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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

Jooga
Honored Guest
Hi, new to forums and don't know if this has been suggested before. Didn't see this on a quick glance.

The main group entertainment for me and my friends is playing "3D-Alias" where the player picks an Alias card and chooses one word to describe by sculpting it in game. The rest of the group is watching this from the monitor. Now the difficulty is that the group is looking through the sculptors eyes so my suggestion is:

Is it possible to make a fixed "camera" to one location at the scuplting room, so that monitor/tv could display the image from this camera while the player sees normal 3d-view from Rift. In other words your audience could see as if the sculptor is creating something in front of them, instead of constantly having a hard time tracking where the sculptor's eyes are at a given time.

I think this would be an awesome feature to get the rest of the room better involved in the sculpting process. I understand this might increase GPU-load by lots and it should be a on/off feature in the settings if computer has enough power to run it.

Also I strongly encourage everyone to try this 3d-alias, it really is amazing fun!

sabotougee
Honored Guest
I bought the Oculus Rift just for Medium and am loving it!

I'm a character artist and have been using ZBrush since it's early inception. I can totally see using Medium as a much faster way to block out characters and using ZBrush for cleanup and detailing. I've always seen ZBrush as more of a surfacing tool. Medium gets you so much closer to real world clay sculpting. Hopfeully as I get better at Medium, I'll definitely put in a request for my studio to get a set to incorporate Medium into the character creation pipeline.

When blocking out anything, I prefer not to use the smooth function as much but would rather have the left trigger (I'm right handed) act as the subtract function for the tool. This has also been mentioned in earlier posts. Smoothing models too early causes them to look mushy so I prefer subtracting as a way to keep clean edges and planes. Having to double press the A button to access the subtraction function kind of breaks the flow when sculpting.  I think the smooth function can be a combination of holding down the B button and pressing the right trigger button. That way, all your fingers can be resting on all three buttons (right trigger, left trigger, and B button) to be able to sculpt without breaking the flow.

Also, since your thumb will be resting on the B button, maybe make this button, when pressed, be the menu for the tool settings. I use the tool settings much more often than the color menu when sculpting. The color menu can be the A button when pressed.

Rotating a stamp feels a little restrictive at the moment. Since the scale function of a tool can be accessed by pressing and holding the right thumbstick and waving your hand left to right, I feel that the thumbstick rotation can be solely dedicated to the stamp rotation, allowing it to rotate the stamp in 360 degrees. Currently sliding the thumbstick left or right rotates the stamp on a fixed plane and moving the thumbstick up and down scales the tool (which is redundant). When wanting to rotate the stamp on a fixed plane (the face of  the controller should be the plane reference) maybe it can be a combination of pressing and holding the right grip button and sliding the thumbstick left to right can rotate the stamp in the YX plane or clockwise and counterclockwise. Pressing and holding the right grip button and sliding the thumbstick up and down can rotate the stamp in the YZ direction.

If there's a way to create icons on the screen (or a custom shortcut menu by pressing and holding down the left thumbstick) to be able to select favorite tools, stamps, etc would be helpful in speeding up selecting things. Having to open up menus constantly to navigate and scroll to select often used tools/stamps/features(e.g. flip function) can be cumbersome. 

This is all I have for now. I'm excited to see where Medium goes from here!

hughJ
Protege
This has been said elsewhere, but I'd really like a view mode that gives a better sense of the true resolution and help convey surface contours.  A toggle to show the actual voxel sub-structure, wireframe triangles and maybe a flat-shaded lighting option.

Sterling77
Rising Star
I seem to be getting stuck in a positioning issue, this is how it goes >> sculpt in medium / get happy >> export to Zbrush and bring the mesh back to Clay Layer - I think there is some cross communication going on.. i will try to be clear. 
  1. Start from a blank new scene - don't move anything 
  2. Reference mesh load 
  3. Select Ref mesh and position it into the center of the mirror plane 
  4. Copy to Clay Layer 
  5. Sculpt some more and get ready to export again for some more Zbrush love 
  6. Back in from Zbrush to reposition close to the existing layer position ( this is where it gets tricky ) 
  7. If i have saved the sculpt in a say three quarter position, moving the current import into position is difficult. 
  8. Just to get it strait >> we have World 0 Sculpt 0 Object 0 plus Pivot Pos and Medium World Origin. 
  9. To adjust everything into place - i have to move the current model back to World 0 and translate it to the mirror center and then the Import additions I zero out and move to the Mirror center - and in most cases you have to also Zero out the Mirror as well. 
  10. Then the kicker some parts are offset and cant be manually placed accurately. 
  11. And yes of course the Bounding Box irregularity, ie my sculpt has drifted impartially. Meaning the Bound is normal but the sculpt is offset. 
I think what i might do is smash everything back to the center of the Grid on save. 

What I would really like is a Zero Out all parts including the Mirror ( the Mirror should be attached to the World Imo) 

Unless someone can point to some logical workflow and non confusing relationship between all these World, Sculpt, Object, Pivot, Bound, Center to Bound, Center to Sculpt, Medium Origin Point, Saved Mirror Umg !  
https://forums.oculus.com/community/discussion/52965/sterlings-sketchbook

Anonymous
Not applicable
Ya, an ability to zero out would be good.  A way to set a center line on stamps would be useful too.

Aligning anything is tricky, ability to snap planes parallel or perpendicular to the mirror line or axis set would be useful.  Just a rough concept, but something like this might be useful for line placement and/or object alignment.  Not a very clean or precise sketch, but enough to visualize how transparent grids which snapped together could be used to set up point to point drawing, and positioning. Grids could be fixed or scale as a set.  Any grid tied to an axis plane would probably have a matching color.  I'm sure this could use considerable refinement, but I think there's potential in the general concept.  Basically just transparent photos that could be cloned and slide along an axis to be used for reference points.
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P3nT4gR4m
Consultant
Here's something I think would be helpful AF and possibly easy to implement? If you could save a position, rotation and scale, similar to how it's done with the mirror plane but for the sculpt. 

It would make bouncing back and forth from blender easier, like if I wanted to go back to medium and change a bit of detail or add a layer or something, I could just work away, scaling and turning the sculpt in Medium, then at the end just reset the transforms and then re-export into blender and carry on. 

It would also allow me to paint masking layers for weightmaps. Presumably if I don't change any geometry and just paint then the uv's will be the same for an export that hasn't changed in worldspace and I'll still be able to use the original albedo on the re-exported mesh?

P3nT4gR4m
Consultant
Continuous uninterrupted stroke. When I'm laying down clay in constrain to surface - mode, right up until I release the trigger, the new clay is not included in the collision. So as long as I'm holding the trigger down I can get a nice even coverage. As soon as I let go of the trigger, tho, the new clay will pile up on top of the existing stuff and I loose the smooth surface on the overlaps.

It would be insanely useful to me if I could press a button or something that would let me keep this effect going between strokes so I can take a rest and still take advantage of being able to go across my existing strokes without building up on them. I use this feature a lot but it can get pretty tiring trying to scribble-fill a large surface this way.

Either a lock like I've suggested or the ability to only constrain to specific layers would probably accomplish much the same thing

P3nT4gR4m
Consultant
*bump* any chance of a sticky on this? We're drowning in feature request threads and this one has all the good stuff


MattHickman
Rising Star

P3nT4gR4m said:

*bump* any chance of a sticky on this? We're drowning in feature request threads and this one has all the good stuff




A fine idea! 

Metrons
Expert Protege
I posted this alerady (didn't see there was a feature request thread, apologies)

If i haven't said it enough already, i LOVE MEDIUM!!!
I've been using medium a while now and i have some suggestions for the Medium team. 

1. Can we PLEASE have a way to alter the shapes of our brushes? Imagine you have a cone shape loaded as your brush, now if i pull on one end of my brush i could scale it out more in Z. Here is a rough example, similar to when you draw out a primitive in 3dmax or modo, you have controls on the primitive for scaling. This could be SO POWERFUL, we could get so much more out of any brush shape loaded as our tool. (snapping increments would be amazing for this! and a reset to default scale would be great too).



really basic idea, just some way of grabbing handles and manipulating our brush shape. the handles i'm imagining would be incremental when snapping is on for a clean deforming of the brush.

9yqrh61u37em.png

2. Can we please get a perspective/ortho toggle? I'm a character artist and a lot of times our concept art for things like characters, weapons or armor are drawn in an ortho view and its just so much easier if i can have an ortho view to line up my concept reference. 

3. 'camera bookmarks' would be really nice. as someone who has to look at reference all day when sculpting, i'd love to have camera bookmark so i can keep looking back at certain areas to make sure they're correct. 

4. Can we get a toggle to turn off the brush shape while laying down a stroke? Similar to what substance painter does with turning off the alpha when you're putting down strokes. i love the green/red shapes of our clay brushes, but when i'm sculpting or cutting away i find it incredibly distracting, i cant actually see what i'm doing most the time. 

5. favorite clay shapes. 

I'm CONSTANTLY having to go back and dig for the brush stamp i JUST used. this is a non stop in medium. i'm suggesting this area on the clay brush menu be an area where we can drag and drop the brush shapes we're using (a). If you expand that area we could have 6 areas to drag and drop our shapes (b). 

Ideally this would store our shapes we've dragged there, even after you close medium since i imagine those shapes you may use often. This could REALLY streamline sculpting. This is just a rough idea, i'm sure the medium genuineness can do way better, but from a production standpoint this would really speed things up imo. 

799s4hjapo0s.png

Thanks for listening, i really, really, really love this tool!