• Jeremy M

  9 months ago

  Extremely "what i am looking for" as a base-meshing / concepting tool. I mostly use my mouse to sculpt, especially in the early stages since it's faster to whip and click then to tap a pen around on my cintiq. Because of this, it's often the case that: metaballs become tiring to arrange and can be performance heavy at higher res. Additive lasso trim can feel imprecise and requires too much tweaking and constant adjustments to the viewing angle. And grab-tooling individual primitives or relying on a string of modifiers requires too many steps and preparation. All of these approaches seem to be standard for base-mesh concepting and creation for a great many blender sculptors, and while they're fine, they just don't strike me as intuitive as "quickly building up layers", such as with xenos.

  It's worth mentioning that building up layers quickly can be done by adjusting the settings of blender's regular brushes in many cases (like increasing strength of inflate or clay strips brushes / turning on 'accumulate') and constantly remeshing/smoothing as you go, but that process feels slightly annoying partly because I prefer to maintain my brush settings for when i'm sculpting 2nd and 3rd level forms on the surface of the base mesh without the need for switching brushes, or creating them for that matter. With xenos, it feels like you're using the best of metaballs with the best of additive lasso trim.

  There are certain complex forms that benefit from informed deliberate construction that a process of building up layers can accommodate. With other approaches, I start to lose my sense of "anchoring". For subtle forms, I have to constantly shift my camera around to get a sense of which side of a limb (for example) i'm working on, or how flat or curved it should appear from a given angle. This makes the standard approaches too delicate a process for fast and iterative construction during the initial base-meshing stage. With xenos, I can string a bunch of size 3 & 4 cylinders into one surface that I can quickly build more layers on, and just smooth it all out later. The gaps and imperfections between the cylinders act as visual anchors to help keep the orientation of the form fixed in my memory in a way that a smoothed down primitive form can't. Of course, you can always use primitives with sharp edges and corners to avoid such an issue, but that only shifts the labor to the sculpting process, increasing the number of steps required to arrive at the final form. Xenos is the suitable compromise in this regard.

  TLDR; very much recommend xenos if you want to quickly and intuitively build out complex forms in a messy way and to simply smooth them down into a base-mesh after.

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  sYNTHOMESH

  9 months ago

  Wow, Thanks ! Such a great review !

  I like the way that you explain your creative process. The layering possibilities, the messy approach to create unusual shapes quickly etc...

  While sculpting is the way to go to add details and refinements, a tool like Xenos is more an experimental tool for creating unusual basemeshes, visualize new shapes in a stroke.

  They are a certain mojo when starting creating a shape randomly with Xenos with few strokes. You nailed it !

  Thanks again !

  You have nailed

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