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Improving the Voxel Brushes: Help us Help you


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  • Advanced Member

I would definitely wish to see a repeat last stroke for the brushes.

repeat last stroke would be great

and record a set of strokes for replaying later would be better, much like zbrush

would be great for the retopo and paint rooms too!

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  • Advanced Member

Another feature that I would find extremely useful is for the option to be able to quickly select the inverse with the marquee tools as well as the rectangular ,oval marquee and spline brush tool.So if I want to cut off outer edges quickly using the clay brush for example with cntrl depressed it's quick and easy rather than trimming the outside using other methods.

I realize you can invert voxel parts using the Hide tool but this doesn't give the required effect.

I've posted an example of the hide tool to show what I mean when inverting using the hide tool.

You'll see in the example that there's a straight through cut/hide but when inverted the inverted voxel's edges are beveled and and not straight through in a singular direction.

post-2166-12704808319575_thumb.jpg

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I'm not sure if Repeat Stroke could be done with voxels. I may be wrong of course. In other programs it remembers the distance that a point was moved and just doubles that, but voxels aren't about moving points you're turning voxels on or off. So if anything I think it would have to be in Surface mode.

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  • 1 month later...
  • Advanced Member

I find that the best current way to get a pinch brush is to use a normal voxel brush with a very sharp pointy alpha, so you cant really pinch but you can draw lines on that look like they have been pinched. Thats my workaround for now

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  • Advanced Member

An extrude tool of some sort, and not that one. I mean, you use one of your lasso tools (or a brush) to define a shape, and when you have chosen that shape, you can define how far out or in it gets extruded, by mouse movement.

I have to say I agree with this idea, the curves method or pose tool method are counter intuitive workarounds not solutions and its hard to get the results you want. What is suggested here by shnitzel is simple and effective, the way it really should be.

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  • Advanced Member

A mixture of fill (+ctlr) and Scrape tool. With some more modifications maybe. This is the closer to the flatten tool of zb. One of the most important real sculpt tools. :)

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  • Applink Developer

Let's talk about this video. http://www.vimeo.com/11555496

I think that there is some room for improve how the cursor moves on the surface. In the beginning

of the video you see how I slide the cursor over the edge. You can see that rotation of the yellow circle is calculated

according the area inside of it. Even when the center of the cursor is on flat surface it's rotating because yellow circle already

passed the edge. Then I move the cursor to other edge. The yellow cursor dosen't rotate. Why? Because it seems that surface tracking

is camera based. If the surface is hidden (behind the edge) it dosen't change the cursor rotation. For me it sounds better if this could

working diffrently. It should matter also what is behind the corner. Now 3d-coat dosen't do that. MAybe this is the reason why sometimes

spikes are created so easily.

EDIT: well, in my tests it seems that all spikes in surface representation always happens because of this, so fixing this

and we could have spikes free models.

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  • Reputable Contributor

The pinch brush actually does what it is supposed to if you think about it it pinches what its dirtected too. What i beleive we are talking about is a brush that not only pinches but creases also, concave/convex dependant on the alt stroke. Just like the displacemnt brush can work in ZBrush.

I hoped that the Chisel brush would have done the trick but it really does not crease. It always chisels at an sloping angle. We do need a real world like chisel tool...

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  • Advanced Member

What's happening in real clay sculpture world? Most of the time we add clay and cut it to shapes. Thats why scrape and flatten are important.

"What i beleive we are talking about is a brush that not only pinches but creases also, concave/convex dependant on the alt stroke. Just like the displacemnt brush can work in ZBrush."

this is really important too.

The most important though is the move tool. But here we are in the voxels world, I'm not sure that a smooth and precise move operation is possible. There's a 3d grid behind.

All these tools work fine in a traditional surface environment (zb like). What is really happening when trying to adopt geometry or bake a voxel model to a quad cage? Is this a voxels to tri mesh operation? Have you tried to export this hi def tri model and adopt it in a quad cage in Zbrush? In blender (better here)? Lot of artifacts. Anyway 'traditional' surface sculpture works fine after all these. Here is all the power of zbrush, the best, the more precise tools.

In my dreams: A voxels based sculpture (precise tools), painting (not a quad based like ptex), finished.

My nightmares: retopo, cages, Uvs, seams, retopo again, and again.

The challenge: Model a realistic piece of rock, a crisp one. Not more than 5K faces please. :)

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • Member

I just wish that the smooth brush would affect the voxels mesh more. It is too soft, even when turned up to the maximum limit.

Because of this, I personaly find it difficult to clean up a model. The result is uneven surface, bulgy areas that are hard to get rid of. The way I work around this is to use the fill tool to try and get som voxels in between the little lumps and bumps I have produced while sculpting, before going over with the smooth brush. It works somewhat, but...arhg, this is really getting on my nerves!

It should be easy to fix, should¨nt it?

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