Basics of 3D Coat

For the next several videos we're going to be working in 3D coat. So go ahead and open that now. I'm using version four point eight point one eight. And this is the screen you should see when you first loaded up the 3-D code is a sculpting read typology and text Drian program for right now we're just going to be focusing on the sculpting part. So be sure that you click on sculpt. This is the 3-D coat sculpt room. You'll see our viewport still takes up most of the screen. We have all of our tools on the left and we have our object list on the right. This video will serve as a very basic overview of how to navigate 3-D coat to navigate that 3D viewport. It's a little bit different from Blatner orbiting the camera is left click and drag it panning the camera is middle click and drag and Darleen or zooming and the camera is right click and drag. Some tools may require you to also hold down the Alt key while you are clicking and dragging with any of the three mouse buttons. So let's get started by creating an object. So and my tools on the left if I scroll down to the object section and I select primitives you'll see that we have an object here we can move it around. I can scale it up and but this isn't actually an object it's just a preview of one to make it real you have to hit Enter now to get rid of this or simply select one of my other tools like build and you see the object comes in as black. That's because we haven't assigned a shader to it yet and we'll talk about that in a little bit. For right now let's go over how exactly 3D coat handles objects and sculpting 3D code is based heavily around the voxels as opposed to polygons. If I hit w on my keyboard on the wireframe mode you'll see that this mesh is not premade. This is generated based on the volume that our object occupies. So when we use a sphere we see that preview of the sphere and when we ultimately hit enter what 3D code is doing it is it is filling a spherical volume of voxels and then it is wrapping a mesh around it. That's why we see all of these rings going around because of how the meshes are generated. This has some very major advantages and what it means is that we are not constrained by any sort of typology on our model just to demonstrate and. If I were to start to move these polygons away you see they become stretched and after a while I simply don't have the resolution to make anything detailed because we're working with a finite number of vertices. But with voxels if I were to do the same thing what we're effectively doing is we're telling 3D code that we want to fill this volume and it will regenerate the mesh in to wrap around that. That means that you can start to drag out these points and you'll see them model never loses its resolution we can effectively keep adding to our models until our computer runs out of memory. So this means that 3D code is a very free form sculpting software. Now let's give this sphere some color. As I said earlier the reason why it's black is because it doesn't have a shader on it right now. So right here in your shaders window which should be on the right. If it's not you can go to windows pop ups shaders. And if you get a new one you can give it a name like default and it'll ask you for some parameters. Really the only thing you'll probably want to change will be the color. Now I'll just make mine an off white and hit OK. Now we can see our object a little bit better. Let's talk about how we can use some of these sculped tools. So we're not going to go over all of these tools right now. I'll be focusing on the build tool because we'll be using that one a lot and I'll use this to explain some very common 3D code features. Now with this tool if you left click and drag over your model you'll see how we can build that up. If we want our brush size to be larger. We right click and drag to the left and right if we want our brush to be stronger. We right click and drag up and down. Now if we make it very strong you'll see that things can quickly get out of hand. So make that a little bit shallower and if you want to make really subtle adjustments we can do that as well. Right now you'll see that we're sculpting with a very soft brush. We're not making any very harsh adjustments. If you want to change that we need to change what's known as the brush. Alpha So you see right now that red curve in the middle of my brush is the alpha. I am currently brushing with. You'll see that it's very smooth curve. It eases out towards the top and bottom. If I go to my alferez tab I can select a different one say this flat one you'll see now the edges have a much sharper drop off. And if I click and drag you'll see we get sharper features if I want to smooth that out a very easy way is to hold down the Shift key. The cursor will become green and that means you are now smoothing and while holding Shift you can right click and drag to change the strength of the smooth. If we hold down control you'll see that our cursor turns blue and that means we will start carving into our model as opposed to out of it. And this will happen with whatever alpha you choose. Now up here above the tools you'll see this little S-curve. And if you hover over it you'll get a window. These are some of the different ways that brushes can be applied. So for instance right now we are clicking and dragging. And that's because we're using this second curve these few curves are meant to be clicked and dragged or used in combination with a drawing tablet. However after that we get ones like this line that allows us to draw straight lines on our model just to over from that we have our spline tool. This allows us to draw a premade curve. And if you hit enter then your brush will be applied along that curve. We can edit it. We can Right-Click one of these points to change the interpellation and we can get very clean smooth results there are also these marquee ones these shape tools so we can draw simple shapes we can draw more complex shapes. So that would be a polygon. And then this one to the far right is just like the spline tool only it forms a closed loop these marquee modes are especially powerful with certain other sculpting tools like the cut off tool. Since we're working with voxels we can radically change the shape of our object in a single brush stroke. This is one way we can do that. So if I draw a shape that goes into the model and then outside of it and hit enter and then escape you'll see that we can simply cut away large portions of our model in order to create radically new shapes. We could also use something like our move tool. We can make that very large and start dragging around our model to get it to that particular shape that we want. Now if I wanted to sculpt fine details I'm going to have a little bit of a problem. One of the drawbacks of using voxels is you'll notice that our model topology is uniformly dense. There's no areas that are particularly high polygon relative to anything else. This means that although we can change the shape of our model indefinitely that's not going to help us get very fine details to do that we have to increase the voxel resolution all the way to the bottom you'll see a command called rez plus and there are two things to pay attention to pay attention to the model and also look right here where it says Volume 7. If I hit rez Plus what's happened is that we now have a 2 X next to Vol. 7 meaning that it is twice as dense as it would be otherwise. And our object has become a bit more smooth and the polygons are more fine. So I went back to my build brush and just started drawing to make sure that I in one of the drawing modes and you'll see that we can get a cleaner result. Now we were able to before when you're sculpting a very very fine details it's not uncommon to want this to be at four or even 8 x and every time you click rez plus that number will double. So now you see we can sculpt very fine details but trying to make larger changes will be a bit problematic. So it's important to work on your overall structure first before attempting to sculpt these fine details in the next few videos. We'll learn about some more specialized tools and how we can use this workflow for organic modeling in order to create the handles on the side of our goblet.