definitely build over time, like the first version. That is what an airbrush does. The depth control (which should really be renamed "rate", or "speed" or "flow" for an airbrush) should control the speed at which the brush is applied. When pressure is linked to depth, 0% pressure would do nothing, and 100% pressure would equal the amount in the depth parameter. When pressure is unlinked from the brush it should run at the amount in the depth parameter constantly. It should not switch over to a new behavior, this is how all the brushes work currently and should work. This is how v27 appears to be acting now, and it's perfect. But really, this is all getting a bit out of hand. There are too many brushes now and they all do nearly the same thing, and one person likes this and wants that, and another person hates it and wants something else... I'm going to reiterate what I said a while back HERE , but this should not be a unique tool. There should simply be an "airbrush" option which makes the currently active brush build up over time rather than some other option such as movement. Andrew should not be spending his time tweaking and adding new brushes trying to make the perfect set of brushes when it all really comes down to a few different methods in a few different areas, because the brushes will never be perfect that way. Someone will ALWAYS want something different. If all of the options are exposed so that anyone can have the tools react how they prefer then EVERYONE can be happy For instance, Rimmason's request for the carve brush above should simply be a checkbox to have the brush also perform smoothing as you stroke. You should be able to use that option on any brush, or turn it off for any brush. This is how the extrude brush was working for a while, but I notice it's not now. I am going to take some time and write up a proposal on the options that are needed and maybe a layout for what it could look like. I encourage everyone to give this some thought and spend some time thinking about the truely unique properties that we should have at our disposal, and not necessarily how end result tools should behave.

I would like to see a "minimum radius" setting similar to photoshop and others for having pressure linked to brush radius. I like having size hooked to pressure but I rarely want 0% or 1% so I hardly ever use it. it would also help to smooth out the jumps between pressures because most of the time you would have it at more like 50%.

ha! ok, yes, very different question. nevermind me... I'll be over here in the corner...

I like to be able to do whatever I want, whenever I want I usually rough out a form and color at the same time because it helps me visualize the model as a whole. the more I can experiment as I go the better. this is going to be especially important with voxel sculpting because you may start on a model and nearly "finish" one area and detail it out, and then decide you want to add a few more arms or a tail or whatever. I think voxel sculpting is going to need some sort of vertex paint, or polypaint like zbrush, so that we can lay down some color while we sculpt since we won't be able to have uvs. then when you convert to a mesh to finish it up, at least you would have a good starting point for your color.

ok, testing build 25... multithreading is awesome. the brushes are much smoother now. so I was playing around with the new "build" brush and quickly roughed out a torso for the head above. the tool isn't perfect, it needs some tweaking, but it does help a ton. now THIS is where voxel sculpting is going to shine, being able to sculpt a head, and then start adding a body onto it at anytime without having to do anything other than continuing to sculpt. yes please. this was super quick, I used the build brush for almost all of this, and then refined a little with the extrude brush and lots of smooth.

multithreading is awesome Andrew! there is a huge difference in brushing speed on my system. strokes are much smoother, and the smooth brush works much better now.

always sculpting in screen space would be nice. then you would just need some way of determining how far back the plane sits.

the 2d paint tool would be great for blocking in volume if it were fixed up a bit. the hemisphere that is flat on the side facing the screen and round on the back is very annoying. I expect it to just be round centered on the plane. but the big thing that needs work is easily and intuitively setting where the plane sits. if it were so easy to get the plane exactly where you wanted without having to think about it very much it would be awesome. I just watched this video yesterday and it made me think of this situation. it's pretty damn elegant, everyone should watch it. http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~shbae/ilovesketch.htm I also love being able to use the freehand tool to cut away large chunks from a model, but we need to be able to hold ctrl and ADD to the volume. that would rock. between that, 2d paint, curves, being able to mask and move, and layers for adding primitives and moving them around, we would be set.

thanks Jokermax. well, it is a bit slow for me too, so I'm usually just making a couple quick strokes to add a little volume, then using smooth to reshape. but I do keep falloff set to 0.0 and just use the alpha to control the shape and falloff of the brush which speeds things up some since you don't need as large a brush. large brush radius = slow. it's not perfect, the whole system still needs a lot of "finessing" which is partly why this guy is so lumpy. I didn't spend much time on it but if I were trying to polish something I would be spending more time smoothing things out than getting the shape right. I don't like using pen pressure to change the radius of the brush for instance because it's too unpredictable right now. you get jerky lines that jump from small to large and you have to go back over each stroke and smooth it out.