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[RnDr FOX]

Yea here is another one of those requests so steve I can see this at the bottom of your list but i might as well put it out there.
How about a sculpting tool

[Steve]

How would it work?

[RnDr FOX]

Well I asked the guys at animanon what DAZ studios was and they told me about hexagon so I googled it and found........sculpting!!!! 

http://www.daz3d.com/i/software/hexagon?_m=d

now howitzer bought this program and told us that it was amazing

http://www.3d-coat.com/index.html

yea this is a little advance(well I think so) so I don't really expect it anytime soon but I figured I might as well pitch the idea out there

Thanks Steve

[Suppastar]

&feature=related

This is an example of sculpting in Z Brush, of course Z Brush is a more highly advanced tool, yes. But Most models after sculpting are at least 100,000 Polygons. Anim8or on Some PC's would run very slow.

Basically you start with a block or Sphere and extrude the crap out of it. I myself never got a hold of Z brush or any other Sculpting Tools, Mainly because just opening Z Brush Pushes my Little 2.6 Ghz Celeron to 100% CPU usage.


But nothing is as simple to use as Anim8or. Great job on that by the way, Steve. If anyone could make Sculpting Easy and Less taxing on the CPU , Steve probably could.

[hihosilver]

Personally, I think sculpting shouldn't come quite yet.  First I think it'd be nice to see some kind of soft select, which would enable some easy tweaking of objects (which I know headwax supports as well.)

[RnDr FOX]

hihosilver: I second the soft select, at first I did not know what you guys were talking about till I "googled" it and it looks like a fast simple way to get detail on your model.

suppaster: I read on a hexagon forum that some guy made a sphere and sculpted the living soul out of it and made this extremely detailed fish and he said that it add 0 polys to his model (I probably read it wrong or he was lying) but sculpting to my knowledge should add polys but I don't know for sure

but I also agree that anim8or may not be ready for sculpting yet (or maybe it is) but maybe we can expect to see it one day in the future (the magical v 1.0 perhaps or maybe Steve has something else planed)

[headwax]

I third the soft select

Not only for fine tuning models but it makes morphs a lot easier!

[xalener]

Well, if we're gonna have sculpting, we're gonna need normal maps too. heh.

But yeah, soft selection would be VERY useful.

[RnDr FOX]

ok noob question coming up......so prepare yourself

what are normal maps

[Claude]

The easy way to render a face is to calculate the lighting
of each pixel according to the orientation of the face given by
its normal.A normal is simply a 3D  vector(unity) giving that
orientation.

To obtain a better result,you can use a different normal for
each pixel.To do that,you use a texture named normalmap.
Each pixel RGB value of the normalmap represent the normal for that pixel.

Here's how you would calculate the x coordinate of the normal from the red value(0-1.0):
x = 2.0 * (redValue - 0.5)

Anim8or actually supports normalmap for bumpmapping.
Heightmaps are used because they make life easier.As soon
as they are loaded, they are converted into normalmap used
for rendering.

Here's an example:

[Steve]

Yes Anim8or uses normal maps internally to implement bumpmapping.  It's really the same thing except bumpmaps are easier for users to deal with.  One reason they're used for games is for speed of rendering but you need tools to create them.  That way Anim8or handles them it's all built in.

I understand what you mean by scuplting now.  It's a powerful concept.

[bamman62]

I've actually used Zbrush (far from mastered it). It has some interesting modeling functions.

I can only explain it this way, the sculpting tools use a brush to push the polygons around, and the different tools push the polys a different way. The tools themselves cannot add polygons, they can only move them around.

[hihosilver]

Would implementation of normal maps be too difficult?  Often times I've noticed they seem to give better depth than I've seen from a bumpmap, it seems they may be more versatile?  I'm not sure of all this, but that's what it seems to me with the mixing of shades of color instead of a simple grayscale.

[onespirit5777]

If Steve makes a sculpting tool it will be the easiest to use with great results.

I don't mind typing in the attributes by the way.

[RnDr FOX]

yea I don't hate typing in attributes but some times I forget what to type so that can be frustrating at times