after updating myself with the new tools and toyz - here are a few things I wished I had in my toolset.
- First, I wanted to make a klingon -
First I realized that to really make a good klingon forehead, I'd need a few extra faces in the forehead area - then I came back and considered that this is just more weight on the character and computer resources - so I came up with a few ideas that would help...
Segmented / selective Subdivision - what is that ? well ...after I dress up my characters - I could make the covered parts invisible, so I really don't need high poly in those sections....and if anything I'd want them invisible to not have to wrestle with weghtmaps and pokethroughs ...so that right there would give me a ton of faces to allocate to the face / forehead region while minimizing unseen sections of the mesh to minimize waste of resources .... so I imagine a puppet that pops up, much like the hide mesh puppet panel...except in this panel, I can assign face values to each section of the body ....the feet will be covered by shoes ..low poly....the arms legs torso will be covered by cloth, low poly ....the neck and face will get most of the visual detail - high poly. - so rather than increasing the overall poly of the mesh - you allocate how you want to use your current face count limits.
next - this came from wanting to get a more realistic look on my samurai character -
I wanted to make specific textures, then add wrinkles to them.....then I thought how helpful it would be to approach this the way the skin gen is doing it ....then I can layer wrinkles, stains, burns ...and opacities to my clothing...
Now for this same character .....The Cloth physics can be a pain in the kittens - RL software is not to blame, but sometimes the UV islands on clothing is arranged awkwardly on the UV maps and if it's one piece, like the outfit I created for samurai it's all stacked together, making it really difficult to guestimate where the gradients should fall to get a smooth realistic flow .
Good luck using this as a gradient reference !! lol - I figured out a work around, but not without going crosseyed first !!
! I was thinking it would be nice to have a substance designer texture specifically made for the cloth physics weight map area to stop the guesswork, then I can see this visible white cloud hovering on my character in realtime to place the cloth physics exactly where they should be - I have work arounds for this, but it would be very easy to simply have a substance tool for it.
and finally a single button that says "Optimize for Real Time Iclone animation" - i think the name of that button is self explanatory - so we can keep the old advantage of low poly real time story telling. The fancier setting should stay, but we should have an optimize button to go back to the ease of working with G3 models as an option, I don't mean literally go back to G3, but they were lightweight characters and easy to animate...this way I can make less important characters low poly, and keep lead characters higher poly - right click on a character and "Optimize for real time animation" bakes everything down to a simple low poly mesh low res images. ( again, allocation of resources ) - that fat kid that gives me a thumbs down on his iphone is not going to care how many polys my scene had or how many weeks it took me to make a video lol.
And at unreal, if you want me to use your software more, you need to give me a ui in Iclone please ....I love what your software offers, what I don't love is how much time i need to learn yet another software, when I'm already happy with what I'm getting from iclone and have to be mindful of my time.........that fat kid that gives me a thumbs down on youtube is not going to care if I use your render or iclone or indigo or iray ...so you need to ease us in with a familiar ui, and then we can gradually learn more over time ...that's how Iclone did it with early versions. Iclone is not just an animation software, it's logistics were also educational. But don't tell them I said that ...they need to Optimize cc3 and iclone to get back to "real" real time rendering .....
The truth is a great story is more important than anything you or i can render .....we are just baffling them with eye candy lol!!
I'll use this thread to post any more ideas I may get.
edit - and we need a eye dropper in the color picker panels, so I can select colors from existing materials on other parts of the model. particularly useful for matching skin colors with face images.
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"To define Tao is to defile it" - Lao Tzu