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3D-Coat 3.5 updates thread


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Is the flatten pressure fix in this build ?

[EDIT]: yes and its awesome.

Is the viewport faster too ? I get more fluid camera movements.

Also about zbrush navigation scheme, it needs a Y axis constraint option (it exists for 3dx mouse : rotate around y Axis).

Export as dense quad is very welcome too, it avoids making a remesh and reproject in zbrush, can't wait to have an applin between those two :)

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I disagree with the anti-ATI sentiments. I'm currently using a 3800 and have owned primarily ATI cards in the past with two Nvidias in there. I had just as much trouble with the nvidias as I have had with the ATIs, which hasn't been much. Basically, if there was a problem with my system, it didn't matter which card I put in, both crashed under the same circumstances. Pretty much 100% of the time, problems were the result of the software in question or, usually on a newly built rig, with the configuration of the the rig (usually unstable memory). I can't think of a single time that I had a show stopping issue that turned out to be an "ATI Driver" issue in the end. I've had tons of issues with Nvidia's RAID drivers on their motherboards (I've had to pull the a specific storage driver and mix it with current MB drivers to not have crashes under high disk usage) and likely never buy a motherboard product from them again. But I've had little issue with their video cards.

Anyhow, I've said my peace. I think both companies have made great hardware and would put either into my machines anytime (though I tend to pair Nvidia with Intel set ups and ATI with AMD set ups).

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Ok Andrew,I deep tested Export Dense Quad for you.

Here are results,I splited in good/bad to identify clearly the problems I encountered.

1)EXPORTING

GOOD

I was able to export much bigger objects,objects that would cause out of memory issue when using other exports.

I exported a 29mil tris object using this option .

It took 7-15 minutes approx to export which is normal since i donmt have a crazy computer.

BAD

There are no progress bar.

At the end of process there was 4 3DCoat.exe simultaneously opened in task manager..

The first one was sucking up 2gig of ram, all 3 others were using 40mb of ram .

In first one was displaying wrongly scaled version of the mesh in red wireframe, all 3 others were displaying startup screen..

All were frozen I had to manually kill the 4 in task manager.

But even with this it seems export was successful.

2)INTERACTION with MB/ZB

GOOD

I exported a 29mil tris object using this option and it loaded perfectly in both ZB and MB.

Smoothing and sculpting on the topology works fine in both apps...its very even and nice to work with.

BAD

EDIT: No bad. :)

Conclusion:

For experimental addition it works very well.

Its big milestone I think because its the first time in 3DCoat development that users can really make base in voxels and directly keep sculpting in ZB/Mb.

Without using Unified skin,Project all or 3DCoat MV/Ptex hires exports.

IMHO its a very big selling point and I think it should be advertised on website.

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I completely agree with the above.

@artman: you can export specific volumes by hiding those unwanted (also make sure nothing is in surface mod or it crashes).

This is a game changer :>

Now i need to find the steps to make import export the same size/coordinates in zbrush and 3dcoat (i always get offset/off scale meshes). < Actualy the export as dense mesh solves that problem itself \o/ Love you Andrew !

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@artman: you can export specific volumes by hiding those unwanted (also make sure nothing is in surface mod or it crashes).

Merci mec, it works!!

much better this way because we can export any combination of voxel layers at once!

(On my side,I dont have crashes if object are in SF mode,I even exported a proxy using this.)

Also it seems scale is respected ! :yahoo::yahoo::yahoo:

Great work Andrew!

@BeatKitano :it seems now alt-click on eye icon leaves parents visible,another good surprise.

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Merci mec, it works!!

much better this way because we can export any combination of voxel layers at once!

(On my side,I dont have crashes if object are in SF mode,I even exported a proxy using this.)

Also it seems scale is respected ! :yahoo::yahoo::yahoo:

Great work Andrew!

@BeatKitano :it seems now alt-click on eye icon leaves parents visible,another good surprise.

Yep it's all good, but I get lot of crash on exporting with dense quad option. Most often I need to sym copy and/or make a few strokes on the volume to export it without crashing. I hope it gets solved quickly.

Anyway very nice work Andrew, I must say all those bugfix feature completion toward useability is very engaging :)

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I disagree with the anti-ATI sentiments. I'm currently using a 3800 and have owned primarily ATI cards in the past with two Nvidias in there. I had just as much trouble with the nvidias as I have had with the ATIs, which hasn't been much. Basically, if there was a problem with my system, it didn't matter which card I put in, both crashed under the same circumstances. Pretty much 100% of the time, problems were the result of the software in question or, usually on a newly built rig, with the configuration of the the rig (usually unstable memory). I can't think of a single time that I had a show stopping issue that turned out to be an "ATI Driver" issue in the end. I've had tons of issues with Nvidia's RAID drivers on their motherboards (I've had to pull the a specific storage driver and mix it with current MB drivers to not have crashes under high disk usage) and likely never buy a motherboard product from them again. But I've had little issue with their video cards.

Anyhow, I've said my peace. I think both companies have made great hardware and would put either into my machines anytime (though I tend to pair Nvidia with Intel set ups and ATI with AMD set ups).

With Adobe throwing their weight behind CUDA, the tide may have turned in favor of nVidia for 3D work (but not for games).

I've also had problems with Catalyst in the past, and have been very happy with nVidia GTX-285 2GB VRAM.

To be fair, you do have to be careful to research the latest drivers from nVidia, as I've had BSOD on Win7-64 due to nVidia drivers.

But GPU rendering seems to be favoring nVidia by a wide margin.

Here's a pretty cool product that uses nVidia only for rendering. Check out their GPU-X also! Very cool!

http://www.refractivesoftware.com/

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With Adobe throwing their weight behind CUDA, the tide may have turned in favor of nVidia for 3D work (but not for games).

I've also had problems with Catalyst in the past, and have been very happy with nVidia GTX-285 2GB VRAM.

To be fair, you do have to be careful to research the latest drivers from nVidia, as I've had BSOD on Win7-64 due to nVidia drivers.

But GPU rendering seems to be favoring nVidia by a wide margin.

Here's a pretty cool product that uses nVidia only for rendering. Check out their GPU-X also! Very cool!

http://www.refractivesoftware.com/

I don't argue your point. My problem is with blanket comments as to the usability of one product over an over based on "their drivers suck" when given information is likely not caused by said drivers (for example, catalyst control panel not opening shows problems well beyond a driver problem).

I don't argue that Nvidia has gained a strong step foward in the gpu rendering arena. I would not buy ATI if this was the application area I intended to use. For games, I would buy ATI at the moment. For 2D and 3D general applications, I've found no legitimate basis to prefer one over the other. I've had BSODs with either, for a while, Nvidia's drivers resulting fans shutting off(never had this issue with ATI). Most BSOD issues I've experienced when I traced them down actually had nothing to do with the video card but with either the system bus or the harddrive controller during access to the page file and were handled by upgraded (or downgraded) drivers for the motherboard. That's been my experience. Obviously, mileage may vary. I don't have the same system as others and can't base their experience on theirs. But it goes both ways.

In the end, buy what you want. I'm no ATI fanboy, I've own cards by both companies. And generally have been happy with all purchases, (one exception was the dual gpu cards ATI produced in the late 90's, they worked with almost nothing and crashed on nearly any game or app unless I disabled one gpu. Wasn't happy with that one at all.) But it bugs me a bit when I see these blanket statements made regarding one product over an other based on one bad experience that is likely a bad configuration, insufficient power supply, a bad ram stick, etc. When I installed the current card on my current system, I had crashes all the time when ever I the card was put use for 3d. Changing drivers did nothing. Returning to the old card did. Finally, I discovered that my 5 year old power supply was the problem and couldn't keep up with the new card. A new power supply handled it and I've had no issues since. And every time I've fixed someone's issues, it has been similar, the card didn't the case and was on an angle, the 3rd ram stick was bad. Old drivers from a card by the same company were never removed before installing the new one, etc., etc.

I've just never seen frequent crashes be the result of drivers from either company, with some noted exceptions, like the fan issue mentioned earlier (which was caught and handled by Nvidia with recommendation to rollback until they found the cause). Not saying it can't happen but I haven't seen it, yet I see it claimed to be the reason often.

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I don't argue your point. My problem is with blanket comments as to the usability of one product over an over based on "their drivers suck" when given information is likely not caused by said drivers (for example, catalyst control panel not opening shows problems well beyond a driver problem).

I don't argue that Nvidia has gained a strong step foward in the gpu rendering arena. I would not buy ATI if this was the application area I intended to use. For games, I would buy ATI at the moment. For 2D and 3D general applications, I've found no legitimate basis to prefer one over the other. I've had BSODs with either, for a while, Nvidia's drivers resulting fans shutting off(never had this issue with ATI). Most BSOD issues I've experienced when I traced them down actually had nothing to do with the video card but with either the system bus or the harddrive controller during access to the page file and were handled by upgraded (or downgraded) drivers for the motherboard. That's been my experience. Obviously, mileage may vary. I don't have the same system as others and can't base their experience on theirs. But it goes both ways.

In the end, buy what you want. I'm no ATI fanboy, I've own cards by both companies. And generally have been happy with all purchases, (one exception was the dual gpu cards ATI produced in the late 90's, they worked with almost nothing and crashed on nearly any game or app unless I disabled one gpu. Wasn't happy with that one at all.) But it bugs me a bit when I see these blanket statements made regarding one product over an other based on one bad experience that is likely a bad configuration, insufficient power supply, a bad ram stick, etc. When I installed the current card on my current system, I had crashes all the time when ever I the card was put use for 3d. Changing drivers did nothing. Returning to the old card did. Finally, I discovered that my 5 year old power supply was the problem and couldn't keep up with the new card. A new power supply handled it and I've had no issues since. And every time I've fixed someone's issues, it has been similar, the card didn't the case and was on an angle, the 3rd ram stick was bad. Old drivers from a card by the same company were never removed before installing the new one, etc., etc.

I've just never seen frequent crashes be the result of drivers from either company, with some noted exceptions, like the fan issue mentioned earlier (which was caught and handled by Nvidia with recommendation to rollback until they found the cause). Not saying it can't happen but I haven't seen it, yet I see it claimed to be the reason often.

I pointed out back to back problems with different cards...and each time it was simply the drivers. You don't have to like it, but that is the reality of it. When you update drivers and it tells you that you have to restart your PC for the drivers to take effect and then you immediately start getting error messages upon every bootup, you can't blame that on anything but the software/drivers.
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Thanks Andrew.

The dense quads option worked really fast (mac build). Wrong scale though, not the scale of the re-topo mesh. The export from voxels palette (the tri mesh, export scene!) is the only with same scale.

Not very useful this way. I don't find it useful anyway as the tri mesh works fine for re projection in zb or and blender.

The only use of this IMO is to work at low density voxels >1M, export quads to zbrush, do sculpture, import for 3dc retopo or voxels again, export etc etc. A zbrush applink could be fun and 3DCoat starts to look like a nice zbrush plugin. Close to my workflow but not as good LOL. Talking about zbrush, the new navigation (click+drug) needs to work opposite. I already fixed this but I prefer my blender like navigation. Unfortunately I haven't find a way to customize the ZB navigation.

So many times I wrote that 3DC is more a helper app than a stand alone in the sculpturing game. So many attacks for this, and here you are now.

As long as 3DC wont have a zb or mb like after-retopo-surface-sculpture room.

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Andrw, Thanks for the update. Models that would hang autoretopo now work. One thing though, I understand this is a beta version but it really needs a progress bar. I initially thought it was hung as before. All I got was a spinning beach ball as before with no sign I had even pressed the next button at all. (This is the button you press after you lay down strokes if you wanted to.)

Other than that I am happy I can finally get on and test further.

Cheers

Mike R

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Atrman, it is strange that export took so long, I will look, it should be much faster.

Andrew,I made more test with export dense quads in reuploaded win version speed was greatly improved it took below 4minutes to export the same file as before. :)

But sadly I can confirm as Michalis mention that scale is not preserved.It seems i didnt made enough tests. :(

post-1195-12875009135294_thumb.jpg

please read http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6586

Its one of 3DCoat most longstanding problem (I remember you even tried fix it a longtime ago...but it didnt work it seems)

The key for solving really is in "export pattern for merge".

There is something in that export method that makes scale being respected.Please find what it is.

(On another note:just wanted to tell you that my max global upload size on forum went down from 95mb to 24mb :blink: .

So I was already way above 24mb so I had to delete a crazy bunch of pics from my posts just to be able to upload one pic.

Most of them were pretty old bugreport images..but I was still a little upset about that.)

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"export pattern for merge" as "export scene"

All exports should ask for preserving scale. By default they should.

I tested the new build exporting meshes ~1-2M only. I didn't even seen spinning beach ball. Nothing. The whole process was instant. I'll try something heavier.

To make an applink to zbrush was not a bad joke BTW. 3DC does everything zb can't... and the opposite of course.

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(On another note:just wanted to tell you that my max global upload size on forum went down from 95mb to 24mb :blink: .

So I was already way above 24mb so I had to delete a crazy bunch of pics from my posts just to be able to upload one pic.

Most of them were pretty old bugreport images..but I was still a little upset about that.)

At least this resolved :)

Now you have 100 mb

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Patience is key.

I know, just saying. I already linked them as a workflow. On my last posted render I transfered the mesh 3-4 times from zb to 3dc and back. Some people think that methods like this are complicated. But they aren't really. What is complicated is drawing with precision.

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When you update drivers and it tells you that you have to restart your PC for the drivers to take effect and then you immediately start getting error messages upon every bootup, you can't blame that on anything but the software/drivers.

I really don't want to go down this road further. The facts are that this statement simply isn't true. There are so many other possible factors that there is no way that statement can factually be made. I can think of several things to check right off the top of my head - corrupt drivers, any of the issues mentioned in earlier posts that are now visible because the drivers are engaged, etc. Secondly, if the problem were solely driver related, then the majority of computers out there would be experiencing the same problem with the same drivers. I don't assume a cause until I've found what fixed it. Because I don't know what caused it and any theories I have are just that until then.

And that's the issue.

Anyhow, use what works for you. Both ATI and Nvidia have worked for me.

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Now another request Andrew. From a ZB user of course. LOL

When zooming, tool is zoomed too. Why so? Should stay as it is on the screen. Extremely handy believe me. Same as zb behavior in blender. HANDY!!!

ZBrush uses the same wideness for every tool. 3DC remembers this setting for every tool. This is handy too, zb should fix this nonsense.

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Now another request Andrew. From a ZB user of course. LOL

When zooming, tool is zoomed too. Why so? Should stay as it is on the screen. Extremely handy believe me. Same as zb behavior in blender. HANDY!!!

ZBrush uses the same wideness for every tool. 3DC remembers this setting for every tool. This is handy too, zb should fix this nonsense.

As for tool zooming, I think it can be useful as it is but it can also be a pain. Would like to see it be toggled by a checkbox or something.

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As for tool zooming, I think it can be useful as it is but it can also be a pain. Would like to see it be toggled by a checkbox or something.

I like it the way it works now and need it too this way,

So if some change occur regarding this please may them be optional..checkbox is fine.

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I really don't want to go down this road further. The facts are that this statement simply isn't true. There are so many other possible factors that there is no way that statement can factually be made. I can think of several things to check right off the top of my head - corrupt drivers, any of the issues mentioned in earlier posts that are now visible because the drivers are engaged, etc. Secondly, if the problem were solely driver related, then the majority of computers out there would be experiencing the same problem with the same drivers. I don't assume a cause until I've found what fixed it. Because I don't know what caused it and any theories I have are just that until then.

And that's the issue.

Anyhow, use what works for you. Both ATI and Nvidia have worked for me.

How can you tell me what I stated was not true...were you involved? It's a very logical conclusion to make. Install new driver...driver is now bad, giving error messages. How do you know that ATI is NOT getting a ton of complaints about this particular driver. Again, you don't have to like my comments, but I stand behind them. When I was having trouble with the ATI 4850 over a year ago, I waited for months, installing subsequent new drivers and I still couldn't use Combustion properly. I contacted ATI's support about it and never got a response back. So, I went out and bought an NVidia card, installed it along with it's latest drivers and BAM....problem fixed. Combustion and everything else worked perfectly. So, you can't tell me I'm just making things up, and that there has to be some unexplained excuse. The reality is, based on my experience, is that ATI's drivers flat out are problematic. One fact for you here...they have supposedly offered AVIVO (their free video compression utility, similar to NVidia's Badaboom), but in my experience it has nearly taken an act of Congress to find it many times. It seems they offer it, then pull it cause there are ISSUEs...you know the imaginary issues you are taling about here.

Never once have I had to dig around to find a solution to a bad driver or issue with NVidia. There may have been issues with a select few, but none that I've encountered. I'm not being a fanboy...prior to the 4850, I usually bought ATI's. But I'm simply relaying my own recent experience. And please, spare me the tech lectures. I know what I'm talking about. I've been building my own PC's for 2 decades now.

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How can you tell me what I stated was not true...were you involved? It's a very logical conclusion to make. Install new driver...driver is now bad, giving error messages. How do you know that ATI is NOT getting a ton of complaints about this particular driver. Again, you don't have to like my comments, but I stand behind them. When I was having trouble with the ATI 4850 over a year ago, I waited for months, installing subsequent new drivers and I still couldn't use Combustion properly. I contacted ATI's support about it and never got a response back. So, I went out and bought an NVidia card, installed it along with it's latest drivers and BAM....problem fixed. Combustion and everything else worked perfectly. So, you can't tell me I'm just making things up, and that there has to be some unexplained excuse. The reality is, based on my experience, is that ATI's drivers flat out are problematic. One fact for you here...they have supposedly offered AVIVO (their free video compression utility, similar to NVidia's Badaboom), but in my experience it has nearly taken an act of Congress to find it many times. It seems they offer it, then pull it cause there are ISSUEs...you know the imaginary issues you are taling about here.

Never once have I had to dig around to find a solution to a bad driver or issue with NVidia. There may have been issues with a select few, but none that I've encountered. I'm not being a fanboy...prior to the 4850, I usually bought ATI's. But I'm simply relaying my own recent experience. And please, spare me the tech lectures. I know what I'm talking about. I've been building my own PC's for 2 decades now.

Glad it worked out for you.

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So lets keep it as it is. Not really a problem. So you have to change wideness as you're zooming. I can live with this. :drinks:

It can be quite useful as it is. But sometimes I rotate my view and the scale of the mask changes. This is annoying, as I'm not zooming, and I have to rescale to get back to where I was. Also, sometimes in the retop room, you rotate the camera using the widget at the top and curves get drawn on the mesh. May not be related but a similar issue.

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