Topics

1

Gallery / Wake up and shoot the coffee

« on: April 22, 2013, 08:43:32 PM »

I made this sculpture to try the latest build of MM, using as an inspiration the cover of "Wake up and shoot the coffee" a parody comic starring the Pulverizer against Wulvoream.

The characters models have been sculpted mainly with sculptris but all the props (weapons, shells, claws, bags, mask, boots, slices and booleans) have been done in MM.

This version seem to be quite stable, the program didn't crashed not even once.
The difference booleans left every time some holes on sharp corners but the inspector had no problem in fixing those (unfortunately smoothing those areas in the process).

The slice works very good, but on complex models apparently the undo don't work as expected.
The cut plane appears but the model isn't affected anymore. On simpler forms it seems to work though.

Eventually I'll make some other test and post the images to show what I'm referring to and how to do it, and while I'm at it I'll try some of the other new functions I didn't need for this sculpture.

Nice work as usual RMS.

2

Gallery / Desert Eagle

« on: November 05, 2012, 09:03:54 PM »

I completed the Desert Eagle model; it took more time than it was worth and I simplified some elements, but it's done entirely in MeshMixer with individual pieces like the Peace Maker revolver I did last time.
Some things I noticed doing it:

I was right, smooth boundaries pin handles can't move anymore after any of them is cancelled (double click on existing pin handles);

booleans tend to ruin edges when there isn't enough detail, and don't work well with small elements leaving, more often than not, open areas that can be closed only with the stamp tool;

to clear the outline list from already deleted elements it's currently necessary to restart the application;

It could be nice to have a wider palette for the face group colors.

I'm sure there was something else, but I'm too tired now and I don't remember what that was.
I'll post it here should that come to mind.

3

Gallery / Demon

« on: February 13, 2012, 10:24:14 AM »

I used the model of a demon I'm doing for a contest to test some of the new features of MM. You did an awesome job as usual, RMS.

Now that I'm using the lazyNezumi for the lazy mouse I'm finally starting to get the right feeling from the sculpt brushes, the only thing missing is the possibility to have bigger values for strenght: when I use the surface brush with a small size I have to pass on the same spot countless times just to start seeing a faint line. Or maybe an airbrush function in the brushes could do the trick (not to mention it would be quite useful anyway)...

One thing I just noticed is that when I double-click on the sliders, a window to insert numeric values pops up; I don't remember if you added this feature in the previous versions, anyway it's quite cool.
Is there a way to select more than one manipulator at once for the warp?

I also noticed that if I try to do a mirror of an object, the transformations manipulator shows up at the center of the mirror plane. Is it possible to have a relative position for the mirror plane so that if I'm mirroring smaller objects I don't have to zoom the camera back and forth to use the manipulator?

There are just two issues that I found, one is with the drag 'n drop, the other is with the plane cut. I'm attaching images of both.
For the first I didn't used it extensively, but I noticed that sometimes the mixed objects disappear, or rather I should say that they are moved on the inside of the model, creating a hole on the mesh.
For the second, I don't recall if anyone already pointed that out, but some of the object's faces are reconstructed in a weird way.
Anyway the build is quite stable, it crashed just one time when I did a transformation and the mixed mesh rotated inside of the model, so I think I could call that just bad luck.

4

Gallery / Ghoul

« on: January 18, 2012, 07:07:12 PM »

A week ago I started wondering what was happening with MM and I found out that a new version was out, so I thought: why not making a model to test it? So I decided to participate on a contest (no prize involved) to feel more motivated and I opted for a ghoul as a subject.
I tried many of the new tools (still not all of them) and thanks to the new r2 I didn't have to use blender anymore as a workaround for the problems with the obj export issue (it was driving me crazy ).
I still have to try the sculpt brushes extensively (I did the blocking of the body with sculptris and I still have to switch back and forth because meshmixer don't have the hide and the mask selection for sculpting so for now it can't be helped), but I will do it to add all the details like the skin pores and the scars (and I will know if there are still problems with my wacom tablet). So far the last release appears to be quite stable, a couple of times it crashed but I forgot to use the bat file so I don't have a log, sorry.
As for the new tools:

I love the inspector tool, it helped me a lot;

good work with the manipulators, now the basic transform operations are way easier to do than before;

the remesh tool is neat and very helpful (it crashed only once , but I was working on xp32 so it have been probably due to memory error); oddly the lower remesh value gives always a quite high polycount result (except once when it was crunching the polygons a lot more going up on the remesh slider, but maybe it was a bug because I haven't been able to replicate that anymore even on the same mesh), anyway I think it would be a good idea to set as default the remesh value to '0' and check the adaptive box, it's safe to assume that whoever uses this tool wants to maintain the same original form and reducing the remesh from 50 to 0 sometimes is a real pain;

the booleans are quite stable, it would be good to have the possibility to expand the 'combine' to more than one element at once (the 'edit' button appears only with two objects selected, from the third onward it disappears; now, it's a good idea for the operators that have to recalculate the meshes but combining more than one object at once could be very helpful if you want to group various elements together, doing it for the spheres on the pants has been quite tedious); Also I'm not sure why is it that the primary objects (the 'A' objects I mean) must have a thickness of at least 0.071 (I'm using the extrusion offset value to make it clear) or the operation doesn't work;

A strange thing that happened is that I once made an extraction, then I appended a sphere and the extracted faces became part of the focus of the second object; 

Another strange thing that's occurring is that if I extract an area of selected faces with 'smooth boundaries' and I use 'normal' instead of 'constant', the more I offset the more the borders lose the smoothed circular form of the original selection;

It would be really nice to have a hide and a smooth selection mask for sculpting in a future release, but you have already done an outstanding work with this new release. Thanks RMS.

5

Gallery / color test

« on: August 05, 2011, 02:36:43 PM »

I sculpted a complex model just to try the new color brushes... well, ok I'm stretching it a bit, it's not really that complex, nonetheless I extracted various parts to have more than one mesh to deal with.
I have to say that they work fairly good, color and smooth are quite powerful when used with alphas and playing with size and spacing.
I didn't like the fact that to get a smaller alpha you need to reduce the size of the brush: if you need it for small areas it could work but in my case to cover the whole body it took forever. It would be good to have a slider for a clone factor or something like that so that you can duplicate the alpha inside of the brush circle to cover wider areas mantaining the needed alpha size. The possibility of using shaders other than the default one for coloring could be a big help painting the surfaces (a flat shader could be a good start ).
I was wondering... will you add the bump map in the future?
Another thing is the lack of layers (we already talked about that for sculpting purposes): obviously if you have to color a single mesh it's not needed, but if you have more complex models it can be quite difficult to color one object without touching the near ones. In my case areas like the inside of the mouth have been a nightmare to deal with.
The bad habit of freezing the brush pointer when using my tablet is something that forced me to close and reopen meshmixer countless times. In the end, just for the sake of completing the model in this lifetime, I switched to sculptris to complete the sculpting and I used it in conjunction with meshmixer to extract and extrude the various parts (hair and undershirt) and to correct some problems with the topology. The problem remained during the coloring session, but in that case... well, it couldn't be helped, after all the purpose of this model was to paint it with meshmixer to begin with.
I imported the model inside of meshlab just to see if it imports the colored model correctly (and it does), now I have to understand how to transfer the vertex color to a uvmap or from a model to another with uvmap. Maybe it would be good to have a map converter inside of meshmixer (I don't have the slightest idea how complex it could be, I'm just saying... ).
In the end I shaded the model with sculptris materials like I did with the zombie: not too shabby If I can say this myself (especially considering that I matched the meshmixer camera position by eye ).

6

Gallery / zombie

« on: June 17, 2011, 08:16:22 AM »

Thats quite some time I don't post anything and I said I would do a model using the new tools of meshmixer... well, unfortunately this isn't that kind of model, but I'm gonna do something soon (err... at least I hope so...  ).
To be honest this model changed quite a bit from its original concept, it was supposed to be a "gunner", but for some reason I decided to make it a "zombie" using it as an excuse to exercise a little on anatomy sculpting.
It's still a wip obviously, but still I will use the extrude, hole and bridge tools to create the rotten meat, the broken bones and the pending intestine.
To sculpt it so far I used meshmixer to sculpt the volumes and sculptris for some of the details.

7

Gallery / first mesh mixing test

« on: April 28, 2011, 04:07:44 AM »

The title is self-explanatory enough, I guess.
For my first test I used as base an old model I made a while ago, I dismembered it (using on its parts the "mask-drag'ndrop-add to library" process) and reconstructed it posing and scaling the single parts.
The process of adding elements in the library has been easy and it worked smoothly, and till now I had only one crash I couldn't replicate.
But this has been just a quick test, I still have to try something more complex...

8

Gallery / Knight

« on: April 26, 2011, 05:44:16 AM »

I was about to call it "Dark Knight", but then Batman popped out in my mind...
Anyway I tried to make something a little more complex controlling the poly count. I still exceeded by far what I had in mind (it's still 1.4 million and I was aiming to 600) but without bump mapping its not easy to have some detail without adding polygons. Truth is I wanted to add some parts with the mesh mixing tools, at least the cloak and the hairs, but in the end I just sculpted everything from a single sphere: that's a shame, really, but I will definitely do it with the next model.

9

Gallery / baldie

« on: April 20, 2011, 06:29:08 PM »

I cant believe this: I realized only working on the other image (golem) that the last brush is the equivalent of a clay brush. Wow, now sculpting is going to be way easier. This is my first (very quick) doodle using it, just your average baldie. Maybe next time I will sculpt hairs too.

10

Gallery / golem

« on: April 20, 2011, 06:35:48 AM »

Second try, sculpted out from a sphere. I don't really know what this thing is, I started sculpting with no symmetry and no plan at all. The program crashed countless times, mainly while I was sculpting, and I reached the million of polygons. I didn't bother to manage the polycount just for the sake of research, so this model as you see it is 1.8 million polygons (I could have done it with less than a half maintaining almost all details). As I said the most frequent crashes happened while I was sculpting, four or five times the program freezed and three times it crashed while saving. Because it also happened with the last save, I lost the details and some of the branches you can see in this image, so this is the only proof I have that I did them.
Anyway I'm attaching the logs with two examples, one is for crash while saving and the other for crash while sculpting.

11

Gallery / first sketch

« on: April 18, 2011, 01:49:01 AM »

This is... not my first try, but still I can consider this my first "official" doodle, modeled out from a sphere.
I know, it's still rough; actually I almost finished it with details and all a couple of times, but in both cases the program crashed: the first time when I was still working on it, and the second one when the program was saving it.
Anyway I got bored with this model, so I'm gonna do something completely different for the next one; maybe something involving... mesh mixing.

12

Wish List / sculpting tools

« on: April 17, 2011, 03:23:42 PM »

Here's some suggestion:
- Camera snap to have ortho views;
- Layers to have the chance to work on multiple elements and lock or hide them during sculpting sessions;
- A menu for shortcuts remapping;
- Something to understand where is the center of the symmetry on a model;

Here's some rant:
I didn't find the size control for the volume brush linked to the mouse wheel very comfortable, but maybe It's just me; a falloff control for the brushes would be useful, and having the chance to link the camera zoom to the mouse wheel for faster movements would be great (even maintaining the ctrl command for a more precise zoom).

Oddly enough changing the values of the 'depth' bar in the right panel of the volume brushes d1/d2 makes no difference, but ctrl inverts them; I don't know if it's a bug.

I have to test this matter more to be sure, but I had the impression that the values of 'intensity' and 'reduce' of the brushes seem to be related to the 'size'; that means that if the size of a brush is too small, the intensity in scale will be weaker even at 99 and the reduce factor will not go beyond a certain limit, so it's not possible to operate with a certain degree of precision.

13

General Discussion / Ok, now I'm impressed.

« on: April 17, 2011, 02:17:10 PM »

Really, I'm very impressed. I know this software by name since the 0.2 and at the time I played with it a little, but with the introduction of the sculpting tools I suddenly found it very interesting. The dynamic tesselation seems to work flawlessly and the feel with the brushes is quite good, especially considering this is your first try implementing them. I have to say that I noticed a little instability, I used the latest release (16 april) two times and it crashed in both cases. Anyway it's very good and I can't wait to see what will come next. I'm doing some doodling, maybe in the next days I will post more suggestion. Again, great job so far.