Hello, I was just checking out the SubD tools in the Rhino7 WIP and I didn’t see any tools for ‘organic’ clay–like modeling. If anyone’s familiar with ZBrush or Clayoo, those have tools where you click and hold while over areas or paths and the mesh is built up or subtracted as desired, plus all the creases and holes, etc. Am I missing this or does Rhino7 not have this type of tool yet?
Thanks,
from Nathan
Well SubD isn’t really for sculpting in that way. ZBrush isn’t SubD, it is dense meshes. Clayoo was kind of a mix. Usually with sculpting brushes you need dense vertices for it to really matter (like ZBrush) which is kind of the opposite of what SubD is for.
Clayoo bizarrely converted the whole model to triangles any time you used the brush tools. That made it impossible to smoothly convert back to NURBS. It was a silly marketing feature that was fake.
ZBrush can indeed remain a SubD modeller since it subdivides to a smooth mesh and can even retain multiple levels you can work on so details are added to a still-existing rough mesh. As long as you retain quad meshing (or remeshing as needed) it functions exactly like a SubD modeler.
Rhino already has soft selection behavior. Adding a brush tool would be trivial then to move control points around merely. It’s a weekend project at McNeel. But they won’t do it since they are mostly old men.
Not really if we are talking about Rhino SubDs (or Tsplines) which are mathematical and retain curvature. ZBrush is polygons (faceted).
Just to add… I use ZB <> Rhino 7 WIP all the time myself, the tools complement themselves very well IMO. The SubD from Rhino exported as obj has mesh density controls too that you can think of as subdivison levels with the control polygon being base 0 or what you’d see in box mode while modeling (tab key). UVs from Rhino carry over too and units don’t matter or never have for me anyways going back and forth, the size just stays the right size and I love that about the workflow. So once in ZB you can Dynamesh the mesh from the Rhino SubD and sculpt away. Export the tool back out as an obj and import into Rhino again. As mentioned, the meshes are typically very dense in ZB so depending on what you plan to do with it I suggest using the decimation master in ZB or ReduceMesh in Rhino. It’s also important to weld verts, optimize point orders and close holes in ZB as well as checking the integrity of the mesh. This is easier than chasing open meshes once in Rhino. Polygroups from ZB also come in as separate meshes which you can join in Rhino if needed.
You may not have wanted all that 
but thought I’d add an opinion just in case it helps. They are very different tools, I wouldn’t expect either to match what the other does anytime if ever but they work great together with a little practice.
We wont do it because it’s a bad application for brush technology. If you want a sculpting program use a sculpting program. (zbrush, 3d coat, mudbox etc…)
Clayoo’s brush stuff was not awesome, and IMO is what happens when you add stuff “in a weekend”
You’d get either a very soft brush which is not super useful when a real soft select tool would be better, or a super dense mesh which would be suitable for sculpting which is not super useful for a model in a nurbs pipeline.
I love it when people say “its a weekend project to add___” Sigh… ok… if that’s the case jump on in and start coding! Our SDK is free (and so is the tech support) for all to develop their own stuff… If it’s soooo easy, have at it!
but what do we know…we are too busy eating soft foods and taking naps, being sooooo old an all.
And also don’t understand that it makes no sense at all. Sculpting needs lots of verts. The main reason to use SubD is to not have lots of verts and achieve complex continuous curvature. In order to sculpt a SubD it would need to be very dense and this defeats the purpose of SubD. Sculpting is just vert displacing.
I agree that if you want to sculpt complex things like animals with details, there is nothing like Zbrush or this kind of poly software, But if we could have a MoveUVN Brush version, that could be so useful.
Sometimes you need to smooth a group of vertex or move them up or down in normal direction, that is a slow process that involves the selection of points and doesn’t have a falloff setting…
I know that this may not be a priority but wanted to give my vision as user of subd and nurbs programs…
What could be pretty awesome and as a non-coding person, super easy :D, would be to have a subD component thingie… where by you could insert tiny separate subDs, like a leaf, and perhaps select a single face to insert the component (like a sub-subD which would act perhaps as a SubTool in ZBrush). So you could sculpt it by arraying these little pieces along an EdgeLoop or FaceLoop, etc.? I don’t know, just throwing things out there. It’s lunch time.