[Bf-modeling] Modelling thoughts:

[Michael Williamson]

When Campbell invited me to this list I had some thoughts on his topics 
and others.. No I'm subscribed I'll post them here too for further 
discussion:

The following are what I sent him and his response:

> To your points above, snapping is quite powerful now.. I'd hate for it to
> become cumbersome!  If you can check out MOI
> If I recall right it had some great options as a set of checkboxes.
Right, its already kindof cumbersome IMHO, useful options are a bit
hidden and hard to extend.

> An important thing in snap in blender that no other package seems to 
> do is I
> can hold down ctrl at any point during a transform and then snap...  
> Other
> packages I get really annoyed that I have to modify before i start a
> transform.. this is important because on heavy meshes it can be 
> cumbersome
> to snap to what you want and in blender it's nice to move "into the
> ballpark" first.. other projections sounds good too..
I have patch for shrinkwrap style projection (without using
shrinkwrap), but I like to make UI good too.

> Shrinkwrap modifier is our *best* retopology tool , even in a point to 
> point
> workflow.... but in use you often get terrible artefacts and at really 
> high
> poly counts just a mess! Not sure exactly what goes wrong but it could do
> with some love, especially now Dyntopo is so amazing!


> I'm not sure it's a modelling tool strictly speaking but transfering
> attributes between topologically different but similar shape meshes is a
> feature I could really use...  We already have weight transfer but UVs 
> and
> Vertex colours is needed too!
This is a gsoc project, my student is working on it, its not such a
complex project,

> Mirror editing... because it doesn't work with everything most of us gave
> up on it and use the modifier in the workflow instead..
> Would be nice if it worked  very frustrating when it breaks!
Yep, We could figure out if limited support is worthwhile or not.
Having to write custom code for every tool to support this its really
not great option.

> Proportional editing... silo had a great feature called Topology 
> distance..
> where it edge walks the connection out....  so for example opening a 
> closed
> mouth.. top and bottom lip are within the radius but the edges of the top
> lip are further away it looks like that's how Connected works now and I
> think it's a great feature.. but maybe the old behavior should be 
> restored
> too.. so you could have  3 modes...  distance, connected distance and
> connected topological distance as the modes..
Yes, ton wanted to kick out this behavior, but Im thinking it could be
optional..... tho Im a but worried of just making everything optional
too :S, we end up with even more buttons!



Ok, so that was a kick start to many topics. Great to hear that there';s 
a gsoc for transfering attributes!
On snapping.. I suppose i'm just used to it and how it works.. I know it 
often gets complained about.. maybe I'm too old school because it does 
what I need and I understand it..


  have to disagree with Ton about connected mode behaviour I find that 
there are use cases for all three and they're not fringe cases either..

I wonder if Nicholas bishop's symmetrize tool could work on parts of a 
mesh rather than the whole thing..  sounds complex and could be a can of 
worms but coders often surprise me with what is trivial or hard to them..

I'm curious about your "shrinkwrap" patch..  not sure how that fits in 
with retopology:
The use case I'm talking about is converting an arbitrary mesh to a 
multires object for further sculpt detailing (and/or displcacment/normal 
map generation and applying to a subdiv cage with a displace modifier.. 
as follows:

create a subdiv cage around your dyntopo model by point by point 
modelling using surface snap (and or shrinkwrap modifier)  then apply..
Add a multires modifier and subdivide..
use shrinkwrap to snap the new multires verts back to the original 
mesh... then apply shrinkwrap.. the details are now embedded in multires 
modifier and can be sculpted/detailed further...

The shrinkwrap modifier  can work in the modifier stack and so is 
viable... i'm guessing your shrinkwrap style snap is editmode only so 
won't work with multires as you only get the base cage in editmode since 
2.5?

Shrinkwrap is problematic.. hard to describe why exactly.. I'll probably 
need to get some screenshots here..  a "project" brush in sculpt mode 
may be a way to conform your multires to another model.. and by 
projecting into the screen may give better artist driven capture.. but 
is that beyond the scope of this mailing list?

Finally, Blender's tool prompts and feedback can always be richer!!!




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