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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

JPBenson
Protege
My workflow is to import meshes, convert to clay, sculpt them to clean them up in medium, then export and reimport into another program. I beg you to make a feature so that it's easy to export meshes in the same size, orientation, etc.. as they originally were before importing. To date I've spent almost a hundred hours wasted in medium because it's terrible at doing this. This one feature would make medium so much better for me

Anonymous
Not applicable
Intersection so retains color (currently multiple stage process)
-- example have a block of color painted on one layer, and a stamp of a figure on another layer, the figure can remain, but take the color information from the color block.   [think this took me seven steps last time I tried to do it, if there's an easier way currently, please let me know

Save stamps both as color and b/w with toggle and color previews (for colorized stamps).  This would probably require a bit more memory, but would be very useful for stamp management.  Toggle would only show stamps in the current mode.  This would work around the issue of creating tonal bases with stamps, as well as make the menus easier to work with.

The ability to change stamp name directly from stamp selection menu.  If you forget to name the layer, you're stuck with a pretty unusable name.  Ability to directly name from the menu would make it easier to identify and organize stamps.

Not sure if this is possible, but some kind of flat stamp that would conform to the surface underneath it, or only translate color information to the intersected area would be awesome.

Anonymous
Not applicable
Interface concept for advanced features

Advanced features and complexity compete with interface space and can be intimidating for new users.  However, for more skilled users, in a dynamically changing environment, the need for powerful tools is also present.   This is an approach that would potentially allow depth in terms of complexity, while maintaining a basic interface that isn't overwhelming to new users.

To visualize this, replace one of the tools on the palette with a spell book type symbol.  Traditionally spellbooks are organized so that increasingly complex concepts are created in levels.  A user doesn't need to go deeper into the spellbook than they are prepared to go, as it takes time to master such powers.   When the spellbook icon is triggered, a virtual spellbook appears.  Each page represents a tool or group of tools.  The book itself floats freely, the way a menu does.  By pointing at the book and toggling the thumbstick (or buttons), the pages turn/flip, much in the matter of an old jukebox where you can flip through and look at the record covers.  The pages themselves, could be torn out and placed in the workspace, if needed, and possibly tagged for quick access.  The pages themselves might be able to be slid over the tool wheel to create an alternate selection wheel (think of switching cds in and out of an old player).  "Closing the book" causes it to vanish/hide. 

Essentially, the deeper into the spellbook you go, the more powerful/specialized the tools.   For the new user, there's just the tool wheel to deal with, and no need to explore deeper, until ready.   For more advanced  users, more tools are available and added to the book as they are designed.  The interface remains clean, yet the depth can increase as the tools become more sophisticated.

Clampinator
Explorer
An "Unlit Textures" button in the export panel, so that we get out the exact textures we put in (resolution I assume will still be based on voxel density).

Hell, a "reproject" function that reprojects the imported mesh's textures onto a chosen (or all?) layer(s). That would be amazing.

keldor314
Explorer
I agree that the geometric brushes and stamps are visually hard to read at the moment.  Simply adding lighting and maybe even a bit of texture (presumably using tri-planer mapping) to the transparent red or green ghost shapes would make them far easier to read without greatly changing aesthetics.  Also, it would be nice to drop their opacity a bit.

Anyway, I have some suggestions regarding the move tool.

I use the move tool during common sculpting, where it can be useful to bend and push around bits of geometry as I'm refining a shape.  An annoying thing here is that the size slider has very little granularity for small sizes, since it must also allow for very big sizes when you're moving big pieces of the model around.  Please change the UI size mapping to be closer to geometric (exponential) instead of linear.  This would help with all tools, but the move tool is the most egregious example due to it's huge range.

I'd also greatly appreciate a way to scale geometry.  Right now I can cut a piece out into a new layer, scale it, and merge it back again, but then I have to fix all the seams, and heaven forbid I'm working on something in a cavity or some other area unfriendly to the cut tool!  I'd like a tool that can scale a region bigger or smaller, while blending in with its surroundings.  Algorithmically, this is a very natural extension to the move tool, so this shouldn't be a problem.  The only question is whether it's possible to somehow get it to fit into the move tool itself, or if we run out of controls and have to split it off into a separate tool.

Finally, I want to be able to use stamps with the move tool.  A use case is where I want to adjust a long curve without impacting everything else in the area.  This isn't actually very hard to do algorithmically, or rather, the hard pieces should already be in place.  Since everything is already stored as distance fields, we can use this to calculate the falloff even for complicated shapes.  One tricky wrinkle is that, unlike a sphere, it matters how we work out the shape of the inner and outer isosurfaces.  Would it be best to shrink the base stamp surface to generate the inner isosurface?  Expand it to generate the outer isosurface?  A combination of both?

charliemakescar
Expert Protege
Forgive me if this has already been mentionned but the scaling for the inner/outer radius goes from zero to huge real quick, especially when zooming into a sculpt.

If there was a way to slow that down so we could make more incremental changes for that rather than the huge jump in size just from lightly tapping the thumbstick upwards.

Does that make sense?

P3nT4gR4m
Consultant


Forgive me if this has already been mentionned but the scaling for the inner/outer radius goes from zero to huge real quick, especially when zooming into a sculpt.

If there was a way to slow that down so we could make more incremental changes for that rather than the huge jump in size just from lightly tapping the thumbstick upwards.

Does that make sense?


You can press down on the thumbstick to get a sizable yellow thing but, yeah, the low end velocity could use a bit of tweakage

spiritparticle
Honored Guest
Hi, Using Medium is amazing. I have some feature requests. The constrain to line and etc I would LOVE to have the option to grip the line and place it in the world instead of trying to line up my hand while also changing the placement of my tool tip. Another feature I would LOVE is the type of tool to create points and connect them to form lines and polygons. This way I can import a 3d scan and retopologize it on another layer at room scale. Its a DREAM at this stage to go into a 3d scan in VR and retopoligize it from scratch. Medium could make this a reality. I am also not sure if this is already implemented. I will check later. I would LOVE if the flatten tool could use different shapes. Like a square or ellipse instead of only a circle.

charliemakescar
Expert Protege
It would be great to have the option of locking the Mirror Plane to the sculpt and also center the Mirror Plane to the center of the sculpt in case of accidental misalignment.

Anonymous
Not applicable


Hi, Using Medium is amazing. I have some
feature requests. The constrain to line and etc I would LOVE to have the
option to grip the line and place it in the world instead of trying to
line up my hand while also changing the placement of my tool tip.
Another feature I would LOVE is the type of tool to create points and
connect them to form lines and polygons. This way I can import a 3d scan
and retopologize it on another layer at room scale. Its a DREAM at this
stage to go into a 3d scan in VR and retopoligize it from scratch.
Medium could make this a reality. I am also not sure if this is already
implemented. I will check later. I would LOVE if the flatten tool could
use different shapes. Like a square or ellipse instead of only a circle.



Pretty similar.
Ability to lock the line/plane steady stroke tool.   So that while it is locked, if you let go of the trigger, the line remains.

For example, a pattern like this could all be done in a controlled line with precise placement of gaps, and ensuring the entire thing remains on the same axis.  Basically, the lock mechanism would keep the line from resetting as soon as you let go of the trigger.  Ideally, this would also leave the guide line lock in place when doing things like re-orienting the stamp, or changing stamps.
 b4f9hkel72c8.png
..
It would also be cool if the "plane" and "line" could be set at the same time.   Essentially this would constrain placement to the plane and only allow "vertical" and "horizontal" movements.  With this ability, the pattern drawn vertically could easily be replicated side by side, allowing repetition patterns, in one or both directions.  With locking, it would be even more flexible.

d1ck4mc8i6cl.png