The big Blender Sculpt Mode thread (Part 1)

I’d love to know that too. Maybe @scorpion81 knows more about this?

Hey Tonatiuh, thanks for updating us and asking the questions. You knew that the multires rewrite project is a large one that wouldn’t happen in a few months? So i’m curious as to why this upsets you, seems as though Pablo is just saying that this project is a big one, so you are better of using other software during this time.

“there is no one willing to work o it”

Indeed, that’s why the majority of people in this thread are excited that Pablo is willing to work on it.

It seems that what they want for now, is consistency between tools in multires, dyntopo and just the regular sculptmode (without multires modifier)They probably don’t want users wondering why this tools works here, but doesn’t work here etc. If they have decided that consistency is more important, it looks like they are willing to sacrifice performance in the short term, for the sake of getting the tools in.

This is just my interpretation, if i’m correct, i’m not sure its right one, but I guess we can wait for an official explanation.

The sculpt mode is one of the largest legacy chunk of code in Blender and with reason: probably it’s the most complicated and unpredictable system in Blender code nowadays. It’s seems that Sergey and Brecht both ran screaming from it when they dealt with the code back in the day, so i think that dealing with this is not something anyone wants to do, for free or with payment either. Nicholas Bishop’s baby turned into a big monster that bringed us with quite the beauty art, but also carried quite a bag of pains.

We should be grateful that Pablo is willing to deal with the sculpt code “as is” and bring us better tools on top of a bugged system, so we can have these tools as soon as possible.

A full rewrite will require not only funds, but found somebody willing to scrap all of the old code and rewrite all of it. Considering the “everything nodes” project is around the corner and there will be quite some changes in the modifier system and animation system, the smart thing to do is to wait for these to end and then try to fix the sculpt mode.

Maybe not as soon as most people here wanted, but there’s exciting times ahead, despite all of the bumps.

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Is there a devtalk forum for sculpt mode suggestions/papercuts?

Was just wondering what people using Zbrush in production think, what the main features are holding them back to from using Blender?

For me it’s mainly a quick and effective use of polygroups, layers and blending in morph targets (constrained to axis if needed). UV Master, Zremesh, fast map baking is also something that I use quite frequently.

I know that many things like these is something Blender is capable of as it is, and Pablo was referring to a lot of these features as being mainly a UI thing to make them more streamlined. Was just curious - what would it take for those of you using zbrush for their daily jobs to switch to Blender for sculpting? Also, if there’s a forum on devtalk for suggestions? Not sure if Pablo is open for this type of conversation or if he mainly want’s to do his own thing.

Nevertheless, I like the improvements so far.

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Zbrush main strengths upon Blender :

Multiresolution editing that works
Zremesher
Decimation master

Blender main strengths upon Zbrush :
real 3d environment with background images, cameras and lights.
Cycles and EEVEE rendering

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Performance.

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Performance is probably the biggest one. Zbrush has lots of bells and whistles that make sculpting really enjoyable but when it comes down to it, being able to handle 10’s of millions of polys is it’s biggest draw. Also, I’m not working in production but I’ve heard from others that sculpt layers are essential for art direction and flexibility in a commercial pipeline.

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Second that. Haven’t used Zbrush for a while, but when I did I was using my Toshiba Satellite with integrated gpu. Could go to about 6mil poly without any major problems…

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Yes, layers and being to morph parts of the mesh back and forth between them is essential. It’s very fast and easy in zbrush, good luck trying the same with shape keys and vertex groups on a 20 million poly model.

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that’s up to the devs to decide when, just like it happened with the UI’s papercuts.
i assume they don’t need much user feedback until the branch is merged, the master is closed only for necessary fixes, so i predict at least a couple weeks before it’s re-opened even though more work needs to be done under the hood, it’s true that zbrush is pretty powerful and basically the sculpting software that everyone dream to have all of it’s features…etc but personally i would prefer if we can come up with new ideas that could be even better, it’s not impossible just needs hard work like what pixologic is doing.

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Ye, well, fingers crossed.

I don’t even need a fraction of the features if that means I don’t have to jump back and forth between apps - as long as I don’t have to trade efficiency for it.

As for new features, I think if texture painting was a bit better (dare I say half as good as substance?) with painting across udims, I think that’d push many people over the edge and get 'em hooked.

He asked for feedback from z-users in his post in artstation some time ago:
https://www.artstation.com/pablodp606/blog/1vEn/new-blender-sculpt-mode-introduction

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Thanks! Completely missed that. It’s so hard to know what to keep an eye on with blender… devtalk, rightclickselect, twitter, artstation… :slight_smile:

To my experience, Blender’s Decimate modifier yields quite comparable results to Decimation Master. The Decimate modifier just needs vertex paint support.

What I’m still really missing in Blender Sculpt Mode is:

  • Topological brushing (but maybe this is already present in the latest Sculpt Mode Features builds?)
  • Better smoothing algorithms that preserve volume.
  • General smoothing functions with the same volume preservation, like Deformation ➔ Polish, Relax and Smooth.
  • An option in Dyntopo to have smoothing (Shift + brushing or when the Smooth tool is activated) also affect topology.
  • A hotkey to easily reapply the last brush stroke (like the ‘1’ key in ZBrush).
  • Polygroups, including polygroup tools such as Polish By Groups, Group By Normals, Auto Groups, Merge Similar Groups, etc…
  • Fast masking, slicing, clipping and trimming using easy on-screen gizmos (line, circle, ellipse, rectangle, etc.)
  • ZRemesher (but QuadRemesher will soon be available for Blender)
  • Better OpenVDB or other voxel remesh algorithms implementation (Dynamesh is still better than the current OpenVDB remesh functions in Blender)
  • A Remesh By Union function, removing parts of a sculpt that intersect.
  • InsertMesh functions, preferably working like the 3ds Max Autogrid option, so you can add any Blender mesh on the surface normals of a mesh.
  • Easy extraction of a masked area to a new mesh with smoothed edges, like the ZBrush Extract function.
  • Laplacian deformation inside Sculpt Mode, like a blend of rigging and the grab brush. For example: you mask everything but an arm, and can deform the arm with Laplacian volume and shape preservation. See this video for an example.

Just my two cents. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Reading all the comments here about what blender lacks currently regarding sculpting (including the many awesome tools and perfomance issues while operating on high density meshes) it makes me wonder if it wouldn´t be a interesting idea to have a Blender version which is solely and exclusively dedicated to sculting? Maybe in this way it would be possible to remove the chunk of old and complicated code which makes Blender behave unpredictable while sculpting?
I thought of something like kind of a Blender Lite Version (removing all the “unnecessary” tools which primarly aren´t any relevant to sculpting) and implementing tools which would be beneficial for sculpting. Maybe in this way making it more lightweight it would also drastically boost the perfomance and thus easy to deal with high densed meshes? However, I don´t know if the Blender devs would fancy such an idea.

Now I am no dev so I can only imagine how incredibly difficult and time consuming it is to code and therefore I´m sure it´s more a naive and illusional idea of mine. Despite all that…I am immensively happy and grateful for the work which Pablo Dobarro contributes to make sculpting more of a joy and I also highly value the work of other devs which work to make Blender even better. So…just my two cents here

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You can paint weights on a mesh and vary mesh decimation with Decimate modifier.
But setup this and applying modifier and switching between modes, each time you need to decimate a dyntopo mesh is an obstacle to use of that.
It is complete opposite of why dyntopo is fun.
And problem about a Simplify brush is that is too brutal there is no adaptation of decimation to brush radius.
About modifying topology, that is very time consuming to make a smooth transition between 2 parts of a dyntopo mesh using distant resolutions.

I would love to have a kind of Decimate brush. I don’t know if Pablo can do what others did not succeed to achieve. But result would be terrific.
A smooth brush that modifies resolution would encounter same problematic to make smooth transitions between distant resolutions.And the adaptation of margin of this transition to normals, resolution and brush radius is probably very very complex.
Easy to ask for but hard to accomplish.

A partly similar issue. A tool that is time consuming to setup as several modifiers.
That would be so much more fun as an active tool with a gizmo.

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I think we have to find a way to communicate best with Pablo, Maybe some one can create a topic in devtalk And call him? Also some of you that are more tecnical can coment in the paches he is making? I see the google summer of code threats in devtalk and I think we need something like that.

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https://bartoszstyperek.wordpress.com/2018/06/19/volume-preserving-smoothing-for-blender/

Hes got a Volume Smoother, I use it extremely often.

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Nice. Heard of it before, but now might be the time to buy it.

https://developer.blender.org/D5367

Basically this was the issue, the falloffs were hard coded and not even correct but Pablo is already on it

Most of the issues with the brushes are the falloffs being hard coded actually, but I guess that will change