Plugin for mesh brushes
IsaacNewton
Posts: 1,300
It has been requested before that DAZ include mesh brushes in DS, but there has been no response. So could a skilled programmer please make a plugin that provides brushes that worked directly on object meshes within DS?
Brushes required:
Push/pull (normal to the mesh surface), Move left/right (across the mesh surface), Smooth, Shrink to target, Loosen from target, Add wrinkles brush.
I'm sure people will think of other useful brushes, but these would be a great start.
Benefits: No more poke through, subtle and highly targeted modifications to correct distortion caused by autofit, able to fit almost any clothing to any character, able to correct small distortions at character joints, turn loose clothing into tight fitting. etc etc
I would definitely pay a lot for such a plugin as it would greatly enhance the usefulness of DS.
Will anyone take up the challenge and make a small fortune at the same time?
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Comments
This would be an instant buy from me... I would love this.
Mcasual's mcjWarp offers some of that functionality.
It would probably have terrible lag if built as a plug-in.
I believe the weight mapping brush that is part of Studio already will do a lot of what you want.
Thanks for the feed back, all.
Hi Jimbow. I checked out the link you gave for Mcasuals mcjWarp. It does appear to have some mesh modification capabilities, but they looked very coarse. The illustrations given were on primatives like a plane and the results looked very crude. A quick trip into Hexagon would probably result in better results (IMO). I did not see any examples of the tool applied to clothing or figures.
Hi daywalker03, I had a look at some DAZ tutorials on the use of the Weight Map Brush. It seems to me that this technique is for manipulation of bones and how they cause the mesh to bend when the joint/bone is moved/adjusted. It looks useful, though with quite a steep learning curve, for changing how figures/clothes bend. As far as I can see, for the purposes I described originally, this method is not really applicable, it would seem to actually be quicker to go into Zbrush and do some semi-random pulling/pushing/smoothing followed by checking the results back in DS then repeating the process a couple of times, for most of the aplications I described in my first post. (Since that iterative fudging in Zbrush is actually neither quick nor very accurate, that says a lot about how much effort using weight maps would be to achieve the simple changes I have described.)
Hi Jestmart, Sadly, I know little of the inner workings of DS, but I haven't noticed other plug-in causing lag problems. Is this an issue with efficient programming or correct interaction with DS subroutines? I can only hope what you have said is not (necessarily) true.
What I am proposing is a simple brush system that can be applied directly to any mesh and which morphs the mesh in the desired way to achieve the results described in the first post, and this in real time inside DS so you can immediately see the results.
I think one of the problems you'll find with high detail displacement painting is that the subdiv HD tech in DS is proprietary and kept very close to DAZ's chest. Only sellers are allowed to use the tech and it's locked from general users. It's probably a big reason why DS is rarely used in pro productions and sniffed at by the big guns, who would find themselves with the only option of using traditional texture driven displacement methods for high detail work. If the HD tech was open to users then I'm quite confident MCJ's paint displacement wouldn't be as course as we see. Sadly, it's one of the features users constantly ask for but will probably never get.
Hi Jimbow,
I suspect you are right in saying that DAZ3d will probably not release it's HD tech to mere clients such as we. Even so, a set of brushes with minimum allowed diameter (to prevent us mere clients from doing HD work) would still fulfill the goals I set forward in the first post. The possible exception is that the Shrink to Target brush might not be allowed to shrink to existing HD details in the target. I could easily live with that restriction.
In fact seeing veins or warts visible in the folds of a T-shirt etc probably isn't a major goal for most people. :)
Actually, I don't use "HD items" on the whole, partly in protest of the policy DAZ3d has regarding HD availability. It's their technology, if they want to keep it to themselves, then indeed they can keep it! I doubt I'm the only one to hold this view.
In summary, I don't think HD issues would be too important for the suggested uses of the proposed Mesh Brushes.
It is for me ;) That kind of thing makes or breaks an image as far as I'm concerned, and as such we have to hope we can get away with a decent normal map, or export the mesh for refining, or use displacement. It drives me absolutely potty. And don't even get me started on praying my LAMH or Garibaldi hair will even touch the surface of the coat or face it's sprouting from.
Something about mcjWarp...zoom in closer and the area the brush warps is much smaller....
To tell the truth, it's little, if any, different than a PA here (or at another store) putting a restriction on what you can do with merchant resources. They simply do not want folks giving away HD items, which I can fully understand after the time and effort (not to mention money) they have invested in developing it.
I just thought of another really useful brush, though maybe this goes beyond the basic standard of the others mentioned initially.
A draping brush or liquify brush. This could, for example, be applied to clothing so it fits better to a particular pose. Typically when a figure is in a sitting pose the hem of a "fully conforming" dress is frequently floating a small distance above the legs (or is intersecting the legs). The draping or liquify brush would make the polygons move as though affected by gravity (positive or negative). In this way clothing could be draped over a body part precisely and realistically without using dynamic clothing which currently, in DS, is limited to very specific clothing items. You could also use this brush to simulated melted items... wouldn't that be cool. Salvador Dali.. eat your heart out!