Cycles Viewport Sculpting : Simple Proposal. (N panel)

Easy Read

  1. Is it possible to have specular available for opengl lights in cycles viewport for sculpting.

  2. When we set “display” options in (N) panel to “only render” , can we still display the viewport gradient if we have it enabled it in preferences > themes.

Long read

I had a very brief discussion in dyntopo thread.

However, I just wanted to bring it up here. I hope a Dev can take a look.

I’ve only been using Blender just over a year, so I never really messed with BI and went straight to Cycles. When sculpting under Cycles Viewport using opengl lights, the spec is unavailable. I’m sure there’s a reason for this, probably because BI spec doesn’t represent cycles glossy.

However, if you are a prolific sculptor, and you use cycles viewport primarily. You would have come across the problem of “losing detail” in your cycles render, simply because you haven’t sculpted “deep” enough. Your sculpt looks lovely in the viewport, but the GI in cycles means all that detail becomes lost.

Recently, I started using BI viewport. I’ve discovered, that with the use of spec, I’ve actually had to do significantly less messing about with my sculpt when looking at cycles previews. Specular allows you to get a better approximation of how deep you have sculpted on a mesh. When going to a cycles preview render, it will be closer to how it looked in the viewport. I’m talking about forms here.

Most of us are using the “quick prefs” addon. I think its far superior to matcaps, as you move the light around etc.

so spec is a actually a great aid to sculpting.

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In this second image, I can also locate “ugly” areas of my sculpt that weren’t so obvious to me using the cycles viewport.

[ATTACH=CONFIG]273263[/ATTACH]

So my proposal, under cycles viewport, is to simply add a “use BI spec” checkbox in the N panel, this can become available when entering sculpt mode only.

My second proposal is about the “gradient viewport” I like to sculpt with “render only” on, so I don’t have to look at the 3dcursor, or hide other objects (like the lamp) when sculpting.

However when you turn render only on, the gradient viewport is no long available, so I was hoping perhaps and option to use gradient with render only on, could also be available. Its a just a nice visual thing that makes our work area look less mundane. I’ve been told how to do this under BI. However I’m talking about cycles viewport.

WHY?

Well for those of us that use Cycles primarily, its a lil annoying to have to switch between BI and cycles simply to use spec, and the switch back to cycles to render previews etc.

i’m sure some sculptors will agree, anyway, thoughts?

yes here is a sculptor that agrees… and also wishes a better solution, like ng suggested…my workflow also is cycles based, in fact i never learned about bi, but i use as ng now the bi render in viewport for sculpting, and switch back to cycles once sculpt mode is off…

I don’t understand what sculpting has to do with rendering - but why not use a second scene and link in the sculpted object (or anything you like), then just have one scene for rendering and one for sculpting. That way you don’t even need to have the same material for both.

They’re not talking about rendering, they’re pointing to the difference (lack of specular light) in the sculpt mode when you are in Cycles Render mode in comparison to the Blender Render mode (the render mode you set on the top header).

yes I think you have misunderstood Greg, apologies if I wasn’t very clear.

perhaps you misunderstand “cycles viewport” for rendering inside the viewport, as in preview render.

as sanctuary said, i’m talking about when you switch the engine at the top of the screen.

I don’t understand what sculpting has to do with rendering

???
Now into topic

  1. I doubt if specular OGL can help us understand how deep we are carving. However, it looks better, a slight amount of it. I also use it now.

  2. To ask for a button like “BI specular in cycles” is a little funny. There is already a button that says Blender render LOL
    Here a question. What really OGL viewport has to do with BI or cycles? It is linked to BI editor but this is just a feature. After all on prefs panel (or on quick prefs panel) we have a full OGL editor. Why it does not working (specs) under cycles, this I can’t understand.

  3. What could be a great help: A way to tune this OGL shader. A less contrasted shaded sphere. more grey tones, if you follow me.
    Like more ambient effect.
    This idea comes from zbrush shaders. I’m tuning basic shaders adding more anisotropic diffuse. As it is expressed in the Z language anyway (LOL). This way I can carve a bit deeper and have a kind of a preview on how it gonna look under cycles GI+SSS environments.

  4. OGL shader is not really superior to any matcaps. A nice matcap selector could help you change lighting as you sculpt. (presets-some matcaps)
    Matcaps are supported by OGL. Now in blender, well, what can I say? They hit performance. I have never seen it on other applications.

Matcaps support then.
And because we love blender, a nice on the fly editor on matcaps. I don’t mean the obvious possible rendering of a sphere and save the image. I had in mind something similar to the lighting editor of zbrush (yeah, it converts it to matcaps if you wish, on the fly)

Are all these so important?
Well, it is about preview, visualization.
Not important to some but it is one of these cases where I start getting boring with blender development.
A kind of bad taste from the devs teem. They don’t seem to care. They don’t have fan fixing such UI issues.
A hard critic to Ton. Because he started a matcap support which stays there. As a ridiculous annoying thing. We can leave without it alright.

  1. @NG
    So, we sculpt under OGL preview and render under cycles right?
    It is much easier to tune cycles to come closer to a OGL preview somehow, than the opposite.
    This is what I do recently and this is somehow what Doris is doing on her recent renders. Am I right?

  2. My last one.
    PLEASE, a button that says “hide the 3d cursor” pleeaaaaasssee

I just gave my experience, so i’m not why you are doubtful. I found that after I swapped to BI, I had to far less work to do after looking at a cycles preview.

  1. To ask for a button like “BI specular in cycles” is a little funny. There is already a button that says Blender render LOL
    Here a question. What really OGL viewport has to do with BI or cycles? It is linked to BI editor but this is just a feature. After all on prefs panel (or on quick prefs panel) we have a full OGL editor. Why it does not working (specs) under cycles, this I can’t understand.

perhaps you missed it. I do cycles previews every now and then.

I have to switch from BI viewport, to cycles to do the render preview, and then switch back BI viewport to get the spec. With it enabled under the N panel, I don’t have to switch to BI at all. I can just hit shift Z to activate/deactivate render preview.

  1. What could be a great help: A way to tune this OGL shader. A less contrasted shaded sphere. more grey tones, if you follow me.
    Like more ambient effect.
    This idea comes from zbrush shaders. I’m tuning basic shaders adding more anisotropic diffuse. As it is expressed in the Z language anyway (LOL). This way I can carve a bit deeper and have a kind of a preview on how it gonna look under cycles GI+SSS environments.

this is sounds good, but this was more about things that could implemented easily.

  1. OGL shader is not really superior to any matcaps. A nice matcap selector could help you change lighting as you sculpt. (presets-some matcaps)
    Matcaps are supported by OGL. Now in blender, well, what can I say? They hit performance. I have never seen it on other applications.

matter of opinion, they work better for me. matcaps are supported by OGL? i’m confused?

not sure I understand the last thing.

  1. @NG
    So, we sculpt under OGL preview and render under cycles right?
    It is much easier to tune cycles to come closer to a OGL preview somehow, than the opposite.
    This is what I do recently and this is somehow what Doris is doing on her recent renders. Am I right?

It may have sounded elaborate, but i’m really just asking for spec availability under cycles viewport. I just thought i’d explain it in more complex way so the importance is understood,so that it wasn’t just another “request” thread with no real explanation.

Hey, I’m not doubtful. I also use specs. Your last posted artworks are very good, not just because you started using spec on preview. Hey, you’re getting better, that’s it. IMO.
OGL language supports matcaps.
What you might ask is an on the fly matcap editor. The existing system is already a kind of it.
Ng, it could be great to be able to have a softer shader, right? Why not matcaps then? Matcaps should perform as the existing OGL shader. Why they dont? I wonder.
BTW, I use a combination of three OGL lights on shader, same grey color, all of them. One of them has a slight spec. Trying to make it softer you see, but not quite there.

of course, when you sculpt with an aim, and not just some random blob, you want your sculpt to look a very predefined way in the render… now, when the viewport does not show similar to render you are sculpting in the dark, it is guesswork at best. not very professional, huh? … that is why render equals sculpting, at least it should… we actually would not only love a button that changes easily between bi and cycles viewport, but we actually would wish to sculpt directly under cycles, meaning cycles would truely render while we sculpt… i know that is impossible now, so we wish a single little button, which would make our sculpting a lot easier… the images ng posted clearly show the problem…

and yes “a hide 3d cursor” button would be great too, as my first action when starting sculpting is always manoever the 3d cursor out of view from each angle…

If 3d cursor could share a role in sculpting…. if it could be a possible pivot point for posing somehow…
Well, it is not.
So, when entering sculpt mode in blender, why not automatically hidden?

Last version of zbrush I used, a while ago (maybe its changed), when using matcap, you could not actually move the light around. Matcaps are sort of “baked” lighting situation, you can’t see the model with light in different position, thats why I think OGL is somewhat superior. In zbrush there are “materials” and “matcaps” they are separate no?

I thankyou for the compliments, However, i’m not talking about the sculpt itself, rather workflow. I did a “trial” run, I sculpted under cycles with no spec, I had to do a lot more work on that sculpt after looking at cycles preview. I then tried a separate sculpt under BI with spec and used cycles preview, there was less work. I did several attempts.

So what I mean to say is, its not entirely to do with the fact that i’m “getting better” its definitely a workflow issue. There are things you just don’t notice when working with cycles viewport, this is what the images I posted where suggesting.

like I said, on the fly matcap editor, may be a good idea, but it is not one that can be easily implemented, lets face it, nobody is working on anything involving sculpt.

what I propose is only a simple UI addition. Or just include spec in cycles (sculpt mode) permanently, then no need for any buttons.

regarding spec: not a sculptor here, but the cycles glossy shader has a GLSL representation (if you switch to “material” Viewport shading). if you provide o low roughness (e.g 0.01) it behaves similar to BI, no? I mean it is less contrasty (it always dials in an ambient term plus an xtra diffuse term - which I myself think is a little too strong and perhaps should be turned down --> you can do this /source/gpu/shaders/gpu_shader_material.glsl, look for “node_bsdf_glossy()”) but should work?
Also note that it doesnt use scene lights, but the lights in user preferences > system. You might have to tweak/increase the Lights spec color “value”.
Let me know what you think, otherwise I could suggest to devs to tune down ambient/diffuse on the glossy representation with a patch…

@2d23d
No, I don’t see this.
What I do miss now?
Not of great interest as it will hit performance badly. Just saying.

hmmm ??? what does that mean?? we are not programmers, we use blender, sculpting that is… i never saw anything like that in blender while using it. if that is available as you say, then we wish a button where we can turn it on…not every blender user wants learn the programming… and i really have no idea where these things are you mention … and material in viewport slows down sculpting to my experience. best is work solid viewport, others are noticable slower…

@2d23d

The preferences > system lights, are the opengl lights, thats exactly we are talking about here, except we use them via an addon called “quickprefs” which appears under the N panel :slight_smile:

Its a good suggestion, but by entering material, we sacrifice the dark more contrasty “shadow” created in the solid shading mode, and as you said the spec also isn’t contrasty enough. Adding a fresnel factor can fix this slightly,but then the opengl colors aren’t accurately represented. I dunno how to change it like you said…

I would prefer spec to be an option under solid shading mode in cycles as I have proposed. Others might like the way material shading behaves in blender, I don’t want to change entire behavior of something just to help me.

@michalis he means click material viewport at bottom of screen. (where you find wireframe,solid,texture mode etc.)

edit: also I didn’t know other shading modes where slower as said by users above, as i’ve never used them. So looks like it isn’t the best way to go.

this is what glossy looks like with the changes I suggested (turned down ambient/diffuse by a factor of 20)


But yeah, maybe not the way to go… (@michalis/Doris: out of interest: how much slower is “material” compared to solid if you only have a glossy shader sitting there?)

Anyways, I could also have a quick look of how cycles “solid” is represented in GLSL and add a spec term there… This will have to wait til tomorrow though…

Night all!

@michalis he means click material viewport at bottom of screen. (where you find wireframe,solid,texture mode etc.)

yeah, I know what he means, I think so, I just don’t see any spec.

Edit: Sorry, I do see them now.
It hits performance badly.
As expected.

well thanks in advance for having a look the code, what about the second suggestion, gradient in viewport available in “only render” display, is that possible?

or as the as others suggested, getting rid of 3d cursor in sculpt mode.

i tried, the performance is bad, and even though there is now specular under cycles viewport, it has nothing to do with the cycles render of that material. so, its useless… as i said, what is needed for sculpting is a representation of the sculpt as close to the render as possible… so, far the quickpref lighs are the best solution under bi, and we would like have a simple button for ease of switching automatically between bi and cycles when entering or leaving sculpting. no more.

@doris: well, “Material” draw mode should give you the best viweport representation of cycles nodes or “as close as possible” to the final render. there are some cycles nodes that still do nothing in the viewport (e.g. procedural textures) I’d like to improve this as well. I personally would also consider using scene lights in “Material” draw mode (instead of OpenGL preference lights), but that’s another story.

And as you said, if “Material” draw mode lacks performance for sculpting, this is not good…

Anyways, had a go at cycles SOLID drawing mode and here is what it looks like hardcoded with spec {1.0,1.0,1.0,1.0} and hardness 50.
This pretty pic will surprise noone, I know, just wanted to say I have a patch here that does this…


I could propose this to brecht in IRC (if I can get a hold of him there) or just submit the patch to the patchtracker if you like. It would certainly be interesting to see the reasoning behind the decision to NOT have cycles SOLID drawmode have specular. Lets see… I would propably favour solid WITH specular in cycles as well, but my voice is little -> so to get this accepted this thread makes a good point I guess

[ I’m short in time, so hiding 3d cursor and bg gradient in “Only render” will have to wait a little - even though they would propably get my vote as well :slight_smile: and certainly doable]