Do you 3d? As in Max, Maya, Blender, SketchUp, Other? Or Modding Games?

One of the Rebel Designer TED talks on Netflix has a cool look at an actor scanning and lighting stage.
They use polarized lights to capture just diffuse, and just specular.

The character animates and the textures animate as well. IE the girl's pores stretch as her expression changes.

Anyone played with 123D Sculpt in the AppStore, and if so, how well does it play with other AutoDesk Apps (specifically Maya).

I know it says it can, but just wondering how well it sucks in all the info, textures, etc.

Sort-of related, but I thought it was pretty interesting news, although not enough for a dedicated thread.

Torque 3D has gone open source! I just found out about this tonight. You can now fork it on GitHub. I thought it was relatively big news about a year ago when they redid their entire pricing structure to offer their entire source code for $99, although later they went to $129 or $139. Now it's free.

I always seem to have an interest in game design and game engines, so it's nice to see another rather nice engine that is open source. Obviously the biggest Indie one is Unity 3D, which also has a free option, but all the bells and whistles costs around $1500 per license. Torque 3D now being open source will hopefully get quicker updates and more features, or at least options and plugins. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the 3D indie scene with this option.

The open source model is interesting.
I often wonder how the blender society survives.

I tried sculptris recently.
On October 26, the samsung series 7 700t1c lands. I will probably end up buying it and putting a sculpting software package on it.
Rumor is that Autodesk is going to move to a full access subscription business model. While this will cost me more as a business, I will get access to Max, Maya, Mudbox, etc. as part of their ultimate design package.

edit

Booya, my Autodesk subscription automatically updated to building design suite premium = I now have a license for 3dsmax.

Though my subscription fee probably goes up.

Anyone use 3dcoat, as available on steam?

The workflow video actually looks like a good blend of organic, sculpting, and mechanical modelling.

I have used 3d coat in the past. I like its UV tools and have baked some maps with it. There isn't great documentation.

So the learning curve is steep. But it isn't because of how the tools work. It is more of way too many tools, tools that do similar things and sometimes awkward widgets for the tools.

People seem to be getting okay performance with the voxel sculpting but it just bogs my machine down to the point of only being able to do simplistic stuff. If I could get performance to a workable place I am dying to try out the clip brush as I feel a more natural way to sculpt is subtraction or carving rather than slapping more virtual clay on.

They recently added Sculptris like sculpting but I have yet to use it. One of the reasons Sculptris works is that it does what it does and nothing more so you have no overhead.

They have also recently added smart tesselation for the voxel stuff so that may really increase voxel performance. (so that you don't merge and subtract a couple of cubes and spheres and balloon up to thousands to millions of polygons.

The spline tool is great (you block out creatures very quickly in a stick figure like fashion. (where you can add more joints and resize them) I like it much more than zspheres in zbrush. (despite zspheres being much more refined and diverse) It is also great for adding belts and chains to existing meshes.

So, it has a lot of promise but it is currently a mixed bag for me.

I had trouble in sculptris. The spheres all remained individual. Admittedly, I didn't delve very deeply.

After reviewing the video on 3d coat, there are some red flags. At one point he points out that LeftClick+Drag changes depending on which tools you have selected.

Some of the other videos look pretty slick though. I'll stick with sculptris and blender if I dabble in digital sculpting, probably.

There is a free trial of the latest version on the 3dcoat website. It is for 30 days I believe.

I had trouble in sculptris. The spheres all remained individual. Admittedly, I didn't delve very deeply.

Yeah if they would only update Sculptris, sigh. They need real layers and more than just foreground/background, a clip brush would rock and some Boolean functions or a merge feature would make an awesome tool much more awesome.

Though many of the 3d programs today have the ability to bridge objects. So you could delete the overlapping bits, select the open edges and then use a bridge tool to connect them.

And here I thought I'd see page after page after page of your work.
shame on you.

All. Of. You.
Less walls of text and more rendering of your awesome work!

I don't have time to read whatever it is you're writing about (aboot for our Canadian friends)!!

Hobbes2099 wrote:

And here I thought I'd see page after page after page of your work.
shame on you.

All. Of. You.
Less walls of text and more rendering of your awesome work!

I don't have time to read whatever it is you're writing about (aboot for our Canadian friends)!!

But I think people post that stuff in the "post something you've created" thread. Here too, but.... there as well...

SOMETIMES YOU NEED WALLS OF TEXT!!

Does anyone know sketch up well enough to get around, and have a lot of free time on their hands?

I want to test a method of playing board games online using drop box, and a couple of component files.

It's with regard to Heroscape specifically, but I think it could apply to any system. Games like Xwing, or even warhammer might apply.

You would want to be bored, know sketchup and have nothing better to do on a Saturday night between 8-11pm EST.

Eventually, it might turn into, model, or scan figures, build maps and assets for an online repository. But that's pending a test of whether or not it's a viable system.

Hobbes2099 wrote:

And here I thought I'd see page after page after page of your work.
shame on you.

All. Of. You.
Less walls of text and more rendering of your awesome work!

I don't have time to read whatever it is you're writing about (aboot for our Canadian friends)!!

Dug out out an old unfinished model just for you (material was a bit shinier than expected after rendering )

Halloo!

I am using TinkerCad to create models for 3D printing and I want to put textures on my models. I'm attempting this with MeshMixer and failing miserably.

For example:
I create a plain "wall" in TinkerCad and export the .stl file, which I import into MeshMixer. I import an image of wood planks as a Stencil and then try to apply that to the surface of my model. I just get warping of the object surface. I've mess with the brush, falloff, strength, size, etc. and just can't get anything near what I'm trying to do - just blobbage. I've tried with a normal picture of the wooden planks and I've also set the image to black and white and that didn't help.

I increased the "refinement" thinking I just needed more triangles, but that didn't do it.

Does anyone know how to apply textures easily to 3D models this using MeshMixer? Or another free software?

-BEP

The best free option is probably going to be Blender. I'm not at all familiar with TInkerCAD, but I'm not aware of a CAD design program getting into UV layouts (which are necessary for textures). I'm fairly certain MeshMixer also doesn't do UVs, as it's more of a print-prep kind of software with some sculpting features. It's more a part of a pipeline wherein you would sculpt and texture in Mudbox or ZBrush then bring it into MeshMixer for optimizing and print preparation.

Blender is free, though, and has all the functionality of an all-around 3D package like Max or Maya (albeit with a steeper learning curve, if you can believe it). I personally can't stand to use it, but I'm biased by years of Max and Maya use.

ETA: that last gulp of coffee woke me up. You're probably referring to surface texture, like you want the wall to have depth and surface detail, not texture maps like I was thinking. If that's the case, Blender might be able to do it with a bit of effort (you're basically applying a displacement map then converting that to geometry). Otherwise ZBrush can do it easily, though it isn't free. You might have some luck with ZBrush Core (cheap, but not free), and maybe Sculptris (free, but limited functionality). Otherwise, you're looking for software that can tessellate or subdivide the mesh, because a print requires more polygons for higher frequency details. Which MeshMixer is capable of, as you know, but I don't believe it has projection/displacement functionality like ZBrush or Mudbox.

Thanks for the info.

I fired up Blender the other day for the first time in forever. I was able to get a texture on an object and have the texture be 3D ( and not just painted on ) when I rendered it, but when I exported the .stl file, the texture was gone. I'll look deeper to see how I get the texturing to apply to the actual model and not just be something done in the rendering engine since .stl files don't support the uvs.

This is the tutorial that I followed:

Blender definitely has a steep learning curve. It's nice that it does soooo much, but a beginner like myself isn't going to fare well in it.

-BEP

So that tutorial is a good start. But you will want to convert that displacement map into actual surface detail. I believe Blender has sculpting tools. You'll want to look into subdividing the model several times to give it enough polys, then either apply that displacement map as geometry, or use it as a mask and sculpt in the detail yourself.

And I'm speaking in ZBrush terms because that's what I know, but Blender has similar tools (just different names and UI positions).

Everything you said makes sense. Thanks.

-BEP

Displace Modifier?