The big Blender Sculpt Mode thread (Part 1)

Interesting. But in general you agree that the default behavior should be switched though?

This is a really exciting project that is pushing Blender’s Sculpt Mode much more towards a serious ZBrush and 3D-Coat competitor, but I do think one of the most important ZBrush and 3D-Coat strengths is still missing: a solid quad-poly auto-retopologizer. OpenVDB is an effective alternative for ZBrush Dynamesh, but there is no ZRemesher or Autopo yet. I really hope that will follow. Looking at Pablo’s achievements so far I think he has the capacity to create a good quad-poly auto-retopologizer as well, as that is the key to turning sculpts into clean, neat geometry without time-consuming manual retopo labor.

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Zremesher dev I guess is making plugins for other software. Didn’t confirm anything for Blender, but seems to be looking into it towards the end of the thread.

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Very interesting! Too bad the old 3ds Max and Maya dinosaurs are getting it first. I’d definitely be willing to pay for a solid Blender auto-retopologizer if it matches or surpasses ZRemesher.

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IMHO the results from ZRemesher are really not that great most of the time. They’re the best on the market, sure, but far short of what a human can produce.

Now, faster manual retopology tools in Blender, that would be most welcome.

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The new one in 2019 has improved a lot, especially coupled with the edge detect feature.

But yes, if it’s faces or proper subdiv hard surface it’s still not the way to go. Waiting for retopoflow for 2.8 and crossing my fingers for some serious speedup with high poly editing is the best I can do…

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I’ve always hated manual retopo. :slightly_smiling_face: The new ZRemesher 3.0 is pretty flawless indeed, although 3D-Coat’s Autopo also has improved during the past years.

I’m very interested in the new tool by the ZRemesher developer. He is interested to develop it for Blender as well, as long as there are no GPL issues.

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That’d be amazing! Zbrush, Substance and Rizom UV are the last commercial softwares in my pipeline, just waiting for a reason to hit that uninstall button :). Won’t be anytime soon I guess, but it’d be a big step forward.

Really glad to see a separate sculpt branch heading in a good direction as well.

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About the topic of Zremesher for Blender :rice_ball:

Well it looks like he is working on it perhaps ?

But is concerned about the GPL license

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There are attempts already…

According to some tests that users did some years ago, Instant-Meshes was the closest thing to ZRemesher that we had when it comes to OpenSource. Still, ZRemesher apparently is much more configurable and gives better results.
There are some addons to facilitate export/import between Blender and instant-meshes

No, not in general.
It may be disturbing for a brush like smooth brush.
It is really something to limit to some brushes.

It would be a good default for Clay Strips, Layer, Blob, Inflate, FIll, Pinch.
For brushes with closed behavior, like Scrape and Flatten or Dam and Crease, it is probably possible to choose one brush to have option ON by default and the other one with option OFF.

Default mapping of a brush texture is view plane. That is one reason why I would not use it as default for Draw brush. And if bug with Line Stroke method can not be solved easily, that is another reason to keep this default brush with option OFF.
IMO, Clay brush would benefit of more pronounced fading. That why I would let world spacing option OFF for this one, too.

The world spacing option does not seem to have an impact on brushes using Dot method by default. So, I would let it OFF for them, too, in case, user decides to change the method to Line.

To sum-up, in most cases, I would let the World Spacing option OFF by default.
But I would enable it for almost half of default brushes.

I was concerned about this the moment I saw the discussion. I’m sure he won’t risk giving his code (which is the best in the market when it comes to auto retopo) to people who buy it, especially considering it would affect not only Blender’s side of things, but all the other platforms he is targeting.

Is there any way he can make an addon just to send to an outside executable that doesn’t need to be GPL compliant?

I have read that there are some black holes from what could be exploited, but that they could equally take it to a court.
I understand the desire of some users to have ZRemesher in Blender. But do not lie to the guy. If he is worried about GPL licensing, Blender is not the best place to do business for him.

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There’s really no problem to transfer a file or use a network socket. RizomUV works very well with Blender, even if it’s a non-GPL paid product. Especially if in future we will have faster import/export for .OBJ files, it will be non-issue. Same thing for baking with Substance, you can create a Blender addon to use a baker.exe (for example) and simply give it command line parameters and paths to files.

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That’s great to hear, thanks a lot ambi! I’ll try to point it out to the developer.

Just a reminder: I’m not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

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Hmm, right. This should be only an importer/exporter. Perhaps what I had read is about things integrated into Blender or using Blender API.

Am I the only one that thinks Instant Meshes is janky?
I mean it still gives triangles and solving it is just making it more messy

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https://twitter.com/pablodp606/status/1121030528805875713

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