The big Blender Sculpt Mode thread (Part 1)

You’ve become a master developer, man :sunglasses:
Now you can go after those guys at BF!

The big thing is that attributes like uvs and sculpt colors are now interpolated properly. There’s also a bunch of stuff for fine tuning dyntopo settings per brush, so you can for example turn on dyntopo for smooth brush (and more importantly shift-smooth) if you want. Oh and yesterday I made undo quite a bit faster.

For other features, there’s a new “curvature” topology rake mode to automatically follow mesh curvature flow lines. I also coded a sculpt colors version of Pablo’s face set boundary smoothing (to makes hard lines between different regions of colors by squishing vertices, useful for stylized stuff).

Btw, if there are any sculptors who happen to be UX designers we’d really appreciate some help on cleaning up the mess we’ve made with the UI. I’ve added a bunch of stuff myself to the disaster that is the workplace buttons, e.g.:

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And this wonderfully confusing panel:

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I believe the idea is to put some settings inside a proper brush management UI, but we’ve had trouble attracting UX designers. Please help! Sadly, despite being both an artist and an engineer I absolutely suck at UX design (did you know I designed the knife tool all by myself? Including such wonderful features as right click cancel and being purely modal! I’m so happy someone is proposing to rewrite it for GSoC).

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I propose to introduce right-clicking to select. Daring, innovative, rebellious.

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Nice to see developer in this thread. Do you think its possible to mix quads and triangles in dyntopo mode?

@edit, ive made simple example how it might work. Red area would be created after brush stroke and surrounding green area would still be triangulated dyntopo. This kind of thing would improve massively sculpting performance, cause those sharp cuts would require a lot less geometry to get nice shading.

I’ve actually played a lot with this in research code. What works best is to try and produce quads while keeping triangles. This is what the new curvature topology rake mode is for. It’s still not perfect though, I haven’t quite solved hard edges yet.

Note that I’m talking about when dyntopo changes topology. I am planning to add support for quads/ngons to dyntopo in general and just have it triangulate faces when needed.

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UI-wise I think it’s worth using the preset system over a button for “use defaults” but maybe that’s just something you have there for convenient development ? In any case Dyntopo with attribute interpolation is fantastic. That could work with custom geonodes attributes ?

Btw if you don’t mind me asking Joe why is your branch called multires ? it seems to be all related to dyntopo right ?

We’re planning to use the preset system, yes, this UI is just a stopgap. On attributes, dyntopo currently handles vertex, face corner and face attributes but not edge (though it does try to preserve edge seams).

As for the name, what happened is I made a branch for rewriting DynTopo, (temp_trimesh or something) and a branch to fix problems with edit mode interpolation of multires. After a few weeks of coding and consultation with other devs I decided a full rewrite wasn’t needed after all. Since maintaining two branches at once can be a lot of work I decided to use just one.

To maintain a branch you have to regularly pull in commits from master, which tends to trigger a full recompile of all source files. That in turns takes a lot of time. The build files themselves also take a lot of space–7.5 gigs in my case, which can be a pain.

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yep not only confusing but also scared of the new settings LOL, we will need a good in depth tutorial explaining all this and the uses in example sculpts when all that is done…
also for when you think this will be ready for 2.93 or for 3.0 perhaps?

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Wow, mixing triangles and quads to support geometry sounds pretty great. i suspect there is no general solution, so just any kind of improvement over “always triangles” mode is cool :slight_smile:

Would be great to have “triangulated quads only” mode, where triangles are only happens across quad diagonals in proper direction. Dynotopo could just turn triangulation in direction aligned to brush movement, without additional vertex mess. So it will be just quads “creased” across proper diagonal

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Speaking of quads in Dyntopo, I wonder if it would be possible to have hyper-localized remeshing that will execute during the sculpt process (so as to skip the retopo step completely and go straight to utilizing the highly optimized multires that is also being developed)? Add in the sculpt vertex colors and artists will be able to greatly speed up the process of going from cube or sphere to an animation-ready final asset.

Though that would be future work after the initial version of the new Dyntopo is in master (as feature creep will only delay what is a very important project).

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What I really can’t stand is all that params there giving me headaches. That’s too technical. I really don’t want to know about “spacing” or “projection”. What I want is a jpeg with a brush that show what it does. For instance. Let’s start from the usual sphere. I want a brush which can draw a flat tunnel with 90 degrees walls. The “straight walls brush”. If you actually can create this, it really doesn’t matter what you do with all parameters, you can hide them in an “advanced” data structure and let them be mastered by those who create brushes…
As an artist, I shouldn’t know about lots of technicalities… I just want to take my pen and draw…

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Does anyone know what Pablo is talking about at 47:16 regarding Sculpt Vertex Colors? Has there been any development on it, because it seemed to me like it was in limbo since last year.

Thanks for the info, Joe. That’s great news and great to see a dev being part of the discussion here.

Looking forward to it. Multires performance has been really great.

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He probably had informal discussions with Pablo Dobarro.
Nothing new was documented.
Pablo’s Today’s Report is mentioning “work on more technical/roadmap documentation” for this week.
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/User:Pablodp606/Reports/2021#May_10_-_May_14

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well thats the downside of being 3d artist, or 3d sculptor, you need to know the techniques and technicalities of the tools, software, and addons, to achieve the results you want in a digital medium, remember this is not real life clay sculpting, instead digital polygon sculpting…

There are plans to simplify this, yes.

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IIRC, I think the multires stuff in the official release builds was done by. . .Sergey I think? My stuff has to do with changing topology in edit mode and isn’t in master yet.

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I hope in future acquiring normal map from hi res sculpt to low res should be much easier too with few clicks as possible. Realtime(game) engines are growing trend and this is very important part of that process.

Multires performance notes with Dfelinto
https://developer.blender.org/T88381

It seems like performance in sculpt may become a priority soon for the BF (which continues the increasing push toward performance seen in the last few months).

This is only a good thing, as I would rather not get a new PC now if Blender development allows me to stretch out my current one (which is especially important with the shortages and accompanying price spikes).

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Espero que sea pronto amigo

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