cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

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

Kuraokami
Explorer
Please give us the ability to import STL-files as well as OBJ onto a polygon-layer. STL is very prevalent in the age of 3D-printing.

Crankbolt
Honored Guest
Hopefully I have not overlooked this feature and Its probably mentioned a few times already but masking, via paint layer or its own type of metadata so you can freeze voxels or the "clay".  Would be really very nice to have a type of lasso and a paintbrush/airbrush masking tool.  This is the only thing that really feels like its missing so far.   

jessicazeta
Heroic Explorer
Hey friends, you can import OBJ files into Medium as of June 2018. STL is very prevalent but we haven't gotten around to supporting it - many things come into play when deciding when to support new file importing and exporting - but a good work around for now is opening an STL in 3D Builder and re-saving it as an OBJ to import inside of Medium.

@Crankbolt - We hear ya!!!

Anonymous
Not applicable
Playing tutorials in Medium.  Add a incremental rewind so we don't have to restart the tutorial from the beginning if we miss something.

JasonW
Protege
sorry duplicate post

JasonW
Protege
@Crankbolt & @jessicazeta There could be a better way to do masking than simply borrowing from surface based approaches (lasso, paintbrush, airbrush, etc.). How about support for layer masking using Medium's existing layers system, so that:

1. Clay voxels occupying space in a mask layer would prevent clay from being painted into voxels occupying overlapping space in regular clay layers. Thus masks would be volumetric instead of surface based like Zbrush.

2. All existing tools in medium could be used to paint masks inside mask layers, including stamps, imported geometry, and the paint & airbrush tools could be used to create soft edged masks on surfaces.

3. Regular clay layers could be converted into mask layers, or mask layers could be converted back into clay layers.

4. Nesting a mask layer under a regular clay layer would allow the clay and mask layer to move together when repositioning and limit the effect of masking to the clay layer parent. A mask layer not nested under a clay layer would become a global mask, masking all clay layers and could be moved independently.

5. The masking effect could be turned on or off by toggling its visibility. Another layer control would allow the mask to be inverted.

6. When a mask layer is selected the clay painted inside would become opaque for easy editing, however when a clay layer is selected instead, the mask would render transparent or semitransparent depending on another layer preference.

7. The grip button in one hand could be used to reposition a clay layer plus its child mask together, while The grip plus trigger button could be used to reposition just the mask independent of its clay layer parent. The grip button on the tool hand could reposition the clay layer but leave the mask layer locked in place. 


stayinwonderland
Explorer
There really really needs to be some absolute world alignment tools. Having to guess where the floor plane is or guess where a slice made that's parallel to the floor plane is just unacceptable. So many times I'm about to make some kind of sweeping cut, let's say I have something cylindrical and I want to start cutting/shaving it down to size from top towards bottom, perhaps a fort or castle shape, well I have to really eyeball it and it's impossible because you're looking at it in perspective all the time.

You can use the plane constraint but you're still having to guess if it's fully flat to the world. And you don't know if something you sculpted is flat either. I've brought what I thought was a flat floor plane out of medium and into a 3d package and it's totally leaning and skewed and bent.

Likewise the mirror tool needs one button (like in all 3d packages): align to center (center mass of sculpt/layer). This is critical because so often you make something and later want to turn on the mirror tool and have to spend ages trying to move it (and of course because there's no absolute alignment tools you're moving it in all planes at once and it's leaning etc.) by hand and it's never quite right.

I really can't fully commit to using this professionally while I'm guessing where things are in 3d space.

Stepphen_Robert
Honored Guest

tolitt said:

Wishlist.
It would be nice if showed how many times the grid was enlarged!

6pn9y5rnafwp.jpg


It seems much better than in a previous time,

Anonymous
Not applicable



Likewise the mirror tool needs one button (like in all 3d packages): align to center (center mass of sculpt/layer). This is critical because so often you make something and later want to turn on the mirror tool and have to spend ages trying to move it (and of course because there's no absolute alignment tools you're moving it in all planes at once and it's leaning etc.) by hand and it's never quite right.


If the object bounding box, when the layer is constructed, had a center plane that matched the original mirror axis, you could snap the mirror to that.   Basically the plane would be at the center of the box.  The little round ball could have a slightly different shade on that sphere line.  Make it really easy to align/reset things.   Re-centering the bounding box might be tricky, but presumably the centerline would want to remain in the same place relative to the sculpt it was originally in.

I think this would allow each layer to have built in symmetry, on a per item basis. 

Of course, if the box had a plane running on all three axis, from the object center, then the mirror could be snapped through the various perpendiculars (x,y,z). 

Aside from that, simply being able to flip the mirror 90 degrees would be a really useful feature.

keith_talbot
Explorer
I know many people export their sculpts into Keyshot, butI really enjoy painting the sculpts when they are done.  The current painting tools are actually pretty good and work surprisingly.  I do have a couple of suggestions for the paint engine.
A few brush blending modes like you get in photoshop and other painting software would be useful, even just something like colour, multiply and overlay would be a great start as they would allow you spray tints of colour over shading or add shading to already laid down colour.
Keep up the great work.