A Few Questions About Nvil...

Hi.

I have a few questions.

First question is, is VoidWorld shooting for a topology and/or retopo tool, or is VoidWorld headed for a complete 3D Studio?  The program that I downloaded, really seems close to a complete 3D Studio.  As is, it is pretty good.  I especially like the Height Maps, I don't have a program yet that can do that easily.  I don't know how well Nvil performs or how well Nvil can handle various formats produced from programs like Poser's, Lightwave's, Blender's, etc., I just registered it yesterday and found Nvil last week...

Second question is, (I might have already answered my own question by remembering a video on how to use your program and going through the help files, but it is a little foggy, I have been going through a lot of stuff lately) does your program have a method like BSurface using BMesh in Blender where you can add two to or more pictures that are the same resolution and taken in different angles to draw an item out using the photos as a reference -- Lightwave has a method simular to Blender's too -- or do you have to import a file format like *.obj into Nvil first or a sculpture from either ZBrush or Sculptris to work with Nvil?

Third question is, I have found a programs that does Bolean Operations, where it cuts into the mesh of various polygons, and pivots on an axis holding the objects together while pivoting.  One program in particular is, GroRoboto.  Do you have a method like that or will you be implementing a method for that?

Why I ask, I have a bunch of programs, and I am really trying to slim down the amount that is needed to quickly learn and do things.

Thanks again...

Hi again.  Sorry, I have one more question.

I know this is more for a game engine, but I am wondering if by chance with the Height Mapping and the Animation part of the program, if by chance you are thinking of adding a method for Navmeshing?  I think a navmesh might be good for animation if used with Kinect for PC to make the poses and motions while possibly adding X-bod Controller support to make animating easier and quicker.

I am not a professional in CG, I do it for a hobby, and I don't know that much yet about it, but I have been paying a lot of attention to those areas trying to figure out a way to make posing, rigging, animating, and speech lipsyncing easier.  A method I would love to find is, a Text2Speech program, that uses a raw sample of a human voice, that is cut up into phonemes, that when typed in the text2speech application after having someone read a text designed to get all the possible phonemes, the slices in the raw file, creates an output that can be put through processing to polish up, to have phoneme triggers to work in the CG environment, to increase the speed at which you lipsync characters and to save money on vocal actors.

Well, thanks for any answers to these questions...

I don't know what you want to do with a navigation mesh inside NVIL. These NavMeshes are used to tell pathfinding algorithms where the walkable area is. The structure of such meshes depends on the algorithms used for pathfinding, so they differ from engine to engine. Today, you often have a function inside an engine that generates the navmeshes automatically (with some guidance) and maybe lets you modify it with its own tools. I would strongly discourage from building the navmeshes by hand because the structures aren't always what one would call good topology, you could also introduce errors to the pathfinding and it needs a huge amount of maintenance while developing a level.

Since I am not even aware that Nvil would have animation capabilities, let alone agents, I don't understand what you would need that for. Do you have the latest version of NVIL? Download it from the forums.

ya nvil is directed at just good highpoly and lowpoly modeling tools and hopefully soon good UV tools and workflow, if your interested in games and things like nav meshes for AI and stuff like that you should prolly look into a game engine like UDK.

nvil isnt really designed as a complete package, and most including me jsut use it for tiny pieces of there workflow.

like i take advantage of the clipboard feature with some of my custom maya scripts for quicklying moveing objects with one click between the 2 pacakges, do do all my modeling and retopo in nvil since it's workflow and toolset is just better than maya's for that, than i fire things back to maya for UV's, rigging, animation and finally the final export to my game engine of choice.