At first I thought my video card was incompatible...

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Midnight Carnival
Posts: 44
Joined: Mon Jul 05, 2010 1:28 pm

At first I thought my video card was incompatible...

Post by Midnight Carnival »

I'll be honest, I've just tuned into this program over the past two days and love it to pieces as I got it as a magazine freebee but I did try this out a few months back and ran screaming initially.

The two things that threw me off were the number of 'this feature not in your version tags' which led me to believe that the program was under some heavy construction and whenever I saw the little red 'not allowed' sign next to a tool I thought it was because I was using the demo.

Also, the even bigger thing is I believe that a lot of people familiar with this new novelty way of modeling experienced the Teddy Smooth and Shape Shop prototypes which require you to draw the shape COMPLETELY thus closing the line that you were drawing.

Obviously, in Curvy this makes a huge mess.

It was actually buckling down and playing hard for the past two days that I realized that you're only meant to squiggle one half of the shape and the other half falls into place symmetrically. Silly me, going back to 3D 101, that is what a 'lathe' is......however......the kind of people that will be the biggest audience for this program are the ones that don't have the time or patience to go through that 3D 101 and learn the hard way through poly modeling.

I thought my video card just wasn't up to par for this a few months back and that's why I kept making a big mess (although the orbit function works much to quickly and chaotically in 1.6 and I have to VERY slowly move it in tiny increments to keep my model from jumping all over the screen.).

What I'm suggesting is more tuts like the teapot one that explains not to panic when a big mess happens on the first curve and that is just what the program does until the next curve is drawn in properly and also explaining the definition of 'lathe' and when starting off the model with the lathe tool, only the first side of the expected shape should be sketched and not closing the line. =)

Now that I know what I'm doing, I'm having a blast! I just wish I could attach my pieces together in 1.6 so that I can export my Curvy models to other programs.

Will be looking to purchase 2.0 before x-mas though. =)
Simon
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Post by Simon »

I agree those first steps with Curvy can go rather awry if you just start drawing and miss the lathe technique :oops: The close line shapes you get from teddy are pretty cool - you can make similar blobs in curvy using Image Inflate, though it would be cool to have the close lines inflate automatically.

The 1.6 technology is a couple of years old now - all those "this feature not included" messages are to hint towards the new version that has them all :) Sorry if it is off-putting.

Attaching parts together was one of my main objectives when I set out to write Curvy 2.0 - I tried lots of ideas to get that working but had to throw lots away as they were too complicated for the end user. The actual technique I ended up designing for 2.0 is ever so simple to use and fun too.

The Orbit button goes a bit crazy when you are using a graphics tablet, but works fine with a mouse... a slightly weird but I've not managed to track down yet!
Midnight Carnival
Posts: 44
Joined: Mon Jul 05, 2010 1:28 pm

Post by Midnight Carnival »

With some simple and in-depth explanations this could go over extremely well for 2d savvy artists intimidated by poly modeling and young people whom can't quite grasp poly modeling yet.

As for attaching with these types of programs I was playing around with prototypes presented by the Teddy Smooth student. He took a really simple program and tried to implement forced curves in a manner where you couldn't draw it if it didn't conform to the object properly. I couldn't get anywhere with the prototype because it was near impossible to draw perfect curves.

The person whom did Shape Shop, apparently has overcome this in Meshmixer - specifically designed for easily attaching objects together but Meshmixer won't even open on my old, outdated, AMD processor where Curvy runs on it very very well.

But as for 'perfect' attachments, I don't look to Curvy or Sculptris for making something that's going to be used in a real-time interactive environment so as long as it's conformed just enough to import into other programs, it's fine by me. =D
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