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Oculus Medium Suggestions

slipgatecentral
Explorer
TL&DR: Medium is a very nice toy, but it's hard to be productive in it. 

After playing for few hours with it, I have some ideas that might improve this software for professional artists, without ruining accessibility for beginners.

-Almost very tool needs an alt modifier, that will allow user quickly switch to alternate mode. Example - for clay tool, to cut holes you need to open menu, select "Erase", and close menu. Needs to be faster, preferably holding modifier button on left controller (like the one we got for alternate tool). Every sculpting 3d software has this - primary function can be switched instantly to it's opposite.

- We must be able to select same tools for primary and alternate, but they must not share settings. This will be extremely useful in many cases. Like, you can paint using 2 different brushes with different color.

- Desperately need move/pull tool. Smudge doesn't do much. If there's no room on the palette I suggest removing useless swirl.

- Need an option to customize brushes and my palette. Would be great to have my own selection of saved tools with different settings. Time saver.

- Need bigger color swatch accessible from menu. Right now only 3 colors in it.

- Eyedropper tool takes too long to select. It also needs a button modifier for quick operation, like Alt key in Photoshop.


I am a professional 3d artist and I'm looking forward to work in VR. Those are just first steps but I see tons of potential in VR sculpting. 
323 REPLIES 323

P3nT4gR4m
Consultant
So here's an idea for export to help make filesize and resource appetite a bit smaller. Right now if I export a multi layer sculpt via .obj with UV's it's giving me separate meshes and individual UV and albedo/normal maps. So far so good but the problem for me is sometimes I maybe only want 4k or even 8k maps on a couple of the main layers but I got maybe half a dozen or a dozen layers that's just little stuff, hardly worth going to 512 for, never mind 4k a pop.

So the solution is to export every layer one at a time and choose whatever tga res I want or maybe (tho I haven't tried) I'd get away with scaling in photoshop but I was just thinking it'd be nice if the export screen had a list of layers where I could override texture size per layer. 

bobduffy5
Protege
Suggestions
- Assign left trigger to be the alternate of the tool - inflate to deflate, add to erase
- when grabbing and moving a layer allow the left trigger to snap to the mirror or lathe in the scene
- Add a scale and measuring tool to allow you to sculpt to scale.  The scale should remain the same regardless of increasing resolution or sizing the sculpts.  If you size the sculpt your measuring guides increase or decrease with the size.  But if you size a layer then that layer is increased and reduced in size against the world measurement
- Allow the drawing of guide lines with a measuring feature.  ie draw a horizontal guide line that is 5.25 units long without putting clay along it.  Then pick your stamp, size of clay, or other tool then start to draw along the guide where it snaps to the line similar to the line feature

Anonymous
Not applicable
@bobduffy5 if you double-tap the green tool option button you can quickly switch between additive and subtractive. 🙂

Anonymous
Not applicable
Increase the utility of the cut tool:

The current method is both slow and hard to be precise with.  Slow is ok, but having to redo the operation is painful.

Possible control options:

Area cut:  uses a scalable cube or rectangle to define the cut boundaries, this would give clean cuts and clear area boundaries.  You'd also have a shadow overlay to see exactly what you are removing.  The entire section could be bound to its own layer, perhaps.  This would allow multiple uses of the tool to isolate floating sections.

Planar cut:  since the cut tool is limited in how extended it is, would be good to just be able to select a plane, and have the object separate entirely along the face of the plane. 

Cancel:  An instant cancel would be nice, since this operation starts
automatically when you release the trigger, and can take several minutes to perform.  You usually know
right away if you missed a cut attempt, but then are forced to wait
until the program figures it out.

Ruler:
The new dimension tools are useful.  They might be more useful if you could actually snap on a ruler/precise measurement directly to the axis.  Adding additional rulers (snapping continuous or at right angles) would allow very precise placement.   I envision them being visible in a similar way to the mirror plane.

Stamps:
Stamp Rotation: The ability to orient the direction of the stamp along the other axis would be useful, as another user mentioned, using the secondary hand to position it would likely work well.

Custom resolution or a high rez stamps folder.  Higher rez stamps could be identified with a number icon, if needed.  Some things are good as shapes, for other purposes, very precise forms are useful.  Would be very helpful for detail work or for personal kitbashing sets.  

Folder Organization:

Being able to put sculpts into folders by drag and drop or highlighting the images would be useful.  Sorting through hundreds of sculpts can take a long time.  At some point, they will number in the thousands.   Same applies to reference images and stamps.  Obviously being able to name the folders would be helpful as well.

Thoughts on advanced options:

As ideas are implemented, the usage gets more complex, which is an obvious concern.   Either a pro package or a "feature unlock" menu, could keep the software accessible with its basic features, and add additional abilities as the user is prepared to learn them.

Wishlist  :

Lower priority items,  more complicated, or both:

Paintbucket:  Ability to fill a layer with a solid color (or reset to uncolored default, which might allow recovery of color data memory).  Sometimes it's useful to reset, or quickly establish a base color for painting. 

Fractal painting:  Envisioning something like the texturing  used in the Kai Power Tools 3 (KPT3) texture explorer.
example:  veerle-v2.duoh.com/images/uploads/KPTexture.jpg,  a system like this would be advanced, but also an interface suitable to pint and click.  Basically uses randomization and iteration to generate color patterns. Presumably it would apply to a continuous surface, a layer and possibly as a paintbrush option.

Layers info:  An icon next to the layer showing how many levels of resolution it has currently would be helpful.

Invisible mirror:  Would be nice to be able to keep the mirror on without seeing it while you sculpt. 

Mirror per layer:  Not sure if this functionality is in the new update, forgot to test it.  Being able to use the mirror on the selected layer without realigning everything, would be awesome.  If it's in place already, disregard.

Importing layers:  Possibly similar to the high rez stamps option.







Anonymous
Not applicable
Double post, can't delete it, but can make it take less space.








Monstaah
Heroic Explorer
Something like the curve tool would make some stuff a hell of a lot less painful...bu6r1c0cwwoj.jpg
PC Specs:

Black Box, with wires & some kind of electronicy stuff inside..
oooh it even has lights!! 😃

Anonymous
Not applicable
>Ruler:
The new dimension tools are useful.  They might be more
useful if you could actually snap on a ruler/precise measurement
directly to the axis.  Adding additional rulers (snapping continuous or
at right angles) would allow very precise placement.   I envision them
being visible in a similar way to the mirror plane.


(apologize for the previous double post)

Have been thinking about this some.  Instead of a ruler, might be nicer to have a grid plane overlay that snaps to the axis,automatically scales to your baseline measurement.  Maybe in tenths (so if you have a 1m default, each square is .1m).  This would allow you to very precisely place things using an x,y,z coordinate system, visually.  Snapping would work as described above.  This could give a pretty intuitive way of handling measurements without being too interface heavy, or too imprecise.







Sterling77
Rising Star
I think for the ruler - a strait to bezier toggle would work a treat. Some of this discussion about ultra precise modeling is a bit of over kill in some ways - medium is a place to go and express and be free, and not get stuck in VR for 6 hours. As i have experienced moving past the 3 hour mark becomes energetically draining. Simple tools to do powerful things are where its at. 

A new sugesstion would be a Belt Sander , this is an extension of the lathe tool - allowing you to cut shapes or fashion shapes from a moving negative cutting surface. Just an idea. 
https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/52965/sterlings-sketchbook

hendrikvp
Honored Guest
I LOVE Medium, it is really great, keep up the good work!
Though, it always can get a little bit better, right? 😉

1. Would be nice to be able to align the center of a model to the center of a mirror-plane.
2. Transparency would be useful to be able to see a reference-image behind the model.
3. I started off the first two times by using the sphere that is created by default in a new scene (as it is perfectly aligned with the mirror-plane), but had difficulties to add details to it, as even the smalles size of the tools is comparably big to the sphere. Even when I can manage to create the biggest sphere possible aligned with the mirror-plane, adding details is hard. So, being able to create bigger primitives / stamps would be helpful for this.
4. Some form of splines that can be freely manipulated by their control-points, and the tools then can be aligned to it (like the modeling tool can already be aligned to a straight line).

I hope that this project won't be abandoned, as it is currently free and generates no income to Oculus. Even as hobbyist, I would pay for it when it gets improved and updated along the time.

Sterling77
Rising Star

hendrikvp said:

I LOVE Medium, it is really great, keep up the good work!
Though, it always can get a little bit better, right? 😉

1. Would be nice to be able to align the center of a model to the center of a mirror-plane.
2. Transparency would be useful to be able to see a reference-image behind the model.
3. I started off the first two times by using the sphere that is created by default in a new scene (as it is perfectly aligned with the mirror-plane), but had difficulties to add details to it, as even the smalles size of the tools is comparably big to the sphere. Even when I can manage to create the biggest sphere possible aligned with the mirror-plane, adding details is hard. So, being able to create bigger primitives / stamps would be helpful for this.
4. Some form of splines that can be freely manipulated by their control-points, and the tools then can be aligned to it (like the modeling tool can already be aligned to a straight line).

I hope that this project won't be abandoned, as it is currently free and generates no income to Oculus. Even as hobbyist, I would pay for it when it gets improved and updated along the time.


1. Would be nice to be able to align the center of a model to the center of a mirror-plane. >> 
You can align the sculpt to the mirror plane by using snapping in the new transform tools options - 3 options WORLD SCULPT OBJECT, the mirror is on the sculpt zero point so if you zero out a sculpt and position it you can get the mirror center. 

Transparency agreed 
Splines agreed 

I hope that this project won't be abandoned, as it is currently free and generates no income to Oculus. Even as hobbyist, I would pay for it when it gets improved and updated along the time.

>> This an interesting perspective - Medium actually generates income from the sheer fact that there is nothing like it - so i bought my rift for the one main reason to use medium.

https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/52965/sterlings-sketchbook