Feature Request - ClayPolish AKA Blurred Tangent Smooth

[wendallhitherd]

Hello! I am trying to use 3DCoat more for an A-Z asset production pipeline and occasionally run into hitches that mean I have to kick the asset over into ZBrush for finishing.

One such thing is the ClayPolish mesh filter. This is very useful for prepping a sculpt for autopo or removing surface noise from scandata. or even enhancing a sculpt to have nice sharp features. It is also very good for eliminating small "gooby" shapes from a sculpt that accumulate over the sculpting process, especially for hard surface. I have not found an adequate substitute in 3DC so far

Before & after single iteration of ClayPolish

The mesh on the right, after a voxelization, is much cleaner for input for autopo, as autopo will not be "confused" by the surface noise present in the input mesh.
I know 3DC already has tangent smooth, but it seems to be used for relaxing geometry without changing the shape at all. I also know Angulator exists, but it seems to cause strange divots on flat areas of the model. It seems 3DC has no method of removing surface noise across an entire mesh without also smoothing corners, and this is a super useful tool in ZB when handling scandata!

"Cyte" on the Houdini forum has implemented the same thing from scratch and I have rebuild his OTL for myself and use it all the time in Houdini; it's a really awesome way to remove or exaggerate forms while preserving shapes and removing unnecessary detail -- finding the "essence" of the shape. From what I remember the method is a couple existing 3DC functions strung together. First you calculate the tangents of the mesh, then you displace each vertex along its own tangent -- but the vectors are first blurred across the mesh. The larger the blur kernel the larger the shapes are preserved, and the larger the details are eaten. Conversely the smaller the blur on the tangent vectors, the smaller the details are preserved and exaggerated. Then, after the mesh is displaced along its blurred tangents, a simple mesh smooth is applied to relax the self intersections and details -- because the mesh was exaggerated to begin with, smoothing returns it back to an approximated but simplified version of its original shape.

 

The method, put simpler:

1) calculate tangents of mesh

2) blur tangent vectors

3) displace vertices along tangents

4) smooth result

https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/69286/

The forum post for the interested ^

 

Generically, there are a few small ui improvements which would help a lot as well. 

For one thing I think the sharpen, smooth all, angulator, and noise tools could be consolidated into one single "mesh filter" tool, which could handle all mesh fx that do not actually change topology

The 3DC tool could either be a docker like this, or even one single tool with mesh filter types!

- Another thing I think it needs is a "strength" -- EG what if I only want to add a little bit of angulator?

- Lastly, I think the automask settings that show up under angulator (for mask edges) should be in a generic "Mask Generator" tool rather than hidden away in the settings of the angulator. One common thing I do is use edge masking from angulator and then invert the mask to apply smoothing.

 

Anyway, I love the development of 3DC so far but am really itching to reduce the amount of apps I use, and consolidate everything into one, but there are a few critical tools that mean I am still firing up ZB and  exporting big highpoly OBJs to final models and it would be really great if 3DC did those things so I wouldn't even need to open ZB! 

All the best!

 

[frmdbl]

I would say generally some good ways of let's say post processing the mesh would be cool, so e.g some menu where you could 'clay polish', sharpen the whole mesh etc

(not just by using the brush).

 

[bathyscaph]

Yes, having the exact problem with 3D Coat. Modeling with voxels is very fun but at the end I am left with a model that is almost clean but not up to my standards. Using clay polish, I can clean up the edges but I would prefer to leave ZBrush out of my workflow entirely. I may actually look into the Houdini tool mentioned above as Houdini is one of my main tools. Still, this feature would increase the usefulness of voxel sculpting and would no doubt be useful for others as well.