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V4.1 BETA (experimental 4.1.17D)


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Not needed...What!??We obviously dont use same workflow.

 

same as Beat here... I dont even set foot in voxel mode (unless I got some booleans to do)

I would never be able to sculpt from a sphere without RemoveStretching on...

Pause is barely noticable on my side....

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Btw Artman, since I never switch between surface<>voxel (only converting voxel sphere brush blobs as a starting point and never going back), is the new liveclay change stable ? No problem with conversions ?

well I did not need to switch already on the project I'm working on right now...but I used proxymode a few times without bad surprise.

Anyway,pay yourself a little 1 hour session and do all the things you fear in 3Dcoat...that would be good testing...

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I don't see the point. You either use SURFACE tools, with or without removestretching (sometimes you don't want tesselation to kick in), or you use liveclay which are FREEFORM tools.

Why try to merge two different approach into one which would be awkward ?

I honestly don't like liveclay approach (small radius gets lot of tesselation, larger get less this can be quite ridiculous if your don't take the zoom level into account, and this require a lot more setting tweaking) but I don't ask for everyone to switch to removestretching mode. Both are valid, it only depends on your use/pov. But taking away remove stretching is a big no no for me. Like a goodbye 3dc no no ;)

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yeah, right... is The Great Work

 

 

my humble opinion about consolidating UI

 

consolidating UI with the actual handles and tool manipulation may be is a waste of time and -over time- a dual work

 

 

some manipulator, some tools need an up to day, fast keyshots... shortcuts... to offer a fast workflow in the overall sculpt experience

 

example:

user need to move ? press m... scale s

all the retopo handles, lights, render settings, tweak room...

 

The software grows very well... the vision about how workflow affect the user "feeling and excelence work achieved" need to be focused first

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BeatKitano - I too love to work with rapid2 (and mud2) brushes, but LC dosen't seems to have brushes similar to those, that is why I would like to have them with dynamic tesselation. 

And about detail slider - I didn't said it would be brush size independent. I would behave more like multiplier, just like detail slider in LC brushes. Anyway   what I wish is, to have rapid brush and possibly other brushes in LC mode

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Then you didn't express yourself properly   ;)

 

What you want is Good LC brushes :) On that I agree, rapid 2 is probably the most versatile and reliable brush in the surface mode.

So this beg the question of actually sorting the brushes... I've currently 6 brushes (in fact less than that since I count as brush my presets, and some of those are just the same brush with different settings) in my toolset, I can do whatever I want with those, they work well.

I know everyone works differently but the question to ask is: do we really need that much specialized brushes (swirl clay and ripple, are they that useful, they are pure gadgets to my eye) ?

Not the first time I bring this up but there's lot of poor/very rarely used brushes here, and a lack of good solid brushes in some area (liveclay is lacking a good solid brush like rapid 2).

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Remove stretching not needed ? You kidding ? Best brush is 80% of my workflow: rapid 2 + removestretching... 

If it were me all brushes would work with removestretching the way it work is much more instinctive than fiddling with a slider, the closer you're to the surface, the more definition it adds.

 

When you need to be close it's for details, it's THERE your need subdivisions.

 

The only use of a density slider is like you said: stamping high frequency details.

 

As for the delay, it may be annoying depending on how you work, but I've learned to ignore the remeshing process, just keep working letting the program do it's work in between strokes and so far it never bothered me. Feels transparent.

 

And again, removestreching was not added to smooth transition between voxel and surface, but to avoid stretching polygons when in surface mode:

 

See the uglyness without it:

removestretchingBenefit.jpg

Funny you would try to use and extreme example to refute my point. OBVIOUSLY if your stroke STRETCHES far away from the base of the object, it makes sense. But most of the time, users are not making these kinds of strokes...but instead building, pinching, etc. in more gradual forms. Extending the stroke so far away from the mesh is used a small percentage of the time. Maybe you like it, and that's fine. But I don't find it needed as often. Only when using the Move tool or something, where the stretching is pronounced.

 

Beforehand, it was helpful because an object converted from Voxel mode to Surface, produced very rough results. That's not the case, now.

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Hum... the fact is this was extreme to demonstrate the point, but try to sculpt progressively without removestretching, if you really try to push the enveloppe, more than your initial base mesh it'll get distorted and stretched pretty quickly...

You can't blow a balloon without expecting it's surface to stretch...

 

AbnRanger, you maybe sculpting from a pretty  much definitive base mesh from voxel mode, but that's not the case of everyone. And if you want to sculpt quickly from the surface mode you NEED removestretching (or liveclay if you like it better). That's not a choice, that's a fact. I defy you to sculpt a character from a sphere in surface mode without removestretching/liveclay :)

you may do it, but that would be pretty stupid because you would need to subdivide your mesh to an insane amount of polys.

With remove stretching you can do whatever you want for a fraction of the cost of a quad based subdivision sculpt.

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I think this is why I spend most of my time in Voxel mode, perhaps without even realizing it.  I figure, if I wanted smooth brush sculpting and dealing with stretching, I could have stayed with ZBrush.  Now that I have 3D Coat, I enjoy working with voxels immensely.

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@JoseConseco:man,I just made you a little LC Clay brush very close to my SF clay(rapid2) ...try it :)

artman LC Clay.3dcpack

It works well but depth needs to stay low...I mean freakin low.

I like it a lot,I'll maybe use it more to see what I can get out of it...(its true myself also find the removestrtching does not gives enough resolution when doing certain things or working on very lowpo meshes...)

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I think this is why I spend most of my time in Voxel mode, perhaps without even realizing it.  I figure, if I wanted smooth brush sculpting and dealing with stretching, I could have stayed with ZBrush.  Now that I have 3D Coat, I enjoy working with voxels immensely.

You're missing out, cause contrary to zbrush in 3dcoat you can kiss goodbye to topological considerations when sculpting. And you don't have to deal with memory issues like in zbrush and worse with 3dc voxels.

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@JoseConseco:man,I just made you a little LC Clay brush very close to my SF clay(rapid2) ...try it :)

attachicon.gifartman LC Clay.3dcpack

It works well but depth needs to stay low...I mean freakin low.

I like it a lot,I'll maybe use it more to see what I can get out of it...(its true myself also find the removestrtching does not gives enough resolution when doing certain things or working on very lowpo meshes...)

 

Tnx I'll try it too. About the reso issue with removestretching, I never find myself restricted, I'm using the zoom like crazy. Removestretching is really a setup of camera pos relative to mesh detailing. I really like that approach, it's very much like traditional sculpting, when you bring the figure close to your eyes to knife the hell out of it :)

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I think this is why I spend most of my time in Voxel mode, perhaps without even realizing it.  I figure, if I wanted smooth brush sculpting and dealing with stretching, I could have stayed with ZBrush.  Now that I have 3D Coat, I enjoy working with voxels immensely.

removestretching/Liveclay are much better than dynamesh...it does not remesh your entire sculpt in a lossy heavy way,it just remesh your stroke exactly when/where needed.The problem with voxel mode is that the brushes are not great...there is no decent clay brush ,no decent organic flattening and Pinching is mathematically impossible in voxel mode because points cannot be closer to each other...so what you see in voxel mode pinching is an illusion of pinching...I dont know if you can sculpt without proper clay and pinching behaviours...but not me.

 

Have you seen some of Beat sculpts? they were not started in voxel mode...

 

But what is still great with voxel mode is that you can be absolutly reckless....I mean doing wacky stuff.

Snake,Spikes ect...they all work better in voxel mode.Booleans are also a hundred times faster .

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But what is still great with voxel mode is that you can be absolutly reckless....I mean doing wacky stuff.

Snake,Spikes ect...they all work better in voxel mode.Booleans are also a hundred times faster .

 

The only advantage. The only reason when I sometimes want to use it, then I get spiky blobs of WTF sticking out of the mesh for no reason and go restart in surface mode ;)

 

If voxel<>surface transition was reliable, voxel weren't generating artefacts and the brush were solid I would gladly start in voxel do most of the shaping there and then refine in surface. But I feel like the 3 conditions are much harder to get than start in surface mode from the start.

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The only advantage. The only reason when I sometimes want to use it, then I get spiky blobs of WTF sticking out of the mesh for no reason and go restart in surface mode ;)

 

If voxel<>surface transition was reliable, voxel weren't generating artefacts and the brush were solid I would gladly start in voxel do most of the shaping there and then refine in surface. But I feel like the 3 conditions are much harder to get than start in surface mode from the start.

did you try it with new builds or is this still based on your past experiences?

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So far on my past experience, I plan to, like you said, start an aggressive testing session sometime in the week, but I don't know when, I've hardly enough time to sculpt for the challenge lately... (the last sculpt was a test of stability for the latest build).

 

Maybe it got better, I hope so, still those brushes which feel very poor...

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@JoseConseco:tweaked again...this one is much better(there was some shearing because of too low spacing values,it seems Liveclay brush does not like it as low as rapid2) artman LC Clay.3dcpack

 

Edit:its very cool,gives nicer results than rapid2 I find....but unfortunately it does not work proportionally in substraction mode....and there are no tweaks possible to fix this...unless I make them 2 separate brushes (I'll ask Andrew/Raul to look in this)

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I just tried both pinch tools, one in Voxel Mode, one in Surface.  I actually prefer the Voxel Mode, due to the Surface Mode flattening the areas beside the pinch.  It's really just a preference.  

 

That said, I also noticed after I switched back to Voxel Mode, I had surfaces disappear, as Raul stated would happen, but that doesn't occur in other builds...and makes me wonder how unbelievably high my resolution could possibly be for the model, when it's only showing it's at 1.7 mil.  I have to say I'm not finding this new hiding of surfaces a useful or enjoyable feature at all.  I just want to sculpt, as I always had and not have the program dictate when my resolution is too high.  That should simply be limited to my computer resources...especially when I've driven 3D Coat to 57 million polys before...just to see how high I could take it.

 

Of course, I wouldn't want to sculpt with anything more than about where I'm at with this particular model.

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I just tried both pinch tools, one in Voxel Mode, one in Surface.  I actually prefer the Voxel Mode, due to the Surface Mode flattening the areas beside the pinch.  It's really just a preference. 

 

Leaving the preference aspect aside: if you need very "sharp" pinched edges you need to increase resolution a lot in voxel, leading to high memory consumption, while in surface you can (not in the current build which has a bug though) freeze-protect the surrounding area and still get a sharp edge without having a huge memory consumption increase.

When doing sharp well defined models voxel is not the ideal choice, you need very high resolution which needs tons of memory and a good computer to handle all the data voxels generate.

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Problem is that you can't substract with this brush. It's nice otherwise, it seems to emulate rapid with your settings you would need a much higher depth value with invert action.

yeah found out while you were writing this...I might still use it though its really cleaner than rapid2 on low density meshes.

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Thanks artman for lc Clay brush. It's way better than any default LC brush, but this is what is happens when programmers are making brushes, and not artists ;). And I agree with what someone said here before - that default LC brushes are bit weird. I do not see why there are brushes like: wrinkle clay, ripple, extrude clay. They seem to be only be useful in very specific, rare occasions.

There are some great default brushes : crease clay, tube clay,  but they are hidden among not useful brush presets.

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Hum... the fact is this was extreme to demonstrate the point, but try to sculpt progressively without removestretching, if you really try to push the enveloppe, more than your initial base mesh it'll get distorted and stretched pretty quickly...

You can't blow a balloon without expecting it's surface to stretch...

 

AbnRanger, you maybe sculpting from a pretty  much definitive base mesh from voxel mode, but that's not the case of everyone. And if you want to sculpt quickly from the surface mode you NEED removestretching (or liveclay if you like it better). That's not a choice, that's a fact. I defy you to sculpt a character from a sphere in surface mode without removestretching/liveclay :)

you may do it, but that would be pretty stupid because you would need to subdivide your mesh to an insane amount of polys.

With remove stretching you can do whatever you want for a fraction of the cost of a quad based subdivision sculpt.

Defy is a rather bold word to choose. :) Plus, we were talking about REMOVE STRETCHING...alone. Not using LC or anything else. BTW, do I get anything if I defy that challenge and succeed? ;) When you use some of the SHIFT action options (Powerful Smoothing and Tangent Smoothing are two that come to mind), it optimizes the mesh anyway. Smooth All with Tangent Smoothing chosen, is another tool I use often...you can brush select areas to apply it to). So, Remove Stretching is but one means to.....well...remove stretching. :D

Edited by AbnRanger
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Thanks artman for lc Clay brush. It's way better than any default LC brush, but this is what is happens when programmers are making brushes, and not artists ;). And I agree with what someone said here before - that default LC brushes are bit weird. I do not see why there are brushes like: wrinkle clay, ripple, extrude clay. They seem to be only be useful in very specific, rare occasions.

There are some great default brushes : crease clay, tube clay,  but they are hidden among not useful brush presets.

Glad you like it :) it still shears to the other side when you work on the sides in symmetry doing fast strokes and inverted mode does not work proportionnaly at all,but its a good brush so I'll try to get Andrew or Raul to fix it as there are no good default LC Clay  brushes at the moment.It would be great also if TubeClay and Generalbrush had flatten curves as it seems only Liveclay basic brush benefited from this addition.

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Defy is a rather bold word to choose. :) Plus, we were talking about REMOVE STRETCHING...alone. Not using LC or anything else. BTW, do I get anything if I defy that challenge and succeed? ;) When you use some of the SHIFT action options (Powerful Smoothing and Tangent Smoothing are two that come to mind), it optimizes the mesh anyway. Smooth All with Tangent Smoothing chosen, is another tool I use often...you can brush select areas to apply it to). So, Remove Stretching is but one means to.....well...remove stretching. :D

 

 

Come on, this is starting to get ridiculous, you know what I mean... You're talking about tesselation enabled brushes to relax the mesh when there's an anti-stretching function available... in the brushes themselves.

You can play with word the truth is still there: the function is useful, maybe you chose other workflow but talking about using smoothing algorithm (which are destructive in their nature) while you could work directly without stretching from the get go, is a workaround.

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