Gosh Dan, I have no idea. It's an interesting thought. One downer for me with the HQ viewport is the sometimes painfully lengthy delay when you switch to it. It may not seem like much time but it's enough to discourage people from using it routinely.
I have a love/hate thing going with the HQ viewport. When I make myself use it, and take the time to adjust some display settings, it can be a gorgeous way to work. When laying out a scene or doing some modeling having the greater aesthetic display environment has a real effect on my feeling and mood as I work. We are artists, and the "space" we work in makes a difference, one which our more rational/calculating minds tend to discount. But it's also painful when it pauses to think and breaks the very creative flow that is one of it's strengths. I would urge the devs to keep working on the HQ view... its a first release effort, and a good start, but they haven't gotten it to a point where people love it yet. And they can get it there. To stop now would be to stop at a point where it adds no great value for the effort put into it. But back to your thought about a high-speed zbrush-like creative viewport... It's certainly possible to "fake" a display mode with a script which saves out all materials, switches them with a matcap shader while switching the viewport display to HQ or returns the materials. I considered this briefly but decided it was unwieldy and intrusive, at least at the scripting level I'm accustomed to. But I LOVE the idea of a high-quality-high-speed view which uses something like a global matcap as a way to sculpt or simply display geo in a more aesthetic manner than the shaded view and/or get the benefits of fake complex lighting directly with a matcap. (steps on soapbox aka - fungus time!) I can only hope one of the guys out there who read this thread and know a thing or two has an idea and interest in the challenge. Softimage is a tool for artists. Softimage needs more artists to adopt it. Artists are sensitive to UIs and how their work is displayed. Zbrush has a painful UI but a beautiful environment for the actual art the artist is focusing on, and it immediately appeals. Softimage should tap into this effect. Engineers like displays like CAD systems, but artists want a sense of light and mass while they work. (steps off soapbox) The Matcap shader and scale: This brings up an issue with the way I've implemented this shader which becomes apparent sometimes in a scenario where you texture an entire scene across the whole camera field with a single matcap: the scale of the underlying texture of the matcap is affected by the size of the object. If you put a finely textured matcap that looks great on a small sphere and then put that same matcap on a huge backdrop object, this issue becomes apparent. I haven't looked into whether zbrush has a trick they use to deal with this - at the moment with my shader the only solutions are: 1) in a case like this, avoid matcaps which reveal much texture and just use them for light qualities (boo) 2) make several scale variants of the matcap where the texture and resolution of the source image compensates (now you've turned something simple and elegant into a lot of time/effort. boo again) 3) use the matcap in a rendertree setup in which objects recieve their "light" via the matcap but have flat, diffuse textures applied normally (better, but still you lose some of the benefits of the matcap. Worth trying out, though I haven't myself.) On Mon, Feb 18, 2013 at 5:07 AM, Dan Yargici <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Andy, I was musing about this some more this morning and I have a > suggestion. :) > > How big an endeavor would it be to have this as a Display mode? i.e > setting a viewport Display mode to 'Matcap' or 'Litsphere' and having it > override all materials. Perhaps setting the litsphere image via custom > preference? > > A more immediate way to set it up would certainly be awesome. > > Like I say, it's just a suggestion, kudos for making the shader in the > first place! > > DAN > > > > On Wed, Feb 13, 2013 at 5:40 AM, Andy Moorer <[email protected]> wrote: > >> Awesome Gustavo, yes you broke it out perfectly! >> >> The big plus with this multi-node approach is that you can do stuff I >> haven't implemented, like rotate the texture, or more easily mix several >> matcaps together, add bump etc (though I guess you could do that with the >> single shader, too.) >> >> The shader I made is the bare bones, I strongly urge anyone interested to >> dive in. I'd love it if someone better at this kind of thing blew my little >> shader out of the water with something more robust. >> >> If we can get a really strong solution it will be a major boon, just look >> at the mileage Zbrush users get out of matcap shading - it's a very robust >> way to shade, in particular for modeling/sculpting and for stills. >> > >
