The big Blender Sculpt Mode thread (Part 1)

Any idea for such a tool, as the one in the video below, for Blender?

3 Likes

Whatever happened to Ptex? No new tech update about it in years. It wasn’t widely adopted by the 3d industry. Everyone is still using uvs which I would admit is flexible.

EDIT: Hmm…

Seems they released some tools for Ptex here that helps ptex transfer to another mesh and other tools:

1 Like

It is a shame that PTex was canned, because who would not want to just paint a model without having to deal with UVMaps? Unfortunately, there were a few issues that ensured any implementation would not be near as straightforward as it sounds.

The initial implementation for example did not work well with multithreaded rendering, and then you had the fact that it was somewhat dependent on model topology in terms of how many texels you get per inch. It is possible these problems could’ve been solved eventually, but Hollywood is stubborn and has a reputation of not even giving new tech. and new workflow concepts a chance unless it can either slot into legacy pipelines or if it would revolutionize how films look (ie. PBR).

Even on this forum, you have industry pros having to be educated as to why they would want to use a 3D cursor instead of moving a newly inserted model a few thousand units from the scene origin to where it is supposed to be, innovation in many cases is just frowned upon.

5 Likes

It seems 3D Coat once again is ground breaking thing with this new vertex texturing.

Despite lacking some precision, the texturing is way better than simple vertex painting. Could that become some new alternative standard on 3D engines or real time renderers ?

Simplified workflow, sculpt, paint directly on sculpt and bake normal map and textures.
Will have to test that.

I would say better buy 3D Coat when it somes to using voxel sculpting , specially about latest performance updates.

3 Likes

If anyone’s interest in 3D Coat has been stimulated by the above posts, here’s a thread about using 3D Coat as a companion to Blender.

You have a point but nowadays polycount isn’t necessarily a hurdle anymore. I guess Ptex was way ahead of its time especially as hardware has become more readily available and affordable now (except for gpus atm due to this crypto stuff) which I think is why Ptex might rekindle peoples interest especially with nanite being a thing.

From the link I posted, it was stated multithreaded rendering didn’t work well with other renderers but renderman does the job 6.7x faster because its designed to work with ptex so I don’t think Cycles would work well with Ptex unless its tailored to do so.

That post was made in 2014. Thats 8 yrs ago. Surely Ptex is even more improved than before. There are probably better ptex tools now.

You can even paint the mesh flattened with Ptex. Personally, I wouldn’t mind giving Ptex a spin if Cycles supported it and its as fast as renderman. My days of tiling textures and uvmaps would be over.

I agree about the industry sticking to what you know thing and if people were more open minded especially in the films industry, I think Ptex would be a workflow changer by now and I applaud disney for sticking to it because it seems to do the job since polycount isn’t such a big deal anymore.

Innovation should be the norm and encouraged.

For once in a long time I had an opportunity to do a little user testing in Blender. Tried out the new painting system some more, like painting with actual UV texture maps. First impressions so far are pretty good. It’s very fast, especially compared to the old system, which is still in Texture Paint Mode for quick comparison. Bodes well for the future of texture painting. :partying_face:

That said, I found a bunch of bugs involving colour management, including but not limited to: undoing brush strokes not working in Sculpt Mode with UV textures, swapping primary/secondary colours not working as it should in Sculpt Mode when making a shortcut key, alt colour picking not working in Sculpt Mode when making a keybind for it (works in the Image Editor and Texture Paint Mode), and colour swatches not syncing between Sculpt Mode and the Image Editor.

I also wish it was easier to make vertex/texture layers in the new system. I know that it’s possible using nodes, but it should just automatically make them out of the box. I hope that once Blender gets a proper layers system that it will be able to sync layers with the current node system. Would make for a pretty powerful workflow.

Finally, I hope that some more work will be done with the UI regarding colour and brush management. All the settings for the brushes are just being piled up with no way to move or separate them to organise the settings into new panels. Imagine if a program like Photoshop put all brushes, brush settings, symmetry, blend modes, and even the colour wheel into a single panel. It would be chaos, but that is what Blender is doing right now.

I can’t even move the colour wheel to the top of that pile. :frowning:

4 Likes

and how about perfomance in blender sculpt? , there is any new?

I did bring up layers before on devtalk (which included the notion that avoiding such has been a thing exclusive to Blender), and the devs. did in fact mention that it is one of the things they are looking at.

I do hope they have it as a priority, especially since a lot of nodes have a dynamic socket structure now (so the list of outputs for image nodes can increase and decrease as needed). The performance work and Eevee Next will also remove slowness as an excuse to not implement the layer system (since the system should be able to handle it well).

2 Likes

There is an addon that seems to do an excellent job of automatically creating nodes behind the scenes when you add a new painting layer. For the life of my I can’t understand why the core devs don’t just grab proven code or at least proven ideas from the addon community.

1 Like

Agreed. I still don’t understand why the Node Wrangler is still an add-on when they have put in so much time and effort into nodifying everything inside of Blender for the last two years. In what universe would you not want to be able to ctrl+shift+L click to preview the nodes in the viewport? Just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Same could be said about LoopTools and F2. Heck, I recently read the notes of the guy working on the new Retopology Mode, and he had to fix the add-on to work in it because he like most people realise that it is basically a mandatory add-on at this point.

5 Likes

Even Cycles is an add-on. :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like

Integrating Node Wrangler into Blender itself would not magically make its features appear in all node based editors.

Um, okay? What part is magical about developing the features to work in all node based editors? The whole point is that developing the add-on ideas into becoming a part of the core of Blender is a good idea. There will always be work involved in implementing them, but they are at least proven ideas that people use on a daily basis, so it would not be a waste of resources.

It would though. It takes away dev time from the Geometry Nodes developers. It’s 100% new code they have to write to support everything Node Wrangler does.

It would be great for Node Wrangler features to be “standard” but it’s not critical nor even all that important right now. There are bigger fish to fry. Your time would be better spent getting the Node Wrangler developer or your own developer to add support for the editor(s) you want it to work in.

Most of us don’t want “everything”. We want the 20% or 10% or 0.5% that we truly RELY on thousands of times per day.

nor even all that important right now. There are bigger fish to fry.

I still think Blender isn’t scratching the surface when it comes to making the massive noob community happy enough to donate more money. Making important areas easier to use without having to go through extra steps to make them user friendly is something that will always pay for itself. I have encountered many artistically gifted people turned off from Blender by: having to constantly turn on addons for 1 feature used in a tutorial they were following, the clutter of the sidebar tabs, the inability to put rounded caps on the end of curves, and most importantly the inability to use the built-in HDRIs for their final render.

I have tried to introduce a few graphic designers to 3D by teaching them Blender and in the end most of them decided to buy/rent Cinema4D. With just a few improvements in areas that rub beginners the wrong way I could have maybe turned about 10 people into bronze or silver level monthly donors. Some of them already spend MUCH MORE per month on apps they rarely use, both through their employer and personally. If I could convince them to make the time to audit their adobe and other expenses I might have even been able to convert a couple into Gold donors or at least convince them to make individual donations over $100 once or twice a year.

6 Likes

Quality of life matters… :wink:

6 Likes

Indeed. Just for anecdotal evidence, when I was showing off the viewport renderer in Blender for a bunch of classmates the other day, they were pretty impressed by how simple it was to get good PBR viewport rendering in the matter of a couple of button presses compared to Maya.

The Blender quality of life improvements that have been done since 2.80 and onward are making a difference in what software people are picking up. My current game development school even teaches Blender instead of Maya to the level designer students because Maya is too costly and that they have started to realise the power of Blender for game development. Bear in mind that this is one of the biggest schools for learning game development in all of Sweden with ties to companies like Dice and other big shot companies in the Stockholm area, so it’s a big deal.

Heck, since I am the only Blender expert in my year I have even taught other students and teachers how to use Blender. Imagine how happy they were when I showed them the Industry Compatible Keymap with W, E, and R for transforming objects. :stuck_out_tongue:

6 Likes

[ Puts on Blender Artists moderator uniform :man_police_officer: ]

OK guys, let’s get back on topic. Any interesting news regarding Sculpt Mode? :slightly_smiling_face:

6 Likes

Lol :joy::joy::joy::joy:

3 Likes