ChronoSculpt: time based cached sculpting

MagicSugar

Hey, it's SIGGRAPH week

It's a standalone (Modo will accept lwo and alembic files, yes!). Benefit for a non-sculptor like me that I can think of right away: tweaking muscle detailing for armpit and rib areas as character raises arms. Or even sculpting relaxed vs tense or flexed muscle blend shapes.

Looks like a nextgen tool to me.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iskaa6krwzQ"]ChronoSculpt Teaser - YouTube[/ame]

Ark

Saw this in the Lightwave newsletter, it looks cool, but seems quite specific and situational. Looks to be aimed more at the movie industry than games.

equil

my first reaction was that it's just an answer to sparta. not really sure why you would want to use this instead of blendshapes, since it works on point cloud caches from what i understand.

Cageman

Lets say the director want that a certain part of the brigde still standing, but you simulated the whole bridge to fall appart.

You have two choices.

1) Redo the simulation (which can cause a lot of other parts of the simulation not being what the director wanted).

2) Use Chronosculpt to fixate those parts of the bridge the director wants fixated and be done with it.

Morphs/blendshapes are fixed vertex positions, which can be animated on/off and over time (the verts move in a linear fashion from point A to to create the effect of animation, but past that, they do not offer what Chronosculpt offers.

vargatom

This sounds good on paper, and in fact most major VFX studios have a tool like this to fix things like facial deformations or muscle sims in camera quickly, instead of trying to go back to the character rigging stage.

However the tool is from the stone age. The sculpting is worse than Maya Artisan and the "camera" is a mess. I mean you can't even import your camera animation and the view controls are below basic.
Also, if you're using a Maya pipeline for VFX or CG, you've probably heard of the increasing floating point precision error on deforming meshes like skinned characters. The only reliable way to fix that is to work at a smaller scale, like 1/10 - and then even the tool precision and the camera clipping planes get messed up in CS.

So it's a very very primitive tool, very limited functionality, and there's been no sign of further development for a long time. It still has some small potential but in the end it seems like a dead end...