Carve related tools discussion

[3dioot]

Ive decided to keep it simple. This is for a very open brush with two settings. I will give you starting values that i think will work but by sticking to settings people can play and see what they prefer.

Ill give two problems which would dissapear by implementing this.

-Sculpt a single stroke on a flat surface and try to raise it by repeatedly making the same stroke over it. It will never become higher. Im talking about seperate strokes here where you lift your pen and start a new one so this is seperate from the stuff we talked about before (the stuff with brushes growing over time versus growing on movement).

-Create a corner with an angle of 90 degrees. Try to subtract into the corner. It wont budge. Its the same problem as above only reversed.

This brush has two settings:

- average depth (recommended setting .75)

This controls where the insertion point of the brush will be. Entering zero would correspond to taking the deepest point it can find under the brush (so that would correspond with the way it is now) and one would be the very top of the surface. This value gets reversed for subtractive action. So .75 favors the top surface when your adding and .75 would favor the deepest surface when your subtracting. In my example you can see i replaced the sample sphere with a sample cylinder (from my tests it seems this is already the case or the brush would favor the depth near the center of the brush over the depth near the edges of the brush and this currently isnt the case). The special thing is that this cylinder has a limited depth. It can NEVER register a point thats either deeper or higher above the point where the brush touches the surface then half the radius. This is a bit of a gamble on my part but i think this will solve the freakish behaviour the current carve brush displays when you try to brush over one very small but very deep hollow.

- offset (recommended setting +10)

This adds (or removes if you make it negative) a value to the insertion point of the brush. It does this in percentages of the radius of the brush. While it may seem average depth and offset do the same they dont. They influence the same thing yes, but both do it in a very different way and they both need to do their thing to get a smooth result.

This example is a little unfortunate in that the final result looks like it has just taken the top of the surface. The final insertion point depends heavily on the surface itself so it could have ended below or above it just as easily.

Lastly i would like you to implement this as a new brush so people will look at it fresh and not in a "i liked carve the way it was i want it back" kind of way. Also i hope this is easy to create since it seems all the methods are allready there in the current brushes its just a matter of putting existing stuff together in a specific way for this brush.

Thanks for reading.

3dioot

[3dioot]

Im back from being away for a while. (death in the family)

Im happy to see so much progress being made on all kinds of things.

Andrew do you think you will get to spend some quality time on the brush engine/path interpolation before release?

Or will you just settle for "good enough"? I hope not.

3dioot

[Andrew Shpagin]

Im back from being away for a while. (death in the family)

Im happy to see so much progress being made on all kinds of things.

Andrew do you think you will get to spend some quality time on the brush engine/path interpolation before release?

Or will you just settle for "good enough"? I hope not.

3dioot

Hi!

Glad to see you there! I was thinking - where are you?

My condolence on what happened in your family.

Yes, I still plan interpolation. I tried it once, but there was no big success.

You know my principle - do what is most required divide by hardness at this moment.

[3dioot]

"My condolence on what happened in your family."

Thankyou

I can imagine it was strange having someone so "vocal" suddenly going quiet. Im still watching just because its so interesting but participating like i used to do likely wont happen for a while. Without going into details it was someone very close to me and it will take time for me to get "back on track" (for lack of better words).

I hope you dont underestimate the importance of how the tools feel. It will be the very first thing "newcomers" to 3dcoat will experience. If strokes are jaggy and they bury themselves randomly in curved surfaces you will lose out on potential customers. Thats not even taking into account the people who allready love the voxelscupting but are expecting you to bring it up to the level of similair tools (zbrush/mudbox). Dont make the mistake of watching at the art that has been created so far as proof that its good enough, great artists can make art with a piece of charcoal. This is still as important now as it was when i first posted it.

3dioot

[druitre]

Hello,

I'm still kind of newish to the forum (registered user since a few weeks) and addicted to voxelsculpting. This thread vocalises my main concerns about the sculpting toolset quite well so no need to repeat that (especially the last one by 3dioot is spot on). Couple of things I want to add though:

1- At the moment (alpha47) I'm confused about 'scrape' - I really like that one, but why does it always remove and not follow the LMB=add/ ctrl=remove convention like all the others? And the 'depth' seems to not have any influence? Also, when scraping around a hard edge it goes all funky - sudden holes appear upon pen-release, very irregular cuts along the path.

2 - Right now, I'm sculpting with an 'increase' tool set to the first left 'pen' with settings so-and-so, falloff so-and-so, etc. Is there a way to save this combination of settings into one preset? I'm discovering certain combinations of settings that come close to how I want it to work, but I have to re-discover them every time I start a new sculpting session.

3 - And finally: the selectiontool in 'transpose' with 'select with pen' active. Very hard to accurately select the parts that I want to transpose or to have the right kind of falloff/ soft selection. What I'd want is a 'select with lasso', 'grow/shrink selection' and a 'smooth/sharpen selection'. Also the tool itself makes little sense to me - I'd much prefer a universal transpose gizmo, like most 3D packages use (XYZ arrows for move, circles for roll/pitch/bank, lines with blocks at the end to indicate scale) with options to place it at the center of the object, of the selection or user-defined. The way it's now, it looks as if it is reinventing the wheel and ending up making stuff more complicated.

(I see the title of the thread being 'carve related tools discussion' so I hope this last one is not out of place here. Also, it's all constructive suggestions, not intended as negative criticism. As I already said, I'm addicted to VS, I am convinced this will eradicate the polygonal approach from existence, especially if some genius would come up with a working auto-quadrangulate tool to get stuff into animation packages. The way it is now, it is already blowing my mind.)