My proposals for Curvy 3D 4.0

[granada]

Making a great team with the ideas guys,i like it.

Dave

[Kato]

I wonder if the bones will come back for the 4.0 version, because it's very useful for posing characters, and also the experimental render engine, all these questions are based on what i have seen on old curvy screenshots.

[Simon]

I've been thinking about bones recently. It's so much harder sculpting "posed" than sculpting aligned with the axes and posing later. However it is fiddly enough to setup that most people don't actually use the posing feature.

In my head I'd just make a wireframe sketeton, and imagine the rest of the object was made of soft putty that naturally follows as the skeleton bends. If I can get it that simple - then it might make it's way back into Curvy as a kind of "toy" rather than a full blown complicated skeleton implementation that you would get in Blender/Maya etc.

Of course the other option is to export your model and do the posing in other software (the hard way!)

[Kato]

I'm thinking using bones in curvy only when the character is already done and to make the pose i want to export it in other application for the render part, the feature that will be cool in curvy, it's a layer where the character is in vitruvian man stand to continue it the sculpting, and the second layer where the character is boned and posed, all changes made in the first layer will be apply on the boned and posed version in the second layer, well it's only a idea.

I know we can imagine the pose of the character and sculpt it directly in curvy or make the full rig in other application, i say that because i have see some intersting Curvy 2.0 screenshots with bones and i say whoa it's cool feature, i know bones it's a headache to implant in a program and find a good UI to use them.

It's not blender that can sketch bones with a stroke and the bones are created and already weighted in the model ?

[Simon]

That is the way Curvy's bones used to work - you could switch back and forth between posed and unposed versions of the model. Its still a posibility, although at the moment there are a lot of higher priority things on my todo list.

[Simon]

I'm thinking through how operations with multiple input curves + meshes should work. I quite like the idea of an operation being like a new Object, and you just choose the input objects and curves to use with it with a "Pick" tool. You'd also get the choice of whether to hide/delete the input objects, or leave them as editable objects in their own right.

The simplest possible 'operation' is a transform, and this happens to end up working exactly like Instances. Indeed this nicely fits with, say, an array duplication which makes a lot of sense to be using Instances rather than copies.

Pretty much all 'Actions' that rely on a parameter or input object could benefit from being made interactive - essentially a built-in "undo -> change param -> redo" loop. And it makes a lot of edits more like the easy curve-editing stage.

When an operation requires Curves, I hope to label the input curves clearly with a colour, name or symbol so that you don't have to remember which order of curves to use. Might take a bit of experimentation to get that right. A lot of the new features on this forum depend on this mixing of meshes and curves to make new shapes - so it is a high priority to get working.

[Simon]

Just added "Lazy Mouse", very helpful! You can now draw slow shaky mouse strokes and the Lazy Mouse turns them into elegant precise strokes (for curves, sculpting and painting alike).

[franklejp]

Awesome!
Lazy mouse is even beneficial for tablet users.

[Simon]

I love the way Lazy can create both smooth arcs as well as sharp points. It is a big improvement over the "smooth everything" approach I had before. I used to find I was going back over my curves just to add those sharp points.

It's also very useful if the frame rate drops (eg: Sculpting a dense mesh) as the stroke will be clean and smooth despite moving the mouse slowly.