sculpting tools

[hieveryone]

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.

[RMS]

Thanks for the feedback.

The 'depth' setting is not the depth of the draw brush. It is the depth of the center of the tool sphere inside or out of the surface. The draw brushes just push towards/away from the normal, so changing depth for them doesn't have much effect. But if you change depth for the Drag or Pinch tools, you will see the difference.

For Draw1/Draw2, the Strength controls the height of the bump, and yes, Ctrl inverts it. Sorry, I guess 'Depth' is overloaded here and is causing some confusion.

By Intensity, do you mean Strength? Yes, that is related to the brush size. Other sculpting tools work this way too, though...

Refine and Reduce are also related to the brush size. This I don't like so much. Other tools that do local refinement also base it on the brush size, plus a modifier parameter. The Reduce setting being based on brush size is more of a problem, because when you use a big brush, you might wipe out detail elsewhere. This is something I am working on...definitely I agree that it is not good enough!

Part of the problem with using a very small brush is that it is not yet smart enough about doing something small inside a large face. So you need to get the local triangle count high enough that you have several vertices inside the brush sphere. If you do that, it should feel the same at all scales. I don't quite understand what you are saying though, so maybe you could post a screenshot?

[MagWeb]

Hi,

I´d would like to see layers or some multiple objects solution (selection of connected vertices) too...

but if I had 3 wishes:

Some mask feature for sculpting  would be on top of my wishlist (or did I miss it?).

Second would be to add a magnify(scale) and rotate option of selected areas (to do bigger mesh modifications)

Next would be improvement of the stroke as airbrush mode for some of the tools (means the tool should work even without moving the cursor) and some lazy behaviour to get straighter strokes

[RMS]

those are all things I want to add too =).

You might be able to get magnify-like effects using the Deform tool (see meshmixer03 video on youtube). Not the rotate, though.

Airbrush/lazybrush, yes, those are pretty easy, will try to do soon...

[hieveryone]

Thanks for the fast answer.
About the explanation of the depth bar, well I'm not that sure I got it right, but I can definitely see the difference using pinch brush, so I'm leaving it at that. I found odd anyway that to have a correct inverted pinch you have to use depth and not ctrl.
Yes, for intensity I was meaning the strenght, sorry about the confusion.
I think that my problem was the exact opposite: because the level of detail was too high, smooth and sculpt brushes didn't have the same intensity as when you have less faces. That happened mainly because I used the sculpt tools with 'mesh refinement' function always enabled, so they were continuously adding detail even when refine was at 0 due to their size. Anyway I think I now grasped the right way to use the brushes managing reduce and refine.
MagWeb preceded me about those points, anyway here's something else to add to the wishlist:
autosymmetry - ok, this needs an explanation. Sometimes can happen that you forget to activate symmetry (well, at least I did after the program crashed and I re-opened the same project to continue sculpting), and in that case it would be useful to have the possibility of mirroring the details of one side of the model on the other half;
log - could start automatically with the program or you could put a checkbox or a menu voice to enable it once meshmixer is started;
autosave - it happened to me that the temporary file saved after the crash of the program turned out to be corrupt, so an autosave with incremental number and a customizable time would be great;
pose tool - actually as you pointed out you can already do something like that with deform, but having the chance to use a pivot point to scale or rotate a model with axis control would be better, especially to pose your model and that bring us also to:
mask for volume brush - if possible with symmetry (paint mode doesn't have it) and a smooth function so that you can use it to sculpt or to pose an area of your model;
hide areas - so that you can sculpt more easily two or more near volumes;
texture for brushes -  to sculpt using patterns. Not necessary for now, and anyway as I read on another post you have already the intention to add this function, but I'm pointing it out anyway;
change materials/backgrounds or light direction - to have a better understanding of what's really going on with the volumes you're sculpting; unfortunately visual schemes are not very helpful;
I know those are a lot of things, still I tried to list only those I really missed while working on some doodle. Anyway I think that for me too mask and pose would be at the top of my wish list for now.
Before I forget, I noticed that when I used the mask selection on the model I posted in the gallery, the camera orbit became very slow, is it normal?

[RMS]

yes, managing reduce and refine is non-trivial. I am working on a better way to do it that will make it less necessary to manage (and ideally reduce it to one parameter instead of two)

The other things I more or less agree with.

Autosymmetry is tricky...the mesh is not actually symmetric, I just apply the same brush on each side of the symmetry plane. So the shape looks the same most of the time, but because of the dynamic meshing you can get asymmetry. One neat thing is you can actually use symmetry on a non-symmetric mesh, unlike with topology-symmetry. So it can do partial symmetry...although I need to give some control over the symmetry plane...

So, the problem for autosymmetry is that I can't just mirror vertex positions because the topology might be different. I have some ideas about how to handle it by copying the mesh from one side to the other, but first i need to be able to merge arbitrary meshes (my part-dropping would work for small areas but not for example to mirror an entire torso). But once I do this you will actually be able to do all sorts of crazy symmetry-copy operations.

Autosave I will try to put in for mm05. I also would like to have it =)

[hieveryone]

Making refine/reduce a single parameter would be indeed a good thing, I think the way it is now can be a little confusing at first.
How could I forget to point that out before... the polycount! - That's absolutely a must if you want to have the slightest idea of how much time you have before your project will blow up to your face.

[MagWeb]

V and t-values are in the lower left corner as a fly-out (same as the tooltips on the upper right) in my current version.

[hieveryone]

Yep, my bad, now I have it too. You can ignore my last comment.

[RMS]

You shouldn't hit any kind of polycount limits, at least not if you are using the 64-bit version. I have had people report sculpting on meshes with 4 million triangles. It can get slow, but it shouldn't crash from memory.  (32-bit versions are a different story, of course...)

[hieveryone]

Well, I'm working on a 32 bit system so the instability I experienced could have been due to that reason.
Anyway the latest release seems to be way more stable, up until now it didn't crashed not even once.

[hieveryone]

Another thing I noticed is that if you have a model opened and you 'accidentally' click the 'import sphere' button, it loads it without asking for closing the current project. I did it once by mistake and I felt like a moron, so I think it would be good to have a confirmation message, something like "you're trying to import another object so this project will be closed. Would you really like to continue?" or something like that.

[hieveryone]

The brush size is always too big for detail sculpting. It would be good to scale it a little more when you zoom in.

[RMS]

ok, please try the new build linked in this post:  http://meshmixer.com/forum/index.php?topic=361.0

new: autosave, fast binary save format, symmetry-plane line, smaller minimum brush size, ask-when-replacing-object, camera controls for pen, free rotate

[hieveryone]

  I wasn't expecting a new alpha to come out so fast. I'm gonna try it as soon as I can and I'll let you know how it works for me.