I got an idea for future blender versions, here it is:
Today you model with a shell, which put the focus on the vertices position and flow. Many tools that you feel you would need can’t exist because of this. What if you could model with volume?
Think of the workflow as the following:
In edit-mode add thousands of particle-like balls by simply spray-draw them, note you don’t need anything beneath it, which makes it easy to make your shapes without even care about the vertices. It would be to draw on a paper. But you would also be able to draw from different views to add volume. Erase and move tools would also be handy. Then you’re done, tab out to object mode and you have a nice mesh that you can convert.
The thing would be that it would be easy to create models and change them. Maybe I could explain a little better, but I hope you get it anyway.
Take a look at voxel sculpting, e.g. http://www.3d-coat.com/
dont think we’ll see voxel scupting too soon in blender though (but hey, you never know;))
That’s the thing, sculpting is like playing with a shell, not volume. The thing with sculpting is that you can’t make base-meshes for a reason, and this would be like sculpting base-meshes!
Maybe it’s hard to imagine, but it would be cowish awzome!
up until now, im sure its been considered but just has been very impractical due to the fact that now youd be dealing with an exponentially larger amount of vertices (voxels) as opposed to a normal mesh. even editing a stupid tree mesh in Blender can be a bit laggy, imagine if each branch and trunk was composed of a volume of particles…
not saying its a shitty idea, in fact itd be great, but its only now becoming possible to do sometihng like that from what ive seen. definitely something to look out for in the future!
3dCoat looks pretty sweet and pretty much exactly what youre talkinga bout now we just need an open-source version…
I think there was something on BlenderNation a while back about Sony making their voxel technology open source, so we might at a later point see some sort of voxel-based sculpting method in Blender.
Here’s a decent tutorial for retopology modeling in Blender. The concept is that you sculpt your high-end 3D model first, then use vert snap to model around it. The one issue I’d say I have with such a model is that then your low res isn’t connected to your high-res multires mesh, and I often find baking from a high layer to the low layer gets the best bakes…but it’s still a great method, and I definitely like the freedom of just diving in and sculpting
When blender will have some OpenCL inside perhaps then we will see voxel based sculpting. But since Matt Ebb have successfully imported voxel data perhaps this step is not so far away. http://mke3.net/
Personally I´ve always found the metaballs a very intuitive modeling tool and had lots of potential even years back.
Voxel sculpting in 3dcoat does exactly this. You aren’t sculpting a surface - it’s a volume with no topology restrictions. You can literally sculpt any shape you want from nothing in 3dcoat - though the program provides voxel primitives as a base to start from, or you can import a polygon mesh made elsewhere and convert that to a voxel object. Everything in my 3dcoat sketchbook was either sculpted from a voxel sphere or nothing… just starting with the 2d voxel paint brush and creating voxel strokes in 3dspace, then building them up from there.
3dcoat also provides the best retopology tools on the market so you can pretty quickly convert your voxel sculpts into polygon meshes for use elsewhere.
I should also add that I’d love to see this tech find its way into blender. It’s quite a liberating way to work when you can pretty much sculpt out an entire character without having to think about polygons at all.
now we just need an open-source version… 