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3DCoat Wishlist


Carlosan
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From what I have experienced so far I would love to see the sculpting side of 3D Coat get drastically improved, more so along the lines of brush behavior and detail creation. Anything to get it feeling a lot closer to zbrush's brush quality.

 

Other than that, generally see the UI both visually and layout go through a metamorphosis, a lot can be simplified and presented in a visually/functionally streamlined manner.

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First, with the new smoothing routine in Beta 12,  I hope as well that the brushes will themselves get some love in that area of not creating bumps. They are a lot better but still need some improving...

 

Now the general brush is really easy to get what you shown in your picture as you are building your brush from scratch...

Here is a setting that works better shown in the picture. Also make sure that your Alpha has Spacing enabled and set at 10% or 5%. Make sure you turn off snap midpoints as shown in the image.

This Brush works best by applying a few strokes, lifting the tablet pen, then rinse and repeat...

Plus your detail level will effect how fast you can lay down the stroke.

 

It is fun to play around with the General Brush to see what kind of brushes you can create. That is the reason the General Brush was added, for the adventurous...

post-518-0-71009800-1423866993_thumb.png

Edited by digman
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There is no easy way of moving multiple UV islands between the sets in the UV room. You can paint selection in the UV preview window, but good luck with picking up those tiny islands with it.

SelectAllVisibleFaces AngelScript function is broken in UV room and picks up invisible faces too (it works fine in the retopo room) and there's no Select tool like there is in retopo. It  makes UV room - a room that is supposed to be fully dedicated to managing UVs - inferior to the retopo room in what it supposed to do, which is quite peculiar.

 

So maybe:

- fix the SelectAllVisibleFaces function in the UV room

- add some tool to marquee/lasso select multiple faces and islands in the UV room.

 

I know that I once voted against it, but on second thoughts, maybe it is in fact a good idea to merge UV and retopo rooms after all, providing the resulting room would retain all functionality from BOTH rooms?

Edited by ajz3d
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Minor:  I'd like the presentation for alphas, shaders..ect to have the same visual consistency as the rest of the UI.  What I mean by this is the removal of the black squares (background), the look of the shader orbs either showing full matcap images or at the very least have the boxes include rounded corners like the voxel/sculpt tool icons. Brushes in the presets tab also have the black removed to give a much more consistent visual presentation.

In short, just some more visual consistency across the UI as a whole. It would definitely help 3D Coats visual appeal/professionalism going into 4.5.

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great topic.

I'm blown away by the new release. I was fast before but now. wow.

my wishlist.

-Uv room: unwrap only the selected faces and pack them into any available place so I don't have to change textures. I like to keep adding things to textured unwrapped models a lot. it's possible now, but it should be easier.

-tweak room: transform tool needs a select all option.

-assignable hotkeys for right click on vox tree menu. rename, decimate etc.

-viewport: needs game mode camera with look and wasd navigation for world building

-import tool: respect spacing bush options and a scale jitter for scattering instance objects. (sprite cards etc)

-inport/export to allembic.

-viewport: needs delete option on env map chooser. can only add.

-render room: option to render spherical hdr env maps.

-import/spline tool: better support for uv mapped models when in surface mode.

-when downgrading a voxlayer, I wish the decimation used better cavity masking to preserve creases better.

-really wish there were a unified freeze menu so the same freeze can be used between, vox extrude, layer, pose, split, cut off, painting etc.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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one more minor bug. but it makes me nuts.

I have vox layers with transforms scaling them up to mountain sizes. works great. the voxel density is low but I can sculpt the terrain and the horizon well. the bug is that the brush radius and the apply curve/models don't respect the vox layer scale transform. since the brush radius right mouse drag size is limited to 500, I am forced to type in a brush radius value of 5000 over and over again. I know it makes sense for novice users to limit it, but with a scaled vix layer, working at massive scale is performant and awesome.

also: applying models to scaled vox layers gives an inaccurate warning about trying to apply a giant volume and creating a billion polygons and running out memory. but -this is not true since the receiving vox layer is also huge so the apply will only add a few thousand more poly's to the scene.

short version.

1: brush radius needs to be scaled by selected vox layers scale.

2: apply model warning logic needs to be extended to understand target layers scale transform.

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I suggested something similar when Andrew re-worked the Surface mode brushes. I don't find Voxel brushing as useless as you claim, but there is now a BIG disparity between the two modes. Essentially, Andrew has abandoned Voxel mode as a sculpting platform. He leaves it as is, because what Voxels do best is construction & boolean type operations. Everything else, Surface mode is far superior. That's why he put the development time there, rather than spread it evenly. I think there should be some level of continuity between them in at least a handful of brushes. But in Voxel mode, you only have 2 or 3 useable ones.

 

This is why I feel that 3D Coat is losing focus.  The biggest benefit it gives me over other packages is the way it handles Voxels.  If I'm pushed to do Surface mode, I may as well stick to ZBrush, which for me personally gives a better brush "feel."  However, I love the way 3D Coat deals with complex shapes easily.  Having to step back and forth tends to lose details that I bothered to make in Surface mode, which is why I tend not to bother with it.  Thus, I might start out in 3D Coat to get my main shapes in, do the retopo work, UV maps, etc. and then port over to ZBrush to add the details I want, and then decide if I would rather paint and project in ZBrush or port back over to 3D Coat to do the same.

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The below is if I am understanding what you stated otherwise ignore my commment.

 

You can vertex paint on your surface mode object by switching to the paint room with no retopoing or baking. Of course the quality of painting is depended upon the amount of vertices you have in your model.  More vertices mean higher quality. Great for the prototyping colors etc...  You can bake the vertex colors to use at least as a base for your finish work.

 

That's true.

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great topic.

I'm blown away by the new release. I was fast before but now. wow.

my wishlist.

-Uv room: unwrap only the selected faces and pack them into any available place so I don't have to change textures. I like to keep adding things to textured unwrapped models a lot. it's possible now, but it should be easier.

-tweak room: transform tool needs a select all option.

-assignable hotkeys for right click on vox tree menu. rename, decimate etc.

-viewport: needs game mode camera with look and wasd navigation for world building

-import tool: respect spacing bush options and a scale jitter for scattering instance objects. (sprite cards etc)

-inport/export to allembic.

-viewport: needs delete option on env map chooser. can only add.

-render room: option to render spherical hdr env maps.

-import/spline tool: better support for uv mapped models when in surface mode.

-when downgrading a voxlayer, I wish the decimation used better cavity masking to preserve creases better.

-really wish there were a unified freeze menu so the same freeze can be used between, vox extrude, layer, pose, split, cut off, painting etc.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

These are great suggestions.

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-viewport: needs game mode camera with look and wasd navigation for world building

You can do this now, sort of, although it is hidden behind a somewhat cryptic name in the UI. From the camera pulldown above the viewport select "Custom Navigation" then from the fly-out select "3D-Coat_Arrows_FPS".

Unfortunately it uses the middle mouse button with the arrow keys rather than the right mouse button with the WASD keys, which is what most people would likely prefer so as to be compatible with Unity and Unreal Engine. You can however change it with the "Customize Navigation" feature, although it's a bit complicated to set up.

It would be a great thing to have the app come with an additional preset that used the right mouse button with the WASD keys and call it something like "WASD Game Engine Style" so people know what it is.

(The above is based on version 4.1. It may be different in the new version which I haven't tried yet.)

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When snapping into one of the box plane positions (front, back, left, right, top, bottom) the vast majority of the time you're going to want to be in orthographic projection when in that view. Then when you go back into perspective view you're almost always going to want to be back into perspective projection. Most 3D apps do this for you, switching into orthographic or perspective projections automatically as described above, but in 3D Coat you have to manually toggle back and forth between orthographic and perspective every time. If you use the box plane positions a lot you might have to manually toggle back and forth hundreds of times in the course of a day's work.

Would it make sense for 3D Coat to have an option to this automatically like most apps? Or maybe just make it work that way by default?

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Hotkeys that are assigned per room, and not globally.

Eg.

-I want to use 'd' hotkey in sculpt room for 'standard brush', but in paintroom I would use it for 'paint tool'

-ctrl+n  in sculpt room creates new voxel layer, but in paint room it could create new paint layer,

- 'E' - eraser in paint room, but same 'E' could be used for crease brush o something.

Maybe even those hotkeys could be split for surface sculpting and voxel sculpting. Eg 'f' for fill brush  in voxel mode, would use different brush preset, than 'fill brush' in surface mode.

The way it works now, when I'm in voxel mode, and press 'F', 3dcoat is asking me, do I want to go to surface mode.

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Polygroup/face groups. It  is basically about tagging faces on mesh. It would allow easy masking previously marked polygons, or areas on which we performed specific actions and we want refine those areas only.

Example:

https://youtu.be/wuBKYiCYJMU

One important feature that  makes playgroups powerful are polishing/relaxing algorithms.

Eg. in link below look for star example and PolishGP function. We can go from star with jagged edges, to clean edge with polishing. 3dcoat has 

http://docs.pixologic.com/reference-guide/tool/polymesh/polygroups/

Or see this - very useful for hardsurface:

http://docs.pixologic.com/user-guide/3d-modeling/hard-surface/polish-features/

 

 

 

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1) I'd warmly welcome some means of calculating curvature maps either from high-poly meshes or tangent/object/world space normal maps that were baked or imported to the paint room. As of now, it looks like calculation of this type of map is based on geometry that was imported to paint room (unless you're doing vertex painting of course). And this is usually a low-poly representation of the reference mesh, so curvature lacks details.

 

2) Mantra-Compatible Catmull-Clark and OpenSubdiv Catmull-Clark subdivision and UV smoothing algorithms available as an option when choosing subdivision method when baking textures for PPP to provide better compatibility with render-time Mantra subdivision algorithms by eliminating the need of importing presubdivided meshes to paint room.

 

3) Sculptable bake cages for baking.

Edited by ajz3d
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Remove "Add Clusters" in UV-Room. I don't know anyone who use it today.

The only interesting situation for it is creating mirrored UVs by two clicks. But it works within mirrored objects only.

 

There should be a list with functions that are obsolete. 3D-Coat has some tools that are not needed anymore and old because of better solutions inside the tool itself.

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Andrew, I don't know how it possible to apply the same tool like the Zmodeller tool into 3DC, but your Retopo room may become more usefull, if you let to apply gizmo and some modeller tools like a Bevel, Extrude and etc.

You already have those....and Raul is supposedly working on some of the many other features that have been long requested

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What ajz3d is asking for is the ability to export all channels the same as we can from the file> export menu. The export all layers function exports all layers exactly in 3DC as a PSD, useful yes, but not the same. It's a feature I've been asking about for some time. Especially useful when you're needing to update and quickly export your textures when you don't need the mesh (say in Unreal, Modo, etc.).

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I think that's basically the script I wrote over in the Coding thread... it iterates all the UV layers and exports Diffuse and Displace. It could be easily extended to export Spec too, or the newer metal stuff too presumably. That's why I've always loved apps that allow scripting, instead of waiting for a new feature you can whip it up yourself, or someone on a forum can if you're not comfortable with scripting.

 

Cheers,

 

Peter B

 

//Admin edit

Angelscript: selecting entrys from a dropdown menu

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