3D-Coat development process

I am Andrew Shpagin, the developer of 3D-Coat. This is my personal blog devoted to the development of 3D-Coat. This blog is created to give fast and non-official information about 3D-Coat. I will post there daily news, what I am doing now, what features are under development this moment. It could be really interesting for everyone who is interested in 3D-Coat.

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Vector displacement

Now I am making support of export/import of vector displacement. What is vector displacement? You have subdivided mesh and texture for displacement. It is not grey, every channel represents shift in space in corresponding direction (XYZ). Vector displacement is important for sculpting because it allowd to displace sphere into something non-trivial like face. Using vector displacement will make export for render engines much mere easy and precise. There is two types of vector displacement

1) World space vector displacement - RGB in picture mean XYZ shift in space. It is most precise method, but it is not good for animation.

2) Tangent space (local space) displacement - RGB mean shift in TBN - space, N- normal, T,B - directions of U,V gradient. This kind of displacement is good for animation but less precise because tangent space calculation can be made using many methods, it even can be non - orthonormal.

I have almost done this stuff, but I have a problem with method of calculation of tangent space in LW or Modo. If someone knows how to do that in Modo/LW, please send me the info.

You can download and test this feature by the link

http://www.3d-coat.com/files/3d-Coat-209B3B-en.exe

I have created the new topic in forum

http://3dbrush.kriska.hvosting.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=1038

Please help in testing vector displacement.

Also, if you have examples of EXR files with vector displacement to transform sphere of some other simple surface into something non-trivial, please send me to support. It will be great help.

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