Feature suggestion/dream: Model to Armature

[Falconius]

I come from traditional sculpture.  And the process there is pretty straight forward, you make an armature, bend it into the rough shape you want to achieve and then you start adding clay to that armature.  Through out the process you can make small adjustments to the armature and it carries all the clay with it.  It seems like it'd be a pretty useful idea to have in a sculpting program, I have no idea if it's feasible or not.

Basically you'd build a bezier curve or nurbs curve bone structure, this curve structure would be persistent and it's own selectable object or layer, then you'd be able to stick vox clay to that curve, and then be able to repose the armature and the clay would follow the curve.

 

It'd be a bit like making an animation armature except the process would be sort of in reverse.

[Tony Nemo]

Have you tried the pose tool? One of the manakins can be posed with transforms. An armature that you describe would be very handy.

[Falconius]

The pose tool is fantastic I love it, but it really doesn't behave in this manner, and it can be quite finicky and clunky depending on what you're after.  This is more for quick early adjustments that you wouldn't really have to think about too much in the early block out and mid stages.  It would also make asymmetrical sculpting of creatures simpler.  I can actually think of all sorts of things it could be used for.  Especially if you have the option to turn on and off armature adhesion of the various objects/meshes.

[gbball]

That'd be really cool.  Off the top of my head...you could assign different pose tool selection sets to different parts of your mesh, then you would need functionality in the new curves tool to control the pose tool.  I'm actually looking for somewhat similar behaviour using the curves with the move tool.  

I think what 3D Coat would benefit from is the ability for users/developers to make robust plugins. then I'm sure we could see some of these cool ideas implemented.

[Carlosan]

Andrew mentioned that he had begun to work the option of adding bones as a pose tool, but I believe that the development was in the background due to fixing bug and improvements in sculpture area.