As some of you may have read, I'm currently working my way through the Mudbox SDK with an aim of creating an exciting new plugin for Mudbox to both ease work flow, and provide a much more intuitive interaction interface for those new to 3D modelling/sculpting!
My project overview:
I am to "Virtualise the art of clay sculpting", which in real terms, is to allow artists to sculpt using their hands, with a 3D interface. I am doing this by tracking the artists hands and placing them into the application, you are then able to grab, push, or use a pen/pencil (again in the air in 3D space) to apply displacement maps to the mesh! This allows for greater accuracy when working in a 3D environment, as it moves vertices exactly where you want it to (based on your hands positions). There are also a couple of gestures which perform actions such as Undo, opening menus to edit the settings. So far I have garnered some interest from Aardman (known for Wallace & Gromit) and @Bristol, as I am Bristol based. I will hopefully be able to upload a video soon, however I can't promise anything looking too spectacular, as I am under a tight deadline and I'm a programmer not an artist!
In the end I aim to implement all of the brush features from Mudbox to your hands, or to the tracked pen/pencil (can be any pen/pencil). I am also developing two modes of feedback: A pen which vibrates when close to the mesh in the air, giving a bit of feedback before you interact, and then stronger feedback whilst you are interacting with the mesh.
The other method of feedback is the use of focused beams of ultrasound using an UltraHaptics device (http://ultrahaptics.com/), this will give haptic feedback (through the feeling of vibration) to your fingerss, again I will implement two stages for this as above.
I would greatly appreciate any responses to my questionnaire (less than 2 minutes):
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/QZ63585
Or please post comments here and let me know what you think!
