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Sculptris - dynamic mesh tesselation


JamesE
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Oooh nice.

There's clearly a lot of issues with it, but I'm definitely interested in the overall idea of it all. And I especially love the aesthetics of the interface!.

It kinda reminds me of an old experimental program that went by the name of CB Model Pro.. The programmers eventually gave up on it as I think they realized it just wasn't going to work.. Let's hope the same doesn't happen to Sculptris..

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Fast Reply was kinda funky on browser ?

Sculptris Speed Model Timelapse

Time Limit 10 minutes

Video Length 2 Mins 34 Secs

Just to show you how powerfull this Alpha software is .

Would be nice to see a Pro make something

http://drpetter.proboards.com/index.cgi

" I gave myself 10 minutes to use the software , no graphics tablet ,just laptop . "

Enjoy Peace

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I wonder if this guy would be interested in selling his code, assuming Andrew's interested. It's getting a lot of interest in the CGTalk thread. It sounds like he doesn't really have a lot of time to be working on it, which says to me that he's not 100% into it.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=2&t=836053

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I wonder if this guy would be interested in selling his code, assuming Andrew's interested. It's getting a lot of interest in the CGTalk thread. It sounds like he doesn't really have a lot of time to be working on it, which says to me that he's not 100% into it.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=2&t=836053

No chance he will sell atm , I spoke with him a few days ago , I think he is happy to develope the program himself ! unless the right kinda offer comes to the table ????????????????????????????

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  • 4 weeks later...

I've seen this videos the first time, today. I like the projection painting feedback very much.

Would be nice to see this kind of feedback in 3DC too.

The realtime tesselation in sculptris seems to be really fast. A good method for 3D Coats surface too. You have only the amount of polygons you need.

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I thought it was quite good but while there was thing i liked there was things i did not like so much. Some of the tools give really nice results and it is fast, what i did not like was the GUI though. The buttons effect while cool looking would probably get annoying and i prefer just the standard type GUI although with this type of thing if you switched to a simple view (current) from a more standard GUI which made it easier to know what was what faster it would be better.

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I've seen this videos the first time, today. I like the projection painting feedback very much.

Would be nice to see this kind of feedback in 3DC too.

The realtime tesselation in sculptris seems to be really fast. A good method for 3D Coats surface too. You have only the amount of polygons you need.

I do like the way he stamps on the target and text images. I've been asking for a feature like that in 3DC for a long time. The tessellation looks fast, and it is at this level, but when you start to get even remotely detailed it slows down real fast. Maybe that's something he can work on.

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I do like the way he stamps on the target and text images. I've been asking for a feature like that in 3DC for a long time. The tessellation looks fast, and it is at this level, but when you start to get even remotely detailed it slows down real fast. Maybe that's something he can work on.

Today I've tested the 3D object export in the voxel area of 3DC. The problem is, that the polygons are displayed really disadvantageous to use them for polyreduction and at least, a good surface shading. The tesselation in sculptris is much more interesting for export.

Hope Andrew have an idea, how to optimise the wireframe display in 3D Coat to a similar result like in sculptris. I don't know where the technical difference is, between sculptris wireframes and the ones in 3DC. So only pilgway can answer how good the sculptris way could work, if possible.

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Today I've tested the 3D object export in the voxel area of 3DC. The problem is, that the polygons are displayed really disadvantageous to use them for polyreduction and at least, a good surface shading. The tesselation in sculptris is much more interesting for export.

Hope Andrew have an idea, how to optimise the wireframe display in 3D Coat to a similar result like in sculptris. I don't know where the technical difference is, between sculptris wireframes and the ones in 3DC. So only pilgway can answer how good the sculptris way could work, if possible.

It seems 3D Coat's decimator has a tendency to want to use the same sized triangles across the entire model. This means that it won't place tiny triangles in the detailed areas. But this isn't necessarily a bad thing if you're planning on baking the original details into a normal map. The whole point of normal maps is to hold the small details, so you don't really want the decimator to be preserving all the little details.

I'm quite happy with 3D Coat's decimator. But that's because my target renderer is a game engine.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Spulptris looks great given its early state of development.

WOW, adaptive/localized subdivision looks like it can REALLY do the job. If anyone here has ever held down the "W-key" in 3D Coat Voxel mode you too know how "unoptimized(IMO)" the poly count is. I know that the high poly count allows for the high res detail of the sculpt, but using such a method for localized poly detail of the mesh representation would allow for a terribly fast voxel mode with the ability not to come to a CRAWL when increasing the res a few times. 3D Coat could easily dominate the area it looks like Sculptris is preparing to dominate(unless 3D Coat/ZB/MudBox beat them to it).

THAT BEING SAID:

I've heard rumors of multires in voxels mode for 3D Coat. Has anyone heard anything about this feature in 3D Coat, have any details? Sounds like it could be just what we need in 3D Coat. ESPECIALLY if the multires is applied spatially like adaptive SubDivision to only areas that have been sculpted on in the given multi-res layer/level. Does that make sense? Sort of like PTEX style local SubD but for surfaces.

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Spulptris looks great given its early state of development.

WOW, adaptive/localized subdivision looks like it can REALLY do the job. If anyone here has ever held down the "W-key" in 3D Coat Voxel mode you too know how "unoptimized(IMO)" the poly count is. I know that the high poly count allows for the high res detail of the sculpt, but using such a method for localized poly detail of the mesh representation would allow for a terribly fast voxel mode with the ability not to come to a CRAWL when increasing the res a few times. 3D Coat could easily dominate the area it looks like Sculptris is preparing to dominate(unless 3D Coat/ZB/MudBox beat them to it).

THAT BEING SAID:

I've heard rumors of multires in voxels mode for 3D Coat. Has anyone heard anything about this feature in 3D Coat, have any details? Sounds like it could be just what we need in 3D Coat. ESPECIALLY if the multires is applied spatially like adaptive SubDivision to only areas that have been sculpted on in the given multi-res layer/level. Does that make sense? Sort of like PTEX style local SubD but for surfaces.

I think it's been discussed before that most people don't have this extreme slow-down you're talking about with just a few increases. As for the multi-res the only thing official I've heard about it is what Andrew said on Twitter, "some routines was done that will make possible multiresolution in near future (in surface mode at least)". That's back when 3.1.23 was released

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I think it's been discussed before that most people don't have this extreme slow-down you're talking about with just a few increases. As for the multi-res the only thing official I've heard about it is what Andrew said on Twitter, "some routines was done that will make possible multiresolution in near future (in surface mode at least)". That's back when 3.1.23 was released

I've cured many of my slowdowns as long as I dont push it too far past 25 mil polys(in vox mode). Though I still would like 2X the detail in VOX mode(hopefully multires will cure this) I just size up the model massively while merging, no need to increase the res of the vox layer first, thanks to your help(and others), thanks :-)

I feel this thread is a separate matter altogether:

****************************************************

I get easily half a million polys for creating a simple CUBE primitive with no additional editing upon creation. Half a million to define an unedited cube, yes I understand a bit of what the voxels are doing, and unless the voxels rely on this poly count specially it would seem unnecessary, though it may be necessary for Andrew's method, but still... and by holding the W-Key you would see the MASSIVE poly-load being handed to the graphics card and/or CPU(AFAIK). So consider the speed boosts that could come with that simple cube primitive in vox mode being only 500 polys, or 5000, or less, attaining the same "vox res".

Now: This feature would be wonderful for many aspects of 3D Coat. WIth such a feature, your mesh would be farrrrr more optimized for thing like realtime display, and Direct export f OBJ files in the vox tree(skipping retopo).

Plus, and this is a major note, using this method, 3D Coat would be able to "know" where on the mesh to have the auto quadrangulation apply/subD with higher densities AUTOMATICALLY for areas with higher detail. Having quadrangulate AUTOMATICALLY sudb the areas that already have higher mesh res due to the user "telling" the program "where" the mesh should have higher or lesser detail, this aspect alone would make this a valuable additions to 3D Coat, aside ffrom the massive speedup of redraw with such an addition when compared to the thousands of unnecessary tris made by creating something as simple as a cube primitive in voxel mode, that same cube could be only a few tris/polys.

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I've cured many of my slowdowns as long as I dont push it too far past 25 mil polys(in vox mode). Though I still would like 2X the detail in VOX mode(hopefully multires will cure this) I just size up the model massively while merging, no need to increase the res of the vox layer first, thanks to your help(and others), thanks :-)

I feel this thread is a separate matter altogether:

****************************************************

I get easily half a million polys for creating a simple CUBE primitive with no additional editing upon creation. Half a million to define an unedited cube, yes I understand a bit of what the voxels are doing, and unless the voxels rely on this poly count specially it would seem unnecessary, though it may be necessary for Andrew's method, but still... and by holding the W-Key you would see the MASSIVE poly-load being handed to the graphics card and/or CPU(AFAIK). So consider the speed boosts that could come with that simple cube primitive in vox mode being only 500 polys, or 5000, or less, attaining the same "vox res".

I hope you don't mean half a million is the smallest you can get. This pic is a little over 12,000 and another one I just made was about 3,000.

2010-02-11_0931.png

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I hope you don't mean half a million is the smallest you can get. This pic is a little over 12,000 and another one I just made was about 3,000.

2010-02-11_0931.png

I dont mead its the smallest I can get, I'm just pointing out that given even a small cube as you've show, you have about 11,800(or more) too many polys to represent such a shape. Using the adaptive SubDivision method that same shape, even for voxel representation, would likely be about 100-250 polys.

I admit I am not aware of Andrew's method, perhaps it absolutely needs all those polys. But I mention my thoughts in this thread because it's possible the poly mesh representation using the voxels as the structural reference is just for drawing the voxels; if this is the case, then much optimization can come from a method such as adaptive subdivision IMO.

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It's a little odd that Sculptris is being considered a challenger to 3D Coat when Sculptris and its adaptive mesh runs 10x slower. :)

Imagine what Sculptris would run like with a 15 million poly model! :nea:

Still, I suspect this is more an issue specific to Sculptris rather than the adaptive mesh technology itself. But the adaptive mesh technology is only going to give you a speed advantage on low detailed objects. If you want to sculpt a wrinkly old man with lots of detail then the adaptive mesh advantage is going to be lost.

Voxels are much closer to manipulating physical matter and so I feel that they're going to ultimately be the better technology in the end.

That's not to say voxels are the answer to everything. There's always going to be a place for things like NURBS where you can quickly select and manipulate edges. In fact NURBS and voxels will probably get married one day and live happily ever after.

By the way - The mesh that gets wrapped around the voxels is actually an adaptive mesh too. It's just not as heavily optimized. But the fact that the voxel mesh isn't optimized means that the brush strokes will be much faster to process. Adding a brush stroke to an optimized adaptive mesh can require more calculations. So a gain in rendering speed of an optimized mesh could mean a major loss in brush stroke speed.

So in summary - don't be betting on the optimized adaptive mesh technology just yet!. Let's wait and see.. ;)

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Splodge: have you held down the W key and seen how many polys are being drawn IN VOXEL MODE for examples like that simple cube shown above? Voxels are voxels, but it still appears that 3D Coat is drawing the voxel representations in POLYS for the purpose of GPGPU's-THUS TAKING UP MORE RAM AND CYCLES. SO voxels are still being drawn in POLY form in 3D Coat, you're manipulating them like voxels, which they are, but they're being drawn by the GPU as Polys, thus adaptive/localized subdivision would make this whole process in voxels much more efficient for FPS-wise and ESPECIALLY GPU Memory-wise, consider how much more RAM on your GPU a 2 million poly cube takes up, when it would only need a few megs, ii that, if it used adaptive/localized subdivision, that is a very key point IMO.

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Yep, I know about the poly representation of the voxels. :)

But I do agree, it would obviously be great if Andrew could come up with a real time mesh optimizer. But it hurts my brain to think about how it could be implemented with voxels.

Slowly optimizing (decimating) the displayed mesh in a background process is the easy part. The difficulty is in having 3D Coat quickly rebuild the parts of the mesh that have been modified by the user. But anybody can do it then it's Andrew!

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nice work 3D Artist. Its cool how the sculptris approach to sculpting seems like a nice medium between the standard ZB/MB poly methods and the 3DC freeform/voxel method... all wrapped up into one nice localized adaptive subD method. hope an OSX version comes out soon.

I hope the upcoming multi-res for 3DC contains some of the innovation that sculptris utilizes very well. Please Andrew please ;-)

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Thanks ifxs, there's something with a fairly empty screen without the distractions of palettes and data that make a nice sculpting space.

It made me realize that a "hide interface" button\key would be nice. (i.e. Photoshop, ArtRage)

I hope the upcoming multi-res for 3DC contains some of the innovation that sculptris utilizes very well. Please Andrew please ;-)

:good:

It's really nice to be able to add tiny detail and not have to worry about if there is enough resolution. (and use high-res only where it's needed)

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