Advanced Member arumiat Posted February 3, 2015 Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 3, 2015 So it looks like the voxel curves tool may be my new favourite thing to be able to do directly in 3D coat rather than doing in Blender via bezier curves and then importing. A few things that would make me love it even more:- 1. it looks as though you can add branches to an existing, unapplied curve in this tutorial (@ 1:48) but I've been unable to replicate this behaviour. Do you need to be holding down a keyboard button when you left click? 2. is there a way to ghost the curve or keep it only on a single layer in an unapplied form whilst working on a second or third one? Currently I'm working with a lot of curves in close proximity.This means however I often click on the wrong curve point and end up moving a segment of the wrong curve It would be nice to have them on separate layers (one for each curve) and be able to turn their visibility/ selectability on and off using the layer system, whilst still in the unapplied state. I have not found a way to do this apart from applying them, at which point they become a traditional voxel object. This makes them difficult to adjust at a later stage, - using the move tool they start to deteriorate in quality when moved around. 3. another workaround would be to apply the curve (make it a voxel object) on a distinct layer before working on the next one, and then converting it back to an editable curve at a later time if required.. T Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted February 4, 2015 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted February 4, 2015 (edited) Creating curve branches... In the curves tool panel make sure you have extrude selected.. Hover the cursor over a control point in the curve, hold down the left mouse button / pen button and draw out. These two points are hard points so draw the curve so you got enough room to add a few more control points. Now switch back to move in the curve panel and hover over a empty space in the new extended curve you just drew out to add another control point and left click again, repeat and rinse. These control points are bezier curve control points and are not hard. Now you can shape your curve and it's length normallly as you do a regular curve adding as many bezier curve control points as you need but you do have to add them manually. Right now I do not believe that curves respect layers.... even if you change the import setttings on the regular import panel. I do not use curves a lot so I could be wrong but I found no easy way... You could save each curve profile for later editing, Then turn it into a voxel object on it's own layer. Make a new layer, create the new curve and rinse and repeat till you have your curves done. Any curve that needs adjusting you could load it's profile again. You could hide the original voxel curve layer till you are happy with the new one and then delete the old. This is pretty much what you said already as a workaround. Also in the curves tool panel look at the hotkeys listed there, makes for faster curve making. I do not use curves very much in my work so if someone comes along with a better answer do that instead... Edited February 4, 2015 by digman 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member arumiat Posted February 5, 2015 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted February 5, 2015 Thanks Digman, this worked great, and it's very useful to have the original curves to edit as well. As a sculpting followup, do you have any tips on how to approach turning the applied curve ends in voxel / surface mode into sharp tips? I know you cna use a cone profile for the curve tips but I already applied them all with rounded profiles (doh). Currently I'm scraping and then smoothing the ends but it's producing a bit of a nasty finish.. T Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor Tony Nemo Posted February 5, 2015 Contributor Report Share Posted February 5, 2015 Thanks Digman, this worked great, and it's very useful to have the original curves to edit as well. As a sculpting followup, do you have any tips on how to approach turning the applied curve ends in voxel / surface mode into sharp tips? I know you cna use a cone profile for the curve tips but I already applied them all with rounded profiles (doh). Currently I'm scraping and then smoothing the ends but it's producing a bit of a nasty finish.. round to peaks.PNG peak.PNG T Cutoff tool? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted February 5, 2015 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted February 5, 2015 (edited) Cut off tool with a E-panel Spline, yep that would work... You could also import your saved curved profiles and Select "Cone", apply the new curves and get rid of the old ones. Maybe you done to much work on them to use this method. The below method is for voxel mode and you need enough voxel resolution for clean work. not sure how much, test to find out. Use the resample tool as it gives you control over how much you want to res up your voxel count. Select the Cone model in the Models menu... Subdivide it a few times to smooth the sides Place it over the end of a curve, scale and move to fit, apply the cone model. The imported cone with the tranform gizmo does not go away so move to the next voxel layer and rinse and repeat till you have done all your curves... Once done go back and clean up the edges where the cones are attached to the curves... Pictures uploaded showing the imported postioned cone and after I clean up a few rough edges. If you go darn, I got a deep grove here where you attached a cone on the curve, Use to the fill tool but set it to 1000% manually in the top tool bar. The fill tool fills much faster at a 1000% and does not take all day... LOL Edited February 5, 2015 by digman 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Solution arumiat Posted February 9, 2015 Author Advanced Member Solution Report Share Posted February 9, 2015 Thanks both, I tried those but found them a lot of work. I ended up inverting the fill tool on a low depth to gradually thin the cylindrical structure and it gave me very close to the effect that I was looking for eventually Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted February 9, 2015 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted February 9, 2015 Ah, good... That is how I found most of the methods I use by experimenting with different brushes and tools to get the end result that I am after... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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