BP 2, great but....

[danb]

Bummer i thought this was going to be a thread about the girl from SIGGRAPH from the description of the thread; Body Paint 2D 2; GREAT BUTT... hehehe. :scream: sorry i couldn't resist.

[kiwi]

Try quantasize [sp] Roger,its hard to get really small movments happening but it should make your life easier.....was in BP 1 am assuming ts in 2 as well.



Stu.

[Per-Anders]

as stu says quantize, is the grid in bp2, it's in theactive tool dialog, and also check out uv transform to be able to transform a uv directly numerically (in the UV manager or jsut in the UV edit menu at the bottom).

edit, no need for me to make a uv manager, instead just go to the structure manager. and under mode go to UVW, then you can edit all the uv's and their attributes.

[LucentDreams]

Originally posted by Roger Eberhart
There are few things bugging me about BP2.

1. Can't constrain movement or scaling of UV points to one axis only. Common, this should be basic stuff.

2. Can't select a UV and set the value through numeric input. For that matter, if you're dragging it with the mouse there is no way to read the UV coordinates. Shouldn't this be in the coordinate manager somewhere?

3. How about a user configurable grid in the UV window? Something that could be snapped to would be great.

Other than that, big improvement over the last version. I never felt inclined to use BP 1 at all. In general, It sometimes feels like Maxon's products need more input from artists and less input from programmers (if that makes sense).

All three are simply user error these were possible in BP 1 as well, and for the record, maxon gets a lot of artist input, if we could name some of the artists that worked on this version you'd be absolutely stunned. Of course with NDA we can't, everyone choooses for themselves whether to be known or not, unless you patient enough to watch the credits in the cool new INFO window they made for BP2 and 8.2 I'm sure if you do that you'll see some names that really stand out.

[Roger Eberhart]

It seems to constrain my move or scale to one axis I have to set the quantize to a fairly high value to avoid accidentally adjusting both. Also, bringing up the structure manager while in uv point edit mode brings up nothing. You have to go back to a standard layout, select the actual points on the geomentry, then go into the structure manager.

In Max or Lightwave I would just select the points (in the UV editor, not the geometry) and set the value. No switching layouts or playing with quantize values.

How much input did Maxon get from game artists? In the gaming field you don't always have the luxury of creating a unique texture for everything. Theres a lot of reusing the same textures. I might have a texture page with four different column textures. If I want to use the third column I would use U .5 to U .75.

If I wanted to tackle this in BP2, without switching out of the UV edit layout, I would have to do the following. Grab all the points on the right side of the column. Turn on UV clipping. Set quantize to .25. Drag them all to the right of the screen to flatten them out. Drag them back again to .75 U. I would then to a similar procedure on the left.

Am I missing something, or is this kind of a pain? Not the easiest workflow in the world for something that should be straight forward. Maybe there is an easier way that I haven't figured out yet. Of course, if it's this hard to figure out, then they've already dropped the ball from a UI design standpoint.

[danb]

Well my point of view is that bodypaint is the easiest 3d painter program to use. and the work flow is nice once you understand how it works. I would think that it could be a little complicated to use if you don't have reference material. good job maxon.

[Roger Eberhart]

Don't get me wrong. I think it's a huge improvement over the last version. That's why I shelled out for the upgrade. However, I'm just perplexed why some of the simple stuff is so convoluted. It's like they're trying to shield the user from doing things the old fashioned way.

[MJV]

Originally posted by Roger Eberhart
There are few things bugging me about BP2.

1. Can't constrain movement or scaling of UV points to one axis only. Common, this should be basic stuff.

2. Can't select a UV and set the value through numeric input. For that matter, if you're dragging it with the mouse there is no way to read the UV coordinates. Shouldn't this be in the coordinate manager somewhere?

3. How about a user configurable grid in the UV window? Something that could be snapped to would be great.

Other than that, big improvement over the last version. I never felt inclined to use BP 1 at all. In general, It sometimes feels like Maxon's products need more input from artists and less input from programmers (if that makes sense).

I agree that you should be able to constrain movement or scaling of both UV"s and image transforms by simply holding down a modifier.

[LucentDreams]

Originally posted by Roger Eberhart
It seems to constrain my move or scale to one axis I have to set the quantize to a fairly high value to avoid accidentally adjusting both. Also, bringing up the structure manager while in uv point edit mode brings up nothing. You have to go back to a standard layout, select the actual points on the geomentry, then go into the structure manager.

No switching layouts or playing with quantize values.

If I wanted to tackle this in BP2, without switching out of the UV edit layout

Am I missing something, or is this kind of a pain? Not the easiest workflow in the world for something that should be straight forward. Maybe there is an easier way that I haven't figured out yet. Of course, if it's this hard to figure out, then they've already dropped the ball from a UI design standpoint.

I'd say your missing the fact that you never have to switch layouts, you go up to window open strcuture manager and dock it into your interface for your UV edit then save that layout. And you don't have to go into your normal layout to select the geometry points, the 3D view in the UVedit is the same, and coordinated with the UV edit (which is in fact a texture view for painting.) you may have to switch from UVpoint to UVpoly to make sure its the which poly your moving (that should be changed I guess, two unnecessary clicks) but I simply dock the structure manager so its tabbed with the object manager in my UVedit interface and its always available, no switching layouts, no having to select the actual points.

Coming from lightwave specifically I can see why you'd think the UIdesign might be bad, but thats because you haven't had an app with this much cusomisability. With BP2 I can make my navigation match LW's perfectly, Also change my entire interface to look much like LW's with a panel on the left all text menus no icons. I laughed at modo when they advertised that they could match any appps interface, I though Whoopdi doo, maxon C4D and BP could do that since XL 6.

[Roger Eberhart]

Ok, that's weird. When I first open the structure editor it's blank. However, if I rotate the view a little or alt-tab out of the application and back in then the UV coords show up. That's why I thought I had to select the actual geometry. I guess it's some sort of refresh bug.

Modo's UI claims are amusing. More amusing is Discreet's advertising for Max 6. The shell command sounds exactly the same as extruding along surface normals, which Max already can do. That and they're advertising new packaging and logo. Wow! Talk about scraping the bottom of the barrel.

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