saw that voxel model you did pior and downloaded the alpha to try during lunch, it is fantastic! much more flexible than I had originally imagined, still a little difficult to get to grips with when your used to zbrush or mudbox sculpting but I havent had much time to get used to the feel of the tools. It was so great to use the negative sculpt and just make holes that go right through objects!
I am very intrigued by what I'm reading in this thread This sounds like exactly the kind of flexibility I would want when creating early concepts in 3d. I'll have to look into it more this weekend.
This definitely sounds really exciting and interesting. I think I will have much more input when I actually load it up and get some sculpting going. cheers. - Anwar
jesus it's really fun to doodle stuff with the voxels. Just wish the sculpting tools were better, it's very hard to get rid of blobby stuff. But then again i don't have too much scultping experience .
nice one peris haha, yeah I find the brushes dont respond the way I expect theyre a bit blobby and the smooth seems to work wierdly too...it seems almost like a fill tool and sometimes creates little lumpy bits around the smoothed areas but then again this is only an alpha.
I tried the retopo tools today, wow Im really enjoying them too, actually might get 3d coat but I dont want version 2 I want version 3 haha
Yup, thats the first thing to come in mind when working with voxels - I whish one could load up cubes, cylinders aso to create the early blockout.
Also I wish the transpose tool would be totpology dependent (ie when transposing an arm its annoying how the leg can be selected as well)
The app really needs painted selection and masking too. Or maybe its here already?
Lastly, I'd love to be able to orient the 2D voxel painting plane at will! (transposing the spaghetti can work around it, but it'd be nice...)
hop on the boards and tell him your wishes...the more folks that mention
these kinds of improvements the better! :poly142: His level of development catering
to his customers is really something I've not experienced elsewhere.
Right clicking should reorient the painting thing to your present view, not sure if you were looking for more than that? (You have to zoom in and out sometimes to keep it workable.)
The only painted selections I've seen so far are tied into the transpose tool
I really like the workflow and pace of development, and the tools are honestly not bad for an alpha -- at least considering he started this stuff in Octoberish. I'm hoping that he does some refinement before jumping to a new idea (or he could open up the brushes so people can find the best settings).
spent some time playing with 3D coat alpha 3 today. It doesnt work as well on my home pc but it was still workable. Made some kind of wierd creature with a hollowish chest. volumetric sculpt from just one sphere
is painting in voxel by default? it seemed weird when I tried the demo, like you were drawing a normal map and then the geom 'pops' out after you've stroked.. buh 15 days is way too short for a demo
yeah rooster that's what i hit too
i didn't have enough time to work out how the hell to use it, and then my trial ran out - and on the day the trial runs out, so does the discount offer for buying it...
maybe i'll re-download with a different email address, this voxel stuff is really rather promising...
Mop and Roost, I dont think the voxel stuff was in that version you mention. Iirc that one was indeed more about painting in that weird way you describe. And the voxel stuff was limited to useless tubes in space :P
The good voxel stuff is in 3.0 alpha, from the forums. It's a direct download, and lasts 45 days. The Voxel tools are all the way at the bottom left (little icon looking like a cube of clay)
There is also a cuda x64 edition.
nice experiment pior, yeah I threw a whole lot of the default objs onto the viewport and made a huge voxel mess when I first tried this haha. I love the generated chains you can make haha, just choose snake tool and select chain.obj on the list.
that wierd normal map painting is still in the program but I havent used it, texture painting might be nice but I havent spent enough time with that to tell yet.
Since voxels are dimensional pixels, can Zbrush reconstruct subdivisions on an exported model?
edit: I had this page open without refreshing, so didn't see a few new posts. Pior, do you really need to retopologise to sculpt on it? If my reasoning is correct, it's made up out of equal-size quads, right?
I've yet to play around with this, but all of your examples (especially yours, Ged!) are making me anxious to give it a go. I first have to find tenants for my flat, though
thanks pea, I cant wait to get some more time to play with this!
there is a convert to polygons button on the voxel menu so that you can export a polygon version of the model or go ahead and sculpt it but it is rather high poly. There may be many good reasons to retopologise though but Im no expert, pior probably knows best.
cool idea with the voxel image planes pior I would be tempted to just voxel sculpt all the detail in and then only retopo afterwards.
Convert to polygons gives you a mess of triangles. Probably not a good idea to send that to zbrush. I don't even bother exporting to retopo. I rather like being able to do it right over top of the voxel mesh in 3dc.
To go back to what Renaud said - in the case of freestyle modeling, yeah there would not be much need for the voxel silhouette stuff. However it is very useful when trying to capture proportions from an established concept. Once the front and side silhouettes are here in flat 3d, the rest of the proportions really fall into place and its great to bulge out the silhouettes themselves instead of 'matching them' like with more classic image planes.
Ged : In my experience voxels slow down more that polies ... especially on my home machine :P Thats why I would use them mostly for roughing in. Also the feel of the voxel modelling tools is slightly different from the usual polygon sculpting tools. They somehow feel more rough, in a good way (I like how the voxel smooth somehow gives sharp edges at the border of the smoothed area for instance). And I love doing retopo work anyways haha
good point Gwot I didnt realise convert to polygon created such a messy mesh until I tried it. Pior I didnt realise voxels might be slower than polys didnt seem to bad on my home machine
my home system( amd 3500+ 2GB 8800GT) usually gets up to about 2.5 million polys in zbrush 3 or mudbox 1 before it starts to become slower and harder to work with.
I wanted to see how far I could push voxel sculpting a character before it becomes too much for my system, I got up to 3 million triangles and didnt find it too hard to work with but there was a little lag.
heres that same character with increase resolution and a bit of sculpting and a stupid amount of detail brushes just as a test.
I really think I could get used to sculpting voxels instead of sculpting polys and then retopo straight from here but I must admit mudbox and zbrush and traditional 3D sculpting in general does have a more refined feel.
nice one ironbear, I was hoping I could do stuff like that in 3D coat with the sphere tool but its a bit imprecise at the moment and you dont really know where the sphere is going to appear and when it does you cant move it...maybe I should make a suggestion to andrew hmm it could work like 3D coat curves, you place all your primitives into position and scale them rotate etc then hit enter and it all turns into voxels.
Hey Iron that's funny, I tried something very similar a few minutes ago. I split up a character mesh in different body parts and imported them in 3DC as an obj, hoping to be able to get easy proportion variants out of this kit inside of 3DCoat itself.
However I realize now that it is a lot easier to go 'the yoshi way' ie arranging and scaling the chunks in a real 3D program with precise controls, and let 3DC do what it is good at : blending all that together.
Hey Ged, it should be possible to do with the merge tool in transform mode using a sphere object (and symmetry )
Cheers pior!
oh yeah that does do some of what I expected, never saw those tools pop up when I went into the merge tool. The one thing it doesnt let you do is edit all the objects and their rotations and scales, you can only place one object at a time and when its placed then its set in voxels never to be moved/edited again. I want to move a large collection of primitives around in the viewport and then hit enter and get them to all turn to voxels at once.
can we import a hard surface model from max to a layer in the voxel tree? I cant seem to find a way maybe its just a little buggy or Im doing things wrong.
Ged: I just create an empty new layer, then use the merge tool(select mesh) as usual. It should dump the new mesh into the new layer if you have that layer selected in the tree view. You can merge through the right click menu too in the tree but I don't think you can use the transform gizmo on it then. There's a lot of WIP stuff in that menu right now it seems.
aaah thanks Gwot, I was using the file menu - merge into file and it wasnt working, your method seems to work well enough but Ive still got some bugs with the ctrl z undos just erasing everything from the viewport and changing the tree view.
heres a very quick test of the new subtool management, its great how the voxels seem to automatically conform to one another...I wonder if that would be annoying with some projects though?
the voxel sculpting layers/subtools is a lot more stable in alpha release 45 with loads of new tools to play with, I know what Im gonna do this weekend
and heres another fun mess around with the new layers tools
Justin: try right clicking on that voxel object in the new scene graph/ tree and choose the mesh quadrangulation option. Make sure symmetry is on too when you do it. I'd like to see a pic of the result you end up with. =]
Gwot Im now impressed with the quadrangulation but Im not sure how useful the uv mapping tools are, I mean I used the mark seams and it seemed to work but I just want them to have their own little uv window so I can see whats going on and move sections around? or am I just not using the tools properly?
I don't imagine myself working without level of details, working with such detail must be a pain in the ass.. to get things well done and not looking as a "mucus" must be hard. I must be very customed to Zbrush hehe
I've tried retopo in the trial and looks cool (like rebuilding an entire model from scratch). It's something i never used because i never needed to use these tools :S. No doubt it's a good program, but i feel unconfortable working with it (with my wacom). Another thing i disliked is the painting method, it should have a method by normals to avoid projection artifacts and hard texture edges.
UV tools will need work from what I've seen of them. It's great that you can define seams and unwrap, but most of us need more than that. I'm content to send my stuff out to UVLayout and back.
I think the seam is there, but I think the snap tolerance for symmetry might be too high. You can grab verts on the seams and pull them apart, revealing more polygons underneath. My solution was just to delete the strip on either side of the seam and rebuild them by hand. Still way faster than doing a full retopo effort if you don't need to.
voxels... i just discovered true love here.
i did this:
from a sphere!
zbrush can't do this, mudbox can't do this!
actually i sent my kindest regards in the form of 140$ to the guy who makes 3dcoat.
now i'm gonna toy with this trial for the time being, and do something more than just toy with the tools.
yeah when you hit increase on the voxel menu it actually seems to increase the size of the model and then zoom the camera out, either way it works to add more detail but I have found making your large forms is definitely easiest before hitting increase. The brushes dont seem as strong in depth when youve increased the model a few times?
oh and jokermax on the 3D coat forums says you just have to turn symettry off to get the x axis seams back, must be the symettry snapping as gwot said.
Replies
You'll have someone's eye out with all that blatant flexibility!
I tried the retopo tools today, wow Im really enjoying them too, actually might get 3d coat but I dont want version 2 I want version 3 haha
Also I wish the transpose tool would be totpology dependent (ie when transposing an arm its annoying how the leg can be selected as well)
The app really needs painted selection and masking too. Or maybe its here already?
Lastly, I'd love to be able to orient the 2D voxel painting plane at will! (transposing the spaghetti can work around it, but it'd be nice...)
hop on the boards and tell him your wishes...the more folks that mention
these kinds of improvements the better! :poly142: His level of development catering
to his customers is really something I've not experienced elsewhere.
(along with posting a baby-eating Jezus sculpt, for the sake of it
The only painted selections I've seen so far are tied into the transpose tool
I really like the workflow and pace of development, and the tools are honestly not bad for an alpha -- at least considering he started this stuff in Octoberish. I'm hoping that he does some refinement before jumping to a new idea (or he could open up the brushes so people can find the best settings).
The 2D plane still needs a more precise way to be reoriented tho.
More testing. Just realized the program can already merge in voxel primitives, and import arbitrary objs aswell, converting them to voxel space!
Future is bright for 3d!
i didn't have enough time to work out how the hell to use it, and then my trial ran out - and on the day the trial runs out, so does the discount offer for buying it...
maybe i'll re-download with a different email address, this voxel stuff is really rather promising...
The good voxel stuff is in 3.0 alpha, from the forums. It's a direct download, and lasts 45 days. The Voxel tools are all the way at the bottom left (little icon looking like a cube of clay)
There is also a cuda x64 edition.
Youre welcome Pernaliciousonetwentyheight!
that wierd normal map painting is still in the program but I havent used it, texture painting might be nice but I havent spent enough time with that to tell yet.
edit: I had this page open without refreshing, so didn't see a few new posts. Pior, do you really need to retopologise to sculpt on it? If my reasoning is correct, it's made up out of equal-size quads, right?
I've yet to play around with this, but all of your examples (especially yours, Ged!) are making me anxious to give it a go. I first have to find tenants for my flat, though
there is a convert to polygons button on the voxel menu so that you can export a polygon version of the model or go ahead and sculpt it but it is rather high poly. There may be many good reasons to retopologise though but Im no expert, pior probably knows best.
cool idea with the voxel image planes pior I would be tempted to just voxel sculpt all the detail in and then only retopo afterwards.
I think I'm going to give it a try.
Thanks for finding this
B
Ged : In my experience voxels slow down more that polies ... especially on my home machine :P Thats why I would use them mostly for roughing in. Also the feel of the voxel modelling tools is slightly different from the usual polygon sculpting tools. They somehow feel more rough, in a good way (I like how the voxel smooth somehow gives sharp edges at the border of the smoothed area for instance). And I love doing retopo work anyways haha
Good stuff
my home system( amd 3500+ 2GB 8800GT) usually gets up to about 2.5 million polys in zbrush 3 or mudbox 1 before it starts to become slower and harder to work with.
I wanted to see how far I could push voxel sculpting a character before it becomes too much for my system, I got up to 3 million triangles and didnt find it too hard to work with but there was a little lag.
heres that same character with increase resolution and a bit of sculpting and a stupid amount of detail brushes just as a test.
I really think I could get used to sculpting voxels instead of sculpting polys and then retopo straight from here but I must admit mudbox and zbrush and traditional 3D sculpting in general does have a more refined feel.
I'm finding the vs stuff alot more fun to experiment with.
I made a bunch of spheres in Silo, then imported to 3dcoat:
Instant Yoshi!
I might link to your pic
However I realize now that it is a lot easier to go 'the yoshi way' ie arranging and scaling the chunks in a real 3D program with precise controls, and let 3DC do what it is good at : blending all that together.
Cheers pior!
oh yeah that does do some of what I expected, never saw those tools pop up when I went into the merge tool. The one thing it doesnt let you do is edit all the objects and their rotations and scales, you can only place one object at a time and when its placed then its set in voxels never to be moved/edited again. I want to move a large collection of primitives around in the viewport and then hit enter and get them to all turn to voxels at once.
I retopoed the yoshi head, the tools are better then any other Ive used, especially quad draw. The select and operate tools are awesome too!
heres a very quick test of the new subtool management, its great how the voxels seem to automatically conform to one another...I wonder if that would be annoying with some projects though?
and heres another fun mess around with the new layers tools
(assuming you're using build 49)
I've tried retopo in the trial and looks cool (like rebuilding an entire model from scratch). It's something i never used because i never needed to use these tools :S. No doubt it's a good program, but i feel unconfortable working with it (with my wacom). Another thing i disliked is the painting method, it should have a method by normals to avoid projection artifacts and hard texture edges.
just tried the quadrangulation on a 30 min head sculpt and its pretty good...there do seem to be ngons and tris in it down the x symetry line hmmm?
i did this:
from a sphere!
zbrush can't do this, mudbox can't do this!
actually i sent my kindest regards in the form of 140$ to the guy who makes 3dcoat.
now i'm gonna toy with this trial for the time being, and do something more than just toy with the tools.
oh and jokermax on the 3D coat forums says you just have to turn symettry off to get the x axis seams back, must be the symettry snapping as gwot said.