Smudge tool posibility?

[Iconoklast]

In the sculpt poly tool options, if you go down to 'Sculpt Variables', where you have normal, x,y,z, etc, there should be a 'View' radiobutton. If you check that, instead of normal, does that produce your effect?

[TechnicallyArtistic]

No, that still only pushes or pulls just based on the camera view instead of normal direction or world axis. Think like the smudge tool in photoshop. I want to be able to click and smear verts side to side up and down, not in and out.

-Evil The Cat

[Datasage]

Someone can correct me if im wrong, but a tool like a sculpt tool has to be a plugin and not a script. Its worth exploring though.

[TechnicallyArtistic]

I wouldn't be surprised if it was a plug-in. I've just been asking everybody I can to see if anybody could figure it out. It seams like it'd be Mayas solution to Soft Selection without ripping off 3D Studio. Cause so far, that soft modification tool isn't much better than a lattice.

-Evil The Cat

[BillSpradlin]

Maybe you should spend a little more time with it, the soft mod tool is one of the best tools that have been introduced to Maya for some the past 3 versions. It's changed the way our modelers model and has increased their work flow in organic modeling 10 fold.

[tsdorsey]

I'm to tired to look into it right now, but give me couple of days and I'll post another response.

IM me if you want to talk about it.

Later,
Trevor

[sunit]

Maybe you should spend a little more time with it, the soft mod tool is one of the best tools that have been introduced to Maya for some the past 3 versions. It's changed the way our modelers model and has increased their work flow in organic modeling 10 fold.

I'd be interested to know how you implement the softmod tool, bill. I wrote a cluster tool a couple of years ago (based on different kinds of percentage falloffs) which i continue to use today. the softmod tool, in its current implementation, i find extremely clumsy.

cheers,
-sunit

[TechnicallyArtistic]

I would like how you're using it too. I find it to be a bit of a pain to do actual modeling with and it doesn't hold up at all to 3D studio's soft selection. I mean, I can adjust a mostly finished model with it, but it's still about 1000 times easier to just import the model into 3dStudo and use soft selection to tweak it then bring it back into Maya.
Soft Modification seems to be pretty much just a cluster with a paint weights brush attached to it. This in all honesty seems to be an extremely half assed attempt at a soft selection on the part of the people from Alias. It doesn't appear to be anything you couldn't do with weighting a cluster before, just a slightly different process.
I just want to be able to click and move verts with some fall off pull to it, over and over and not create a ton of nodes or constantly have to adjust settings. Is there a better way to use the tool that I haven’t figured out where you aren’t switching your selection over to the node and just staying on the verts?

-Evil The Cat

[antweiler]

the viewport adjustment of the falloff is annnoying, since the circle is always too small or out of the screen. come on is it so difficult to create some cool viewport handles, like the ones for the dynamic fields?
i also would like to see
-softmod along normal direction
-and a "consider topology" option (this means the softmod only takes those verts into acount, that are directly connected INSIDE the radius of the softselection) Think about pulling down the lower part of the mouth of a dog, without pulling the upper teeths)
XSI has this, and shows the fallof very nice by coloring the vertices (like max)

And, yes, a smudge option for the sculpt tool would be veeery helpful

wake up alias !

[thematt]

would that help you?

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=167488

[tsdorsey]

OK, from reading all your posts, I think I know where the confusion is coming from. There is an option in the tool settings of the soft mod tool called "preserve history" when this is checked, maya will leave behind a soft mod deformer handle. If you uncheck this option, maya will "attempt" to remove the handle once you deselect it. And what I mean by "attempt" is that, if you have history on the object, maya will have to leave the handle in the history of the object.

http://www.tddev.com/hosting/softMod.jpg

I'm getting this right out of the doc's, first page that shows up when you hit "tool help" in the soft mod options window. Just to let you know that I'm not some uber smart maya guru (welllll......).

So if you want something closer to what you get in Max then delete history on the object and turn off preserve history in the option of the tool.


There is another checkbox "around selection" that will make the tool affect the verts around the selected verts based on the falloff curve and distance. So make sure this is checked (It should be by default IMO), select some verts, hit the soft mod tool button and move them around and see what happens.

Hope this clears things up a bit.

Later,
Trevor

[TechnicallyArtistic]

Smaxmaker: Yeah, I kow about that function. Still a pain to use that tool. Can't see what your selection is when your dragging, and just the tweeking that goes with it if you do want to change your selection. Thanks for trying though.

thematt: Yeah, I think this will help. It's not a bad start, I couldn't use it to start a model yet, but to tweak and blend shape one, probably. I'll most likely start bugging that guy to add the features i'm looking for. Thanks.

[tsdorsey]

Well, I looked into the idea of creating a smudge tool for maya, and it would require a plugin. I'm not at the level of knowledge where I can write one so I can't help here.

I was thinking of a time when I saw the 3D Paint tool using a custom MEL script to decide what it painted, I was hoping that the sculpt tool might be the same, but it's not.

Later,
Trevor

[TechnicallyArtistic]

I was talknig to one of my friends that does scripting, and he thought that the scuplt polygon tool was based off the paint selection tool. You can script for that. Is there any way to make it act like the move tool on a mouse click? And at that, have the fall off when it moves the verts?

-Evil The Cat

[GennadiyKorol]

Nope cause you can't read the cursors position in world space using mel, and you can't tell it in which direction to dragg with paint select tool- you need a separate context.

If you need this tool so much currently you can take a look at wings3d www.wings3d.com (http://www.wings3d.com) - it has an awesome tweak mode, and you can easily export models back and forth using obj format.

[Iotrez]

Do u find the proportional modification tool useful for this? You can create a selection with the paintselect tool and then move the vertices around with the proportional mod tool as much as u like without worrying about extra nodes being created. You can also easily change the pivot point of the selection too which seems useful.

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