3D-Coat 3.0 ALPHA

[3dioot]

Thankyou Andrew! I find these changes a huge improvement (which would not suprise anybody i gues). Im happy to hear im not alone in that according to Mantis and Renderdemon. I hope more people will come forward to say wether they like the new changes or not and why.

A few observations:

-Highlighting feature where the gizmo turns green when you mouse over them.

It makes clicking on the gizmo supereasy. Its superb Tweaking the start and endpoint of the transpose line is very fluent as well.

- Gizmo's really "move, scale and rotate".

I find this pleasing for move and rotate. It makes scale look "broken" in my eyes. This may be personal but if find it unpleasant to see the scale gizmo turn to a little crump or change into a large streak when i scale down or up alot. It just.. doesnt feel right. I would prefer it if the scale gizmos just moved along the transpose line without getting squashed or stretched. So they give a good visual of the value you are applying but it wont distort the gizmo so much it becomes unreadable. The way it currently is for move and rotate is just perfect.

- Rotate gizmo changes

You changed the sphere gizmo from pure screen rotation to a hybrid. I thought about a solution like this when i made my original mockup but since its more dependant on the correct placement of the transpose line i didnt like the idea. It actually works out pretty well now that im playing with it though While the new shape of the gizmo loses its original character and volume i think it reads well for what it does. Im less pleased with the gizmo for twist (the gear). It has too much fine detail and really stands out. I think it would be a better idea just to remove a thin pie slice from the original flattened cylinder i proposed. It would give you a good reading of how much you are twisting without having a real gear floating halfway the transpose line pretending to be a gizmo.

Something else i noticed (and this really has to change) is that when you make the transpose line "short" by moving the start and endpoint closer together the gizmo's get scaled down (or when you enlarge them they get scaled up). This is absolutely horrible. Sorry to say it like this but it is. Gizmo size should be a fixed size. This is also important if you want to give people the option later on to change gizmo size if they would prefer it to be bigger or smaller.

What i suggest is that you decide on a minium transpose line length. The user can move the end and startpoints however he wishes BUT when he lets go of the point and the line is shorter then the minium length it will get EXTENDED towards the endpoint (not the startpoint because thats the origin) so it matches the minimum length you specify. This doesnt get in the way of the user (he can still do what he wants and you dont change the direction you merely change the length) but at the same will give you the room to place the gizmos with an absolute size. This is very, very important! Please implement it.

As a last and final request Mantis is right about this:

"But it miss a handler who allow you to move the whole line at once instead of having to move both point one by one."

I forgot about this one. I want to suggest something very specific as a solution.

The gizmo you have for changing transforms is really bad. It is not unique or distinct and takes alot of space. What i would like you to do is implement a THIRD point on the tranpose line. It has the same size as the start and endpoint but is colored RED and is always placed (automatically) at the middle of the transpose line. When you click AND drag it will allow you to move the transpose line in its entirety. It will be like grabbing the start and endpoint at the same time and moving. However; if you only click it (without dragging) it will toggle the transform modes (move rotate and scale).

The color will make this unique and it will always be in a very specific place. I think this would not only solve Mantis request but also give you a better solution for the "transform mode switch" gizmo you have now.

Thanks for all your effort.

I hope you will spend some serious amount of time on a generic masking/selection tool now because there are many problems with select with pen atm. Once thats up i think transpose can be finalized.

3dioot

PS

@Rimasson

"i found a bug : when you use the select with pen in transpose mode, and you remove selected parts, the brush leaves circle artifacts behind." Yes i get this too. There are many problems with basic selecting. It shouldnt be this hard.

[philnolan3d]

Personally I'm very pleased with the gizmo as it is. I like the gear in particular for showing the amount of rotation and it's fun without looking like a toy or a program for kids. The only one thing I don't care for is how the scale and move "shapes" move away from the line when you drag them. If you go too far your mouse hits the edge of the screen and it stops. Plus the shape goes off the screen so you can't see how far you're moving it anymore.

I also like how the shapes scale depending on the length of the line. If I zoom out really far and the shapes stay the same it would be harder to click them if they stayed the same size. If I zoom in far, then they would take up the whole screen or go off of the screen. So I'm happy with that the way it is.

[3dioot]

I also like how the shapes scale depending on the length of the line. If I zoom out really far and the shapes stay the same it would be harder to click them if they stayed the same size. If I zoom in far, then they would take up the whole screen or go off of the screen. So I'm happy with that the way it is.

They get smaller when you zoom out and bigger when you zoom in. They adhere to perspective like your sculpt. This has nothing to do with the length of the transpose line. I think you are confusing things now.

Im not talking about them being an absolute screensize (eventhough i think that would be even better but we have to start somewhere). The way it is now its too easy to end up with gizmo's that are either ridiculously small or ridiculously big (and you dont even have to zoom in or out for it). This is bad and can easily be fixed.

3dioot

[Psmith]

"Transpose" Rotation and Falloff

Andrew:

I really like the gizmos, and the way you interpreted and improved upon 3Dioot's design. As far as I'm concerned, the gizmos themselves are fine, except I think colors need to be changeable through the "Options" panel. I especially like the adjustable "falloff" knobs on the ends of the gizmo shaft.

If you look at how the "rotate" function works with a limb that already has a bend in it, (like the video example I posted), "rotate" also introduces a kind of "shear" distortion to the rotation itself, regardless of where the "falloff" end knobs are positioned. You can demonstrate this for yourself by dragging from the "shoulder" to the "wrist", (to enable a stiff arm movement from the shoulder), and "rotating" the arm from back to front, in an extreme motion. You will see the "shear" distortion this way.

I can't get "Select with Pen" to work at all, properly.

The "Ring" modifier is exactly what I was looking for and requested earlier - just like a kind of inflatable "rubber band" distortion. Thank you very much.

It seems that trying to get true joint rotation with a transpose type tool will prove to be quite a challenge. I can see it being useful for small movements, but not very useful for large, accurate movements of joints in arms and legs - not without creating a lot of extra, unwanted distortion. This is where multi-joint, hierarchical rigging will become a necessity, whether it is made according to "Kun Zhou's" algorithms or not.

If you modify the "Transpose" tool to allow for multiple joints, you might as well go all the way and develop some kind of rigging system with manually definable, (paintable), falloff regions. Later, I mean, after you finish your list of things you must do first.

As always, great work, timely work, extremely fast work, intuitive work - I can see you're going to please everybody . . . eventually.

Psmith

[Ztreem]

I like the new transpose tool, but the new gizmo is not that nice. I can live with it, but I really liked the standard one that you had before that looked like a normal 3D app. Would be nice with a user option so you could switch between standard and non standard gizmo. The new gizmo is very slow to work with and as you have to switch between modes, really slow workflow. It was better before IMHO.

[splodge]

Rimasson was not the first to ask for moving a whole object with transpose.

Personally I am not very fond of this kind of thing, I really prefer to use regular gizmo ,with the ability to custom your pivot point, to move scale and rotate object .

I totally agree. I hate ZBrush's transpose tool for moving objects around. It's incredibly awkward. The only alternative is using the offset slider in the Deformations panel which is even worse!

[splodge]

The new transpose gadget gets my vote!. It's much tidier.

Well done, Andrew!

[Andrew Shpagin]

Thanks for feedback.

What about idea - if you move origin point it will move whole gismo, if you will move end point it will change direction. I will make "fixed length" Also I will add numerical input and possibility to align along x/y/z on the left tool panel. There is enough space at the bottom.

i found a bug : when you use the select with pen in transpose mode, and you remove selected parts, the brush leaves circle artifacts behind.

Please explain, what is "remove selected parts"?

[Mantis]

Gizmo size should be a fixed size. This is also important if you want to give people the option later on to change gizmo size if they would prefer it to be bigger or smaller.

That's exactly what I thought, having an option to setup gizmo size is a way better than the current resizing.

What about idea - if you move origin point it will move whole gismo, if you will move end point it will change direction. I will make "fixed length" Also I will add numerical input and possibility to align along x/y/z on the left tool panel. There is enough space at the bottom.

Seems a great idea to me.

An other thing about the transpose line, can you make it follow the moving,rotating,scaling operation?

Right now it is like in Zbrush, after these operations the line stay at its first place.

It should follow the operation you have done, if you scale a part the line is scaled in the same way, and so on.

[tree321]

Transpose needs a falloff adjuster, soft selection or edge hardness whatever u want to call it.

[Mantis]

you can see better the strengh of the faloff by decreasing the intensity of the light in 3dc

Right but you have to get a really low intensity to get it clearly visible, and the object become really dark.

Here is a screenshot of the same selection seen in 2 different point of view, and like you can see the intensity is quite low.

You can clearly see the difference between both point of view, this glowing red is not the best way to accurately view your selection.

In fact I got the same problem In zbrush who use a dark greyish color, when you paint your mask by hand and you inflat the inverted selection you got little cavity and you can clearly see brush stroke pattern.

Even if they are not really important, that's quite annoying to have to smooth them and being unable to see them before.

About the painting brush in transpose mode, currently when you paint with it you got a transpose you see the construction guide line.

This brush should also be an option for others mode.

Why not linking it to Shift?

By pressing Shift in transpose you can use the painting brush to tweak your influence, and Shift+ctrl to substract using brush.

So we got:

Shift: Add influence with brush.

Ctrl+Shift: Substract influence with brush.

Like that it's faster than having to change mode just for this, and because it will be use often it's easier like this.

[Crusoe]

Love the new transpose widget idea! Not perfect, but some real good ideas there!

The controls on the line need to be slightly bigger though.

[ghib]

Also liking the transpose widgit here. quick question tho. The red falloff, is there a way to manually alter it after you've drawn the line out? I noticed there's a 'Select with Pen' option but I was looking for a way to shift the start and end of the falloff.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Updated to V38

Changes:

1) More accurate work of transpose (selection without holes)

2) Advanced gizmo - many new options, digital input

3) Possibility to smooth seletion using SHIFT in pen mode

4) Airbrush-style selection

5) More correct undo

6) Many bugfixes

Thanks for testing and feedback!

[TOXE]

Updated to V38

Changes:

1) More accurate work of transpose (selection without holes)

2) Advanced gizmo - many new options, digital input

3) Possibility to smooth seletion using SHIFT in pen mode

4) Airbrush-style selection

5) More correct undo

6) Many bugfixes

Thanks for testing and feedback!

Good news, i'm back from a week far from home without internet... As always i'm here waiting for osx version... Thanks Andrew

-TOXE

[Mantis]

Great, the new transpose is much more accurate, at least I now have the whole part of my selected area who move with transpose, the small dot who didn't follow seems to have disappear.

I didn't test it deeply but here are some feedback:

-Now if you use rotate the transpose line follow the movement, but if you undo it, it doesn't undo the transpose line rotation.

-Scale and move doesn't have the same behaviour and it should.

-The current gradient is good, but the way you did it is wrong, normaly it goes from red to blue, here it goes from red to blue and to red. Blue should be for 0.

-The select object mode is really laggy, and you don't have the choice to get a normal gizmo for these kind of move, I know that some prefer to move a whole object with transpose, (even if I don't understand it because it's really awkward ).

But can you add a way to move rotate and scale a whole object with normal gizmo? Wouldn't be faster than the current way?

-Is it possible to choose the glowing power of the seleced area?

That's all for the moment, transpose seems to work perfectly right now. Tools just need to be fine tuned, but you did the biggest part congratulation.

[Eric Dandoy]

Congratulations, indeed, and many thanks, Andrew. The new transpose tool works really fine, nice and efficient gizmo. I still have to practice a lot, but it will be a lot of fun.

[3dioot]

Woah i dont pay attention for one evening and look what happens. Awesome!

I love:

- the alignment options

- the fixed gizmo size

- the option to change the fixed gizmo size

- the option for setting gizmo size to screen space (i like that alot)

- the colors for selection (with a few suggestions)

- the airbrush for selecting (which for some reason works a 1000 times better then pen; i always got dots with that)

- smooth! (that was a really great suggestion)

Few things that caught my eye (didnt have much time tonight)

- transpose bugs out when symmetry is on.

Transforms get reversed and/or the origin becomes the average of the real origin and the mirrored one on the other side.

- colors. While they help i feel the complete rainbow you have now is a bit of overkill. Normally you mask out pretty solid area's with a smooth transitional edge. This results in a big patch of red with like three colors tucked close together near the edge. I suggest you bring it back to two colors (like red going towards blue). Also, since they practically emit light, i cant see/judge my sculpt when im transposing. This is really bad. Id appreciate it if you could give two more options. One is to hide the current selection (in other words; its still selected it just doesnt show any color) and the other one is just a black mask fading to grey for judging elaborate patterns that you've drawn on.

- the way selection is put inside transpose.

This still gives major problems. Think ahead. People would like to use "stencils/masks" to paint their selections. Its not just an isolated tool inside transpose. Not only that; everytime you want to adust your selection you will end up with a newly placed transpose line. When you try to bend something you do that in stages. You start with most of the tentacle/tail/whatever selected. You bend it. Then you make a new selection with the line tool that excludes the part you allready bent. But wait; that means the transpose line gets replaced too. And that probably was in the perfect place!

The only time where it feels somewhat logical is with the pen tool. And even there its annoying. When you press to draw the transpose line is placed at the first point you click. That first point doesnt need to be the point you want to transpose from. Its just the first point you started to draw from. You really need to think about this especially since you dont have a general masking/freezing solution implemented yet. Seperate selection from the transpose tool and build it out to a general selection/masking tool. We will need it regardless. You may as well save yourself some work and put what you made for transpose in the right place and extend and complete it. Last little nitpick. I dont like that when i use the pen tool i get this start point, line, endpoint thingie. Its just clutter on my screen and serves no purpose whatsoever. Keep it clean. No distractions. Just the voxel sculpt and me... (insert romantic music here).

3dioot

[tree321]

Once again great improvements!Love the new features.No complaints here.

3dioot quote:I dont like that when i use the pen tool i get this start point, line, endpoint thingie. Its just clutter on my screen and serves no purpose whatsoever.

Your right it seems of little value now, but what if the endpoint could be constrained to a certain length using alt or ? but still allow circular movement, then it would act as a protractor, compass or a pencil on a string to draw circles or arcs etc.Also if the line could be constrained A to B using ? key it could be used to draw straight lines...

[Andrew Shpagin]

Thanks for feedback!

btw, there is file CustomSampler3.dds in every Shaders\Custpm\... subfolder. It is gradient picture. You can change and experiment with it to achieve best look of selection. It could be interesting to see result.

[Mantis]

Here is what I've done, a gradient from red to blue.

CustomSampler3.rar

[Andrew Shpagin]

Here is what I've done, a gradient from red to blue.

Very nice! I have slightly modified it (to avoid violet maximum due to texture wrapping)

CustomSampler3.zip

[Mantis]

Is it possible to disable the fading at the end?

Because right now there is an area who is affected by transpose but you see it as unpainted.

And I did the gradient again with your modification to have the full range

CustomSampler3.rar

[Andrew Shpagin]

Is it possible to disable the fading at the end?

Because right now there is an area who is affected by transpose but you see it as unpainted.

And I did the gradient again with your modification to have the full range

All is in shader. I can use alpha channel from texture instead of linear mixing colors.

example of modified shader (Default\mcubes.hlsl). You can play with it

// Vertex shader

float4x4 g_WorldViewProjectionMatrix;
float3 g_ViewerPos;
float4 Sphere;
float4x4 ShadowTM;

struct VS_INPUT {
	float3 Pos	   : POSITION;
	float3 Normal	: TEXCOORD0;
};

struct VS_OUTPUT {
	float4 Pos  : POSITION;	
	float3 N	: TEXCOORD1;
#ifdef SHADOWS
	float3 SPos : TEXCOORD2;
#endif
};

VS_OUTPUT main(const VS_INPUT In) {
	VS_OUTPUT Out;
	float4 P = float4(In.Pos, 1.0);
	Out.Pos = mul(P, g_WorldViewProjectionMatrix);
	Out.N = In.Normal;
#ifdef SHADOWS
	Out.SPos = mul(P, ShadowTM);
	Out.SPos.xy += float2(1.0/4096.0f,1.0/4096.0);
#endif
	return Out;
}

// Pixel shader

struct VS_OUTPUT {
	float4 Pos  : POSITION;
	float3 N	: TEXCOORD1;
#ifdef SHADOWS
	float3 SPos : TEXCOORD2;
#endif
};

sampler ShadowSampler;
sampler CustomSampler3;

float4 Color;
float4 CurrColor;
float3 LDir;
float LDiffuse;
float LAmbient;
float ShadowMin;


float4 main( const VS_OUTPUT v ) : COLOR {
	float mpl=1.0;
#ifdef SHADOWS
	float3 m=tex2D(ShadowSampler,v.SPos).xyz;	
	float3 d=float3(1.0,1.0/255.0,1.0/255.0/255.0);
	mpl=clamp(2.0-(v.SPos.z-dot(m,d))*120,ShadowMin,1);	
#endif
	float L=length(v.N);
	float3 N=v.N/L;
	float dd=clamp(L-1.0,0.0,0.99);

#ifdef AOPASS
	float  D = LAmbient-LDiffuse*dot(N,LDir)*mpl;
#else
	float  D = -LDiffuse*dot(N,LDir)*mpl;	
#endif  
	float4 C=CurrColor*D;
	float4 c1=tex2D(CustomSampler3,float2(dd,0));
	C=lerp(C,c1,c1.w);
	C.w=1;
	return C;		
}

Changed lines:

...

float dd=clamp(L-1.0,0.0,0.99);/0.99 instead of 1.0

...

C=lerp(C,c1,c1.w);//c1.w instead of dd

[Mantis]

Thank you Andrew but unfortunatly I am very bad when it touch to these thing

Even doing a copy/paste didn't worked.

It is not possible to do a slider who allow to change the fading?

Like that you don't have to do many shaders for this.

And I think that the linear mixing is what fit the best instead of an alpha based mixing.

And because we are talking about the colors, I want to add that I really like this suggestion of 3dioot.

Id appreciate it if you could give two more options. One is to hide the current selection (in other words; its still selected it just doesnt show any color) and the other one is just a black mask fading to grey for judging elaborate patterns that you've drawn on.

And what would be really great is that when you will do masking, that you add this option too, be able to see your mask in a color fashion, to jusge it better.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Ok, I can add slider for overall opacity of selection. It is easy. But now I have "exercise" - trying 64-bitting So slightly later.

[Andrew Shpagin]

It seems that moving to 64 bit will be more easy then expected. I have compiled and linked project for 64-bit platform. Still not working, but compiling and linking phase was much more easy then expected.

[Auger]

It seems that moving to 64 bit will be more easy then expected. I have compiled and linked project for 64-bit platform. Still not working, but compiling and linking phase was much more easy then expected.

Good news, Andrew!

[Juan Carlos Montes]

NICE!!

[Jokermax]

"transpose" is great! You should probably rename it though to avoid complications with Pixologix. How about "Sculptform"?

Really looking forward to 64-bit version!