What's missing from modern software?
I've been thinking about this for a while but I can't seem to think of anything so I'm handing this question that has plagued me to the community. What is missing from modern tools?
For a while I thought that we needed a decent normal map painter but CrazyBump seems to be dealing with that now. I'm curious if there's any other stand alone (specialized) tool that you wish you had like the CrazyBumps, MudBoxs, Z-brushes in the world.
For a while I thought that we needed a decent normal map painter but CrazyBump seems to be dealing with that now. I'm curious if there's any other stand alone (specialized) tool that you wish you had like the CrazyBumps, MudBoxs, Z-brushes in the world.
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What's missing from modern software?
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Ease of use.
<font color="#00254a">I'm looking at you, ZBrush.</font>
An easy to use standalone model viewer with decent shaders, lighting and miscellaneous options would be cool. I've got the 8monkey engine tool thing, which is awesome for the job, but that isn't available to most, and most of the modelling packages are either a hassle to use for texture previewing, use too many resources and lag up when you're working on some massive .psd with 20 layers at 2048x2048, or just have shitty viewport rendering (I'm looking at you modo).
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Working on that. Havn't had time the last week or so to work on it though.
(tangent alert)
Of course light baking is really going away =( I really miss the accurate soft shadows, the indirect lighting, the 200 fps frame rates... sigh..
(okay im back)
Maybe a tool that imports a model and it's textures and converts it into a stand-alone executable model viewer
I get so tired of going from one app to the next for which ever little part of the pipeline is next.
Besides; one tool means one company, which leads to lazy bloated applications like the "all-in-one" Maya and Max applications we see now instead of having tools optimized for animations, or low res modeling, or high res modeling, etc. Mudbox works so well because it does one thing really good. Now I'm sure it will get pulled into the rest of the suck and be just as slow and clunky in 5 years. It's the way things have always been.
Anyhow.. more suggestions?
Need a name? call it Third-dimension...
Maybe an external light baking application or maybe an ambient occlusion tool; something that might let you run the process and still go off and work on other things while it's crunching; to not take up Maya/Max..
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With max you can set up a backburner server locally on your machine. Once the job is sent to the "server" it will free you up to go back and work on max. Of course you take a little bit if a performance hit but any system that has more than one core will let you keep modeling with very little slow down. If you have two machines its just as easy to set the second to be a bitch box.
With max you can set up a backburner server locally on your machine. Once the job is sent to the "server" it will free you up to go back and work on max.
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Yeah that was really just a side note, and like you said; if someone had the money they could just set up a bitch box for baking. It was just a thought.
It seems that there's a tool for everything these days. I'm surprised to find an entire community of artists and everyone is perfectly happy with their existing packages and pipelines. The biggest complaints I've heard (including other threads) are, "i wish this button was HERE instead of THERE". I guess it's not a bad thing; but it's certainly not very interesting to think we've peaked.
Also interoperability, Collada is starting to get us there but it has a long way to go.
- A change to the track bar so it zooms and works like After Effects, or flash. The 6 clicks it takes to change the active time segment in Max is horrible, being able to pan and zoom the track bar would be a boon to animation in Max.
- It would be great if the motion mixer was integrated into the track bar.
- I would like to see the motion mixer let us turn any range of key frames regardless of what object they are linked to, into a "track" so it could be copied, pasted or even saved to a library.
- I would like to see the "reservoir feature" allow us to drag and drop "tracks" into the track bar or even the motion mixer, instead of using a goofy 7 click interface to load a track.
I'm really looking for a system that allows us to create a few motion tracks and drop them in on a time line, preferably from a list or library. Then copy, paste, move and adjust the start and end times of those tracks as needed. If the tracks could be inverted by dragging the start frame past the end frame I would crap my pants.
Is there a shortcut to "zoom extents" on the track bar? If not I bet a simple script could be written. I wonder if someone has done that already?
/me runs off to check scriptspot...
Basically have the highpoly, normal mapping cage, and a normal mapped low poly in one view. When you tweak the cage, the low poly registers the change on the normal map in real time, and you can see what you've just done on the low poly, or on a texture map view if you want.
That would be tits.
And even if it does take 10 seconds to update the realtime map it's still better than having to bake and then jump through hoops just to see if a 40x40 pixel area of your map rendered out decently or not.
Personally I think it could be done. Just needs to be coded right so that small chunks of the normal map can be baked individually instead of having to do the whole thing at once.
Und ich habe eine Studentenkarte, wozu brauche ich einen Fahrschein? (Meinst du Führerschen?)
just make what's already out there streamlined and stable, please.
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And add tits.
On the fly normal mapper would be cool.
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That sounds pretty cool actually; but why would you do that if you can just look at the high res model you are working with?
Let me drag and drop a selection of verts to skin weight copy function, let me drag and drop the data to a find opposite function, than drag that to a copy mirrored weights function.
Realtime 3d shader support in photoshop mapped to a simple 3d object - letting me drag and drop a shader from max into photoshop, paint the maps in realtime.
I suppose any distributed computing like normal mapping, etc would be nice. Just taking an existing solution and making it 1000x better
That sounds pretty cool actually; but why would you do that if you can just look at the high res model you are working with?
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Highpolys don't go into game engines, and looking at your highpoly won't help you if your cage/raytrace distance is messed up and bakes out a shitty normal map. You need to see the normal mapped lowpoly to verify that your map is baking properly.
that and a 'make it cool' button. we needs us some of those...
its so boring having to reinvent the wheel..
Being able to adjust geometry after skin weighting, instead of having to reimport/copy across skin weights. I'm looking at you maya.
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Max's Always Deform toggle is a life saver. Some of the new people at work who were previously Maya based were dry humping that toggle button when I showed them what it did.
silo has the realtime switching between base mesh and meshsmooth sculpt and thats the closest Ive seen to this idea so far. havent used silo much but I kinda like it.
I've got one for max...
- A change to the track bar so it zooms and works like After Effects, or flash. The 6 clicks it takes to change the active time segment in Max is horrible, being able to pan and zoom the track bar wo
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just right click on top of the play button so you can open the frame preferences on the fly.
while a model always stays a model (ingames: vertices, primitives, rigg/ some other assigns), effects can consist of so many things, some might need postprocessing, others might consist of regular geometry + billboards and so on. And often all those things interact a bit. Hence I think it its a lot harder to achieve standards here, especially as often they are so specific to a certain engine. While I do like the idea of a particle flow like editor, it often simply doesnt translate to gameengines well. I think gamebryo or so does feature maya + max particles ingame, but it is one of the few I know.
For luxinia I wrote a rather tweakable particle system as well, but with these things it's always a battle between customization and speed. And when looking at particle rendering in games like bf2, they have a very specific/limited featureset, which means there is just "one way" but that way is fastest.
that said, its true that certain features are nearly the same in most particle systems (size, age, velocity, gravity/other forces)
just right click on top of the play button so you can open the frame preferences on the fly.
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Thats exactly the same as left clicking on the "time config" button, which is what I was already doing. Right click play or left click time config, its still not saving me any clicks or time. With that method you still have to:
Click to open the window,
Click in the start frame box,
Type the start frame,
Click or tab to the end frame box,
Type the end frame,
Click OK.
Vs a slider bar that snaps to frame ranges.
So far I'm liking the method Eric brought up, ctrl+atl+ mouse button drag. My one request for that feature would be to have it snap to keyed or marked frames. It's hard to get it to land just on frame 10000. You can spend 30sec bouncing from frame 10001 to 9999.
I still want the ability to control groups of key frames and or tracks with a drag and drop interface. They are so close to getting it to work with biped, the motion mixer and reservoir but fell short. Hopefully they will revisit those features soon...
As for standardized effects, I would see that as having to go down the road of the physics engines. A stand alone particle engine that can be plugged into most games would be pretty cool, especially if it came with plugins & a viewer/editor.
Interestingly, I just got back in touch with someone I worked with awhile ago, now he's formed a particle middleware company, might float your boat.
http://www.forkparticle.com/
Curious to hear what the Mad Doc folks thought of it.
Normal Map generation tools that are friendly for game art, ie you could flip normals whatever way you want and you could easily tell the baker the way you want things mirrored. Realtime shaders that support mirrored uvs. A more streamlined way to tell the baking engine what to bake, looking at Max at the moment. In XSI for example you can turn on a check box for the maps you want to bake for example. Easy seam over painting features would be nice. The ability to set the background color to say 128,128,256 when baking normal maps. An easy way to fix seams in your normal maps at generation time so the artist can make the most out of their uv space.
The ability to only load the tools you need or want, for example if you only model with Max with certain tools it be nice to turn off everything else. An easy way to customize your apps ui. For example if you wanted Max to look like photoshop you should be able to do it, but I'm thinking more in terms of having to use several 3D apps. I find it useful to have the same shorts and sometimes the save views between different apps. An easy way to load and place models from a model library.
A script editor and recorder that lets make quick scripts that are efficient and let you access everything and no fucking need to learn a scripting language looking at XSI and Max here. An easy way to make anything you want a toggle, so if you wanted to create a shift drag extrude type tool in other apps you could.
If 3d apps simply exported to games easily, yeah I'm dreaming with this one but what the hell. You can't tell me the developers of the 3d programs can't take the time to make an exporter for their clients.
Boolean tools that work like solid objects, so you can carve into them and make mechanical modeling easier, or simply booleans that work would be nice.
Better subd tools so you don't have to add extra geo to make areas of the model harder. I'm thinking of something that lets you easily specify how hard an edge is, by dragging a slider or numeric value.
Level design friendly tools. If you want to set the grid it just works, no fucking voodoo magic required.
The ability for artist to export a 3d presentation of their work to show off to potential employers. You can add triggers and what not to get the model to animate in real time show wires, etc. Add turn tables.
An easy displacement editor in your 3d app that you could use on any object. for example you could paint on your model or on your map and be able to work with it in real time. Sounds like zbrush or mudbox but it's nice not to have to go to another app and jump through hoops to get something done. An an easy way to set texture coordinates to these objects like say if you are working on a mountain or tree you don't have to loose your sanity trying to make this work. It's very easy to model something with zspheres for example. Imagine you could go to a stick figure mode to layout your model, then go to another layer tweek the shape add extra crap like armor or whatever and at the end be able to go back to a stick figure mode and be able to animate this or pose it however the hell you want so it's easy to texture, or put it in the final pose, and not have to worry about your mesh getting deformed poorly and your texture getting warped.
Boolean tools that work like solid objects, so you can carve into them and make mechanical modeling easier, or simply booleans that work would be nice.
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Have you tried Pro-Booleans included in Max9 (in 8 but only to subscribers)? Also remember it works best with closed shapes. It has a hard time processing what is inside and what is out when geometry is open. If your shape has a hole there is a good chance when you boolean, it will dork out.
Alex
You can make the point that it's all about planning, but then if you want to just sketch shit out then you can't in a fluid way.
[/ QUOTE ]I think quite a few set backs to work flow come from just that, modeling apps assume you have planned out every last detail before you start building. Too bad we all know things don't work that way. They are finally starting to come around but its slow and it means they have to rethink just about everything they have done up until now.
About the toggle, thats a cool idea and falls more in line with the Silo way of doing things. I reallly like silo and wish it would replace the EditPoly modifier =P After using silo for a few days I went in and heavily customized Max. It will never work 100% like Silo but I was able to set up quite a few KB shortcuts to specific tools that sped up my workflow while modeling. It sucks you have to get that deep and spend that much time doing something like that.
I second your call for those features to be standardized and well published!
Software needs to get rid of all the useless redundant shit they have that break the artist's workflow.
They all should have good snapping tools, like in Maya or XSI. Looking at Max here.
Easy to use your functions without having a damn option menu appear everytime you want to extrude, looking at XSI here. Yeah you can hold ctrl when you do this or turn it off, but the way XSI does this is annoying.
Be able to select and transform things, I suspect most artist want to be able to select components and rotate, move or scale them. XSI and lightwave you suck with this. XSI supra( fancy word for toggle) helps patch this BS imposed workflow but it's retarded. You fixed it with the tweek tool a bit. but it just shouldn't be there. Locking a selection is nice but just have a toggle for that.
Easy way to constrain shit and clone shit. Photoshop is the best at this, you shift and that's it. You want to clone you hold crtl and option. Zbrush why can't you be good at this? It's been around for over a decade, stop sucking! It seems all the 3D apps I have used have dropped the ball with this, why I don't know, again stop sucking.
Navigation tools, there has been a windows standard but the programmers feel they need to innovate with how the user navigates through the app. Some don't use the wheel on a 3 button mouse, what the hell is that. Maya used to do that with the zoom, not sure if you could map it later but it was annoying. Having to press two mouse buttons at the same time to zoom in while hold the alt key was pretty painful on the hand using the mouse, and just retarded. I'm glad Maya fixed it.
Mouse BS. You press the right mouse button you get a menu, why do so many apps like XSI and Maya just fuck with it. Retarded.
I'm wondering about Modo. I'm I the only person that feels that rotating the perspective view in that program odd. I find it annoying, so annoying I refuse to use the app. Why can't it work like say Maya, XSI or Max?
Multiple formats to import and export. Why can't Max or XSI write lwo files or read them. Why can't Maya read Max files. Why does Max not write max files so previous versions can read them. Why does 3ds suck so much. I'll tell you why, it's bs that is retarded and sucks.
Everything needs a real time preview or work in real time. There is no reason to not be able to see the changes I make to an array as I create it. Part of making art is fucking around randomly and looking to see what happens. It becomes pretty annoying to tweek things when you have to constantly hit an apply button to see what happens or render something out to see how it looks.
Well this is turning into another essay.
Vig when I mention planning I'm refering to all the bs the artist has to do to get the functions of the app to work efficiently. 95% if alright but there is always a point where you just get sick of the redundant crap. Why isn't there are easy way to pose a chain that doesn't screw with the solid elements and respect where the artist placed the center point for the link. Or why can't you select multiple objects at once and set their IK limits, Max why, no reason for it. Or why do some apps like XSI not have standard parameters that you can use in primitives and is just missing ways to do any kind of measuring. You have to figure shit out to do this simple shit that should just be there.
Drag and drop should be standard. Why should a pop up come up asking do you want to merge this come up? If I wanted to replace the scene I would have done new? I love how most of these apps have made it a nightmare to open shit up from another file. Why can't there be a put to library function? Is it rocket science?
Well I think for the most part most of these 3D apps are 90 percent there, it's what they drop the ball on that make me wonder what the hell where you thinking that usually gets to me at times.
Alex
On the fly normal mapper would be cool.
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It seems likely that Maya 2010 (or whatever) will have something like this in the future but until then I've found other alternatives to keep me working.
http://inlandstudios.com/products.html
This site has a trial-ware software that lets you set up a detailed workspace with multiple projects and tons of options per project. You can build them all at once and walk away. I keep it on a workhorse machine thats on my network so I don't slow myself down while multi-tasking.
There aren't any tutorials on the site so it may not be for the weak hearted. Also it doesn't really work well with models > 1M triangles but it supports a bump/displacement map on the high resolution mesh so you shouldn't have to go more than 400K or so if you have a good quality bump map.
a good way of doing hard edge stuff in mudbox\zbrush
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Isn't Modo supposed to have a nice solution to that? I've never used it.
Easy to use your functions without having a damn option menu appear everytime you want to extrude, looking at XSI here. Yeah you can hold ctrl when you do this or turn it off, but the way XSI does this is annoying.
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You can set in preferences for XSI to ONLY show options when holding Ctrl, instead of holding it to disable them. Otherwise, you simply extrude by duplicating a face.