93 replies to this topic

[Polygoon]

OK! Thanks Andrew, So 3DCoats engine does it via naming convention. It was not clear to me until I opened 1 in SoftImage and looked at the scene hierarchy. Cool, I have a few ideas for some Negative volume objects.

Thank you for your help.

[Taurus]

Andrew, does 3DC have any performance advantages if CPU with HyperThreading is used vs non-HT cpu ?? Will it change soon ? I read 3DC bought some programming multithreaded libraries from Intel.Now I dont know which CPU should I buy with HT or non-HT, non-HT are of course cheaper.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Andrew, does 3DC have any performance advantages if CPU with HyperThreading is used vs non-HT cpu ?? Will it change soon ? I read 3DC bought some programming multithreaded libraries from Intel.Now I dont know which CPU should I buy with HT or non-HT, non-HT are of course cheaper.

It can't be clear right now before the library was not seriously used. But in general I am not big fan of HyperThreading. The more cores and frequency is better, more cash is better too. Other parameters are not as important.

[Taurus]

Ok,my choice is clear now, thank you for reply

[Javis]

OK! Thanks Andrew, So 3DCoats engine does it via naming convention. It was not clear to me until I opened 1 in SoftImage and looked at the scene hierarchy. Cool, I have a few ideas for some Negative volume objects.

Thank you for your help.

The PDF manual also has a section covering this.

[AbnRanger]

Andrew, does 3DC have any performance advantages if CPU with HyperThreading is used vs non-HT cpu ?? Will it change soon ? I read 3DC bought some programming multithreaded libraries from Intel.Now I dont know which CPU should I buy with HT or non-HT, non-HT are of course cheaper.

You asked the same question in a separate thread also. Didn't get the answer you wanted? If you want only Andrew to answer, maybe PM him. It might help to google-search "hyperthreading" and find out how it works. Whatever is multi-threaded will get some degree of performance boost. The question is how much.

You can look on Tomshardwareguide.com to research the CPU's you're considering and see how well they do in the benchmarks. There is usually an "Applications" category that lists 3ds Max rendering benchmarks and that is usually what I go by. A 6 core AMD should outperform all but the most expensive Intel i7's (the $1k models, which are 6 Cores themselves), and cost a lot less. When I can afford to, I am going to take a look at a pair of the 8-12core Opterons that are priced lower than the Highend Intel i7's. They have lower clockspeeds, but the number of Cores for rendering are just overwhelming.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819105265&cm_re=opterons-_-19-105-265-_-Product

[michalis]

Renderers can use as many threads are available so 16 threads are better than 8. Most other apps can call as 4-8 threads so 4-8 non HT cores at 3gh can be more efficient. Most time my 2 xeon HT work at half speed or less because of this. But when rendering they run at full speed and its lovely.

[Andrew Shpagin]

There are 3.5 videos on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.c...ay?feature=mhum

[Shawn Driscoll]

I disable the User Account Control upon first installing Windows 7. I hate that darn thing. It's more trouble to the user than it is for any would-be hackers.

Very much agree.

[Andrew Shpagin]

You asked the same question in a separate thread also. Didn't get the answer you wanted? If you want only Andrew to answer, maybe PM him. It might help to google-search "hyperthreading" and find out how it works. Whatever is multi-threaded will get some degree of performance boost. The question is how much.

You can look on Tomshardwareguide.com to research the CPU's you're considering and see how well they do in the benchmarks. There is usually an "Applications" category that lists 3ds Max rendering benchmarks and that is usually what I go by. A 6 core AMD should outperform all but the most expensive Intel i7's (the $1k models, which are 6 Cores themselves), and cost a lot less. When I can afford to, I am going to take a look at a pair of the 8-12core Opterons that are priced lower than the Highend Intel i7's. They have lower clockspeeds, but the number of Cores for rendering are just overwhelming.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819105265&cm_re=opterons-_-19-105-265-_-Product

I think he asked because he got to know my plans about using Intel TBB library, so the question was how will it use HyperThreading. No problem there.

[b33nine]

Is tinker's library available that he was using in the video? I see the Greebles library, but it certainly doesn't have all the goodies from the "Rich Primitives" video. Am I just missing it or did I not load it correctly?

If we don't have access to it, I'm not sure I'd showing images of the individual objects in the library ( http://www.pilgway.c...inkerModels.jpg ) in the marketing of the software as it seems kind of misleading.

[philnolan3d]

Is tinker's library available that he was using in the video? I see the Greebles library, but it certainly doesn't have all the goodies from the "Rich Primitives" video. Am I just missing it or did I not load it correctly?

If we don't have access to it, I'm not sure I'd showing images of the individual objects in the library ( http://www.pilgway.c...inkerModels.jpg ) in the marketing of the software as it seems kind of misleading.

It's here:
http://www.3d-coat.com/files/TinkerModels.3dcpack

It's also on the official 3.5 announcement page right under Tinker's video:
http://3d-coat.com/3d-coat-35/

If you're using IE you may have trouble with the file, just make sure it is called TinkerModels.3dcpack not with a .zip extension. Load it with File > Install Extension.

[b33nine]

Thanks Phil, no idea why I couldn't find it. Excited to play around with it.

[Digital777]

Not really a bug or request but one thing i have noticed recently is for merge and snake etc a few folders seem to be less suited for one thing or need a few more in the folder as there is just a few. For example i think one was called pen tips that was for snake tool but they didn't seem to work that great but would however for merge tool instead. The folders for some like i think plants had just a few but i guess these will expand in size with time though.

The merge and snake tools are getting used all the time now for me though and i have made a few of my own also. The new model pack is really amazing also, it really shows that these tools can be used for amazing things. The only thing we need now is maybe some sharpen edge/corner tool to make diagonals and corners better as the steps effect they get can stand out still even at high res. This program is definitely starting to get good for hard surface models now though.

[Adamek]

When I make voxel element very dense refreshing brush position over that voxel element is VERY slow.

When it has 500k tri all seems to be ok. Even with large brush diameter. Making it more dense to 2mln tri makes brush to be non responsible to mouse moves and with small brush. Very small too.

CPU i utilized to 25-40% (on 4 cores). I'm using GF 250GTS so CUDA is enabled and should be efficient.

The same situation is on other computer (2 cores and GPU non CUDA).

Any one has the same symptoms?
3DC Version does not makes any matter. 

[philnolan3d]

You didn't specify how much RAM you have, that plays a big part.

[Javis]

You didn't specify how much RAM you have, that plays a big part.

It's in his sig.

AMD Athlon 9550; 4GB RAM; GF 250GTS 1GB; WIN7 64 bit, 3DC 64 bit CUDA



That machine should handle alright, though I suspect your CPU might be a bottleneck. Could you possibly use Jing to record a short video showing us, and email it to support AT 3d-coat DOT com please?

[philnolan3d]

Oh you're right I didn't see that. I would still recommend upgrading that ram though, for voxels 1GB is not a lot. I have 6GB and I'm wishing I had more.

[AbnRanger]

Oh you're right I didn't see that. I would still recommend upgrading that ram though, for voxels 1GB is not a lot. I have 6GB and I'm wishing I had more.

I have 8GB and wish I had more...but then we are always prone to push every program to it's limits.
Back to the original question, you want to use lower resolution when using large brush sizes and making broad sweeping changes, and increase the resolution only as needed when you detail...even then, that is where you would usually want to switch to Surface mode as it is designed to be much faster than Volume mode (it ignores volume data and only accounts for surface level data).

Sometimes though you need to go back and make some large changes even after you have reached the detailing stage. That is where users are going to HAVE to start taking advantage of the Multi-Res capability. It's there for this very purpose...to make fast work of situations that slow you down in Volume mode, and it's wicked fast. If smoothing gets slow, for example, cache that layer (I like to stay to 2x level Proxy) and see what kind of difference it makes.

[DragonFist]

First off, I want to say that I am loving version 3. I'm trying out the free trial and plan to buy the upgrade when I get my check for the new month.

Couple of things I'd love to see:

• Recovery from hitting memory limit - Currently, if some action hits an out of memory error, 3D Coat crashes and I have to restart. I normally save before any major action so it isn't a big deal (and I seem to have an imagination larger than my system's ram, lol), but it would be nice to have it recover and roll back to the beginning of the action so I can change some settings and try again.
• VoxStamp Object Sub-folder support - Here, it is possible that I am just missing something, but I'll blab away anyhow. When I added Tinker's models, I couldn't find them right away. Took me a bit to figure out that they were in a sub-folder of the merge folder. They don't show up in the merge list unless I move them to the top and restart 3D Coat. It would be really nice if the folders showed in the list and if you click them you move down to that set. It would make it possible to organize your merge stamps and not have a thousand random ones to search through. Again, If I'm missing some setting that makes this happen already, forgive my ignorance(certainly seem possible since the add-on pack installs them in such a way.)

Anyhow, I love this product. It is an excellent addition to my 3D tools and as I learn more and more, the ease of creating highly detailed objects is apparent.

Shawn