Hi guys 
This is a short alpha video of the current status of LiveClay, I’m currently facing some faces disconnection issues and is still far from
complete, but is quickly catching UnlimitedClay 
The fact that both, Blender and 3DCoat can implement dynamic subdivision speaks about the generality of the algorithm. Both softwares can’t be more different at implementation level, yet I’m happy to learn from both
Stay tuned,
Farsthary
Hi guys
As you may know, recently I have being working on several relaxation
algorithm that prove to be useful for mesh editing to extend functionality of the current smoothing algorithm implemented in Blender. Well, I have made a patch (link to the patch) with the two best relaxation algorithm I have being working on, the Improved Laplacian relaxation, with no shape shrinkage and the HC relaxation with low shape shrinkage.
The feature is fairly easy to use and it has toggable shape border
preservation.
Hope you like this
Farsthary
Oh yes, and now the kitsch picture
Well , a quick update regarding UnlimitedClay and LiveClay:
————————————————————-
UnlimitedClay:
This weekend I have made a few tweaks to UC and got a minor speed boost, remaining still in my todo list to be released is:
-Implement the PBVH tree faces update (the current showstopper and the most performance hungry step).
-Fix some issues regarding PBVH leaves border faces that seems to get double sculpted.
-Implement correct undo/redo.
Once tackled those issues the patch will be ready for the wild, though fixing them will take a while, UnlimitedClay is in a more advanced stage than LiveClay currently so some leveraging work must be done in the second one.
————————————————————–
LiveClay:
Progress has being faster than I initially thougth, 3D principles are the same across aplications despite of its flavours
The face dynamic subdivision with Loop triangle subdivision (and smoothing) is implemented at an estimated of 80%, remaining is few issues with face conectivity but not a showstopper.
I have Implemented also the Star-Flower subdivision scheme for testing purposes but can be usefull in the future too.
Due to the fully dynamic and local nature of 3DCoat the early performance test are quite optimistic, several million polygons are no issues exploting locality correctly and I hope as the implementation advances to further optimize it, also all of this is without CUDA, intel TBB, by pure software solution (the subdivision part) so there’s still room for improvement here
But still there’s a lot of subtasks that must be accomplished before the first iteration of LiveClay get released.
All the best
Farsthary
Hi all
Thanks to Jahka my particle’s vortex effector update is in trunk! Yay!!!
As he write in the commit log:
“Small particle effectors update:
* Greetings from farsthary: particle rotation is now taken into account for particle
effector direction.
** This gives all kinds of new possibilities as he shows in his blog
http://farsthary.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/vortex-particle-simple-tut/.
**The only modification I made to his patch was to use the actual rotated particle
direction as the effector direction as this defaults to the particle velocity
vector, so no actual new options are needed.
* I also added an “effector amount” setting for particle effectors so that only a
part of the particles can be considered as effectors. This makes it possible to
create simple “farsthary vortexes” with only one particle system.
* Also some tiny reorganization of the falloff min/max values for a nicer ui.
“
Thanks Jahka
Hi guys!
Still is too early to make official announcements so just take it like a status report of the upcoming feature in 3D-Coat: LiveClay. LiveClay is the equivalent as Unlimited Clay in Blender, it means Dynamic subdivision sculpting but eventually will become much more This is a very rough screen shot of two strokes in the same low detail surface, with and without dynamic subdivision.
There’s a lot of road to walk still, and getting used to a new code base requires time but as you know, I love to have my task list full. I also have Blender news for this week so stay in touch
Cheers to all,
Farsthary
Hi guys!
A pending debt! using the new patch is a bit trickier, because you have to specify which particles will act as vortons (vortex particles) so the typical solution is to use the Tracers particles (the particles you will actually see) and complementary low number vortex particles with vorticity force with fallof forces and opposing vorticity in order to get realistic results.
Hope the video explains things a bit better
Cheers,
Farsthary
++++++++++++++ UPDATE Blend Files ++++++++++++++
Hi all
For many people a step by step tutorial book is not enough, some people like the information collage.
Well, Ira Krakov have made a very nice 3D cookbook of many web floating tutorials and tip and tricks scattered over the time.
You will find from 2.4x tips (that can be reused for the experienced artist to 2.5x) to the most recent builds.
Is also a goodie that every tutorial is based on his own videos and timelapses, so if you like you can go deeper and watch them from Youtube.
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/the-blender-3d-cookbook-volume-1/11777448
He was kind enough to allow me to redistribute the Book inside of Cuba to support Blender in our country
Thanks!
