Damn…
Hey, he has got a paypal! That’s good =)
Why doesn’t he have Internet? Didn’t he have it before or was he using Internet at the university he was studying? Or Castro brothers are too tough on people who leave the country and then come back? 
The reserve ava ilable at the exchanger is a quite important indicator as well.
UC is dead because its deveoper started working for a company responsible for 3D Coat (as far as I’m concerned). In other words he doesn’t have time for volunteer work anymore.
I’m not sure
apparently he is back in Cuba and he is not working on 3DCoat anymore
Probably so. He left 3dcoat UnlimitedClay project in an unworkable stage. More or less.
Or Castro brothers are too tough on people who leave the country and then come back?
I don’t believe it. Impossible.
So, what has really happened?
UnlimitedClay tools are miles behind the behavior of the few simple, yet wonderful Sculptris tools.
As far as I’m concerned, Sculptris project is dead under pixologic.
This has stopped for instance. http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?96408-Playing-with-polygons-topology
Pity, as DrPetter is a fine developer, yet a skilled 3d artist. He knows what behavior of the tools we need, this is his secret.
And now, see how an excellent app Zbrush has become. Indeed, if you really interested in digital clay, your best option is to buy zbrush. What else?
Though, IMO, in blender sculpting mode, we find a better behavior of tools and a better UI than in 3dcoat for instance. But it’s not enough for an artist, a 3d sculptor. For someone who tries to study the masters of art, I mean.
Why not??? the tool it’s gonna make the job for you???
master??? zbrush brush doesn’t have many of those news features 6 years ago either .
and they did good work .
And you came to tell us that is not enough to study the masters of art
I think you are very lost
@michalis: Sculptris evolved into Dynamesh in ZBrush. Afaik now Sculptris serves as a demo of what can be done with Dynamesh in ZBrush but better. From the videos I saw it looked like LiveClay in 3DCoat was in a good shape, just needed to be optimized. Maybe he create a frameworks and all that is needed for the tool and someone else will optimize it and polish it… Don’t know what happened there.
http://farsthary.wordpress.com/2012/01/08/endless-polygons/ << I wouldn’t call that unusable state
@motorsep
I’m a 3dc user, some time now, … and a little disappointed. They had voxels, they mixed UnlimitedClay with it.
A little confused… Anyway. Behavior of tools in 3dc isn’t that great. UnlimiteClay’s tools are even worse. Sculptris and zbrush are miles ahead on this.
Something better than 3dc is coming from dynamic topology Branch, I believe so.
@Alekzsander,
Please, You say I’m lost, Am I? Do some search first before offending me. Try blendernation or finished projects topic for instance.
Yeah, I tried 3dc and while people say ZBrush has ugly GUI, I don’t thing 3dc has any better. I like voxels though. You can bring is multimillion poly mesh and voxelize it, then use boolean to merge these voxel shapes and make it back into a mesh.
Sculpt tool in Blender is pretty good, but there is no way to predict how sculpt tools will work with scaled mesh. On big meshes even with pressure set to max, I can’t get regular strokes, they are faint. On small meshes stroked are extremely pronounced with pressure set to 0.02. And i am talking about using tablet.
@motorsep
Indeed, 3dcoat voxels mode is powerful. Excellent booleans, direct spontaneous cuts, all this stuff an artist likes to have.
That’s why I bought it, some years ago. It was a great assist to zbrush. Now things have changed. Voxels are still the appropriate tool for terrains, booleans, even some architectural elements. 3DC has some advanced retopo tools. For some weird reason, I prefer blender for this job. OK, a bit out of topic, sorry.
But, there’s a little hidden reason for why they mixed Unlimited Clay with voxels. 3DC team tried to make the app a bit lighter for less advanced computers. Yes, 3dc becomes very heavy when >10M voxels are in use. Unfortunately it still remains heavy after LC-UC implementation.
IMO, under LC-UC or similar dynamic tessellation methods, its very difficult to construct tools with nice smooth behavior.
Sculptris developer did it beautifully. I hope we’ll see great tools in blender as well.
Michalis & others with experience in other sculpting programs: can you describe further what traits you think I should aim for with dynamic-topology sculpting?
Some examples:
Is it better to wait until the end of a stroke to update topology, or do you prefer this during the stroke too?
Do you care about the tessellation? I.e. if using dynamic topology tessellates the entire model into triangles, is it a problem?
Should surface relaxation (smoothing) happen during the stroke? After? Not at all?
Do you care about having control over local mesh density vs. global mesh density?
What’s the minimum number of mesh faces you need for the tool to be considered useful to you?
What extra tools should a topology-sculpting tool have outside of the regular sculpt brushes?
And anything else you can think of…
There are a lot of different things we can try with dynamic-topology sculpting to make it better for artists, so it would help if I had more information to narrow the possibilities down.
Some examples:
Is it better to wait until the end of a stroke to update topology, or do you prefer this during the stroke too?
Can we have an option to toggle either one? Can they be mixed?
Do you care about the tessellation? I.e. if using dynamic topology tessellates the entire model into triangles, is it a problem?
I will resurface the model later, Tesselation is great!
Should surface relaxation (smoothing) happen during the stroke? After? Not at all?
Something we can toggle. Which one is more efficient? Can we do a mix of the two?
Do you care about having control over local mesh density vs. global mesh density?
The mesh should be able to be become infinitely dense locally. For me, I reduce the poly counts in low detail areas.
What’s the minimum number of mesh faces you need for the tool to be considered useful to you?
If I could get 4 million mesh faces, I’d be able to get a very heavily detailed model.
What extra tools should a topology-sculpting tool have outside of the regular sculpt brushes?
Booleans, decimator brush, auto topo, recalculate mesh structure, make manifold
And anything else you can think of…
Honestly, I feel that you are like Santa Clause–asking our opinion is awesome. Thank you for all the hard work you’ve done! Where can I donate?
Btw, I am a UI/UX designer professionally. So, anything I can do to help.
My opinions:
Is it better to wait until the end of a stroke to update topology, or do you prefer this during the stroke too?
No, I think it’s worthless to sculpt detail especially unless you can see the changes to the mesh as you are doing your stroke.
Do you care about the tessellation? I.e. if using dynamic topology tessellates the entire model into triangles, is it a problem?
I don’t quite understand the question. If you’re asking if tessellation should only be done locally, than absolutely. There no reason to increase the poly count on the opposite side of the mesh if I only need to add detail to one small area. Obviously meshes will need to be triangulated for this to work properly, but meshes should be retopo’d after sculpting anyway.
Should surface relaxation (smoothing) happen during the stroke? After? Not at all?
Depends on the brush. For something like a snake hook brush, absolutely. You can see a great example of how it should be done with Farsthary’s final contributions to 3DCoat.
Do you care about having control over local mesh density vs. global mesh density?
Again, yes. When adding small details, it doesn’t make sense to have to add geometry to the entire mesh. The goal should be to keep the poly count as small as possible while retaining detailed areas so that you don’t quickly shoot up to unsculptable poly counts.
What’s the minimum number of mesh faces you need for the tool to be considered useful to you?
Other people are saying 3-5 million, but in an ideal world I’d be able to work on 12 million+ like I can in ZBrush (even more in HD mode).
What extra tools should a topology-sculpting tool have outside of the regular sculpt brushes?
Nice boolean operations using a special set of brushes would be nice, as well as an improved remesh (with the ability to set a default octree resolution) that is able to remesh multiple objects into one object without polys inside of the mesh where the objects intersect.
And anything else you can think of…
The ability to punch holes through meshes during sculpting would be nice, but isn’t vital. Improved polish and trim brushes would make hard surface sculpting less painful within Blender as well. I dream of having a transpose tool, but I realize that I’m getting to the point of basically describing ZBrush right now =P
It’s nice to have a developer actively ask for suggestions!
most things said ;
immediate seeing what’s happening
non automatic function for surface relaxation
global density reduce function and local reduce brush
4 million triangles or even more 
aim high and keep getting back as much as needed.
additional stuff;
an easier Matcap integration would be great…
(image usage like you have seen them in the other famous dynamic tessellation program)
a little Matcap library would be helpful.
a “rig” option with a pose libary which allows the user to have a rest pose to fall back again if changes are needed
it would be nice to have for such a rig option an activated symmetry.
“rig” option - masking an area in sculpt mode which will have a bone after finishing.
directly in sculpt mode, additional with one simple hotkey…;
wireframe mode to toggle on and of
pivot changing option
a copy and paste option
a cut and merge option
the UI could be a bit more user friendly , it would be cool if the brushes where on the left or on the bottom without the need to click and search for it.
more importantly ; one button hotkey for Pinch or the crease button
one separate hotkey for additional settings.( to collect for example the size button (F) with other options like the density and strength and of course other settings.
if instant feedback is not resources hungry I’d definetely prefer it
Do you care about the tessellation? I.e. if using dynamic topology tessellates the entire model into triangles, is it a problem?
no problem here if it speeds up the process
Should surface relaxation (smoothing) happen during the stroke? After? Not at all?
I see here room for a dedicated relaxing brush or at least option to toggle it on/off
Do you care about having control over local mesh density vs. global mesh density?
this is THE feature for me 
it should be the top priority for the entire dynamic/unlimited/infinite mesh paradigm. Been able to add finest details to some zones while keeping the polycount relatively low on other areas is the magic here!
What’s the minimum number of mesh faces you need for the tool to be considered useful to you?
if previous point could be realized 4 millions is really good
What extra tools should a topology-sculpting tool have outside of the regular sculpt brushes?
a tool for reducing number of tris in that area
Thank you so much Nicholas for asking here! 
I see great progress here. Pity the performance is still unacceptable for any serious work.
Edit: I mean Blender’s sculpting mode overall
I’m only used to Sculptris and Blender regarding sculpting
Is it better to wait until the end of a stroke to update topology, or do you prefer this during the stroke too?
I think having the topology reacting during the stroke is definitively better, having a delay would just make sculpting “feel” wrong for the artist. action->reaction is making sculpting feels more natural in my opinion instead of action -> delay -> reaction.
Do you care about the tessellation? I.e. if using dynamic topology tessellates the entire model into triangles, is it a problem?
Personnally during my sculpris session i have absolutely no problem with tessellation, there are people that created masterpiece full of triangles in various Sculptris gallery.
the only reason i use quads sculpting in Blender it’s because the multires method only works with quad.
If you need the triangulated sculpt to become a realtively low poly model asset full of quads for game engines or animated movies, it’s where retopo is helping anyways, so there’s no problem with tesselated surfaces when sculpting.
Should surface relaxation (smoothing) happen during the stroke? After? Not at all?
Same answer as with sculpting brush stroke, having a direct reaction to your stroke as you do it feels more natural to me.
Do you care about having control over local mesh density vs. global mesh density?
Yes, i think that’s actually very important : being able to sculpt very high details in some part of the model by having the mesh density increasing/decreasing locally so you don’t end with non sculpted areas that need no details being subdivided to hundred of thousand faces that serves no purpose other than just giving performance problems.
What’s the minimum number of mesh faces you need for the tool to be considered useful to you?
for dynamic tesselation, what sculptris teached me is that the “face only where needed” (local mesh density) method allows the artist to “need” mesh with easily 4 times less faces to obtain the same kind of level of detail in the sculpt.
By example for sculpting a bust that need 1 million of multiresolution faces for a specifc kind of detail in Blender multires method, in Sculptris i would need no more than 250k faces (especially using the Reduce brush to remove uneeded faces in some area)
So in the end i don’t really know how much is really needed, being very dependant on what you sculpt, all i know is that for a same detail, you should need less faces overall with a “faces only where needed” than with a “multires subdivide the entire model” method
What extra tools should a topology-sculpting tool have outside of the regular sculpt brushes?
A reduce/increase mesh density brush (similarly to the Reduce brush of Sculptris) would surely be welcomed for sculpting with a dynamic tesselation method to help optimise the sculpt.
for dynamic tesselation, what sculptris teached me is that the “face only where needed” (local mesh density) method allows the artist to “need” mesh with easily 4 times less faces to obtain the same kind of level of detail in the sculpt.
Depends, sometimes a 1/10 is possible. But in most cases, like when mixing pores and wrinkles on a face, you need evenly subdivided meshes. You can’t escape from the nature of things, sculpting apps are basically displacers. You may think that you can achieve this using texture painting methods. Well, gravity asks to smooth wrinkles on the upper side. A well known trick. And here comes zbrush, you can’t beat it easily.
Being a beta tester of latest sculptris build, actually a fun of sculptris, I still am, I prefer the dynamesh of zbrush. BTW, if someone needs a dynamically tessellated mesh, like sculptris, he can still use the superior decimation master addon of zb and have even better results. The power of zb, its excellent performance on huge >15M meshes, running on low end machines. Even under wine. LOL
Anyway, sculptris and zb provide excellent, well tempered brushes, the most important for an artist.
Dr Petter, the developer of sculptris, indeed, how did he make such a wonderful tool?
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?92849-DrPetter-s-sketches
To be an artist-developer, you have to be a little artist too.
Thank you all for your input.
The general response to the question about updating topology at end-of-stroke seems to be that it’s better to do it during the stroke. On the other hand, michalis mentions Dynamesh, which (if I understand it correctly, I haven’t used it) requires a manual remeshing step? So essentially it is not updating topology during the stroke, or even after every stroke.
The issue with updating topology during the stroke isn’t so much about performance. The update has to happen somewhere, and in fact it’s probably better to amortize the cost over the course of the stroke rather than lumping it all at the end. A more important issue though is the brush behavior. If the surface is being subdivided/collapsed around the brush during the stroke, there’s no “original” surface to latch on to. This causes brushes to behave as though the “Accumulate” brush option was on, which is generally not what you want.
I think I can work around that conflict, although of course there’s a trade-off (increased memory usage, possibly slight speed loss too.)
There are some special cases: for the snake hook brush, I think it always makes sense to update the topology during the stroke. For the grab brush, I think it’s the opposite; topology updates don’t make sense in the context of grabbing a static group of vertices.
Looks like a strong consensus that tessellating the entire mesh into triangles is OK.
Similarly, there’s a consensus that surface smoothing should be toggle-able. We already toggle-able brush smoothing of course, but it might be tweaked for dyntopo to give better shape preservation. Still thinking about that one.
Most people want local control of density. Michalis is the exception – dynamesh (still assuming I understand it correctly) gives the mesh an even, global density. For those that think local density is better, how would you see this behaving? A per-brush detail size? Related to the brush size? General sculpt option common to all brushes?
The question of minimum number of workable faces got quite different answers. I know, everyone wants “as many as possible”, but that kinda goes without saying. Note that no matter what, dynamic topology sculpting will be less efficient than regular sculpting (for equivalent face counts.) It will take more memory, and it will use more CPU cycles to do all that subdividing and collapsing. No magic ponies here! 
For extra tools, density increase/decrease seems common. Better hard-surface tools (I’ve recently experimented with an “erase” brush that cuts away from the silhouette of the mesh.) General operations like make-manifold and booleans probably belong in the realm of global operators rather than brushes.
SeanJM asked about donating: I have a Paypal donation account. (Was using WePay, but had issues there.) Your support is appreciated.
Thenewone: many of those suggestions are not related to dynamic topology. I’d rather not turn this into a general feature-request thread, we all know how those get. Some of what you ask for already exists though: material matcap is I think already possible (although it requires GLSL, which is not yet accelerated in sculpt mode.) The pinch brush has a hotkey §, crease too (shift+C).
|MM|: there’s not enough info there to do anything useful with it. If the performance is not good enough for you, be specific about what fails. Are you using multires? With a good base mesh? VBO enabled? Have a good graphics card and enough memory? There are so many aspects to performance, fixing issues on the programming side requires a better understanding than “it’s slow”.
michalis was the only one to talk about dynamesh, but I think it’s worth taking a step back and asking which approach is better? Dynamesh I think is essentially doing what the remesh modifier does, except faster, with cleaner topology, and optionally excluding parts of the mesh. (Someone please correct me if I misunderstand.) This is quite a different approach to the one I’ve been taking, where topology is dynamically updated via edge operations (splits and collapses.) It might well be that remeshing is a better approach though, so I’m interested to hear what people think about it.
michalis also makes a good point that a graphics developer is ideally an artist too. I did my fair share of art studio in college, but I focused almost entirely on traditional 2D art. Most of my experience with 3D graphics is from the developer perspective rather than the artist perspective. I’d love to sit down with a professional digital sculptor to watch them use Blender’s sculpting tools and discuss issues with them. Unfortunately I don’t have any such sculptors handy, so we’ll just have to stick with text-based forums messages for now
Thanks again to everyone for your feedback.