Very Cool 3D Sketching Program | Hacker News Reader

Very Cool 3D Sketching Program

rhondaforever.com

76 pointsDavertron10 comments

Video on the homepage shows an example of using it and some sample drawings. This blew my mind when I first saw it.

The content creation space is ripe for disruption.

"AAA" games are completely art bound. They are the limited by production pipelines, not game engine technology. The price of artwork greatly outweighs all other costs. Game Studios don't have the resources to innovate here, so we need people commercializing tools like this. ZBrush and its clones have effectively reinvented the creation of detailed character models. We need to help make artists more productive if we want to realize the next major leap in graphical experiences without worrying about all of our most talented studios going bankrupt trying to keep up.

I know this space well, but I just don't have the math strength. It's going to take a very special type of hacker, but someday stuff like this will mature. Artists will wonder how anyone ever created a movie or game without it.

ZBrush is amazing, but its interface is terrible. As a customer, I am very grateful with their free upgrades, but as a user I loath trying to figure out which buttons I need to avoid in order to not lose all my work (dropping tool to canvas, i'm looking at you.) For texturing, zbrush is amazing and really is an order of magnitude better (imho, my artist/friend prefers manual editing in photoshop because of the tools available in that context.)

Anyway, thats a long way to say that part of what is going to make tools development really improve is going to be making it a) easy to get started and b) fastfor expert users. Modern 3d software focuses on (b).

Definitely not an easy problem, but a fun one!

(Also, math isnt as hard as you think, just takes time to get progress on.)

ZBrush is a great iteration story. The first versions were for "painting with depth" and when they realized the value in their tools for painting on models, they developed, iteration by iteration, modeling, sculpting, texturing, etc. The legacy of that iteration can be painful in points (dropping tool to canvas is only one such example :-)

As for the math: yeah, tell me about it. I do a lot of 3D game work. I've become quite comfortable with transforms, most quaternion stuff, and boat loads of vector math. However, it took me many, many years to get it down! And I don't really enjoy it that much. I find it tedious and frustrating when all I really want to do is work on the game play logic. That's why I'm not volunteering to disrupt this particular industry...

Yeah, I use Z-brush in my job, and I have to agree. The overhead required just to learn the tool is steeper than it needs to be. Too many gotchas to learn. That being said, it is a great tool.

Speaking of production pipelines...

http://uni-verse.org/

See videos here: http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/video.html

The tool & development video in particular is fascinating, though the actual game he's developing also looks kinda interesting.

In particular I'm incredibly impressed that all that is the work of more or less one man.

Pretty good... Looks like it makes it easy to put together wire models, where each wire is composed by drawing curves in the view plane.

I still have a soft spot for Teddy, though, which is a solid modeler with a great gestural interface:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2H35SlLmUA

http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/teddy/teddy.htm

And there is also ShapeShop:

http://www.shapeshop3d.com

You know, first thing that came to my mind when I saw the title of the news, before even opening it, was that I should post a link to teddy! This was a land before time of zbrush and mudbox. It was a land of new horizons with nichimen (ex symbolics graphics division) leading the way of the new technologies in modeling. That was a great time to witness. And to think of LISP being behind it all...

As far as OP goes - StudioTools has a more powerful workflow similar to this for ages - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQ6Ij2-V_O8

http://pitaru.com/ < creator's website includes many other innovative projects

Personally, I cannot wait till more can be done in 3d space using your hands. It's going to be amazing to be able to set down the wacom tablet and mouse and and interact 1:1

Reply on news.ycombinator.com