Video Drivers
You will need a fairly recent video driver (and video card) in order to run nclay.
nclay has been developed and tested on Nvidia RTX cards, but it should run absolutely fine on other vendors’ cards (at least without Ray Tracing).
If nclay refuses to start, then your video hardware/driver is not supported.
No log is generated at this time, but an error message may be displayed.
Useful tips until I find enough time to write a proper documentation (If you have some spare time and you want to help, you’re very welcome)
- shortcuts
Anything can be accessed by menus or keyboard shortcuts. If you want to redefine a shortcut, just press your <ctrl/alt/shift>+key combo while hoovering on something. nclay will remember your settings the next time it is launched.
Tooltips are your friend, just hoover on something to see if a shortcut has been defined.
- customization
There is a nclay.toml configuration file in ~/.nclay (Linux) or in nclay’s folder (Windows). As every TOML format, it is pretty human-friendly. Tons of things can be changed, from UI colors to which brush is available in the sidebar. Materials are stored in /opt/nclay/materials (Linux) or in the materials subfolder (Windows). You can put your matcaps there, they must be square, 8-bit per channel RGB PNG, with or without Alpha. Stencils are stored in /opt/nclay/stencils (Linux) or in the stencils subfolder (Windows). The recognized stencil format is a square 16-bit grayscale PNG. At this time only the clay brush uses a stencil.
- navigation
Dragging the LMB (left mouse button) on an empty area (or dragging while alt is pressed) will rotate the camera. MMB (or LMB+RMB) will pan, RMB will zoom. If you are already familiar with any other sculpting software, you will notice some similarities.
- brushes and sculpting
Some brushes (i.e. clay) will invert their action when sculpting with ctrl pressed. Holding shift while sculpting will apply the quick smooth brush (as opposed to the smooth brush, which applies a volume-preserving smooth), regardless of the currently active brush. Again, all this is very similar to other sculpting applications.
- objects
Not every object is fit for sculpting with nclay. If you try to load an object with an unfit geometry from a valid file, nclay will give you an invalid file error. However, starting a new scene will provide an initial smooth cube, so you can start sculpting right away.
- symmetry
Axis-based per-mesh symmetry is supported, regardless of where a mesh is in the scene.
- ray tracing
nclay implements a complete physically-based, denoised, real time hardware path tracer (only on video cards supporting the Vulkan official ray tracing extensions). At this time there is only a single default matte material used as a placeholder. This will change in the future.