A few feature requests

[Brendan Ross]

Hi Andrew,

I'm really loving this program, and I'm incredibly impressed with how stable it is, even with all of the work that you're doing to it. It's a great piece of software, and it just seems to be getting better.

Here are a few (ok, the list got kind of long) requests that I've come up with as I've been using it:

- The ability to alt+click the object visibility icons (eyeballs) in the objects palette to toggle between soloing that layer and showing all layers (like the layers palette in Photoshop).

- Currently the H (layer picker) and V (color picker) hotkeys perform similar functions but you interact with them differently. The V requires a left click whereas H does not. I'd like to see the V hotkey behave like the H, so just pressing the key samples the color underneath the pointer (like in Zbrush).

- I love the ability to double click with the hide tool and hide all of the connected polygons, but I find that more often I want to hide everything but a single surface. I know you can invert the hidden faces, but I'd like to be able to control+double click a surface and hide everything else.

- The ability to double click the background with the hide tool to unhide all (ctrl+x is a strange shortcut for this -- I'm used to it being the universal hotkey for cut).

- I'd like to see the same double click functionality for the freeze tool as you would have with the hide tool. Double click freezes a surface, ctrl+double click freezes every other surface, ctrl+shift+double click unfreezes a surface. Double click the background with the freeze tool would unfreeze everything (same as ctrl+d).

- It would be nice to be able to freeze by uv shell. Maybe the double clicking system with the hide and freeze tools could be made to work on the 2d uv view as well.

- I'd love to see hotkeys for at least some of the tools (if not all). Having to click the icons feels really slow in comparison to hitting a key (especially for those of us who use hotkeys for everything). The brush, eraser, hide, freeze, and fill are most important, in my opinion.

- Sticky keys would be incredibly useful for all of the keys, but I'm mostly missing them with the hide, freeze and eraser tools. If you're not familiar with them, a sticky key is a hotkey that behaves differently based on whether you tap it or hold it down. If you tap it, it behaves just like a normal hotkey. If you hold it down for more than half a second or so it switches into the desired tool only until you release the key, at which point you'll switch back to your previous tool. This would be huge because I find that I only ever switch into hide, freeze and the eraser tool to do a quick operation after which I always go right back to my previous tool. This would also bring the app more in line with the way freeze works in Mudbox and Zbrush.

- Automatically switch to the eraser tool when using the eraser on a pen.

- Occasionally it helps to see the uv outline when you're working on the layers in Photoshop. It would be great if it was sent as the top layer.

- It would be nice to be able to click and drag the brush tool on the background to orbit the view (like in Zbrush and Silo).

- It's been asked for before, and I know you can use the tilde key menu, but I think the way other programs (Mudbox, Zbrush, Silo, even Maya) allow you to adjust the size, strength, opacity (etc.) of your brush offers more direct control. I'd love the ability to adjust the brush attributes by holding down a hotkey and moving the cursor left and right.

- The HSL1 color wheel is awesome and I love that it's finally available in a 3d painting app. I'm not sure about the way the color wheel desaturates with the selected color, though. It makes it difficult to know what hue you're working in when you're using near neutrals. An option to lock the color wheel at full saturation would be nice (the way it works in Painter).

- Is there a way to set the camera center over a highlighted polygon or frame all objects in the scene? I haven't been able to find a way to do this. It would be useful if it's not in there (especially when you zoom out beyond the clipping plane and lose your model in the grey).

Here are a couple of small (tiny) interface nitpicks:

- Clicking on a layer in the layers palette can (and often will) move the entire palette. None of the other palettes (to my knowledge) behave this way.

- I'm not sure why painting visibility with the hide tool isn't added to the undo queue, but it doesn't seem to be. It's frustrating when you accidentally hide some polygons forgetting that you haven't switched back to the brush tool and can't just undo it (also another good argument for sticky keys).

- There's a weird issue where when I hit the E hotkey (bringing up the drawing mode options under my mouse), if I don't click any of the options, I lose the palette. Hovering over its icon (above the brush icon) it doesn't pop up anymore. I have to hit the hotkey again and click one of the buttons on the pop up before it will work again. This happens with the different channel popups (depth, spec, etc) too.

- Hovering over the File > Save As menu item triggers the drawing mode popup.

- It was mentioned before, but I think that when you click a menu item (like File) and scroll across the other menu items, those menus should drop down as you roll over them (without requiring another click).

- Navy should probably be Navi or just Nav. Navy connotes a military naval force or its associated color of blue.

And finally, I noticed a couple of spelling errors:

- Layers menu -> Symmertical transforms should be Symmetrical transforms

- Hue Saturation Value Adjust Palette -> Lightnes should be Lightness

I hope this list wasn't too long. I wouldn't have written it if I didn't feel the program had such huge potential.

Thanks for listening,

Brendan

[Andrew Shpagin]

Very nice list of easy to do and essential improvements. Thank you! I hope at least some of them will be included in 2.07.

[Brendan Ross]

Hey Andrew,

Not to completely overwhelm you, but here are a few more features that I think would make the program even more excellent if implemented:

-- Have the color operations tool respect masks and frozen areas.

-- I'm not sure how the eyedropper is sampling colors. Sometimes it seems like it's sampling all layers, other times it seems like it's only sampling the current layer. Adding the option to choose would be useful.

-- I'd like to see the Projection to Photoshop feature respect hidden and frozen geometry when it's brought back from Photoshop and applied to the geometry (the entire projection would still be sent to Photoshop as it is now).

-- An option to disable the light/dark interface dialog from appearing on startup.

-- The ability to invert masks (maybe it's in there now and I just can't find it).

-- The ability to hide frozen geometry.

-- Currently, the Hue/Saturation/Value sliders don't reset after the first time you open the dialog in a session (unlike in Photoshop). I don't think the preview and other checkboxes should reset, but I find myself always resetting the sliders manually before I get down to adjusting colors.

-- An icon (with the other camera and light icons) to roll the camera left and right.

-- I think the Draw with Stamp drawing mode would be more useful if it worked more like it does in Zbrush, where you click to place the stamp and then drag to scale and rotate it.

-- An option to include backfaces when using the hiding tool. This would be especially useful when using the hide tool with the Rectangle, Circle, and Contours draw modes.

Issues

-- Sometimes I'll work on meshes with mirrored geometry that shares UVs. I know I could import it with "Keep Clusters", but I actually want the UVs to overlap. 3D-Coat generally supports this workflow pretty well, but the textures occassionally turn black where they're overlapping. Once I brush over the geometry they update (usually I disable the specular, diffuse and bump channels on the brush) and I can work on them without a problem, but it would be nice if they didn't turn black in the first place. I've also run into problems exporting such maps with the "Save Texture" option. Parts of the exported texture will be missing and replaced with white blocks. I've been able to get around the issue by sending the layers to Photoshop and saving from there, but it's still a problem. I can send you an example mesh if you want.

-- Using the transform/copy tool it seems like when you get close to a surface (which isn't necessarily that close) you get a camera clipped copy of the texture instead of what you're actually seeing in the viewport (so, sometimes you get nothing at all).

-- Shapes are drawn onscreen with Rectangle, Circle, Paint with Contour, etc selected in the draw mode menu, even when you're only moving windows or otherwise interacting with the UI. This can be a problem if you're in a tool like freeze, hide, fill, etc, and move a palette across your model.

-- When using the draw with Rectangle, Circle, Contours, etc modes with the hide tool, control+drag doesn't unhide the geometry.

-- If you add an existing folder in the Mask dialog with any but the default masks selected in the left option menu, only that single selected mask will show up in the bin (or whatever you call the area with all the mask icons). If you add an existing folder when "default" is selected in the left option menu, all of the supported images in the folder will show up (which I assume is the intended behaviour).

Again, thanks for listening (and keep up the great work!),

Brendan

[Andrew Shpagin]

Thanks, will take all this into work. The only thing -

Sometimes I'll work on meshes with mirrored geometry that shares UVs. I know I could import it with "Keep Clusters", but I actually want the UVs to overlap. 3D-Coat generally supports this workflow pretty well, but the textures occassionally turn black where they're overlapping. Once I brush over the geometry they update (usually I disable the specular, diffuse and bump channels on the brush) and I can work on them without a problem, but it would be nice if they didn't turn black in the first place. I've also run into problems exporting such maps with the "Save Texture" option. Parts of the exported texture will be missing and replaced with white blocks. I've been able to get around the issue by sending the layers to Photoshop and saving from there, but it's still a problem. I can send you an example mesh if you want.

I understand that Keep clusterss is not absolutely good solution (I am thinking over something better) but do you know that during the export more "painted" face is preferred if there is some uv-overlap? Or may be it works not like expected?

[Brendan Ross]

Ok, it seems to be working as expected now. I'm not sure what was going on before, but I couldn't recreate the export texture problem this morning. I've tried it with Fill Empty Areas both enabled and disabled and it's working perfectly.

[Brendan Ross]

I just discovered that painting specular only (no color or depth) on a layer seems to pick up the color from lower layers and and act as an opaque layer. Any color strokes on lower layers won't show up beneath the areas that have been painted (with a specular only brush) on that top layer. Is this the intended behaviour?

I had hoped to paint a spec only layer above my other color layers as a final step, but it seems like that workflow isn't viable with the current setup (unless I'm missing something).

[Brendan Ross]

Hey Andrew,

I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement, but adding some sort of face angle tolerance (like color tolerance but using the angle between face normals) to the fill tool could be a huge timesaver. I think it would save a lot of people a lot of time painting masks (among other things).

Thanks,

Brendan