3d coat - wow... now THAT'S voxel sculpting!

[jin choung]

http://3d-coat.com/v3_voxel_sculpting.html

now THIS is indeed voxels.

hahahahahahaha... it's pretty funny that all of these old ideas take on a completely different and useful aspect to them when married with modern computers.

"vertex colors... pfffft... had those in the n64 so they didn't have to texture. ridiculous. pointless. we do badass texture mapping only - BUT OH WAIT! when you have millions and millions of verts, all of a sudden vertex colors becomes really really useful and can rival and surpass the ability of texture maps to capture detail and makes painting so much more direct and fast (zb3)."

"VOXELS? pffft... i remember those from novalogic games and command and conquer red alert 2.... useful for doing 3d. for me to poop on! yeah yeah, it's for the poor schlubs who don't have hardware acceleration! the poor saps who can't pony up to buy a voodoo or this new thing called a tnt from a company called nvidia. voxels are for chumps and lesbians. BUT OH WAIT! when you have millions and millions of voxels, you no longer have to worry at all about vertex or polygon distribution. you can stretch a mesh from here to kingdom come and you will have just as much workable "mesh" (actually voxels) to work with as when it was completely unstretched!"

freakin' awesome. so it's all about the volume and voxels/per now. not about poly density.

it's in beta now apparently but would really like to see how derived meshes look and if there's any way to control topology. cuz maya ain't takin' no voxels (although you could potentially export it as somethng that hypervoxels can read.... like the volumedic stuff - can't do character animation like that but would still be an interesting export option).

jin

[zapper1998]

wow is right

it's the wow factor ..

[UnCommonGrafx]

Jin,
It has some pretty good retopo tools inside the program. Andrew is even working on 'auto-retopo'ing.

It's a rather fluid program for it's Alpha state. Andrew is a crazy, machine-like coder that has shown himself to be quite human. You know, he took two days (or weeks) to implement nvidia's cuda implementation within the program.

The Tree program that is included is pretty out there, too.

Can't believe you don't have this tool... ;)

[jin choung]

well first of all, my d&d alignment of chaotic evil would cause my flesh to sizzle doing d12 damage every round i'm attempting to use it.

also, prohibitions against the creation of obscenity would in all probability lead me to create nothing else but. and i'm not in the mood. currently busy torturing puppies.

: )

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looks neat though. questions that immediately flare up is:

1. do you have to explicitly control the size of the voxelspace's volume? or does that get dynamicaly expanded/shrunk as you work?

2. do you have to explicitly define volume density? cuz he has no provision for changing density right?

3. how does the workflow feel? does it have things like symmetrical sculpting (cuz especially with the ability to stretch out long tubes without worrying about poly distribution, it's almost ideal for roughing out your figures... but not if you don't have any symmetry functionality)? how does sculpting it feel? same/similar or very different? same brushes like pinch, balloon, etc?

neat idea but i wonder how it plays out in real life use.

the real answer to why i don't have or use it is cuz for a long time, i wanted to avoid the expense of zb so ended up playing around with a lot of "toy" apps that did similar things but not really useful for real production. so i ended up just get zb.

3d coat seems, if not a toy app, then pretty rough around the edges. but... if this voxel stuff ends up panning out, maybe i'll be interested enough in viloating the eula... : )

jin

[Silkrooster]

I watched a few videos from 3D-Coat. I have to admit that I am impressed with it. It seams to be more in tune with most modeling programs.
My first impression of the voxels is meta-balls on steroids. I am keeping my eye on this program, so far it seams to be more logical than Z-brush.
Silk

[Hopper]

Well, at least it's using nVidia's CUDA. That's not a bad feature at all.

[UnCommonGrafx]

1. no
2. No. Yes, density goes up only. That is, you can'd down res it once upped.
3. Better than ZB. ;) It's designed to output LWO even with normal map(s) attached in the node editor.
Similar brushes, yes, not all the same though.

The edges have been smoothed considerably. The backbone is quite strong, it would seem, upon which bigger things can be built.

I have them both. ZB is still King but 3dc has a fledgling kingdom it's trying to establish. For lw users, it's much much easier on the brain's workflow.

[Stooch]

i know what i want for xmass.

[jin choung]

1. no
2. No. Yes, density goes up only. That is, you can'd down res it once upped.
3. Better than ZB. ;) It's designed to output LWO even with normal map(s) attached in the node editor.


cool, thanks for fielding questions uncommongrafx...

so re: 2, the density starts out arbitrarily dense? is it just some number like (division1) or does it tell you voxels/meter or something like that?

also, can you start ludicrously UNdense if you wanted to? like start out in an area where every voxel is the size of a car battery or something? (oh, and on a related note, how close can you ZOOM IN! that's what i was wondering when i was looking at the demo. is it possible to zoom in close enough to see the cubes?)

also, when you "res up", does it interpolate the voxels so that it's smooth or do you have to smooth out the stairstep artifacts of the previous res?
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as for question 3, so there is symmetrical sculpting with voxels? if so, that's a huge point right there.

oh, and does 3dc have mask painting? that's a huge one that i love from zb. (and if so, does it have mask painting with voxels? if so, that's gonna make that workflow of just pulling stuff out without consideration of poly density/distribution super sweet....)

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love the fact that you can boolean your heart's content too with the voxels as you'd expect... add, subtract, intersect(?), etc... good stuff and i would imagine very nice for mechanical modeling (though that's another aspect that i wonder about... i can see it being cool and problematic and able to go both ways).

jin

[jin choung]

Well, at least it's using nVidia's CUDA. That's not a bad feature at all.

yah, that's a nice little benefit of new tech too... before, when gfx cards were fixed function dealies, voxels got left behind behind because the cards simply didn't deal with them.

but now that we have more general purpose "gpus" (not to mention multicore desktop cpus), all of a sudden voxels get a foot in the door again.

i guess we'll have to see but first impression is a knock out.

jin

[jin choung]

hmmmm... actually, i was making the comparison of vertex colors and voxels in my first post as old techs but just to put the flavors together:

does andrew plan on implementing "VOXEL PAINT"? like zb's poly paint? cuz that should in theory work just the same as zb's polypaint... you don't have to worry about uvs or stretching and with the added benefit that you are guaranteed no stretching as a result of polys themselves being stretched... everything is quantized uniformly into cubic voxels.

have the ability to tag each voxel with a material as well as a color and it's becomes a very compelling voxelpaint tool....

jin

[UnCommonGrafx]

Hey Jin,
Glad to field a question or two on this puppy: it's some cool new tech.

Yes, arbitrarily dense. And you get a HUD of your present poly amount, if you decide. More to the point: you don't really get to deal with the voxel density.

I suppose you could make some really big voxels; but as I said above, this isn't something you really deal with. It always gives you a usable view of your sculpt, i.e., as a mesh.
You can "see" the voxels but it's interpreted as a poly mesh.


Symmetry can be chosen for any axis, placed as you please on the object and a plane made visible or not to assist the view.

Masking is coming if not already there in the alpha. There are other ways he has implemented to do this type of stuff but people have been adamant about masking.

Ya know it even has a transpose system, right?

Painting a boolean is weirdly cool.

Voxel painting has been discussed. Andrew seems to have some ideas on this but I'm unsure how it's going to come about: there are some obviously non-trivial things to do to make this happen. I think that's why he is continuing revamping the RepoTool: painting voxels, accounting for booleaned material, dealing with re-ressing the voxels with or without their coloring or material are all issues to be worked on and there is no superior replacement of painting on a mesh.

Heck, he just added subtools. I am hoping that with these new additions that we get the ability to use more than one material per sculpt.

[beverins]

I think sensable's lineup are also voxel sculptors

http://www.sensable.com/claytools-system-models.htm

albeit limited because they're tied to the haptic arm.

[wacom]

Well 3DC 3.x is still alpha...so there's a way to go, but there is a lot to love about the program pre 3.0 too!

The voxel engine is a real liberator when it comes to sculpting. Andrew has to iron out the other important details (and is making good headway on them) but as far as sculpting goes it's amazing and dare I say, in some instance far more efficient than the traditional divide and extrude method...

I was reading an interesting article by Jon Carmack that made a good point for pushing forward with voxels for future render engines. He didn't say that we should immediately do away with polygons, but that for many things, in the long run, it just makes sense. These would be things like terrain and internal structures- imagine how much better and easier it would be to develop destructible environments etc. Like say blowing a hole in a wall in a game, or say digging a trench etc.

In addition, from what I understand, voxels work well with future and current GPUs from Nvidia and Ati- I'm not sharp on the details, but as far as I know voxels are primed for processors that can do a lot of simple calculations VERY fast. Which is the exact opposite of what Intel wants to do from what I've read- they'd like to have more complex instructions.

In a nutshell- what I've gathered from reading a few things is that we can see the future of polygons and understand it today- more and faster of the same. With voxels there is a lot of doors that in the long run could be opened that currently are just too development intensive with polygons. Basically the only reason to keep pushing polygons is resolution based. BORING!

Remember...someones got to create all that content...and after using 3Dcoat and thinking about it I'm really stoked on voxel based technologies!

[rakker16mm]

3d coat seems, if not a toy app, then pretty rough around the edges. but... if this voxel stuff ends up panning out, maybe i'll be interested enough in viloating the eula... : )

jin

jin, Where did you find the EULA? I can't use the demo until I get a PC or Intel based Mac. It does look like a fun program though. In any case I always wonder how they would go about enforcing such a restrictive agreement. I think Poser used to have a restrictive EULA way back when, but the reality on the ground is a huge portion of their user base uses it for nothing but..... butt

[geothefaust]

The one line in the EULA is retarded, but, who gives a rats ***? Let's keep this on topic guys!


3DCoat is super bad ***. I'm going to be buying really soon here. Andrew has made some real headway and I just can no longer refuse how great it is. Honestly, I don't think I'll be touching ZB for much longer. Once i get my copy of 3DC, ZB-Gone!

The interface is MUCH better then ZB. The retopology tools make sense, it'll have low poly painting, CUDA support, and much more.

Then there is the price. You simply can't beat the price.

[Captain Obvious]

when you have millions and millions of verts, all of a sudden vertex colors becomes really really useful and can rival and surpass the ability of texture maps to capture detail and makes painting so much more direct and fast
I guess there might indeed be a performance advantage, but I don't think you'd get better detail with vertex coloring instead of UV map-based painting. A 2k image map means 4 million pixels. Even if the UV map makes to you lose 25 % of that, it's still 3 million "units." A mesh with 3 million vertices would have the same (roughly) level of detail, yes, but you could easily replace that 2k image map with, say, a 4k, with 16 million units worth of resolution.

[jin choung]

agreed... let's keep it on topic.

but i saw one review by a fellow on the zb site that dinged voxel sculpting for still being slow and clunky when you got to a zb equivalent high res. can anyone speak to that critique? i'd love to see a sculpting movie of something really dense and see what the performance is....

as for voxels in everyday use, yah, especially if graphics cards continue the route from fixed function poly processors to super duper parallel "gpus", voxels seem to be primed for making a come back. but i do have alot of questions regarding voxels then....

as for making content, it seems like any closed poly mesh can be converted to a voxel model so that doesn't seem like a HUUUGE advantage for a native voxel sculptor like 3dc.

and another question i have is how you handle discrete objects in a voxel "world"... so can i have a thousand by thousand voxel grid for the landscape (which would end up giving you fairly large voxels on ground level) and then a 300x300 voxel grid for a machine gun model that is scaled way down so the voxels for that model are smaller than the landscape? or does all objects need to share the same voxel grid - in which case you would have to make your ENTIRE voxel space as dense as the densest object in the world needs to be... which would be a pretty bad limitation to work under.

also in rt graphics, does voxels lend themselves well to things like occlusion culling and binary space partitions etc....? i would imagine there is a way to hide chunks of voxels space that is not in view (and maybe easier than with polys because voxel "cells" are already quantized cubes) but i have no idea whether that's so....

also would wonder about non rt RENDERING.... do voxels suit themselves to all the rendering techniques that we have available in terms or ray tracing (with radiosity, caustics, etc) and normal maps etc?

it seems like all the renders on the 3dc website were converted to polys before they were rendered right?

finally, i really would like to find out if zb's pixols in their 2.5d space are indeed a super constrained version of voxels.... and if so, i wonder if they have any plans to "unconstrain" them!

oh well, fun technologies on the horizon! can't wait to see how things play out.

jin

[jin choung]

I guess there might indeed be a performance advantage, but I don't think you'd get better detail with vertex coloring instead of UV map-based painting. A 2k image map means 4 million pixels. Even if the UV map makes to you lose 25 % of that, it's still 3 million "units." A mesh with 3 million vertices would have the same (roughly) level of detail, yes, but you could easily replace that 2k image map with, say, a 4k, with 16 million units worth of resolution.

right but at that point, you have to ask whether people normally end up PAINTING textures at 4k? and at that point, what is the performance of painting like? especially if you were using a 4k 2d document in something like body paint.

if you're talking about just resizing a 2k image map in photoshop, you could do the same thing with a vertex colored texture that's been baked to a texture map too.

and yah, meshes are regularly over 4 million in zb so that's why vertex coloring has become useful.

not saying necessarily that it's BETTER than pixels on a 2d document. but if you want to paint a model in 3d space ala zb or bodypaint, the vertex coloring might indeed be much much faster than something like bodypaint because it is just a SIMPLER operation (coloring a vertex) as opposed to figuring out where the brush on the 3d model is in uv space and then mapping strokes back into the uv space and properly projecting that stroke in 2d space back onto the model so the user can see what he did.....

and ultimately, for me, the thing is that you can model and paint without having to uv map first... which can be a laborious thing that can take a lot of thought and time to get right, that gets in the way of the maquette creation... you can save it for later which is a nice option.

jin

[rakker16mm]

The one line in the EULA is retarded, but, who gives a rats ***? Let's keep this on topic guys!


3DCoat is super bad ***. I'm going to be buying really soon here. Andrew has made some real headway and I just can no longer refuse how great it is. Honestly, I don't think I'll be touching ZB for much longer. Once i get my copy of 3DC, ZB-Gone!

The interface is MUCH better then ZB. The retopology tools make sense, it'll have low poly painting, CUDA support, and much more.

Then there is the price. You simply can't beat the price.

Sorry, but I was commenting on an issue that jin raised. I may be in the minority but I do feel the EULA is really very important to consider, especially if it is retarded. 3DC may indeed be Bad @zz, but if I have to look over my shoulder or wonder if I am crossing a line.... or more importantly if some one else feels I have crossed a line I'm not sure I want to bother. Software and hardware limitations are inevitable, but hopefully as things progress we will be able to do more and more. In contrast EULAs seem to be getting more restrictive. It's a trend I think digital artists need to be aware of and pay attention to.

[jin choung]

Sorry, but I was commenting on an issue that jin raised. I may be in the minority but I do feel the EULA is really very important to consider, especially if it is retarded.

do a search here on 3dcoat or its previous name.. (dammit, forgot what it was called) and eula... you'll get the answers you're looking for. and yeah, it's pretty retarded... sigh....

but yeah, it's been talked to death and no point in resuscitating it here.

jin

[RedBull]

Oh the irony................ :)

[cresshead]

>>used to be called "3d brush"

say isn't it about nowish that zbrush 3.5 is arriving?

[geothefaust]

Sorry, but I was commenting on an issue that jin raised. I may be in the minority but I do feel the EULA is really very important to consider, especially if it is retarded. 3DC may indeed be Bad @zz, but if I have to look over my shoulder or wonder if I am crossing a line.... or more importantly if some one else feels I have crossed a line I'm not sure I want to bother. Software and hardware limitations are inevitable, but hopefully as things progress we will be able to do more and more. In contrast EULAs seem to be getting more restrictive. It's a trend I think digital artists need to be aware of and pay attention to.

Hey man,

Sorry, I meant no offense or any thing. I just don't want to see this thread derailed. Nearly all threads about it end up talking about the EULA. I completely agree with you about the EULA, it's important. But, I don't believe any one god exists, so, really, it doesn't effect me in anyway. Well, except for Odin (See you in Valhalla, Brother)!

Anyway, yeah it was called 3DBrush before like cress said. If you're truly curious about the EULA, do a search on it, plenty of fodder on those threads. :)


Back on topic, I'm really curious to see what Andrew puts in to 3DCoat after the release of v3? It's turning out to be a very solid 3D sculpting/painting app. 2009 should be an interesting one

The Return of the Voxel (replacement for the Jedi) seems well placed in this context, and, I wonder, will it catch on in other programs as well?

Hey, cress, you are right!! ZB3.5 should be out by now... What gives?

[rakker16mm]

Hey man,

Sorry, I meant no offense or any thing. I just don't want to see this thread derailed. Nearly all threads about it end up talking about the EULA. I completely agree with you about the EULA, it's important. But, I don't believe any one god exists, so, really, it doesn't effect me in anyway. Well, except for Odin (See you in Valhalla, Brother)!

Anyway, yeah it was called 3DBrush before like cress said. If you're truly curious about the EULA, do a search on it, plenty of fodder on those threads. :)


None taken. :) I was not aware of the previous EULA discussion.