Volumetric and Mesh Modeling/Sculpting

alvordr

alvordr

0
Volumetric and Mesh Modeling/Sculpting

Just out of curiosity, is there a benefit to staying with mesh modeling, rather than volumetric?

That said, is there a reason you wouldn't want both in a modeling package?

Is it safe to assume that volumetric modeling would be super difficult to add to Cheetah?

For what it's worth, I do understand that volumetric modeling would be CPU/GPU intensive. I just feel that having both capabilities would put Cheetah closer to the same shelf as ZBrush, Mudbox and 3D-Coat.
 
For what it's worth, I do understand that volumetric modeling would be CPU/GPU intensive. I just feel that having both capabilities would put Cheetah closer to the same shelf as ZBrush, Mudbox and 3D-Coat.
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I think C3D needs a word-processor (in its text tool) to be "closer to the same shelf" as Microsoft Word... I mean this is 2009, where are the style sheets?

</sarcasm>

ZBrush, Mudbox, and 3D-Coat are basically specialized sculpting programs for which this is core functionality. If Maya, Lightwave, Cinema4D, and 3D Studio Max don't do it (without expensive plugins) then it's hardly fair to expect C3D to. Heck -- modo doesn't do it.
 
I'm wondering the point of one verses the other. Short of making it easy to sculpt, then what's the point of the volumetric method. Even if that is the only point, then you wouldn't feel the need to bounce from one program to another. That's my point entirely. I think that having all the capabilities in a program, if reasonable and viable, make it more useful.

Granted trying to do it all can have negative effects, as well. Luckily, Cheetah is designed well and performs well in almost all categories it's intended to. If it's already a jack of many trades, why not add another tool in the set?

Take, for example, the Windows machine that needs you to buy 6+ programs to achieve what you want, and you find yourself using all of them to do so. Then you go to your Mac and find that it has just about everything you'll ever need to do the job. Anyway, I'm digressing.

I'm already happy with Cheetah, but this is the Wish List section.
 
Mesh/subdiv modeling is a huge advance over NURBS because for the latter you needed to break down the object you planned to build into patches and then painfully create the edges of those patches, stitch them together, and so on. Just the explanation of how to connect two patches together without creating horrible folds (or to fix the folds you inevitably would get) was often dozens or hundreds of pages of unreadable crap.

With mesh/subdiv modeling what you do is much more intuitive and interactive. You build either (a) a small portion or (b) a crude approximation or (c) a crude approximation of a small portion of the object you are after and then work on it by progressive approximation and/or building out. But you still need to keep track of your topology to make it all work out nicely.

With volumetrics you're essentially working on a collection of "voxels" (little cubes) -- you can push, pull, scoop out, pile on the voxels and the program builds a topologically sound mesh around it to your chosen level of approximation on-the-fly. So, assuming you have a fast computer and good voxel manipulation tools, it is as much more intuitive than mesh/subdiv as that was over NURBS. And this applys particularly to surface detail ... if you're trying to put wrinkles on someone's skin, or warts on a frog, or chips in the teeth of a shark -- you don't want to have to think in terms of topology. (But if you're going to animate a figure, having full control over its high-level geometry is vital, so while volumetric modeling may be useful, an animated figure will end up being "retopologised" -- at least until it's possible to rebuild the mesh around the voxels, and animate the voxels.

The 2D equivalent would be like using MacPaint but having Illustrator autotrace your bitmap every time you did something and show you the autotracing as feedback instead of the underlying bitmap. (And consider how much more intuitive that is that learning how to use beziers (bezier curves are 2D cubic NURBs) or drawing a polygonal outline and then smoothing it (the mesh subdiv analog).

What C3D could really use would be better editing of subdived meshes. At the moment, when you edit a subdived mesh the feedback (e.g. which edge you have selected, and where that edge is) conforms to the original mesh, not the subdived mesh. (This is probably because this makes sense architecturally in C3D.)

In Silo 3D a mesh's subdiv level is an intrinsic property of every mesh, which means that Silo can show you feedback on the subdivided geometry -- which is huge. (Silo also lets you sculpt using zBrush/3DCoat/etc. -style displacement brushes, but that's a generation behind the volumetric modeling tools that are coming out now.)

Now, to do this in C3D would, presumably, be tough, since subdivision is a modifier. Of course it would be great if modeling feedback propagated through modifiers in all cases (e.g. the way it does in some very high end tools, like -- apparently -- Lightwave Core) or many cases (as in 3DS Max), but that's a tall order.
 
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podperson said:
Mesh/subdiv modeling is a huge advance over NURBS because for the latter you needed to break down the object you planned to build into patches and then painfully create the edges of those patches, stitch them together, and so on. Just the explanation of how to connect two patches together without creating horrible folds (or to fix the folds you inevitably would get) was often dozens or hundreds of pages of unreadable crap.

With mesh/subdiv modeling what you do is much more intuitive and interactive. You build either (a) a small portion or (b) a crude approximation or (c) a crude approximation of a small portion of the object you are after and then work on it by progressive approximation and/or building out. But you still need to keep track of your topology to make it all work out nicely.

With volumetrics you're essentially working on a collection of "voxels" (little cubes) -- you can push, pull, scoop out, pile on the voxels and the program builds a topologically sound mesh around it to your chosen level of approximation on-the-fly. So, assuming you have a fast computer and good voxel manipulation tools, it is as much more intuitive than mesh/subdiv as that was over NURBS. And this applys particularly to surface detail ... if you're trying to put wrinkles on someone's skin, or warts on a frog, or chips in the teeth of a shark -- you don't want to have to think in terms of topology. (But if you're going to animate a figure, having full control over its high-level geometry is vital, so while volumetric modeling may be useful, an animated figure will end up being "retopologised" -- at least until it's possible to rebuild the mesh around the voxels, and animate the voxels.

The 2D equivalent would be like using MacPaint but having Illustrator autotrace your bitmap every time you did something and show you the autotracing as feedback instead of the underlying bitmap. (And consider how much more intuitive that is that learning how to use beziers (bezier curves are 2D cubic NURBs) or drawing a polygonal outline and then smoothing it (the mesh subdiv analog).

What C3D could really use would be better editing of subdived meshes. At the moment, when you edit a subdived mesh the feedback (e.g. which edge you have selected, and where that edge is) conforms to the original mesh, not the subdived mesh. (This is probably because this makes sense architecturally in C3D.)

In Silo 3D a mesh's subdiv level is an intrinsic property of every mesh, which means that Silo can show you feedback on the subdivided geometry -- which is huge. (Silo also lets you sculpt using zBrush/3DCoat/etc. -style displacement brushes, but that's a generation behind the volumetric modeling tools that are coming out now.)

Now, to do this in C3D would, presumably, be touch, since subdivision is a modifier. Of course it would be great if modeling feedback propagated through modifiers in all cases (e.g. the way it does in some very high end tools, like -- apparently -- Lightwave Core) or many cases (as in 3DS Max), but that's a tall order.
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Thank you. That was a very good explanation of how this all works. It also puts into light how easy or hard this would be to implement. The CPU/GPU intensive aspect of using volumetric modeling would be a good argument against putting this in Cheetah, as it already does well to perform on average Mac machines.
 
Those types of sculpting/painting apps generally work better as stand-alone apps. I have 3D coat and don't use it near as often as I thought I would. It's cheap and there is a demo available if you are interested. If you don't mind seriously increasing render times. If you look at some of the really great digital artists around now they usually model first with polys or nurbs and then take it into something like Zbrush.
 
The current version of 3D Coat doesn't do volumetric modeling -- unless you've been playing with the beta. I think when volumetric modeling becomes fully integrated with box/subdiv we won't know how we lived without it, but that's a way off yet (good way to use all that ridiculous parallel processing horsepower we've all got, though).
 
Hi,
volumetric sculpting tools are not really on my near term todo list. There are more important features I want add/improve first.

Bye,
Martin
 
Martin said:
Hi,
volumetric sculpting tools are not really on my near term todo list. There are more important features I want add/improve first.
Click to expand...

Indeed. Hence:

What C3D could really use would be better editing of subdived meshes. At the moment, when you edit a subdived mesh the feedback (e.g. which edge you have selected, and where that edge is) conforms to the original mesh, not the subdived mesh.
Click to expand...
 
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