Yeah, I’ve got a reputation of volatility, but this time ZB has really become history to me, as I can’t see myself justifying paying $40 a month for a relatively small number of advantages compared to Blender. Up to now I was still naively hoping that Maxon would allow perpetual license holders to pay a reasonable one-time upgrade fee per year, but instead they couldn’t even wait with the subscription shizzle until the next ZBrush upgrade.
3D-Coat keeps my sympathy though. I can see myself reinstalling it some time when I want to create models with tertiary details, like this handsome chap I made with it recently (rendered in Blender).
I hope the upcoming new brush system in Sculpt Mode will allow for easier high-polygon / tertiary detail sculpting. Then I’ll happily solely stick to Blender again.
Are they thinking about hardcoding the behavior of the modifier keys? This is scary man… and should be optional…
I very much prefer to choose which brush to use in my modifier keys, like in the sculpt dev branch…
Hmm, not sure what’s going on there…
I don’t use “Emulate 3 Button Mouse”, and I use the Alt key as subtract…
People really don’t use Alt for that?
Are they working on a new brush system? I’m only seeing plans to shuffle the settings around…
And by the way. I hope they abandon the idea of bringing nodes inside of sculpt mode… this is a recipe for disater…
Yeah, I meant the node-based brush system. I guess it’s not a new brush engine, but more of a UI / UX alteration, that will hopefully make it easier to create, save and share custom brushes. Like @thinsoldier I’m curious why you think that’s a recipe for disaster.
No, they’re not hardcoding them, they’re doing the opposite. Right now shift is always the same smooth for every brush, and ctrl is usually invert of some other per-brush function (eg. fill for Trim).
I think what they’re saying is they want to make that customizable, so you can make one brush have the stardard smooth, another with surface smooth, and another with vertex relax (and maybe one with Fairing Brush? I want to believe! ). Same for ctrl and inverting.
And no, I don’t use alt to subtract, I’m not a ZPerson. ctrl is just a better choice
edit: I realized that the brush modifier keys are actually rebindable (although hardcoded to just smooth/invert), so my whole rant about alt was pointless -_-
Nodes and the Blender community go together like gin, coconut water, and sweetened condensed milk. I don’t see why anyone wouldn’t like node based brushes.
As long as it doesn’t degrade performance even further. But I think using nodes for “easily” creating custom brushes with the settings we already have would be ok, but trying to mix the geonodes with sculpting brushes would probably just add unnecessary complexity and just slow down development in sculpt mode even further.
I may have read incorrectly (ESL is a PITA), but JosephEagar seems to think making the brush+geo nodes integration shouldn’t be more than the settings thingy as well, here’s a quote from https://blender.chat/channel/sculpt-paint-texture-module
I still think using geometry nodes would be software architecture malpractice. We’d need to significantly refactor geometry nodes.
It’s just a different use case. This is also why we can’t reuse any of the draw cache extract code btw for PBVH.
It would be the mother of all straightjackets. Good luck finding developers to ever work on the sculpt module again
Sculpt developers would be constantly frustrated by limitations of geometry nodes. But geometry node devs would also be frustrated by the extremely stringent requirements sculpt devs would constantly be imposing.
Ultimately, the only way to make this work is to make sculpting the primary use case for geometry nodes, with its existing workflows a secondary priority.
Also:
Pablo’s original idea for a brush node editor was really more about editing settings, not anything like geometry nodes. The brush engine refactor is meant to go in that direction.
@thinsoldier@Metin_Seven Imo, it’s just an unecessary extra layer of complexity, really not needed right now, and with time it will only become more complicated…
Personally I wouldn’t want to deal with nodes while sculpting…
The sculpting workflow needs to be simple and focused as much as possible, with little to no technical stuff in the mix… Perhaps that’s just me…
Is there a sculpting system out there where the brush settings are nodes?
Yeah, I totally understand that, and I would also prefer a simpler, settings based brush editor. I’m not talking about using geometry nodes, but a separate system specialized in creating sculpting brushes.
You could input pressure settings, and have them output a brush radius, strength, and color. Intermediate steps could include curves and math for better control.
Not exactly sculpting, but ArmorPaint has a node-based texture brush editor that works really well. I’d be interested to see how it would work in a sculpting system.
More information here if you scroll down to “Brushes”:
It should give you an idea of what I’d be expecting in a brush system.
In the sculpt dev branch it’s not… you can override it and use any brush…
Yet
If they make it very deep so I don’t need to touch it then it shouldn’t be a problem…
Still, I’d like to see many other things being developed first than nodes…
That’s cool, but there’s a lot of cool things in that branch that will never see the light of day ;(
it also seems like a global override, so you can’t configure different shift behavior for different brushes. Like keeping the standard laplacian smooth for all brushes, but have for example Clay Strips use surface smooth instead.
Meh, did the trial, didn’t like it. Although ZRemesher was so good, that I decided to buy Quad Remesher for Blender
Yeah, the sculpting module needs more devs to help with this kind stuff and tackle the basics…
Unfortunately, sculpting doesn’t seem to attract many devs like geo nodes…
That override feature should be in master already…
Sounds cool but a little overkill at the same time… kinda like supporting brush presets…
So your clay strips uses the surface smooth, but for some reason you need laplacian instead… to have access to it you’d need to switch to some other brush that has that… hmm, looks like a strange workflow…
I’d prefer to have a quicker way to change the deformation types on the fly, either by a modifier key or a menu, similar to the way you change the stroke type by pressing E. That way the smooth brush would always be same, no scattered settings…
Haha right… zbrush is not likeable on first date… give it a month… you won’t regret it…
But yeah, quad remesher is amazing… a must have in any 3d app (bf should buy that tech)…
I really recommend you give another chance to Zbrush, maybe look at some of Mike Pavlovich’s tutorials just to see all the tools and possible ways to solve some common sculpt “design” problems .
I’m saying that because I put off Zbrush for waaaaaaaaaaay too long in my artist career and I kinda regret it. For example, even Quad Remesher in Blender falls short of Zremesher coupled with easy to create polygroups (with masking/clip curve) or ZRetopoIt.
I just made that up as an example. Here’s a real one I’d like to have: a grab brush that has it’s shift set to topology relax. I constantly flip between Grab and Slide Relax (even tough I never use the “slide” portion), so it would be useful to combine those two. A nice bonus would be to hold alt to toggle the topology automasking. In the previous thread, I made a crude mockup of how it could look:
Ok, I have to ask because I think E is the most useless key in sculpt mode (I remapped it to switch object transfer mode): do you actually use it that often? To what stroke method do you switch? Don’t you have to go into the stroke settings anyway to configure how the stroke method will work, thus defeating the point of having a hotkey for it? The only stroke method I can think of that would work “out-of-the-box” by just switching to it, is Line.
@RaphaelBarros I already gave it a try with the 30-day trial, and I just didn’t like it. I’ve been watching the Pixologic streams for a long time (including Pavlovich), so I’m at least vaguely familiar with what ZBrush has to offer. Nothing convinces me to drop Blender, pay an absurd amount of money and force myself to learn this obtuse program.
The clunky way Quad Remesher for Blender has to use materials instead of facesets/polygroups for guides is very frustrating, but hopefully that will change once facesets are exposed to python addons
What quad remesher has guides? O.o
I mean jeah i totally knew that.
And just one note on the modes. They have more advantages than grouping the ui. They also can have different internal representations of data which can help to increase performance for special tasks.
The Mode blog post was made to explain that.
Yeah, I’ve got a reputation of volatility, but this time ZB has really become history to me, as I can’t see myself justifying paying $40 a month for a relatively small number of advantages compared to Blender. Up to now I was still naively hoping that Maxon would allow perpetual license holders to pay a reasonable one-time upgrade fee per year, but instead they couldn’t even wait with the subscription shizzle until the next ZBrush upgrade. 
I guess it’s not a new brush engine, but more of a UI / UX alteration, that will hopefully make it easier to create, save and share custom brushes. Like 
). Same for ctrl and inverting.
kinda like supporting brush presets…