Controlling the angle of the brush?

[trubetsk]

Hello guys, I'm just getting used to voxel modelling and working with brush alphas. One of the things I'm currently running into is the 3D 'angle' of the brush head doesn't always point in the direction I want.

It seems to roughly follow to the average of the model's normals underneath it, but there are some cases where I'd like to freeze it along one or more axis for specific rsults.

Is there a way to fully freeze and manipulate the angle of the 3D brush head? Or any protips for workarounds for the 2 cases I'm attaching below?

Thanks a bunch

[Carlosan]

The only way i found is too add a new primitive, ghost it and change pick option to pick & act.

Very cumbersome, but sometimes worked.

[trubetsk]

Thanks Carlos. I now understand how adding ghosted volume on a separate layer may make the brush take that volume into account while you are still painting on your active layer.

 

What does "Pick and Act" do? It didn't seem to have an effect on drawing over the ghosted volume.

 

Also I understand more how the brush chooses the default angle: it's the average of all the normals underneath the circular brush radius. Simply increasing or decreasing the radius of the brush under a particular point will cause the angle to change if the average geometry under the cursor does.

 

Still, it's a bit unfortunate that you can't freeze or lock the brush rotation in any other way, or simply have it use the normal direction under the "dot", not under the entire radius.

[Carlosan]

I understand your point of view but please, do not hesitate to send support-related question or feature request to Andrew Shpagin at

support@3dcoat.com

Thx !

[AbnRanger]

The brush in 3D Coat isn't designed to alter it's angle the way you describe. 3D Coat has tools such as the PLANE brush in Voxel mode or many of the Surface mode brushes have the ON PLANE option in the toolbar (just above the viewport). There are several way to choose what angle you want to utilize.

 

[AbnRanger]

There are also some droplist menu options in some of the Surface Mode brushes (in toolbar > EXTRUDE DIRECTION), such as EXTRUDE and ABSOLUTE, that let you extrude toward a specific axis, view direction or vertex normals.

[trubetsk]

Thanks for the help everyone. These are all very useful tips and workarounds.