Oculus Medium Suggestions

[slipgatecentral]

TL&DR: Medium is a very nice toy, but it's hard to be productive in it. 

After playing for few hours with it, I have some ideas that might improve this software for professional artists, without ruining accessibility for beginners.

-Almost very tool needs an alt modifier, that will allow user quickly switch to alternate mode. Example - for clay tool, to cut holes you need to open menu, select "Erase", and close menu. Needs to be faster, preferably holding modifier button on left controller (like the one we got for alternate tool). Every sculpting 3d software has this - primary function can be switched instantly to it's opposite.

- We must be able to select same tools for primary and alternate, but they must not share settings. This will be extremely useful in many cases. Like, you can paint using 2 different brushes with different color.

- Desperately need move/pull tool. Smudge doesn't do much. If there's no room on the palette I suggest removing useless swirl.

- Need an option to customize brushes and my palette. Would be great to have my own selection of saved tools with different settings. Time saver.

- Need bigger color swatch accessible from menu. Right now only 3 colors in it.

- Eyedropper tool takes too long to select. It also needs a button modifier for quick operation, like Alt key in Photoshop.


I am a professional 3d artist and I'm looking forward to work in VR. Those are just first steps but I see tons of potential in VR sculpting. 

[naycorn]

This thread is packed with great suggestions. We’re constantly improving Medium
and we want to hear your thoughts!

This is an anonymous
questionnaire for Medium users: https://oculusmedium2017.typeform.com/to/CY2h0a

It may take about 20 minutes. We’re
grateful for your honest feedback! Thank you!

[Fistful_of_Colo]

Now that I've had some more time with the program and started creating full scenes - I'll chip in with a few suggestions.

1: The 20 layer limit is a real problem... I remember reading an explanation from the devs somewhere, that the 20 layer limit is pretty much impossible to expand - so a different solution might be to look at what 3d Coat is doing. In 3D coat - you have the possibility to switch any given layer between voxel mode and surface mode. Maybe a similar feature could solve the 20 layer limit in Medium. When approaching the 20 layer limit, one could choose layers containing nearly finished pieces of sculpture and convert those layers to surface mode. That should save memory and surface mode layers wouldnt be part of the 20 layer limit. Naturally it should be possible to convert those layers back to clay if there are free layers left within the 20 layer limit. Hope it makes sense.

2: The line restriction option should be changed to work like in MasterpieceVR. With line restriction activated, you pull the trigger at point A and let the trigger go at point B. Medium should display a line between the two points while the trigger is held down and when the trigger is released at point B, Medium should draw the used stamp in a continuous line between points A and B - possibly even honoring rotation of the stamp line. Changing the line tool to work like that could help working with modelling geometric objects a whole lot!

[MattHickman]

The 20 layer limit is not so much completely impossible to expand as it is limited by min spec AMD machines which can only support a certain number of layers before crashing due to our OpenGL backend. We are working on a new graphics backend but it's a little ways out because as you can imagine, it's a complex endeavor, but we will be removing (or vastly expanding) that layer limit in the foreseeable future.

[Fistful_of_Colo]

Sounds pretty amazing if that is coming Matt! Would really make a huge difference. Does my 2nd suggestion make sense? Handpicking start and end point for the line restrictor is just so much better than trying to hit to endpoints controlling the line tool in its current form.

[MattHickman]

Yeah makes sense, not sure about the specific implementation but improving precision and manipulation across the board is certainly on the list.

[virtualsweden]

When fixing photogrammetry model, I get nausea after a while. So if it would be possible to make model semi-transparent when re-sizing/moving the model it would be great.!!

[Metrons]

We need an option to import with Y being the up direction. I personally only know of 3ds max doing this with Z? No other program i use does this. It's very backwards imo 

[ferrire]

My first impressions are that it needs undockable menus that can be on permanent display in environment, such a pain atm.( I own every VR sculpting tool)

[HomeDistiller]

can the stamp tool please ether ignore the part origin or stamp in the right location if the origin is not centered on the part? (as per this post https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/discussion/59361/stamp-alignment-and-list-view-problems#latest ) thanks!

[3d-illusions.co.uk]

I'm a professional 3d artist and would love to be able to use this tool exclusively as it's by far the best VR modelling app.  It's missing some key features though in my opinion, listed below in order of importance:

1. Quad topology export with good poly flow.  Think zremesher or instant meshes (an open source option which can be used freely by developers (check out houdini's implementation))
2. Useable UV's after export.  It took me 10 mins to model a tree and then about 6 hours to retopo it and hand draw decent uv's.  This means for anything that requires texture based materials it's quicker to just model in a 3rd party software in the first place.
3. Export individual layers so you can quickly add a new element to an existing scene and then export it on it's own.
4. Paintable pbr workflow, so that you can create texture based materials and then paint them directly.  Check out Corona renderer or Fstorm for good examples of material editors.
5. Bezier Guides, which could act as a guide to draw along, and manipulate geometry after creation.  They could also be used by the export engine to guide topology flow and uv islands.
6. Alpha noise brush, so you can use custom height maps to paint repetitive details like scales or tree bark for example.
7. Masking, so you can move large areas without affecting surrouding geometry, such as fingers.  Mudbox's quick pose tool would be ideal.
8. Angle snappable user grids to draw on for better precision, for example if you want to make a table and have the table top at 90 degrees from the legs.
9. Scatter brush, similar to surface option but with random rotation, scale and transform.  Good for leaves etc.
10. Ability to choose directories for exports, stamps, saves etc.  I'd prefer not to clog up my system drive if possible.
11. Better geometry memory management system, check out Euclideon who have developed an indexing system which can store a full city in point data on a hard drive and deliver it instantly to the screen even without using the GPU!
12. Indication of layer's current resolution and memory usage.
13. tool spacing, so that you could specify how far apart each tool would be drawn when not in single mode creation.
14. Nurbs tool for hard surface modelling.
15. Show the tool ghost in surface mode so that you can adjust how far from the surface the stamp sticks out visually.
16. maintain smoothing when increasing resolution.