Jump to content
3DCoat Forums

2024 Feature requests wishlist


Andrew Shpagin
 Share

Recommended Posts

  • Applink Developer

Take your time Andrew working with DP. It's going to be amazing. I have one idea to scuplting. It may work or not. Is it maybe possible to paint the sculpt density. for example if I have a ball with 50 000 tris then if I could Paint one area to increase tris on that area. For example working with eyes. so now I could have a ball with 50 000 and one specific area on the ball would have 1 million tris. And maybe you could control the density with color map for example black 100% density and white 0% density of tris.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member

EDIT: Sorry this isn't VS related -- is there a DP request thread, or is this it?

Can you make it so the various 'import' options add new sub-objects to the scene rather than replacing what we're currently working on. We already have a 'new' button to clear the scene, and the sub-object window to manage different elements. In my mind I expect 'import' to add to the scene (like in Maya and Max), and with 64-bit and DP support it's easy to imagine being able to load large numbers of objects now.

As an example workflow, I'd like to be able to import a reference mesh of the inside of a room, and then import an unpainted chair and draw on it in this context - so I can get the lighting correct, etc. Or an alternative example is painting shadows on a ground object to correspond to where I've placed some reference rocks.

Additionaly, there is already a 'merge' option, but it's limited to the old micro-poly painting system (no DP, no reference). But you could actually remove this if you changed the behaviour of all import operations - which would be a little step towards streamlining the UI :pardon:

Anyway, good work on the DP mode, I've been really looking forward to it! :good:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

EDIT: Sorry this isn't VS related -- is there a DP request thread, or is this it?

Can you make it so the various 'import' options add new sub-objects to the scene rather than replacing what we're currently working on. We already have a 'new' button to clear the scene, and the sub-object window to manage different elements. In my mind I expect 'import' to add to the scene (like in Maya and Max), and with 64-bit and DP support it's easy to imagine being able to load large numbers of objects now.

As an example workflow, I'd like to be able to import a reference mesh of the inside of a room, and then import an unpainted chair and draw on it in this context - so I can get the lighting correct, etc. Or an alternative example is painting shadows on a ground object to correspond to where I've placed some reference rocks.

Additionaly, there is already a 'merge' option, but it's limited to the old micro-poly painting system (no DP, no reference). But you could actually remove this if you changed the behaviour of all import operations - which would be a little step towards streamlining the UI :pardon:

Anyway, good work on the DP mode, I've been really looking forward to it! :good:

That is easy, I will add it soon.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Height Map Exporting

Andrew:

I'm sure others have thought of this, too, but 3D-Coat is a really good choice for hand sculpting and painting terrains of every kind. Would it be possible to add a "height map" export function that allows the user to export the texture along with the height map?

The game engine I am currently using, full time, requires height map data to generate terrains for in-game use.

I know I could sure use this feature every day.

Thanks,

Psmith

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Height Map Exporting

Andrew:

I'm sure others have thought of this, too, but 3D-Coat is a really good choice for hand sculpting and painting terrains of every kind. Would it be possible to add a "height map" export function that allows the user to export the texture along with the height map?

The game engine I am currently using, full time, requires height map data to generate terrains for in-game use.

I know I could sure use this feature every day.

Thanks,

Psmith

You already can do that. Import model or image plane, paint on layer 1, export displacement.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Contributor

I just started using dp and general non-vs stuff and I really like the locking feature for subobjects,could it be possible to implement it in Voxtree?

I'm always accidentaly changing subtools when selecting the transpose/transform gizmo.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Member

Hi andrew,

first of all let me congratulate you for your great efforts and great ideas and overall fresh approach to things...,it is nice to see that people are trying new paradigms and approaches .

I have 10 years experience as a professional modeler and i hace tried a lot of different packages...when i first started i had to fight my way against Nurbs for animation pipleines despite the fact that Nurbs industrial design packages like Rhino or Form Z where my first steps into the modleing arena....

i also saw the appearance of Zbrush 1.0 when it was pretty much considered a toy and toaday we use it in large pipelines everyday.

This said i have to point out a few things that i hope you will take into consideration since it might make the often subtle differnce between good and GREAT!

for confidentiality reasons i cant name my company or project but it is a very large one..probably the largest at the moment....as a senior modeler i am always looking for real life modleing problems to solve and i would like to give you my input so that u concentrate on those.

first of believe it or not creature creation in modleling is maybe rewarding because is hero asset and foreground stuff but in real life production believe it or not Environmnet, props and vehicles are by far the bulk of production....more production days, more production effort and a massive amount of modleing time is put in backgorunds, props etc....this includes depending on teh project organic BG but very often man made and industrial hard surfaces...with a lot of tricky modleing issues taht few modleing packages has solve even today.

that is my point here...i suppose that u where inspired by Sensable technologies when RE introducing teh idea of Voxels wich is great...be aware that creating blobby structures using voxels or inflating meshes via Zbrush is not the holly graal of Voxels actually but rather the ability to deal with all kind of surfaces from soft to hard and in that respect im feeling that u are getiing very close to grasp that ...i just dont want to say so close but so far...

so dont forget to check not only sensable Clay tools but sensable FREEFORM...the differnece? voxels modleing for both but:

u can create fillets, not half assed pinching effects but actual variable radius fillets and blends...u can conform surfaces to curves , u can chamfer, trim with curves etc...

remember that Voxel modeling was first introduce to solve what Nurbs surfaces had a problem to deal with....but not getting rid of the Nurbs toolset that are still today missing in polygonal toolsets ....in conclusion....character modleing requires not such an extensive modleing toolset despite what a lot of people think...

as an overall marketing approach i will suggest you open an especific hard surfaces gallery display...why? because although the organic sculpting looks great it is not IMHO the best selling point of voxels modeling...You could easily reuse human meshes + Zbrush or Zpheres to make a rough lion shape in Zbrush and sculpt away all teh tiny detail...i know that u can create holes in the fly or extrude in teh fly wich is not possible when limited by a poly surface but again it is not the most impressive part of that techonolgy ...actually everyday peopel is having a harder time with industrial surafces in Zbrush so teher you go..polys and Zbrush weak point! in fcat even resolution wise so far you havent matched Zbrush so...hit where it really hurts :)

please note in this vid teh clean quality of the surface because of teh trims and curves constraints...havent seen anything like it in 3dcoat so far...i know its easier to say than do but in the other hand by implementing those tools you will THEN ONLy fill an existing gap between Polys and Nurbs with and all rounder Modleing package.

or this

http://www.sensable.com/documents/document...eatureChart.pdf

Again Andrew you are doing an amazing work and hope you will find in here great new ideas

Keep up the excellent work!

Pierre Salazar

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member

We have advised to Andrew add a curve deformer,but he is so busy,maybe he would add it in 3dc V4.

What I am thinking day and night is how we can get a more smart retopo tools and flow,because I think it is really

a hard work to retopo even a common human body!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Member

Hi,

well i agree that retopo tools are neat..this said the most time consuming tasks and the most creative tasks should have top priority...teh ability to create intricated surfaces as fast as possible is still the problem...topology is a secondary problem that is totally production pipeline related...btw the day we no longer rigg or texture polys that topology constraint will be gone since there is no concept of "good topology" in nature...in that same idea absolutely nothing is texture...texture is just a cheat to what nature really is....everything even color is shape since it is realted to the density and alignemnet of molecules and atoms (whenever we reach subatomic resolution modleing we can ditch surfacing as well hahaha)

anyways joke aside and to answer to ur specific human mesh retopology in todays production there is absolute no need of reinventing the wheel...every company that i know that has one day modeled and rigged succesfully a human does copy and paste......u cant beat that tool ! then the modler is limited to inflate deflate the mesh and change proportions... a displacement pass and its done...in the other hadn industrial class or other convulated surfaces are hard to do and very time consuming with little possibility to reuse as a quick exampel in a car u could proabbly only reuse teh tires and even then....everything else is abosultely custom...while i could with the same face mesh model a digi double of an actor then another of another one without changing topology for man made surfaces that have infinte solutions this is impossible and tehrefore any tool enhancing this is needed.

again the real deal will be as u can c in the freeform demo and specs to have a toolset that will cover the best of every possible need...a really new paradigm and not just another flavor for doing the same thing....i hope 3d coat Voxels get the real Voxel thing and not some "lite" version of it....that would be really awesome and a great success for Andrew

P.

well i suppose that nice

We have advised to Andrew add a curve deformer,but he is so busy,maybe he would add it in 3dc V4.

What I am thinking day and night is how we can get a more smart retopo tools and flow,because I think it is really

a hard work to retopo even a common human body!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member

Sailor I can't agree more from what you said, that's so true.

Reusing retopology is really really important, and instead of automatic magic retopology I strongly agree that's a feature that need to be done.

Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that automatic retopology is bad, but for me that's more a hobbyist feature than a professional feature. (Even if you can use it for illustration :))

I will surely use it to do still image because I love what it does and with the little addition Andrew plan to add that can really fasten the process.

But for the moment even Zbrush or Mudbox haven't got such a feature.

I talked about it a long time before, but I know that Andrew is busy, and I'm glad that you are saying it once again.

Cyslice as such a feature who allow you to conform a topology who is similar for an other model.

First it automaticly align the topology on your mesh, than you can choose some reference dot on both model and they will fit closely to the new mesh.

That's really fast, and really usefull.

But just an automatic alignement tool and a freeform deformer before dropping the topology on the scene to conform it on the mesh could do the job.

All of that to say that's a really important feature, even for game we are reusing topology.

About Nurbs tool, if you can add those incredible tool that are provided by Freeform your software will rock. Like sailor said sculpting Creature or human is not a field where it miss too much thing.

Voxel are great because you don't have to worry about topology while sculpting, but the major advantage is about hard edge sculpting who is a real pain in Zbrush or Mudbox.

I'm always relying on polygonal modeling for this kind of stuff, and I miss Nurbs.

If you add the feature you can see in Freeform in your program, damn I will almost cry I think :)

But freeform is not really converting nurbs surface to voxel, that's more using Nurbs tool to manipulate Voxel, like the trim tool or their Round edge tool, who help you to chamfer your edges, seeing on the youtube shoe video, you can find it in their gallery, it's named Sneaker Sole.

Look at their videos here http://www.sensable.com/industries-video-gallery.htm, there are in a better quality than those on youtube.

That's not reinventing the wheel because freeform is a good program but they are totally closed to the entertainment industry needs, they want to ship their package with their hardware and they are seeing themselves as Hardware revendor instead of software, and then they are totally against adding wacom support.

That's a shame I think but that's an other point.

In conclusion I totally agree with Sailor, hit where it hurts :rolleyes:

And like Sailor said, Blow the man Down :p

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 3 weeks later...
  • Contributor
I would like to have an option in sculptin mode in layer option "Copy symmetry plane from this layer to..."layer" ". It would only copy the symmetry plane to another layer.

Agreed.That would be a cool option.

Meanwhile...

There is a trick for that.

1)clone space density of the object you want to steal symmetry plane from

2)select "move to" and choose the newly created space density layer

(use clone space density on your original object to keep a backup of original symmetry plane)

also:try to match resolution of cloned density layers before using "move to"

even if they are not visible you can still use "clone and degrade" and "increase res" on them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member
If you mean possibility to create and manipulate nurbs surfaces and transform them to voxels, it is not so hard to do, just time question (as always). There is very good SDK - http://www.opennurbs.org/ and I plan to use it or 3DC.

Sailor and Mantis is right, so another vote for tools that would help hard surface modeling in 3DC, but i think that kind of thing should be implemented after 3.0 is done, maybe for 3.5 or 4.0.?

For 3.0 i would like to request a gradient background like Mudbox/ZBrush! :)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Agreed. Not sure how easy it would be to implement a no-hole smoothing tool, but anyway, I do agree.

More examples I've ran into: Webbed feet. Wings. Thin noses. And like Phil, ears.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member
Better smooth brush.

Now,in 2 cases,it's useless.

On thin surfaces,where smooth brush does holes,and when surfaces are too near eachother,in this case smooth brush doesn't smooth locally,but globally on the volume

I will agree with that, one example is that it's very difficult to smooth behind a character's ears.
Agreed. Not sure how easy it would be to implement a no-hole smoothing tool, but anyway, I do agree.

More examples I've ran into: Webbed feet. Wings. Thin noses. And like Phil, ears.

+1 On all of these. Up until recently I hadn't really seen a need for a dedicated Smooth Brush. But I have been working on a character with wings

and it has become clear to me what others have been asking for.

I think 3D-Coat needs a dedicated Smooth Brush with it's own dedicated controls, such as minimum allowable thickness and so on.

Andrew, I know that all new requests come at a bad time as you are trying to prepare for a new release. I believe though, that at some point,

in order to make VS as powerful as it can be that you are going to have to address the present weakness of smoothing.

Thank you for your time.

P. Monk

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think 3D-Coat needs a dedicated Smooth Brush with it's own dedicated controls, such as minimum allowable thickness and so on.

Good point about the allowable thickness controller. There are some times when it's handy to smooth something away into nothing, like little stray "floaters" that sometimes appear outside of the model.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Good point about the allowable thickness controller. There are some times when it's handy to smooth something away into nothing, like little stray "floaters" that sometimes appear outside of the model.

Agreed.

Maybe having an "expanded" smoothing options feature, with more controls. It could be turned on or off with the tick of a box or press of a hotkey.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Advanced Member

Or maybe we could have specialized automatic functions to "Remove Floaters" and "Fill Cavities"? The former would remove all non-contiguous bits of volume below a set size threshold, and the latter would check the volumes for "bubbles" that sometimes occur while sculpting, and fill them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • 2 weeks later...
  • Member

Hi Andrew,

Here's a few feature requests,

-Now that you've got the surface tools and voxel tools switching without any lag, would it be possible to have a toggle switch for "voxel/surface style smoothing"? my major headache with voxel sculpting at the moments is if i go to smooth a thin surface, I start punching holes in it.

-Another feature I'd like to see is some curve based surface generation. I envision a workflow similar to the cloth workflow, but with the surface determined by curves(similar to nurbs surfaces) rather than physics simulation.

-Bezier handles on curves would improve the hard surface modeling capabilities in voxel sculpting, a choice between corner, broken tangent, and locked tangent for each curve point would be awesome.

-Finally it would be great to be able to generate new voxels with the voxel tools such as airbrush. A the moment I can use the snake and curve tools to place new geometry useing an underlying subobject as reference, but the tools like airbrush need something already existing to grow from.

Many thanks & Regards,

Heath

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Carlosan changed the title to 2024 Feature requests wishlist
  • Carlosan pinned this topic
  • Carlosan unpinned this topic

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

 Share

×
×
  • Create New...