Hi there, apologies for the delays lately! We're currently working on porting the software which has been quite time-consuming, but is hopefully a cost that will not accumulate much once we get the initial pre-releases out the door for OSX and Linux.
How can I play the animation? I see the FPS setting but haven't find a play button or hotkey or any info about it in the PDF.
ATM the only way is to use the arrow keys or manually scrub the timeline by dragging on it, but transport controls are the absolute next thing on the list once we get the ports out the door!
How can I remove the affect of a Setup-Mode sculpt? At various times the erase brush in setup mode does nothing or translates the surface to weird places.
The erase tool ATM is not the way to do this. The erase tool is actually very simplistic in function: it does not actually remove deformations but creates a new deformation to compensate which moves points back towards their base cache positions (moving them back to the original cache level). This is not the ideal but is currently the only technically-feasible way we've found to implement it so far.
However, your question does suggest a very nice feature, and that would be to have erase functioning differently in edit/global contexts. In those contexts, it may be more sensible to move the global positions of the base mesh back to what they were originally. We'll consider doing that -- it would be quite practical to do.
How can I tone down the effect of a whole morph to see what it does to the mesh? Can I 'mute' or disable it somehow?
Strength controls were something we've discussed before. It would be a field that lets you adjust the strength (or opacity if you like) of the deformer. That would allow you to increase/reduce the effect it has on the mesh as well as setting it to 0% to disable the effect without having to remove it. What do you think about this idea?
Is it possible to give an explicit name to a morph? Would be nice to communicate what it does.
I think that's a great idea. ATM there is actually a name stored for each morph (doesn't have to be unique) and you can actually edit those names by editing the CS projects you save out (they're plain old text files). However, we lack the UI controls to do this ATM, but can provide them instantly. Basically it's something we anticipated might be necessary but wasn't sure if people wanted (hence we do name morphs but don't provide the UI controls to rename), but this question/suggestion to me is a good indication that it would be worthwhile to provide it. Providing a string field to rename the selected deformer would be no problem at all.
Would be useful to visualize the area that was affected by a morph. Its hard to find what was changed while sculpting here and there on the mesh.
The only difficult part about visualizing the points is that it's a bit difficult to do efficiently. We do this for the pin deformer since the pin deformer simply stores a list of indices of the points being affected, but morph deformers, for example, use a much more complex representation to allow them to be applied efficiently and with variable strengths depending on the point in question. Basically we want to do it, but have some optimization issues to overcome to do it without slowing down the overall program. As a possibility, we thought about showing the effect only when you hover highlight over a morph and not when selecting it. This would avoid slowing down framerates doing normal operation since the points being affected would only be drawn on a hover event.
Is it possible setting a viewport display color for an object? I saw in the youtube video that in the cloth sim fixing part the cloth was blue but I don't know how it was set.
It would be extremely useful setting contrasty colors for objects when fixing object intersections with simulations.
In those cases an LWO was used. We recognize basic surface information from LW object files but currently lack this for Alembic and OBJs. We also lack the ability to change the surface materials after loading which could be a useful feature for visual indicators, but presents a bit of a challenge if we want to preserve the materials across on export. This is a question best answered by our interchange developer, David Forstenlechner since the main challenges relate to import and export.
Is it possible to display more objects at once with normal shading?
At the moment we're using the ghosted shading (screen door transparency) for non-selected, background-type objects, but we were thinking of making it so when we get the play button with the transport controls we're doing next, everything would be shown during playback in their normal, fully-shaded form. If that does not suffice to simply show the full shading on playback, then we could look into more options to allow you control how unselected things are displayed.
Transformation from Alembic is not working just deformation. Is it a known issue or is it intended?
I believe it is a known issue but this is also best answered by our interchange developer. ATM ChronoSculpt lacks a full-fledged motion system which would be necessary to import Alembic objects with transformations without baking the transformations into the vertex positions themselves. A motion system would be the ideal answer to this problem but baking might be a start.
I found some lua script files in the install directory, that suggests that CS can execute script files / commands. How does that work? There is nothing about it in the documentation.
ATM we use Lua as an internal development tool to streamline some of the internal development, but have no immediate plans to make this a generalistic scripting solution. We do have longer term plans to provide scripting to users in some form, but whether we expand on this internal Lua solution or use Python or both (my personal favorite) is currently undecided. For now we use Lua in the same way we use C++ in various areas to develop different parts of the product internally.
