Thanks Paul! Kit bashing is the ultimate goal. Similar to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Om2mATMsJjA The reason why I´m still painstakingly creating polygon basemeshes that don´t rely on wheighting as in subdivision surface edges is flexibility and cross-app portability. You can´t use wheighted edges when there is a possible *.obj/*.fbx transfer involved. My asset elements are accurate and light enough at zero subdivisions for an uncluttered viewport and hold up nicely when going between one, two, three subdivision levels, where two subdivisions is the sweetspot but level 1 may just as well be enough. From those adjustably dense meshes, even a conversion to NURBS or Voxels is possible if needed. I´ve also looked into Solidworks plug-ins like T-Spline but not thouroughly yet: http://www.tsplines.com/products/tsplines-for-rhino.html So I decided to boil it down to all-quads, fully subdivideable (without using edge wheighting) and all UVs of basemesh elements in the 0-1 range for best compatibility with most DCC tools. The asset elements are accurate enough to allow convenient baking of surface information including texture/material properties into a (possibly) custom created low-poly proxy or proxies w/LOD´s. I´ll have to pull it through for this test but the next asset may just be an all voxel kit with a highrez obj derrivate supplied for convenience alongside a more crude low-poly proxy. Thanks again for the tips! Cheers, tim On 12.07.2013 12:42, Paul Griswold wrote:
If you're doing mechanical parts, have you looked at MOI3D? MOI is fantastic for mechanical shapes. It's basically an artist-friendly CAD-like modeler. The current beta even supports Windows 8 Pro's touch gestures. I use it with 3DC and it works really well. MOI can export OBJs and does a very good job. The issue is, it doesn't create anything that can be subdivided using Catmull-Clark. So the solution is to export a high-poly object and then re-topologize it in 3DC. If you don't need to have your object as a Sub-D, you can just export from MOI directly to Softimage. The problem with 3DC for mechanical stuff is - it's really not accurate at all. You can use it for "kit bashing", but if you need to represent an object with any amount of accuracy, it can get frustrating. -Paul On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 3:22 AM, Tim Leydecker <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: Thanks for the insights, folks. Personally, I´m terribly bored of the caveats of polygon modeling workflows in the creation of reasonably accurate surfaces that are supposed to both subdivide correctly and still be clean enough all-quads in their basemesh. It takes forever to create holes, bevels or intricate intersections and corners. Resorting to a Voxel based approach for the creation of complex intersecting shapes using "tooling-objects" or even "auto-watertightened" partial scans stuck into each other sounds like a holy grail. Of course, you end up having to represent those voxels as polygons again and if subdivideable basemeshes are desired, end up with the same holes you need to retopo but at least there is already a shape to try to match... I´m currently creating mechanical parts that only need to meet accuracies of 0,25-2,5 Millimeters and it still takes roughly 90% of my time to make them work when using catmull-clark subdivision on the basemesh. Every intersection is a pain. Every corner needs careful support. That can´t be right. It would at least be motivating to see the ideal (voxel) shape earlier, then try to capture that shape with a subdivideable polygon cage instead of trying to both create the shape and adhere to the needs of representing a surface using subdivideable polygon modeling. I´m really looking forward to getting to use 3Dcoat and see what those voxels can do. Even if only to clean up the 3d scan data of my girlfriend at first, she already has very specific shape requests... (in the 0,01-0,1 Millimeter range, I dare guess :) Cheers, tim On 11.07.2013 14:09, Paul Griswold wrote: I've been using it since it was 3D-Brush & it's always been great with Soft. There is an addon that'll let you send objects directly from Softimage to 3DC and back. The only negatives I can think of are - 3D Coat creates clusters for your surfaces, even if there's only 1 surface for the whole object. So the object's surface is Scene Material & then there's a poly cluster with the actual surface applied to it. 3DC doesn't handle objects using 3rd party materials like Arnold's Standard Shader. So if you send an object from Soft to 3DC that has a Standard material & then bring it back, you'll get back an object that just has a Phong attached with the textures wired in. An important thing to note there is - it keeps the material name unless you rename it in 3DC, so it will replace your original material. 3DCs interface & workflow are a bit clunky IMHO. It doesn't work very well on dual monitors either. None of the windows can be dragged outside of the main 3DC window. The only solution would be to build something similar to Softimage's dual monitor layout, where you've just stretched the window across 2 monitors. Unfortunately the last time I tried that it screwed up the camera in 3DC because the camera was set up to always be centered in your window - stretching it across 2 monitors and placing the viewport on 1 monitor made 3DC think you were pointing your camera to the right (or left). I wish Andrew would hire a really good UI designer to build an entirely new front-end for 3DC, but I'm sure the die-hards would have a fit if that ever happened. 3DC has a great Photoshop connection (CTRL-P) that sends all your layers over to Photoshop & lets you use all it's tools for texture editing. Voxels and retopology are stunningly good & easy to use. Andrew is really responsive to bug reports & feature requests and he's always given me the impression he's there to serve his customers & make them happy. -Paul On Wed, Jul 10, 2013 at 11:51 PM, Raffaele Fragapane <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:raffsxsilist@__googlemail.com <mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote: I can't speak for the interaction with Soft, but for retopo everywhere I look 3DC is getting hailed as really damn good. We used it on a project here to clean some of the biggest, most irregularly sampled, largest surface ever LIDARs. Talking LIDARs big enough that they would take minutes of surveying driving through natural reserves on a Jeep, with enough detail be able to tell what jacket the people who got picked up in it were wearing. The laser shadowing holes, since you can't exactly drive into protected areas, were frequent and big. If it can deal with that, it can deal with pretty much anything. On Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 6:26 PM, Tim Leydecker <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]> <mailto:[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>>> wrote: Hi guys, anyone using 3dcoat with softimage here? How well do the voxel modeling tools work, would you consider it comfortable to use 3dcoat to clean up raw scan data (with holes) into solid volumes? Does 3dcoat play nicely with softimage in general? Anything you´d find important to point out? Cheers, tim -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
