Hi. For what it’s worth I wanted to give some feedback on Nomad. Spoiler: It’s awesome, but I have some thoughts on how it could be improved.
I’m coming from ZBrush. I injured my back and it’s now painful for me to sit at the computer for very long. Rather than using ZBrush on the Cintiq I wanted to see if I could do a complete project in Nomad on the iPad. The entire model was sculpted in Nomad and textured in Substance Painter.
Here are my thoughts on Nomad.
Good: Pretty much everything. It has got every tool I need to do what I need to do. Is it as feature-complete as ZBrush? No. Do I prefer Nomad? Yes. It’s powerful with a great interface and I can use it anywhere. My one big grumble early on was that Nomad doesn’t have any support for hard-surface modelling, but I’m over that now. I’m not even sure that I’d want those features to be added. I was able to do everything with sculpting.
Room for improvement: The tube tool is great (and way more powerful than it appears at first) but it should snap along segments rather than just at nodes, this would be a huge time-saver. The mask tool desperately needs expand/shrink controls, and should have an option to blur by a radius or other numeric value. For a baking/texturing workflow it would be very useful if cloned objects could keep the same name as the original.
Bad: I understand that there’s a bug that causes normals to get flipped, and there are some workarounds that sometimes work and sometimes don’t. BY FAR the biggest problem in this project was dealing with one piece of geometry that somehow got its normals flipped. Just fix the bug or include a “flip normals” command or both. For texturing of complex models there needs to be an option to export facegroups as vertex colours. This is such a crucial feature that I naively assumed it would happen by default until I completed the model and discovered that it isn’t supported. This turned a half-hour texturing job in to a painstaking painting job that must have taken 10 times as long and wasn’t fun. If we could also have an option to export OBJ files with a single material reference for all meshes then this would take Maya out of the mix and Nomad exports could go straight to Substance.
Conclusion: I’d absolutely love to switch to Nomad as my main sculpting software, it’s more than capable, but without being able to export facegroups it’s just not quite ready for a proper texturing workflow on complex models. For my workflow I’ll be stuck on ZBrush for now, but hopefully I’ll be able to switch permanently to Nomad soon.
Thanks to Stephomi for making this incredible program! It was a joy to use.
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In the material menu, « inverse culling » should do that.
It does export them, maybe try to check « split obj by groups ».
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In the material menu, « inverse culling » should do that.
I’d seen that as a suggested solution but it didn’t work for me. Even doing the inverse culling → mask → extract → export → import trick didn’t work for me. I had to export the object to Maya, flip the normals there, and bring the object back in to Nomad.
It does export them, maybe try to check « split obj by groups ».
Doesn’t that split objects in to multiple objects according to facegroups? So you lose face contiguity. Although now that I type that I’m thinking it maybe doesn’t matter, so long as the order of objects is the same in the low and high poly exports. Will investigate further, thanks…
@stephomi Splitting by groups produces unexpected results. For example I created a sphere with three facegroups. I was expecting Nomad to export three objects, one for each group. Instead it exports dozens of objects with no apparent logic to where the splits are.
I’ve noticed that before too…when exporting to Valence 3D.
I’m not sure, but I think it has something to do with the UV.
Maybe you have the UV - for primitives active by default.
So better delete UV.
But I’m not quite sure.
Good idea @Holger_Schoenischka but sadly no, doesn’t make any difference 
You totally avoided one main concern: missing expand and reduce of mask (maybe even facegroups?). Even I fully fall in love with facegroups/ masking now!
By the way I realised why this method wouldn’t work for baking/texturing anyway. The facegroup boundaries on the low and high poly versions won’t match. So even if the meshes were separated correctly according to facegroups, you’d get high->low baking errors.
The correct way to do it is to keep objects intact and assign facegroup colours to vertices. Then the baker will pick up the IDs from the high poly and bake them to the low poly. That’s the way everyone is used to doing it in ZBrush->Substance and nobody’s going to want to switch to using a mess of separate meshes with all the UV seam hassles that method would create.
For example, consider a jacket with a patch stitched on to it. You may want to give the jacket one ID and the patch another ID so they can be textured easily. But when you paint stitches around the patch they need to touch both the patch and the jacket. If the patch and jacket are separate objects with separate UV shells then there will be distortion in the stitches because the texels won’t line up correctly.
No it has nothing to do with UVs.
It works in ZBrush, but not necessarily in every softwares. Similarly if I export a sphere with 2 polygroups from ZBrush I got the same issue outside ZBrush/Nomad.
No, it splits an “object” into multiple “groups”.
It’s up to the software to decide how to interpret what a group is.
For ZBrush/Nomad, by default it will be polygroup/facegroup.
Maybe I fixed it in the OBJ export a while ago (added you in the beta, if you want to test again).
Otherwise I would need the .nom file to see what’s wrong (only the broken part).
It’s not a “normals” issue though but face clockwiseness.
Nah it’s an hack, face data isn’t the same as vertex data.
Especially since Substance can bake from face data instead of vertex data: https://helpx.adobe.com/substance-3d-bake/bakers-settings/color-map-from-mesh.html
I tried “Mesh ID / Polygroup” in Substance… and it almost works.
For some reason it only works if there are no “objects” in the OBJ file, but simply sub “groups”. ZBrush doesn’t declare “object” so I guess Substance assumed only ZBrush is exporting polygroups.
It’s a bit annoying because there is no reason why it shouldn’t work, but I might add a just checkbox for Substance.
Edit:
How it looks like with the new OBJ export option:
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@stephomi I just wanted to thank you for adding me to the beta. I did download the latest version, but unfortunately I can’t use it as I lose my access to Quad Remesher. I think I had to click on “stop testing” to get back to the production version, so please don’t take any offence if you get a message saying that I declined or something like that!
The video at the end of your last message is very encouraging. Being able to go directly from Nomad to Substance would be awesome. I’m just about to fire up ZBrush to continue my current project and I really wish it was Nomad instead
The Quadremesher should still work - possibly restore the purchase - or simply buy again - no money should then be debited. (I hope 
)
Do not end the beta!
If you want to change the version again, simply install the normal version via the Appstore - never uninstall or end the beta.
All files are save - but never unistall …
As I said, you can simply jump back and forth between the versions.
Ah okay, I couldn’t figure out how to go back to the production release without clicking the “stop testing” button. I did try doing restore purchase for QR but it didn’t work. I also tried clicking the button to buy it, just in case it came up as £0 or something, but it was showing the full price.
Good grief using ZBrush again today after using Nomad for a few weeks has been horrible. What a truly bad interface ZBrush has got. Whatever I want to do, the interface just gets in the way and slows me down. Nomad has been a breath of fresh air 
IMM brushes for Nomad soon? Pretty please? Or at least bend array objects along a curve…
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You can’t get charged in TestFlight.
Normally there is something that says it’s for testing purposes only, not sure when.
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