Hey there. This is Seneca Menard from id software..... First off, I've gotta say that I'm just competely in love with mudbox.. I never really thought it would be that different from Zbrush, but boy was I wrong.. There's a number of things that have made me fall in love with it, such as selective subdivision, the precious flatten tool, a polygonal display mode that shows you EXACTLY what you'll get in any other 3d app, a pinch tool with exponential falloff that thus doesn't destroy all the surrounding geometry, etc, etc....
🙂Reason why I'm writing is to report the bugs and oddities I've noticed while using it.. The version I tested them against was build 1.0.2...
MUDBOX BUGS / REQUESTS
(B1) : HOTKEY WINDOW SLOWDOWN : If the hotkey window is onscreen, every time I hit ALT, I get a 4 second pause. Every time I switch between the main window and hte hotkey window, I also get a 4 second pause.
(B2) : WHEN YOU OVERWRITE A HOTKEY, YOU COULD OVERWRITE A WHOLE BUNCH ON ACCIDENT!Mudbox's hotkey overwrite system really needs to be changed. When you overwrite a hotkey, mudbox doesn't unbind that old hotkey in one step. It actually unbinds that hotkey in a step by step process and comes into hotkey conflict after hotkey conflict!!! For example, say I want to overwrite CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-LMB. When I do that, mudbox will overwrite all of these other hotkeys as well!
-CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-LMB
-CTRL-ALT-LMB
-ALT-LMB
-LMB
(B3) : HOTKEYS DISPLAYED IN THE TOOLBAR ARE HARDCODED.The toolbars need to display each tools' current hotkey, not the hardcoded default hotkey. This leads to a lot of confusion.
(B4) : NAMES DISPLAYED IN THE TOOLBAR ARE NOT UNIVERSALI had a lot of trouble finding hotkeys in the hotkeys window, because their names are not the same in the toolbar menus and the hotkey window. For example: ("show all" != "unhide all") ("stroke on curve" != "draw on curve")
(B5) : HOTKEY WINDOW NEEDS TO BE ORGANIZEDI've had a lot of trouble binding hotkeys in mudbox, where I'll literally look for a hotkey for over 10 minutes and still not find it! Half, because there are a lot of commands that aren't in the hotkey editor, and the other half because the editor's unorganized. There's a number of ways to improve that. First off, there should be submenus in the hotkey list, like there are in photoshop and maya. All the hotkeys should use universal names and be in groups, such as camera, viewport displays, tools, presets, toolbar menu groups, palette menus . For example:
----------------------------------
CAMERA CONTROL>
DISPLAY OPTIONS>
----------------------------------
TOOLS>
FALLOFF>
STAMP>
etc
----------------------------------
FILE>
EDIT>
CREATE>
etc
----------------------------------
LAYERS CONTEXT>
OBJECT LIST CONTEXT>
etc
----------------------------------
(B6) : IT WOULD BE MUCH BETTER IF WE COULD RIGHT CLICK ON MENUS OR TOOLS AND BIND THOSE TO KEYS.The best way to create new hotkeys is to click on a tool or command and click "bind to key". It's uber fast because you don't have to load up the hotkey window and search through it.
(B7) : THERE ARE A LOT OF TOOLS AND COMMANDS THAT DON'T HAVE HOTKEYSAs I just mentioned, I ran into a great number of cases where I couldn't find the hotkey I was looking for, and that's because it didn't exist. For example, here are a few: erase , flatten layers , merge layers , mask tool, etc.
(B8) : HOTKEY CONFIG IS VERY FRAGILE FROM BUILD TO BUILD.With almost every new MB build I got, I had to rebuild my hotkey cfg from scratch, and that was a nightmare. The hotkey cfg really needs to be able to be loaded flawlessly on different builds.. I looked at the cfg and I don't know what exactly could have been corrupting them in the new builds, because the hotkey indices should be the same from build to build, but what I recommend is that the hotkey cfg doesn't use indices, but literal text instead (for example, Grow selection: "alt-shift-]"), that way it'll always be safe to load that cfg in every build (plus, us users would be able to modify our configs ourselves in textpad. That's actually very handy. I've swapped stuff around in my modo cfg many times and have loved being able to do that)
(B9) : SOME HOTKEYS DON'T WORK FOR UNKNOWN REASONS.I bound "Grow Selection" to "shift-]" and hitting that hotkey does nothing. When I bind it to "]" it works though.... ?? Also, I tried binding "Freeze" to "F11" and that doesn't work either.
(B10) : TRYING TO FIND KEY NAMES IS SOMEWHAT DIFFICULT..In other apps, if I want to bind a command to "Ctrl-alt-shift-Space", I'll just click in a field and press that button. We can't do that in mudbox and thus must type in the name. Trying to find the name's a bit difficult, actually. Is page down "page down", "pageDn"? "pgdn"? "page down"? ect..? I was recently trying to bind space, and couldn't find it. Luckly I was able to ask a friend and he told me it was "SPC"..
(B11) : IF MUDBOX CRASHES, YOU LOSE ALL YOUR CFG CHANGES YOU MADE THAT SESSION.Mudbox needs a "save cfg" button.
🙂(B12) : WE NEED A SELECT CONNECTED BUTTON.I know this has been requested before, but we need to be able to select all the polys on multiple meshes quickly, and the best way to do that is to select a poly on each and then hit select connected..
(B13) : WHEN YOU SUBDIVIDE A SELECTION, IT SHOULD RETAIN YOUR POLYGON SELECTION.There's been a number of times where I had to subdivide a selection a couple of times in a row, but every time I'd subdivide it, the selection would be dropped and so I'd have to select it again and it was a little tough in some of these cases, because I was raising the subD level up to a level that already existed and so I couldn't select all in that subD level...
(B14) : WHEN YOU SUBDIVIDE A MESH, SHOULD IT SUBDIVIDE THE FROZEN POLYS?It's just a small oddness I noticed. I thought that because some polys were frozen, they wouldn't get subdivided..
(B15) : OBJECT TRANSLATE TOOL + SCREEN AXISIt'd be good if hauling in empty space would translate the selection in the screen axis.. It's just the little things, like having to click on a small handle in order to move an object that slows us down little by little...
(B16) : OBJECT LIST : RIGHT CLICK MENU DOESN'T GET APPLIED TO ALL THE SELECTED ITEMSSo if you have 20 curves you want to delete, you must delete 'em all with 20 right clicks-->deletes...
😞 (B17) : IT WOULD BE NICE TO BE ABLE TO DELETE OBJECTS BY PRESSING DELThis is just a small subliminal thing, but I always try to delete objects by pressing del or backspace and am surprised I can't..
(B18) : ZBUFFER ISSUE?On the past couple of meshes, I've noticed some weird drawing artifacts and I apparently get them because I'm too close to the geometry.. I dunno if it can be fixed, but figured I'd show it anyways
transfer.idsoftware.com/private/seneca/mb/zbuffer.mov(B19) : 16 or 32bit DISPLACEMENT IMAGES I tried creating some displacement images in both Zbrush and Photoshop and failed with both. I also tried a number of different file formats and all failed.. What 32bit displacement format does Mudbox accept?
failed attempts:
16bit BMP
32bit BMP
16bit TIF (greyscale)
32bit TIF (greyscale
16bit TIF (rgb)
32bit TIF (rgb)
this is what they look like in mudbox:
transfer.idsoftware.com/private/seneca/mb/displacement.png (B20) : TRACKBALL ROTATION!!!I'm constantly getting tangled in gimble lock with mudbox's camera rotation system, so I'm begging that we get trackball. Here's a video that shows the difference.(as you've probably seen a million times)
transfer.idsoftware.com/private/seneca/mb/trackball.mov
STAMP AND STENCIL ISSUES.
For my alien, I was trying to place eyeballs onto him with a displacement map and ran into a number of issues. Here's a vid that shows those issues, which are the next 7 bugs:
transfer.idsoftware.com/private/seneca/mb/stampsandstencils.mov (B21) : STENCIL DOESN'T WORK WITH SYMMETRY1) Turn on X symmetry for brush tool
2) Turn on stencil
3) paint on the stencil and you'll see it only applies it to one side of the head.
(B22) : STENCIL WORKS GOOD WITH FLOOD, BUT UNFORTUNATELY CAN'T BE USED BECAUSE STENCIL SHOOTS THROUGH MESH1) Turn on stencil
2) flood fill (to get a perfect displacement)
3) rotate around object and you'll see your stencil was displaced on the backside as well, so I guess stencil needs a backface cull option.
(B23) : IF YOU RESIZE A STENCIL, IT WON'T PROJECT PROPERLY1) Turn on stencil,
2) paint on object,
3) now change the stencil's size to 0.5
4) paint on object and you'll see it's using the old size.
(B24) : STAMP'S ACTUAL POSITION NOT VISIBLE REALTIMEI think it would be really handy to be able to see the current stamp drawn in the current brush handle, that way we can see realtime exactly what kind of stamp we're going to perform before we stamp it. I had a hell of a time trying to get my alien's eyeballs rotated exactly how I wanted them and had to do it with trial and error....
😞(B25) : MOVE TOOL IGNORES STAMP1) turn on move tool
2) turn on stamp
3) use move tool and it won't use stamp
(B26) : MOVE TOOL IGNORES STENCIL1) turn on move tool
2) turn on stencil
3) use move tool and it won't use stencil
(B27) IMAGE IMPORT : I CAN'T IMPORT ANY TIFs AS STAMPS RIGHT NOW.If I convert any TIF into a stamp, I get a blank stamp.
Anyways.. That's the long list.. I love this app! Later folks!
🙂