Has anybody been watching the news on the Novint Falcon? It is a 3d haptic control device. It provides real feedback in 3d space. It seems custom made for Zbrush because as you push and pull at your Zmodel you would be able to “feel” the surface. Just like real sculpture.
Check out this link. They give a good description of it. Link
and here is the official website.
It is under 100 dollars. I kind of want to get one.
I saw these on display at SIGGRAPH in Boston. They look fantastic. I understand that representatives from Pixologic are already talking to them about including support for their device in ZBrush. Weta Digital is also talking to them about supporting Mudbox. They are primarily thinking of the Falcon as something that hard-core gamers will buy to experience something new, but they are also keenly interested in making it compatible with graphics software so that we can all get the sensation that Zack Petroc must have got when he sculpted the large classical statue we saw in “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” with the much more expensive SensAble haptic input wand.
They are also talking to medical visualization people who will be using it for virtual reality training for heart seargeons. They are going to sell millions of these things. I’m really excited.
I got to play with one of these for a while. You can run a cursor over a bumpy model and really feel the ridges. If you had one of these you wouldn’t need to guess how fast to move your cursor over the model or how hard to press because you could feel it. You would know exactly which part you were deforming and by how much, intuitively through your sense of touch. Its an input device that augments your visual display too. And most people’s Wacom pads cost more than this thing is going to sell for.
I’m speechless! This looks and sounds truly extrordinary. True virtual sculpting. This will go down well in schools and colleges, I know I’d have loved to use this when I was at college. Now that you can produce real world printouts of virtual works, this is going to be an interesting time for sculptors and designers.
Beats getting your hands all manky with clay that’s for sure!
I got 3D printouts from ZBrush at the convention too. The Guerilla Studio is my favorite toyland! They didn’t install ZBrush in there until the second day, but I had a model all ready the first day that I brought with me. Got it printed in plastic, so its more durable than the wax dinosaur I had printed when I went last time, in 02. Though the resolution doesn’t seem to be as high as I would have hoped. I’ll post pictures as soon as I can get around to it.
Yes, please do, Wildsketch! I’d love to see more examples of virtual work printed out in 3D 
I’m currently trying to find somewhere to printout my own work.
Thanks for sharing these with us Wildsketch Very much appreciated.
While I like both of these, that semi-transparent, ruby red squid/octupi sculpt looks great! I’d have that on display in my home for sure 
Excuse my nosyness, but how much did these set you back? And does the place you had them produced ship outside of the USA, if at all?
There should be a section dedicated to these 3D printouts. It might urge people to get some of their work printed out.
Have you posted that here? I seem to recall something like that.
Angelstein- I didn’t pay for these prints directly I got them done for free at SIGGRAPH as one of the benefits of being a full conference attendee and signing up early. I understand that software and equipment is donated for these samples. Which means ZBrush was available there for me to sculpt the octopus thing because the fine folks at Pixologic made copies available to the Guerilla Studio for free.
Unfortunately, the plastic builds of these models do not seem to come close to the detail I put into them in ZBrush. They suffer by comparison to the wax figure of the dinosaur I did in 02, which I made with Wings 3D and 3DSMax before I started using ZBrush, because it was a demo of ZSpheres at the Pixologic booth in 02 that got me started using it.
My dinosaur printout can be viewed here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/sightrays/30658308/in/set-77294/
One thing that makes this year’s plastic models superior though is their strength and general durability. The T-Rex was a bad choice for a wax model, particularly one of that size because of the tiny forearms which are brittle when built in that size. The wrist is about as big around as one of the scaffolding rods which holds up undercut pieces while they are being printed out. On the plus side the detail is very high. The tiny polygons can be seen in areas of the wax model where scaffolding was not attached. I suspect that a much better solution would involve a seperate material, like a powder to hold up undercut parts of a build.
Yeah, I got a chance to try this out at Siggraph as well. It has some real potential but I didn’t get very much time with it. For only $100 I think it will be a good value. I am surprised it isn’t more.
I felt like it was a little flimsy. The plastic that connects the arms to the base have a little flex and give. Plus it has a fairly small radius. So you have to sort of mentally keep the tool in the middle of the sweet spot. But I guess that will be a learned skill just like we keep a mouse in the middle of the mouse pad.
If I get the money I’ll probably pick one of these up. If it is implemented well into Zbrush it could really get interesting.
And think if you had two of these. One could be used to “hold” the model in the air and turn it freely and naturally to work on different areas. The other would be the tool hand which can dip in and work on a section. It would be the closest thing to really sculpting where you hold a piece of clay in one hand and work it with the other.
The very nature of sculpting requires so much precision though that I really need some more time with this. When was the release date?
This is something very important for our future
Any news on release date ?
Wildsketch, thanks so much for all that info, very interesting indeed
Shame about your dino 
Because of those arms you’d have had exactly the same problem even with traditional casting methods, unless it was cast in metal of course. You could even have utilised your wax printout for that, had it not broken so early on 
Oh well, it’s early days for 3D printouts, and they can only get better and cheaper with time
I tend to agree about the small work area of the Novint Falcon, (A cube 4" by 4" by 4") but one thing about force-feedback devices is that they are very sensitive. If the interface you use to work with it is similar to what we do now with sculpting and painting that could be enough area to let you do plenty of detail work, provided you zoom in on the area before you start working with it.
The thing is that between the price and the standard USB connection having 2 of these to perform different actions with probably wouldn’t be all that far-fetched. But like the other point I addressed above, its a matter of programming the interface to take advantage of the device.
As for the flimsy plastic connection, that didn’t seem to be as much an issue to me as the tendency of the 3 arms not to slide smoothly back into the base. I really didn’t see why they were curved. The SensAble wand or pen that Zack Petroc used to sculpt the classical statue for “Sky Captain” looks like a much better design. I got to play with one of those for a few minutes at SIGGRAPH 02. I wonder if we could get Zack to talk about whether he had any issues with it.
And the thing is, this might be interesting to us because you know that Novint is going to be cutting into SensAble’s profits, because they are undercutting them big time, and that once they realize what’s hitting them they’ll be anxious to lower their prices. What if they lower them to something competitive or develop a low-end version that does what Novint’s Falcon does, but uses their own design philosophy? I don’t think $300. would be too much to pay for such a thing.
Another thing I’d like to see would be a different kind of grip on the Novint Falcon. The sphere that you grab can come off and be replaced by something else already, so it is designed to expand. I would like to see them add a pen grip. It could attached by a universal joint that just lets it swivel. Only the position of the point in 3D space need be taken into account, not the orientation of your hand. It would be lefy-righty agnostic. (From my experience this might be a bigger point in 3D animation than in many other markets, with 2 out of 4 girls in my animation classes being leftys as well as a significant portion of the guys.)
If you could also swivel the puck or grip that could be a great way of adding an additonal input. Say they added a grip that could be tilted up-down and left-right like a joystick, maybe even let the user swivel their wrist, Don’t some joysticks have a twist ability? With that you could use one control to move the pointer on the model and another one to rotate the model around. Or in games, use one set of controls for normal mouse look and the other to rotate an object you’ve picked up, which would seem to be an important added ability in new games like Half-Life 2 and Penumbra where you are constantly picking up objects and trying to stack them or use them to block monsters.
Yeah, I’m hot to get one, but I’m also hot to get version 2.0.
WOW
putting my c note back for that purchase now…thnx for the heads up
