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Various Suggestions And Feature Requests


Digital777
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I have another thread that had both bug reports and ideas -

http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6259&st=0

The topic title was 'Various Bugs' even though it had ideas however so i have decided to just open a new thread here for ideas and suggestions to make things less confusing. Be sure to check that other thread though because it has many good ideas and also bugs and glitches that need to be fixed still.

Anyway here is some new ideas/suggestions i have that people will hopefully like -

Suggestion -

If you change colors in Preferences like for the Grid Color etc it should update the view as soon as you hit apply. Currently you have to press Apply, then Ok and then move the view or click for it to update.

This makes it slightly annoying to create a custom theme because your constantly going in and out of the Edit menu and Preferences options.

Suggestion -

We currently have the 'Edit in ext. editor' option in the right click menu for Brushes this would be nice for Materials and Masks also. For materials you have the edit dialog which is good and you can find the path but it would be nice to have a 'Edit in ext. editor' sub menu for Depth, Color and Specular textures.

Suggestion -

For Sketch tool if you have images loaded and change to another tool the References image panel stays which i guess is so you can use references still. There is Show/Hide options for these but no actual Remove/Clear images button which would be useful if you decided to cancel.

It's not really important but a 'Remove ref images' button would be nice, i guess it would help save a bit of memory usage also. I am also thinking the close button would be better as a standard icon next to the Pin icon for the Reference images dialog so you could just move that to the top and replace it's position with a new Remove all button.

Suggestion -

When you add a Primitive object as soon as you press Apply you see the next shape if you are going to add one. It overlaps though and just doesn't look very nice if you move the mouse around over it.

What i think 3DC should do is just check if you have actually done anything and give a nicer preview until it starts to be re-positioned again. Basically it looks glitchy/buggy even though it will work fine but it would be nice to update this.

Idea -

Merge Tool Angle Snap/lock for the 'On pen' option. The idea would be when you are in that mode if you are on a corner the pen rotates to match the angle but you would hold down a key and it ignores that and snaps/rounds to the nearest 90 degree rotation. This could also be done for 45 degree or set amounts maybe.

This would be very useful say if you wanted to have details along a tube at the same angle. The best way to do this i find is if you are wanting to do it on a main angle set the camera view to top etc then use the 2d grid with snap, even using this method it will rotate the pen though

You could of course use the Transform tool or adjust the Yaw and Pitch etc to position each however this would be a much faster and nicer way to work.

Suggestion -

You can use the keyboard keys 9 and 0 to rotate the pens but is no reset shortcut so you have to go to the pen options again, maybe 8 would be be good to quickly reset the rotation.

It would also be nice to have a 45 degree rotate so you hold Ctrl and press 9 or 0 and it rotates in a 45 degree step.

Idea -

The Sketch tool can load in various image formats but how about allowing vectors also. This could be very good for scaling and still having sharp edges as this is what vectors do best. They could follow the same type of rule but just use a solid white/black area then the transparent color would count as the outer area.

Vectors would be nice for other things like masking areas etc although for the sketch tool a much better and faster workflow would be direct in app editing.

Suggestion -

I have never really liked the way the menus go so fast if you roll out of it's area. What some apps do is add a bit extra to the area so if you scroll down too fast out of it's area by mistake it doesn't go right away.

Either that or allow the delay time to be adjusted so you can set it higher and quickly scroll back over the area so it doesn't close. I think i asked about this once and there was a option/suggestion but i cannot find it anywhere now so i guess not.

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I have never really liked the way the menus go so fast if you roll out of it's area. What some apps do is add a bit extra to the area so if you scroll down too fast out of it's area by mistake it doesn't go right away.

Either that or allow the delay time to be adjusted so you can set it higher and quickly scroll back over the area so it doesn't close. I think i asked about this once and there was a option/suggestion but i cannot find it anywhere now so i guess not.

+1 :)...I scream each time it closes when trying to select children layer .

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Here is some more ideas and suggestions.

Suggestion -

I don't always get how the scale works with this program, if i export something it is sometimes giant in other apps like blender on import. So a idea would be some sort of scale options for import and export maybe with presets for some of the popular apps so scale is not a extra step and it easily converts to any of the different units a app will use and make it simpler to transfer objects.

Idea -

How about a option to use auto-relaxed strokes for things like paint with drawn contour. By this i mean similar to the Muscle tool where the longer you have the mouse held before release it smooths to the surface, only it would do this with the points in the line etc. So basically this would allow you to get rounded shapes much simpler even if using a mouse which makes things more difficult to draw than if you were using a tablet.

Idea -

Sometimes when working with voxels you get left with grains and islands you don't want so you have to cut or hide them which can be annoying at times. So how about a voxel filter/threshold option that would give you a range control which you can adjust so it would remove any detected islands lower than the threshold you set. So what could be a possibly long task is done quickly as it basically just filters out what is unwanted or problems you might not have even noticed.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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Idea -

Either add a new tool or update the current Snake and Spike tools to allow multi part loading with modes like 4 or 8 etc.

So for example you select 4 multi part mode and you then load in 4 objects/tube parts. The difference now to the standard tool is rather than that object repeating loads of times you have much more variation to the tube/snake that you draw. A good example would be a sci-fi style pipe where you have a regular part, then a part with a vent, then a regular part with some bolts and then another with a slightly different air vent etc.

Currently for this type of results you would need to just make a repeating regular part and then merge all the other parts in, this however would allow you to do it instantly and because of the way you would have 4 loaders it means you could quickly make new patterns also. This would be a really useful tool to have.

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Suggestion -

The Preset system needs to be updated to work for voxel mode also. From looking at the stored information it's designed for paint mode only. It needs to store all of the voxel settings or things that would be useful like pen/mouse switches, locking, Interpolate value, brush/draw mode used, brush settings, which voxel tool was used etc. It also needs a folder system for good organization.

I don't like the current voxel preset system much because it basically isn't fully done it seem and in my opinion this should be updated as soon as possible. When using most other apps the preset system is a big part of a quick and simple workflow so a update would be great.

If this was added it would make things much nicer for my workflow and probably save me loads of time also rather than constantly adjusting things, i know other feel the same also as there has been a few posts about this before but hopefully it will be added some time as it would be very useful.

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Idea -

The Voxel mode Fill tool is useful but maybe it could have some other options to customize the way it works a bit more. Even in the manual it says it sometimes needs high settings to work so a good option would be a drop down menu with low and high intensity so there is no need to boost the depth amount really high.

Another would be some way to make it raise with a sharp result instead of smoothing things maybe so it will pinch the edges of the cavities while it raises. Even if you set smoothing to 0% it still does it so something like this could be used for hard surface sculpting also.

Idea -

For the voxel mode smooth tool it would be very useful to have some option so it only smooths near the edges. This would be useful because if you do something like merge and add a cube without giving it a higher poly count it gives a distorted edge, this can be made to look much nicer if you use a smooth with a low value set but the problem is it also softens un-wanted parts like the corners more also.

Basically i am thinking this would give results something like when you crease corners/edges with smooth shapes so if it was a cube for example rather than ending up more like a sphere/rounded cube it's still a sharp cube shape just smoothed nicely on the edges. This would also be great for hard surface sculpting and higher resolution work.

Idea -

For Voxel modes Plane tool i find working with it annoying because of the way it works. It would be nice to have a option to make it work more like Surface modes Chisel tool so the brush rotates with the surfaces edge as that tool is much simpler to work with. Then you could still also use the current method and just easily switch from the menu.

Idea -

The voxel Hide tool does not seem effected by Masks, this would be a very useful feature though if you wanted to hide only a certain shape or have a very clean edge etc.

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Suggestion/Idea -

With the merge tool even if it's a cube as the default shape and you are using a camera view like Front or Left the pen will rotate near the edges and other merged object edges even if they are flat.

This tool really needs a option like 'Don't Rotate With Edges' as a tick box for the On pen mode. When you merge with transform it's fine though but it would be nice to have this type of control for pen mode as it is much faster to use.

You might have noticed i have already said about a very similar idea above however this is different as it's not to snap to a angle but rather just avoid the default 'follow the surface' style rotation the tool uses, both of these requests would allow much nicer control with the merge tool though and would be great to have.

Off-topic Forum Suggestion -

The Tutorials forum here is great but all the sticky posts are a bit much. They are useful to have but i think instead there should be a index post listing the most useful topics (basically the current sticky posts) and then maybe 1 or 2 of the most important like helpful video tutorial series. Maybe it is just me but even though most of these are helpful half a page of pinned topics seems a bit over the top in my opinion so a index topic would be a nice solution and make things more organized.

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