2.5d in Blender for sculpting?
I was reading about openvdb, and saw in a video how it enabled c4d to have volume objects which are objects which exist as 3d pixel. it seemed very like 2.5d to me. But I'm not an expert,. I love sculpting in Blender But the viewport gets too slow too fast. That's why I had to switch to Zbrush. If Blender could have 2.5d or something to enable it for high res sculptings I would definitely switch back. So devs pls consider this.
9 Comments
2.5D is a term used by Pixologic to explain what they call Pixols, which are pixels with depth, color and material information; while Voxels are only used for sculpting in 3DCoat I believe.
I don't remember where I read this, have to search for the link, but in Zbrush you are able to work with huge meshes because they use several tricks to manage just one portion of the model at the time, so only what you're seeing on the screen is being processed. Basically whatever you see on the viewport at any given moment is just the 2.5D version of that part of the model, that gets projected on the actual mesh once you stop sculpting or rotate the view. Is a very simplistic explanation but that's basically it. For example, if you try the Sculptris mode in ZB you'll see that the viewport starts to lag much faster than when using their traditional Subdivision or HD Geometry approach, because with Sculptris mode you're actually working on the mesh and adding tesselation on the fly (just like Dyntopo in Blender).
It should definitely be possible to have a faster and more responsive viewport for sculpting high-res meshes in Blender, but I believe it would need a LOT of time (or several developers) to manage it. If you take into account that Pixologic has been working on this since V1, with a bunch of developers dedicated just to improve the performance for sculpting.
@Julian Perez: zbrush doesn't use 3d coordinate systems with matrices ..etc that have to be calculated each time with floating points but rather it takes a Picture element and adds depth, orientation and material to make it look 3d object this way your computer doesn't have to do complex calculations..and the only downside is you have to export your model to a 3d package to be able to evaluate it properly...for blender i think it's trick to have that unless there is a genius way to combine both.
@zinogg: maybe we could make the sculpt mode in Blender a "2.5d mode" so every time we go sculpt mode on a object, Blender would isolate it and open it up in 2.5d mode. How about that right? this could work maybe. Wish some devs were interested in this, though.
@jamesprakashjc: u are like me u have the craziest ideas ever hahah, the question, is it feasible?, because you have to switch between real 3D mode to 2.5D mode without having a performance impact unless for example you make only the sculpting template work in 2.5d an not the possibility to switch to full 3D, but like you said we have to get genius devs who are interested to make it happen just like my idea..then blender will be the best software to rule them all.
Please ask for a more responsive viewport during sculpting if that is what you want.
@Emil Assarsson: yeah, that's what i want, but more precisely, I wanna sculpt high res models in Blender when I have to, and so far only 2.5d seems to enable that.
ZBrush has a 2.5D workspace, idk how they do it but it could be very interesting looking into it, considering that ZBrush uses "points" you can assume it is some sort of voxel point cloud data thing.
Do you mean sculpting in voxels?
@ammusionist: yep