Hi guys, I just bought 3dc. Here goes feedback/questions/requests

[JoseConseco]

Ok probably most of this stuff was already posted thousand times, by other users, but here it goes again.

What I find awesome:

V4 seems to be much more user friendly, faster, lots of cool features. I tried version 3.x few months ago but I didn't liked it that much, but now I decide to but it. Paint system with layers is awesome! Lots of cool tools to play with.

I thought I wont be able to use Voxels on my AMD ATI card but it seems to work ok.

2 Questions:

a) are there subdivisions levels (or everything works on tris)?

b ) will buying Nvidia benefit anything more than Voxel sculpting?

Feedback:

I hope that what I write below makes sense.

I have been using mostrly Zbrush, Sculptris, bits of Blender.

Zbrush seems to have most powerful brushes - clay tubes (and even better - clayBuildUp), everybody know that.

In 3dc I found 'rapid' and 'rapid2' work similarly to claytubes (but no buildup option, or is there?). So I did some testing looking for brushes that could clean ugly bumps on model. Here is my research:

Except rapid brushes, all other are not good for this task, and I find this important to get clean sculpt. So I did bit testing in zbrush to see what makes its claytubes (and other brushes) give smooth feel. And the result is - 'Imbed' option and 'Surface sample radius' are doing all the magic:

Low 'Imbed' value makes the brush fill only deep holes, without affecting raised areas

High 'surface Sample radius' smooths brush stroke, by averaging surface normal. So all small surface elevations are averaged and flattened.

And last example of low brush "imbed' value helping smoothing surface (with one long brush stroke):

So what I wish 3d Coat had:

- hottest feature would be - 'buildup' option - makes brush - accumulate stroke daubs on top of each other. Really helpfull adding or subtracting geometry. Pretty please!
- something like 'Imbed' parameter for brushes

- something like 'Surface sample radius' for averaging surface normal

- and really last thing - in Paint room - feathering of brush masking by cavity - it is bit harsh now, and I find no way to smooth it.

Thanks for reading and for awesome application!

[JoseConseco]

Ok. It was late yesterday so I forgot about two things. It seems there is no edit post option, so I am writing new one.

1) I just wanted to ask, why LiveClay uses different sets of brushes? I like lots of surface brushes: rapid1 &2, Buildup, etc. but there seems are so similar brushes in LC mode. Actually I cannot find any decent brush for building volumes in LC mode, and that is really bad... I think it would simplify and reduce lots of brush presets, if they could work in LC and Surface mode. In blender and Sculptris you can just disable dynamic tesselation and use same brushes everywhere.

2) Crease clay, wrinkle clay - they are pinching those vertices like black holes :/, way to strong imo. Is there a way to reduce pinching strength?

[Carlosan]

Multires decimation

another useful videos

About nVidia cards

http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=12991&view=findpost&p=92809&hl=overlay

-----------------------------------

Brushing improvements

http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=9792

Please post there your feedback regarding recent brushing system update. I think we may polish it together very well.

[JoseConseco]

thanks carlosan. I posted about brushes in 'Brush improvements' forum section.

So I guess there is no 'quad mode' with subdivision levels in 3dc. That is ok, with LClay this is not needed actually.

About new gpu, I was asking more about what parts of 3dc engine are benefiting from GPU? Is fast gpu helping eg. in surface sculpting or texture painting or only voxels? It is too bad new nvidia cards do not provide big CUDA performance boost. Actually my CPU seems to be doing ok in with voxels, so maybe there is no need for new card.

[digman]

First Welcome to the 3DCoat community...

Give it some time and you will discover the true power of the brush system in 3DCoat. Creating your own brushes and settings and saving them as presets, When to use voxel brushes, surface mode brushes with remove stretching enabled or disabled. LC brushes controlling your density through the detail slider. Creating your own personal LC brushes based off the LC General Brush. How different alphas affect the brush system in 3DCoat. Creating your own personal alphas directly in 3DCoat. Editing the curves of your brush radius, depth and smoothing. And not to speak of the falloff, focal shift settings or steady stroke.. The use of Tsmooth to help relax the mesh in combination with Powerful Smoothing

Things like when to move from Voxel sculpting to surface mode brushes and then LC brushes or a combination of both. How they work together as a team to sculpt your model.

ZBrush and 3DCoat might seem similar in a number of ways but really there are quite a bit different.

I do agree there needs to be some tweaking of the default brushes to make them easier to use and understand right out of the box for the first time users...

Here is a link to a 2 very basic tutorials I did on the brush system in 3DCoat. There are getting a little old now but still apply. There were done on the fly, no editing...

Interpolate in now called Steady Stroke.

In the second video it is important to change one thing I said, Do not use the duplicate feature when Creating your own preset brush based off the LC general brush, simply save it as a preset. There might still be a bug in using the duplicate and renaming feature.

http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=10194

Here also is a link to Artman's preset brushes.

http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=11447

[michalis]

Welcome Jose

Here we're again. It's a rather small world.

[JoseConseco]

digman thanks for videos! They helped me a lot in understanding how 3dc brushes work. But they do no solve problem of 'cleaning' bumpy geometry imo. But maybe I it just matter of getting used to different workflow, and trying to maintain clean sculpt all the time.

michalis - awesome to have you here. You really pushing those voxels hard . I love your work and reading your tutorials, especially sculpting with uv. I wish I could join, but I'm more into 2d, and lowpoly stuff and work is taking lots of energy too.

[AbnRanger]

You are right about the lumpiness that seems to be occurring lately. This seem to be a relatively recent issue. Others have mentioned it here and I concur. By default the behavior should be rather smooth, without having to make adjustments to smooth out the behavior. I have heard some blame it on recent Wacom tablet drivers...maybe Windows 8 glitches. I'm not sure when I first noticed this, but it seems to have cropped up after upgrading to Win 8.

If Linux users notice this, too, then that nixes the Win 8 theory.

[digman]

I looked again at the images you posted... The pictures shows my results of getting a clean mesh without building up the mesh but removing the lumps.

This could have been better as I did it quickly and could have run smooth over the area once I was done but this is after using the fill brush with a couple of techniques I have

learned...

Each picture shows the results of using the surface mode fill tool to get rid of the lumps on the model's right side.

[Andrew Shpagin]

How imbed is different on displacement degree? From the hint it looks like just displacement.<br />I will enable Sampling radius in several other tools but Flattern, it should definitely help.

[BeatKitano]

Damn... about time.

THNX.

@JoseConseco

You know, I could kiss you... what're asking i've been hammering for months without success,

I didn't even upgrade because I lost complete hope. SO TNX.

[JoseConseco]

AbnRanger - With parameters 'surface sampling radius' and brush 'Plane offset' (imbed) lumpiness will be history. See image below.

Digman - nice cleaning of your model, but those secret techniques may be to hard to new 3dc users

Andrew Shpagin - Ok Imbed (akka Plane Offset) vs Depth - I did many test today and what I thought about Depth was bit wrong. I was thinking that 'Depth' = 0 won't sculpt at all but it seems it is filling holes just like imbed set to 0. Here are 3dcoat tests:

This shows why I love rapid brush, it is very close to 'ClayTubes' - meaning building volume while making surface even -just look how perfectly it filled hole. Default clay is not so cool.

So the only difference I see now Imbed vs Depth is - Imbed allows negative plane offset - meaning only deepest places on surface gets affected. But now I do not find this that important, since with Depth set to zero We can get nice surface too.

Here are bunch of test in zbrush and Blender:

As you can see in Zbrush Imbed< 0 won't affect higher surface area, but in Blender it does - so this is bug in Blender imo.

Right now I don't care about Imbed anymore, but 'Build Up' option for rapid brushes would be awesome (for other brushes too I guess). I makes brush stroke additive, which speeds up building a volume on sculpt. Faster workflow = more money

BeatKitano - I was sure other 3dc users requested this features too, because they make life so much easier that is hard to sculpt without them.

Thank for reading, and sorry for long post.

[digman]

"Digman - nice cleaning of your model, but those secret techniques may be to hard to new 3dc users"

Ah, I was going to tell ya... As with most software if it does not do it right out of the box you find ways of making the software work like you want and need.

First set your depth for the fill brush to 1000% or even higher depending upon your polygon count. You can manually type in a percentage past 100...

This will fill the lumps but leaves a few ridges you have to take care of.

Now, hold down the control key and go over the area again... It will even out the mesh...

Last part, use the fill again normal fashion and you are done.

Sometimes depending upon what your doing a combination of holding the control key and releasing it as you work over the area helps to final things out but do this after what is described above.

Use smoothing at the last if you think it is necessary.

I do have remove stretching enabled when doing this type of work.

Play with it for a while and you will get the hang of it.

Also, Andrew will now give us the sampling radius for several brushes, which is great...

Take your time and enjoy learning the ends and outs of 3DCoat. There indeed is a lot of power with it and I sometime will make a few more videos...

[Andrew Shpagin]

Imo I see no difference between Depth and Plane offset in terms of math.

All clay like tools act in so way

Flatten+displace

In math terms

New=Old + (N*N.dot(Old-Center)+Displacement*N)*Alpha

If we have Imbed like

Center1=Center+N*Imbed

New=Old + (N*N.dot(Old-Center-N*Imbed)+Displacement*N)*Alpha =

=Old + (N*N.dot(Old-Center)+(Displacement-Imbed)*N)*Alpha

So, if flatten and dispalce using same alpha then Imbed (as plane offset) is equivalent to Change of displacement on Imbed value.

So I still see no meaning of Imbed.

[JoseConseco]

digman - cool trick with the fill too. I didn't knew there is such tool. I wil have to check this out when I'm back home.

Andrew Shpagin - I'm not a mathematical guy, so I cannot tell you mathematical formula. But I think Displacement is only positive, and Imbed = Displacement but with negative values.

Here it is shown that negative Imbed makes brush fill only deepest parts of hole. But with Imbed>0 it behaves the same as Depth (displacement).

So in the end I think you may skip implementing Imbed, unless somebody else thinks this is important. But please add 'Build Up' option if you can.

[Carlosan]

Hi Jose

Will you please read this article and help Andrew to see the differences ?

http://books.google.com.ar/books?id=QqE-CAmNvUEC&pg=PA13&lpg=PA13&dq=imbed+vs+depth+zbrush&source=bl&ots=nzUBCK8uy7&sig=2Ayknqhf_bhjiAYrK0Yt8s0fvMY&hl=es-419&sa=X&ei=HtfSUff_O8j6igKX7IHACg&ved=0CFoQ6AEwBw#v=onepage&q=imbed%20vs%20depth%20zbrush&f=false

ty

[digman]

I meant the surface mode fill brush. Sometimes I transpose them, calling a brush a tool.

I edited my posts...

[Andrew Shpagin]

digman - cool trick with the fill too. I didn't knew there is such tool. I wil have to check this out when I'm back home.

Andrew Shpagin - I'm not a mathematical guy, so I cannot tell you mathematical formula. But I think Displacement is only positive, and Imbed = Displacement but with negative values.

Here it is shown that negative Imbed makes brush fill only deepest parts of hole. But with Imbed>0 it behaves the same as Depth (displacement).

So in the end I think you may skip implementing Imbed, unless somebody else thinks this is important. But please add 'Build Up' option if you can.

Thanks. Now understood Imbed. Ok, I made buildup options in all brushes where is may have sense.

Normals sampling introduced in even wider set of brushes.

Brushes that depend on direction (Rapid, claws, all ones with Rotate along stroke) got very smnooth rotation interpolation - no more random brush rotation wnn moving brush not too fast.

I tweaked a bit rapid brush to be more controllable, I hope it will be noticeble too (in good sense).

[JoseConseco]

Cool, thank you very much. By the way I asked one of Blender devs who implemented 'Plane offset' about it. His response:

"Many of the clay brushes will move vertexes towards or away from a plane which is computed as being at the mean of the normals and positions of all the vertexes. The offset moves that plane up or down from its computed value."

So his definition of clay seems to be bit differen, but I guess results are the same as flatten+displace.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Ok, done many changes there. Now I think you may mimick most of brushes that you like and even place them in tools panel instead/with default ones.

Update comes in nearest Sunday.

[BeatKitano]

Good news, crossing fingers