N-Sided has conceived its new product, Argile a 3D retouch tool, based on the Sculpt and Paint features of Quidam 2.0. N-sided has tried to develop an efficient product for a really low price. The Argile philosophy is to allow people to quickly change the shape of a 3D model and/or add textures to use it in their application or directly with the integrated rendering engine. Let's look in more detail at some the Argile features…

The Sculpt Studio

After importing a 3D object (.OBj with optional .MTL or .QDM), or choose a preset one like some primitives and useful common objects, you can start to use the subdivide option to add more details to your model. As you may guess, the more detailed your object, the more RAM and CPU power you'll need.

Argile is really fast and responsive as long as your object doesn't have millions of polygons. The sculpt tools are very intuitive. In a few minutes people who have never used sculpt tools will be able to play with and deform objects.

Sculpt tools are divided in to two parts, the basic ones (Moving, Rotating, Scaling, Softening and Erasing). More subtle tools allow the user to play with a set Jelly Brushes to deform the model. Where classic brushes work once with a click of the mouse, the Jelly Brushes work in a continuous way along the strokes you are drawing on the surface of your model. With the Jelly Brushes you can move, emboss, digg, grow, shrink, rotate, smooth and sharpen models.

Two Jelly sliders are useful to adjust the strength and spacing of the effect. Combining the different selections option and the smooth selection mode, you can obtain very precise results without a lot of effort. An option lets the user decide if he wants to work in a symmetry mode.

The PaintStudio

Painting with Argile can also be divided into two main parts. First you have something more like texturing where the user can change ambience, diffuse, specular highlights, shininess, opacity and reflection mapping values, associated to one color. And then there is a 3D paint mode that acts on 4 channels (color, transparency, bump and normal map). Thanks to a large set of brushes and masks, the possibilities are infinite. You can also create your own masks and brushes. Argile can also use different projection modes like UV Mapping in the current View and Mapview. The Mapview button opens a window displaying the unwrapped texture of the object and offers a flat view that N-Sided has conceived in Argile, a 3D retouch Tool. Based on the Sculpt and Paint features of Quidam 2.0, N-sided has tried to develop an efficient product for at a low price. The Argile philosophy is to allow people to quickly change the shape of a 3D model and/or add textures to use in their application or directly with the integrated rendering engine.

A set of tools, such as erase, stamp, clone and fill, can be selected to retouch, duplicate or remove painted parts. Additionally, the background tools are helpful. For example, they allow you to use reference photos to map a head.

But the Paint features description wouldn't be complete if we didn't speak about the different blend modes. Argile offers 6 different application methods: Normal, Overlay, Additive, Subtractive, Multiply and Replace (in this mode the content of the surface is replaced by the current used brush). These modes can be refined with the blending options: Strength, Size, Rotation and Step.

Exporting

Argile is easy, as it comes with export plug-ins for the OBJ and QDM (Quidam) formats. Argile allows you to export the UV Maps of your 3D models either into an image file or a vector file.

You can also export a multilayered Targa file with all the channels, Color, Transparency, Bump and Normal Map, after having rendered it with the Render Studio.

Conclusion

N-Sided has developed an interesting 3D retouch and paint tool, not only because it's affordable, but also because it's a tool that could be easily integrated into a small company pipeline. Despite the fact that Argile can't modify vertices and meshes (you can't remove or edit points) it has a powerful set of retouching and paint tools which could satisfy a lot of 3D users who can use it as a complementary tool. We hope to have more import/export format options in the near future. Argile is new software that uses most of the Quidam 2.0 paint and sculpt features. We're pretty sure that this software will quickly evolve and offer interesting tools for 2D and 3D Artists real time of the modifications.

Argile

Price : 59€ / $99

Download a Free Demo (30 days) : www.n-sided.com

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