Hi all 
We are proud to announce the the first public BETA of LiveClay is available to download
http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6634&st=0
First of all LiveClay is still a WIP but it has an important milestone implemented recently: Subcells or the possibility to refine any voxel hierarchical to any level … what this mean? unlimited small details, you can sculpt a small zone and have there 10Million polygons without too much hassle and can jump to a nearby zone of the model and continue sculpting without loss of performance (of course, hardware is the limiting factor but not the software) 
The current released beta have some issues (mesh output quality) that prevent to fully take advantage of that feature, so users can find a performance cap with very small pen radius and lots of polygons but still in that case the system is quite fast! Once fully available and implemented, trust me, performance won’t be an issue no matter the amount of detail of the model, this will be a critical feature because 3DCoat will be able to dynamically sculpt incredible detailed models in a fully local way even on modest hardware
Just for testing I was sculpting using that feature and after reaching in a very small zone (the size of a voxel) 1,5 million polygons I quit because I got bored and didn’t see any performance slowdown on a slow PC! of course, getting mesh gaps and disconnected faces because of the current issues I talk about, that’s why this is currently not aviable for public usage.
Previously 3DC used static voxels so in order to increase resolution you have to add globally more voxels, now you can refine any voxel into subcells and each of them into more and so on! currently is in a raw state and only functional for Surface LiveClay, it basically allows to have a hierarchical dynamic mesh partition so performance of LiveClay is fully local and is independent from the global mesh resolution you can keep adding more and more detail in smaller and smaller zones on the model as long as you want, I think this is awesome and can be used for the rest of the bruses since the required changes was minimal
Currently we are working toward improving mesh quality and reducing extraordinary vertices, this is very important too since dynamic subdivision by definition introduce lots of them, the work in this area will allow to solve the current performance limitation in order to take advantage of full locality and after that we will tackle dynamic Mesh Simplification/Decimation, that is the opposite face of the same coin. LiveClay will includes both features: dynamic mesh subdivision and simplification at the end.
With this beta we aim at user feedback for tool usability and enhancements, we would like to see artist models and real life use cases since we developers tend to focus too much on testing fast usage and not heavy usage of the tool, of course this will not be the final GUI of LiveClay and expect some crashes too
Stay tuned with future improvements. Hope you enjoy it and feed us with some gorgeous models made with LiveClay
PS: In order to access to LiveClay tool go to Edit->Preferences->Show beta Tools
Cheers
Raul
