About my new and reformed strategy to try to break off a product out of texture painting first, I wanted to clarify some things. I have recently learned that I cant get any job in Japan, not even as a janitor. This is what set me off and changed my mood so dramatically a couple of weeks ago. I was always dodging reality with this project, trying to put up some epic battle, but I always thought I could take some menial job as a plan B, only to realize recently that plan B might be impossible. Im backed into a corner here: plan A is the only thing I have. So I have to desperately tone it down as much as I can, break it off into a smaller goal to minimize risk. So, for a start, this has zero effect on my long-term plans. It has a very large effect, however, on my immediate plans. Theres multiple reasons Im favoring it: 1) Its a significantly smaller scope than modeling. A complete modeling software tends to rival the scope of an entire animation software lacking modeling, especially if we go deep with it with workplanes, falloffs, multi-axis symmetry, multiple coordinate systems, action centers, sophisticated gizmos, real world unit system, sculpting, subds, curves and patches, surface constraints for retopology, etc. It tends to call for so many sub-systems which have maximum impact on the entire software environment. 2) It hits an area my engine was weak at: realtime shaders. In fact, seeing Substance Painter caused one of the biggest deviations to my plans in this project other than the realtime curve/patch system I tried and took too long to do earlier. It made me realize a modern engine needs modern shaders, not just to look pretty, but to show you what you are doing. This gives me an excuse to work on them and not end up hopelessly behind on schedule. 3) Working a lot on texture painting has low probability of trapping me into an architectural corner. Going uber deep and seeking an ace modeler could inadvertently have me writing code which is incompatible with integration purposes for animation. I was planning originally to go shallow with modeling when I dropped the animation just in case I missed something. But with texture painting, I can go deep pretty safely: its a relatively isolated system. Now I should clarify that I have no aim to support more than one product. The texture painter of v1 is going to be the same software that supports modeling, hopefully in the near future (as soon as v1.1, a free upgrade). Its somewhat like ZBrush in this respect in that it started out as an image painter and ended up getting sculpting in 1.5 or so. Unlike ZBrush, Ive anticipated these needs way in advance so I should not have the growing pains of getting a weird workflow like editing multi-tools rather than actual geometry in a scene. It is possible that I could get trapped inside texture painting for a long time. There is always that danger. It depends a lot on how things work out in v1. If I have too few customers, I want to treat them like kings and really listen to how to improve it for a while to expand that customer base just for texture painting unless theyre already really happy, in which case Ill immediately go for modeling and try to expand the customer base that way. If theres too many, thats also a danger in that its going to be hard to communicate the evolution to modeling. I really have to go with my feel here, but thats why I feel I need to graze the market. If my software sells three copies, thats infinitely better than going for ages with none. I can work with those numbers and those people, make a plan to increase the numbers, and Id feel so much better once I just get something up on an online store -- anything. But whatever happens, my focus is on expanding to modeling and animation and eventually rendering and compositing. Ill try my best not to get trapped in any one of these areas forever. It would be a complete waste for me to have built the architecture needed to combine texture painting and modeling, even solving the difficult problems associated with editing topology for a UV-less system, and not ever using that. So Im just as keen on getting the modeling ASAP. That said, some people seem afraid of whether I can compete with yet another texture painter. After all, we have Mari, Modo, SP, MudBox, 3DC, ZB... One thing I would say is that the fact that there are so many now could be seen, in an optimistic sense, that there can be enough interest just based on subtle variations alone. Another thing on the optimistic side is that just the pocket change of what the developers get from something like Mari or MudBox could probably save this project. I dont need anywhere even approaching their business success to continue my project. What they make in a week would probably buy me a year. Thats not to set my sights too low though. I have some plans for the texture painting which should be quite exciting and interesting on their own. And I have experienced users of texture painters guiding me on how to make mine stand out.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 03:21:23 +0000
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