cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

medium with quest link -fantastic& a couple of questions

finkbom
Explorer
Great to have a nice mobile setup using medium on a quest via the link & laptop- works great
- would medium benefit from an rtx graphics card  over an gtx 1070 ?
- any plans for more sculpting  tools /brushes - particularly liking  some of the new ones in blender 2.81 (im not familiar with zbrush) for doing creases /flat edges
- any plans to allow painting/stamping  with bitmaps / brushes
- a do not change topology option would be good - where appropriate  for making blend shapes/ morph targets
- any road map for medium development publicity available?

anyway thanks for a great tool - really appreciate the focus on elegant interface over just chucking the kitchen sink in - i love quill as well but find it a bit overwhelming sometimes re key/button combinations-
both quill and medium are real feathers in oculus software cap    🙂

thanks for any answers from devs

7 REPLIES 7

nosferalatu
Protege
- would medium benefit from an rtx graphics card  over an gtx 1070 ?

At the moment, no, Medium takes no advantage of RTX (hardware raytracing). However, other features of NVIDIA's latest Turing GPU's (the 16x0 and 20x0 series cards) make them run Medium faster than the previous Pascal GPU's (the 10x0 series cards). So, for example, a 2070 RTX will run Medium better than a 1070 GTX, but it won't take advantage of the hardware raytracing features.

As far as the other questions, we don't have a public roadmap and unfortunately I can't comment on upcoming features. We have an update that we'll share with you soon, though 🙂



finkbom
Explorer
excellent news about an update- thanks for info re gpus
another thought- would it be possible to bring a model into medium with uwvs already assigned and just paint on it with out changing the topology- effectively making medium like a 3d texture painting tool - seems like an easy win
but i suspect that the voxel nature of medium probably means topology has to change in order to import the model to use mediums tools -is this correct?
- as far as i know there is no vr tool for this work flow - any one care to correct me on this?
(i guess you could hack something together in blender or unreal but i have not tried)

thanks

hughJ
Protege
Yep, importing a mesh into Medium means being converted into "clay" in order to paint, at which point you destroy whatever mesh topology there was, and any surface detail that's smaller than a voxel can't be resolved to position or color.  They would need to seriously overhaul how Medium works, imo, in order to replicate what you can do in Blender or Zbrush.

I've yet to try this: https://www.marui-plugin.com/blender-xr/ to see how much of Blender is accessible via their plugin. I'd imagine it's super janky and probably doesn't expose all of Blender's features to the VR UI.  Unsure if you can paint with it.

nosferalatu
Protege
Yup, hughJ is correct.

> but i suspect that the voxel nature of medium probably means topology has to change in order to import the model to use mediums tools -is this correct?

That's right. Medium completely replaces an imported mesh's topology (its vertices and edges connecting those vertices) with voxels, which represent the surface of the original mesh as a signed distance field. This means that there's no UV parameterization that stores colors in textures. Instead, colors are stored in the same 3D array as the signed distance data. When Medium exports a sculpt, it computes new UVs and textures, but the original UVs and textures are long gone at that point.

finkbom
Explorer
thanks for answers - very interesting how it works -especial the signed distance field aspect of it - i sort of get voxels, a bit like voxel remeshers that are now in blender et al 
can i ask Nosferalatu - is the sdf an array of slices of the model -  or is it all in one sdf (like a volumetric texture?)

I imagine an sdf as a gradient image of one slice of a cross section of a 3d model and a whole model to be made of of many slices.
is the reason for the use of sdf efficiency of storing the data and or resolution independence ?

thanks for taking the time to explain  

nosferalatu
Protege
The SDF is similar to a volumetric 3D texture. It's actually stored sparsely as 8x8x8 blocks of SDF voxels, but it can be accessed as if it were a 3D array. In Medium, a voxel is a signed distance value and a color. Each layer in Medium corresponds to a separate 2048x2048x2048 grid.

> is the reason for the use of sdf efficiency of storing the data and or resolution independence ?

Medium uses SDF's to represent surfaces because they can efficiently and robustly support boolean CSG operations, like add and subtract. Adding and subtracting the builtin shapes and stamps are Medium's bread-and-butter. Storing the SDF in memory also lets us do field operations; for example, the smooth tool works by applying a Gaussian blur to a region of the SDF.


finkbom
Explorer
thanks for the explanation Nosferalatu,very helpful.