915 replies to this topic

[philnolan3d]

Hey guys, is it just me or do you still feel the need to use UVLayout just because it can smooth out the edges of the UV islands? In 3DCoat's UV room you can use the brush tool + SHIFT key to smooth out the tension of the UVs, but only inside the island or selection itself. You can never smooth out the island edges algorithmically, only manually, which is tedious and a serious bummer.

Or am I missing something?

When you merge into the painting room there are options to smooth the edges of the islands.



You may also find my post in this thread helpful:
http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5855&pid=48090&st=0&#entry48090

[StOrM3]

The only time I find it necessary to use the UV tools is when the model was exported from Lightwave itself, which creates an extra set of faces Just inside one of the cube sides when you create a cube, hidden but 3dcoat tries to texture them, this caused me headaches, so I stopped using L.W., similar things happen when I export vert/face modeled objects from fragmotion 3d, forget to turn off 2 sided faces, also if I don't weld all the verts, weld all doesn't fix it, even using weld verts from 3dCoat import OBJ. I Only Manually UV Edit, when painting and a face messes up, letting me know that the UV of the face, is NOT as it should be. I go into UV, and select: -add clusters(lft menu), -islands(top opt.), then click the face, -upd. Islands, -unwrap, -Apply UV Set -yes I understand, viola the face is fixed, and now it paints works perfectly. I have ran across a few models, I was unable to fix no matter how much I tweaked. I can never select the verts / faces that I need to del. / upd., even if I follow the hints closely.. Ex. is the 2 faces from the L.W. cube model, I wanted to del. the extra 2 faces, even though I managed to select & hide the outer faces, I still could not select the inner 2 bad faces, even with outer faces hid, while I tried to click on the inner ones it selected the hid outer ones.. So I tried editing the UV's, hitting del. on the selected bad face, nogo, so then I looked at all options on left menu, none seemed as a delete option, I selected a few which were wrong, like clear, I still couldn't manage to del. the faces from the model, so I just redo my model, using other tech., other programs, welding all verts, no extra faces, I also select: remove all orphans, save a *.ugh frag3d backup file for future adjustments, export the object, hold my breath, cross my fingers, import the new model, usually it works.

Sometimes I have to do some wierd stuff, export the obj file from 3d coat, use U3D to adjust the UV's, deleting extra faces etc.. save it, re-import into 3DC, finally paint it. The bucket fill tool, Modulation fill's, Allow you to create custom fills, and even use them in other tools like paint. It is a really good tool.

I hope this information helps users both new / pro's, as well as gives Andrew some insight into how users are using 3DCoat and some of the issues causing tough problems.. Also, I'm glad to see Andrew fixed the Paint.Net stuff, as I had been working with the psd plugin author of paint.net to fix the issues, whenever you would select the rle-compression option in the psd file save dialog of paint.net, is when I noticed all the crashes happening between paint.net and 3d coat, eventually paint.net was unable to read the psd files, and 3d coat was telling me their was a problem with the format.. That was before I'm going to heavily test the fixes Andrew stated he did for Paint.Net support today, as I make use of Edit Projections in External Editor Quite often, mostly because I can't figure out how to draw a straight line in 3dCoat.. Ok, I'm off to do some more testing, I hope this helps MadDox understand about the UV mapping, and Andrew alike..

Thanks,

StOrM3

[philnolan3d]

In my 8 years of using LW I can't say I've ever heard of it creating a set of hidden faces. You cold try hitting M (merge points) and Shift+I (merge co-planar polys) before exporting.

[Taurus]

AutoRetopo Bug:

If object has meshes/volumes which aren't connected 3DC will autoretopo only one of them or will crash without warning.

[Javis]

When you merge into the painting room there are options to smooth the edges of the islands.



You may also find my post in this thread helpful:
http://www.3d-coat.c...t=0

That's good and all, but not being able to brush smooth UV island edges is a real PITA. It would be nice to have the option to do so.

[StOrM3]

In my 8 years of using LW I can't say I've ever heard of it creating a set of hidden faces. You cold try hitting M (merge points) and Shift+I (merge co-planar polys) before exporting.

Thank you for the tips, it's LW 9.3, if that helps. I will try your suggestions tho.. I'm not an LW Pro or anything, I bought it at one of those consignment stores where people donate stuff, and I found it in a pile of disks and CD's, and I've had it for a while, and finally decided to install it and give it a go.. Your tips are great stuff, thanks Phil.. I have more to tell ya, but not here, as I'm already off topic too much in this msg.. I'll pm you later.

Thanks

[MaDDoX]

That's good and all, but not being able to brush smooth UV island edges is a real PITA. It would be nice to have the option to do so.

Glad that you got my point, Geo. Anyone that has ever used UVlayout knows exactly what I was talking about, and considering how 3DCoat exceeds UVLayout in most aspects (usability, stress feedback, relaxing, etc) it's AWESOME that Andrew has just - as in 5-minutes ago, according to his twitter - added this feature to its suite

AndrewShpagin: It will be possible to smooth UV islands edges in UV room in brush mode.

Go Andrew go!!

[Lorenz]

Hello there,
just downloaded 3D Coat from the download page, and wanted to claim that the ptex export isn't working, but than I realized that it's not the latest build which I have. Why the current build is only accessible through the forum is another point, but more urgent I need to discuss the problem I have now with the .ptx export. 3D Coat crashes whenever I try to export the texture as .ptx.

BUILD:
3D-COAT 3.3.13(CUDA)(GL64)(trial)
OS:
Win7 x64
BUG DESCRIPTION:
Crashes before exporting .ptx file
STEPS TO REPRODUCE:
I've imported creature.obj for ptex painting from the samples folder, and applied some color to it. Then under the Textures menu I chose Export->Color to Ptx. Then it crashes.

Regards
Lorenz

[jedwards]

Voxel performance on OSX seems to have decreased significantly with the new build. Loaded up my old power armor sculpt to try to auto-quadrangulate and it was incredibly sluggish. This is on a new i7 imac with 8 gigs of ram and a better vid card than the 3 yr old imac I did the sculpt on originally. Wondering if this has anything to do with the new graphics update apple released a week ago, just not playing nice with 3dc. Down rez-ing all the voxel layers helps, but it has also proved to be unstable doing any scene management. Crashed several times just trying to optimize my scene for smoother display updates. Also, trying to retopo one voxel layer in particular generated an empty mesh layer. Others seemed fine. I'm only moving the pieces over to zbrush anyway since I much prefer to detail and sculpt there in general. 3dc is still largely only a block out solution for me when it comes to sculpting though. The rest of it is evolving nicely. Would still love to see some way to manage and group paint layers though - especially when dealing with multiple objects, and importing images. Would be nice if the option were there to name layers automatically after the imported image. It's a real pain to manage multiple normal, diffuse, spec and AO maps, in addition to the extra layers for each I often generate.

[G-Rom84]

That's good and all, but not being able to brush smooth UV island edges is a real PITA. It would be nice to have the option to do so.

May I ask some question? In which kind of way for what tasks this feature could be helpful? (please write detailed answer not just general phrases like "to simplify uv editing process")

[MaDDoX]

May I ask some question? In which kind of way for what tasks this feature could be helpful? (please write detailed answer not just general phrases like "to simplify uv editing process")

When you're smoothing out your UV, you're basically diminishing the compression (blue in 3DCoat) and stretching (red in 3DCoat) of the polygons in the UV space. In the other hand, it's generally advisable to have the least possible amount of islands in your UV to minimize seam problems related to edge padding (black edges show up when enabling LoD in real-time and game engines) and normal maps, since in render time - real-time or not - it's almost impossible for the renderer to keep the simulated normal continuity across discontinuous islands. I'm putting that on light terms since these problems would require a much more thorough explanation, but for the point in discussion suffices to say that it's wise to have the least possible amount of seams and "hide" them (ie. keep them out of the intended or most common viewing ranges) as well as you can. It's also worth mentioning that PTex is supposed to correct all these problems, the problem being that almost no current real-time engine supports it, but if you're working for TV/movie production it's definitely a superior and no-frills option.

Back to UV-land. The problem with reducing the amount of islands is that you induce sensibly more stretching and compression issues. To fix them gets exponentially harder since you employ less "decompression cuts" when defining the islands. All that's to say that you have to manually move the UV island edges away from its current contour to open room for the inner polygons to expand (ie. de-compress). Not having the ability to do that algorithmically (yet localized by the brush radius) forces you to do lots of tedious vertex pulling.

Hope the explanation didn't get too confusing. I wish I had the time to grab a couple screenshots to better illustrate it - which, curiously, would probably be faster than typing all this lol

[G-Rom84]

When you're smoothing out your UV, you're basically diminishing the compression (blue in 3DCoat) and stretching (red in 3DCoat) of the polygons in the UV space.

for compensate distortions/compressions i am selecting polys over such places and apply few times relax it resulting that those areas become almost gray maybe with slight tint, or using smooth brush, but it would not be perfect everywhere anyway. still, even after i read the explanation i still missing smthing, i like that for now i coud not affect the borders of uvs by smooth brush. As for the seams and their appearence in game engines the way to avoid them is to use padding while baking maps in pixels which extends color over the borders of uvs slightly. but presence of the padding some times not necesary means that it will release model from artefacts in the seams area, some thimes while turning around model on those seams happens some blinking and the only way to get rid of it - is to move a bit uv borders >inside< texture space, but such act will result in non coincidence of a texture along either side of a seam.
As for uv editor in 3DC in general, it is sad for me, that it have no option to show an actual texture map applied on model in uv preview window, also undo on selection works strange in preview window - need to push it few times and it removes not the last element item picked, but the whole selection of elements

[Andrew Shpagin]

Hello there,
just downloaded 3D Coat from the download page, and wanted to claim that the ptex export isn't working, but than I realized that it's not the latest build which I have. Why the current build is only accessible through the forum is another point, but more urgent I need to discuss the problem I have now with the .ptx export. 3D Coat crashes whenever I try to export the texture as .ptx.

BUILD:
3D-COAT 3.3.13(CUDA)(GL64)(trial)
OS:
Win7 x64
BUG DESCRIPTION:
Crashes before exporting .ptx file
STEPS TO REPRODUCE:
I've imported creature.obj for ptex painting from the samples folder, and applied some color to it. Then under the Textures menu I chose Export->Color to Ptx. Then it crashes.

Regards
Lorenz

I VERY recommend you use DX version instead of GL. GL is not working well under Vista/7 because of drivers. I tried DX and ptx export works very well.

[MaDDoX]

i like that for now i coud not affect the borders of uvs by smooth brush.

True, it's many times handy to have edges "locked", that's exactly why UVLayout (probably the most professionally used UV creation application) has a 'smooth edges' toggle. UVLayout also has the ability to create 'pins' (using the A key shortcut) that hold specific vertices in place as the smoothing is carried out, very handy for the smoothing of tight corners in which you never want some vertexes to move and create overlaps.

As for the seams and their appearence in game engines the way to avoid them is to use padding while baking maps in pixels which extends color over the borders of uvs slightly.

Edge padding work things out nicely for diffuse (color) textures, but it's really insufficient for normal maps. That's more related to the normal map technology itself than to some 3DCoat limitation, there's a recent Pixar workflow presentation that explains that in detail - you can search for Pixar + ptex in youtube. Talking of which, normal map creation also has been an area in which 3DCoat has fallen short in my opinion, although Andrew has made great improvements in that aspect recently. Anyways, my point stands that your best option for real-time/game engines is have the least seams possible, preferrably just one island, and keep those seams as well hidden as possible. To achieve that goal I'm finding the UVMaster (zbrush auto-UV creation plugin) + 3DCoat combo to be almost unbeatable. I create the base UV cuts in ZB/UVMaster, those cuts work as a great starting point while the auto-UV option in 3DCoat just creates garbage which's unfortunately as useless as hard to clean up. I then edit and smooth them in 3DCoat using its excellent UV toolset.

A little known fact is that 3DCoat's smoothing brush algorithm is sensibly superior to the brush smoothing algorithm in UVLayout (not talking about the island-wide option, that one is pretty kickass). 3DCoat's UV brush reaches higher levels of smoothing and distributes smoothing better across larger area, leading to superior results.

As for uv editor in 3DC in general, it is sad for me, that it have no option to show an actual texture map applied on model in uv preview window

Actually the texture maps show up in the UV preview window normally in the Texture Editor (Paint Room) just not in the retopo's UV preview. To be honest I don't understand why that would make any sense, since while you're retopo'ing you - as far as I know - shouldn't think about the final texture, just about seams and distortion. Care to explain why you'd need that?

[robotbob]

hey there, i am a new coat user so i don't know exactly how things work here,
and sorry if this is not the right place to ask basic questions but . .

do you download the version at the top of this link to use all the new beta features ?
does your serial work in the beta ?
can you run the beta and the released version on the same machine ?
is there a mac 64 bit version on the way ?

thanks

pete

[artman]

do you download the version at the top of this link to use all the new beta features ?

yes.

does your serial work in the beta ?

yes.

can you run the beta and the released version on the same machine ?

Yes,but not at the same time.

is there a mac 64 bit version on the way ?

I wouldnt expect it too much. It seems to be very hard to do.

[kay_Eva]

Are we going to be able to autotopo mesh objects without converting to voxels step? Because I I get some bad converstions sometimes from mesh --> voxel objects particularly when importing a sculptris mesh. Also, it tends to lose sharpness and detail

thanks!

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[philnolan3d]

Make sure the mesh is closed, that's what usually causes that problem. Either before hand or with the make Mesh Closed button in the Params panel.

[kay_Eva]

Make sure the mesh is closed, that's what usually causes that problem. Either before hand or with the make Mesh Closed button in the Params panel.

hey it worked!

Now for the other problem which is loss of detail. How can I make sure that the voxel object will be the right resolution to retain the fine detail. I have problems with that part.

thanks !

[philnolan3d]

Now for the other problem which is loss of detail. How can I make sure that the voxel object will be the right resolution to retain the fine detail. I have problems with that part.

Well, there is an auto scale button, though I find I need to scale it up just a bit more than that, then the res is correct. If it's not enough detail, hit Undo and scale it up some more, then hit Enter again.