1786 replies to this topic

[BeatKitano]

Startscreen was scheduled for redesign. Was, i don't know anymore.

[bisenberger]

Digman,Psmith
I'm agree too,at the beginning i didn't really like the room concept,but now i find it clean.
I just have few problems with, basically i would like to be able to access the "hide" tools in every rooms.
It is a little bit painful to always go to the voxel room, (it would be good to rename it sculpt room) to hide some part of a model imho.

I like rooms too.
You can use Windows>Popups to open panes like Voxtree in the Paint (or Retopo) Room to turn voxels on and off without leaving the Paint (or Retopo) room.

[pixo]

Thank you Bisenberger good to know that ,

But my main problem is more to have access to the "Hide" tool and to hide some parts with the "E" curves.
When i was modeling , i found it more than handy , i should say "indispensable".
When i was painting , my workflow was to hide the parts that didn't allow me to see the area to paint ,for instance when you paint the under arms of a Character.
It was painful to make some "go and back" in the voxel room but indispensable,the freeze tool wouldn't help cause i was mainly using the Materials.

Anyway i think it's may be because it's very new to paint on the voxel (PVP) and to access it in the Paint room.
But it could be good to be able to do that.
It's the same for the Retopo room , i just start to do some retopo and i have the same problem.

I pretty sure that there is some tools that should be share between rooms.

[Polygoon]

As I see it Retopo already has almost everything it need for poly modeling, just need a way to select the points and such without having voxels behind it. Maybe some other selection methods like a lasso.

Yes, throw in a way to create hard edges / crease edges by just selecting an edge or edge loop and pressing a button. Extrude polygons/edges along axis, extrude polygons/edges along normals & perhaps an extrude along curves using bi - rail or something like B surfaces in Blender would be real cool.

I have to say I am exited to hear that poly modeling is coming to 3D Coat and I am looking forward to seeing what we will be able to do.

[kay_Eva]

I don't currently have a problem with the rooms. However, when I think about what a Silo-esque modeling suite inside of 3d-Coat will mean it seems that the natural progression would be to get rid of the rooms in order to fully take advantage of the potential for synergy between voxels and polygons. Why separate the modeling tools from the voxel room? If you put the two together, they will be many times more powerful. Because you will gain the precision of poly modeling, with the flexibility and sculpting of voxels. For example, let's say you are sculpting in voxels. But you want to have really precise definition for your character's eyelids. The most effective way to do this would be to sculpt the face, and then to superimpose polygons as the eyelids.

Or you are modeling a building, which is currently kind of tricky, you can use polygons to lay down the basic parts and then superimpose the voxels on top of the base. Or let's say you are kitbashing. You would be able to edit your various pieces as polygons before applying them to your voxel model. I just don't see the advantage to seperating any new poly modeling features from the voxel room.

The next question then becomes, how to organize a single all-purpose room for modeling? And modifier stacks is the simplest and least obtrusive thing. Once you organize modeling with modifier stacks, why not do the same to the rest for UI cohesion? To me, it seems like the natural progression if you want to take full advantage of modeling tools in 3dCoat.

[AbnRanger]

First off: I love the way the Sketch tool works now. Its pretty much how I expect it should work with one small problem...

When I press the Apply button, nothing happens. The object I've sculpted disappears when I switch to another tool. I'm probably doing something wrong, but I've tried option return, ctrl return; and I can get it to appear. I'm on 16A on Mac OSX 10.6 laptop.

Excelsior!
Eric Kunzendorf
Jacksonville University

First off: I love the way the Sketch tool works now. Its pretty much how I expect it should work with one small problem...

When I press the Apply button, nothing happens. The object I've sculpted disappears when I switch to another tool. I'm probably doing something wrong, but I've tried option return, ctrl return; and I can get it to appear. I'm on 16A on Mac OSX 10.6 laptop.

Excelsior!
Eric Kunzendorf
Jacksonville University

I reported the very same problems for the Windows version, and it got fixed in .16 or .16A. Problem is sometimes they will name the MAC build a little higher, for some odd reason. So, in this case the MAC .16A is probably the same as Windows .16. That problem needs to get straightened out. I think they want it to appear that the Mac builds don't always follow the Win builds.

As to all the talk about consolidation of the rooms into one unified environment....that's how it's done in Mudbox, and it works very well. The main reason is does is because you have an outliner panel to show only the element(s) you want in the viewport. There are PAINT and SCULPT buttons that seamlessly toggle between paint layers and sculpt layers. Having said all that, I will have to continue to sound like a broken record and stress PERFORMANCE and REFINEMENT > dozens of neat little features. There has been and continues to be a major problem using large brush radius'. That problem stays on the backburner in favor more and more features...small and large alike.

[geo_n]

Andrew PLEASE CHECK THIS OUT!.
3ptools Lite

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAUSVwoUBiM

amazing modelling tools its like sculpting polygons. Actually I wouldn't mind doing retopo this way. Just drag mouse and create polys. Its an another option to point to point, edge extrude, guide loops.

[AbnRanger]

Andrew PLEASE CHECK THIS OUT!.
3ptools Lite

amazing modelling tools its like sculpting polygons. Actually I wouldn't mind doing retopo this way. Just drag mouse and create polys. Its an another option to point to point, edge extrude, guide loops.

You could always do that with the inexpensive WrapIt plugin, but I never found it to be all that handy. I want to be able to dictate where the verts and edges are placed. Painting strips like that means the program is laying them down arbitrarily....just along a path you paint.

[geo_n]

3pt looks to have smart constraint and automatic bridging which is what makes it fast. Does wrapit have that? Looks like you still have to fix overlapping polys and clean and weld vertices.

[philnolan3d]

As I see it Retopo already has almost everything it need for poly modeling, just need a way to select the points and such without having voxels behind it. Maybe some other selection methods like a lasso.

You can use the lasso select tool in the E-Panel and the SELECT tool to do that.

Ah, you're right, I wasn't thinking. It does need a way to just click and select without a voxel object though. Hopefully a faster way to access the lasso. I don't think you can assign a keyboard shortcut to it.

Yes, throw in a way to create hard edges / crease edges by just selecting an edge or edge loop and pressing a button.

Unless I misunderstand, you can already do this, just select the edge and use Bevel.

[BeatKitano]

@AbnRanger: 3pt is much more advanced, it doesn't stick to a surface which almost every tool can do nowaday, it actually try to guess what plane you want it to go which is pretty nice. It's very nice to be able to sketch ideas with polystrips (best method to get interesting shapes/flows). This tools actually already production tested in many big studios, and so far the feedback has been very positive.

[polyxo]

On Rooms:
3DBrush initially did not have rooms and I never liked their introduction. In my optinion they suggest an artificial linearity in workflow (first do this, then that and finally that...) which in my perception stands in opposition to the freedom in creation mesh-and voxel-modeling generally allow for.

Coming from a technical modeling background where this linearity is much stronger due to whole nature of Nurbs-Tools I really wonder why people wish for this artificial ordering structure when other sculpting-programs show that it's actually not at all required. One of the problems I also have with rooms is that they require ugly logical redundancy as for instance the case with duplicated tools in the UV-Room and Retopo-Room.
Far from elegant.

[johnnycore]

I will have to continue to sound like a broken record and stress PERFORMANCE and REFINEMENT > dozens of neat little features. There has been and continues to be a major problem using large brush radius'. That problem stays on the backburner in favor more and more features...small and large alike.

Yes, we need performance!

I bought a new computer because my laptop could not handle it anymore (look at the specs in my signature).
And sadly there is almost not difference in speed.. at first I tought it was Windows 8 so now I switched back to Windows 7 and still quite the same performance...

Well there is a small difference in performance; something like.. +10% ?

My desktop is at least four times faster than my laptop, and the little performance difference made me cry a little..

[AbnRanger]

As I see it Retopo already has almost everything it need for poly modeling, just need a way to select the points and such without having voxels behind it. Maybe some other selection methods like a lasso.

Ah, you're right, I wasn't thinking. It does need a way to just click and select without a voxel object though. Hopefully a faster way to access the lasso. I don't think you can assign a keyboard shortcut to it.



Unless I misunderstand, you can already do this, just select the edge and use Bevel.

Phil, you can now hover over E-Panel Brushes and assign hotkeys to any of them. One problem I have with the Bevel Tool is that it expands everything outward. The default behavior should be to extrude the geometry INWARD. That's how it works in Maya and Max. Maybe a slider that adjusts the extruded geometry inward-outward.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NQRq0FuvQUA&feature=youtu.be

[AbnRanger]

Yes, we need performance! I bought a new computer because my laptop could not handle it anymore (look at the specs in my signature). And sadly there is almost not difference in speed.. at first I tought it was Windows 8 so now I switched back to Windows 7 and still quite the same performance... Well there is a small difference in performance; something like.. +10% ? My desktop is at least four times faster than my laptop, and the little performance difference made me cry a little..

I don't think Andrew understands how frustrating this problem actually is. I mean he did invest a lot of development time in Multi-threading (which he was just as reluctant to do as he is with CUDA), and that made such a huge difference. However, I think his hard work is somewhat undermined by the limitations of the CPU. Graphic cards are inherently designed to excel at realtime poly-crunching and shading. The newest Kepler (NVIDIA) Cards have 3 times the number of CUDA cores and twice the amount of memory...but that doesn't mean jack because 3D Coat relies on the CPU to do ALL the work.

Moving from CPU to GPU is precisely how Mudbox took ZBrush's crown (as of MB 2009) in terms of raw sculpting performance. 3D Coat can do the same, but not as long as the development focus is a continual rush to add more features. Mudbox focused on Performance and Refinement FIRST. Once the word got out (Siggraph 2008) that MB was now on equal (or better) footing with ZBrush in terms of performance, more and more studios took notice and added it to their pipeline. It is now considered an industry standard, right along with ZBrush. Until 3D Coat reaches the same level, it will only get harder to establish any kind of foothold in the industry. That goes for both sculpting and painting.

I made the same mistake myself...spending money I could have used for other things, on upgrading my PC...thinking I'd get this big boost in performance. The same performance bottlenecks I noticed on an Intel Core 2 Quad 6700, 8GB, GTX 275....was the same I noticed on a 6 core AMD CPU and a GTX 475. It is pretty disheartening when you consider that CUDA is sparsely utilized in the application and that it hasn't been recompiled to take advantage of all the new CUDA advancements since it was added as a feature over 4yrs ago. Features aren't 3D Coat's Achilles Heel. It's large brush sizes and large deformations (Pose tool paint selection is slow and most deformations are too). When I blow a fuze on here, it always comes back to this (being overlooked), and stability.

[Polygoon]

Yes, in a way the bevel tool to me is like a bevel tool, no pun intended, not a true hard edge. The hard edges I am talking about creates no extra edges in close proximity to negate smoothing of a surface when using a Catmull Clark type subdivision. With the Hard edges I am talking about, no extra edges are created. I believe the edge is given an extra normal, sort of an extra edge in exactly the same position. Less geometry and is sharper and has the same effect if there is need of a seam on a 90 corner that bevel can be used for, but when further subdivision is applied it will not round off and smooth at all.

[AbnRanger]

Yes in a way the bevel tool to me is like a bevel tool, no pun intended, not a true hard edge. The hard edges I am talking about creates no extra edges in close proximity to negate smoothing of a surface when using a Catmull Clark type subdivision. With the Hard edges I am talking about, no extra edges are created. I believe the edge is given an extra normal, sort of an extra edge in exactly the same position. Less geometry and is sharper and has the same effect if there is need of a seam on a 90 corner that bevel can be used for, but when further subdivision is applied it will not round off and smooth at all.

That's true, but you really need to do that in your rendering app. I think it would be pretty hard for 3D Coat to use edge weighting and export those weights to a multitude of apps, using different weighting protocols.

[Polygoon]

Agreed, to the point of rendering, but what if you are creating geometry for conversion to voxels, LC? Just thinking this would be a handy thing.

[AbnRanger]

Agreed, to the point of rendering, but what if you are creating geometry for conversion to voxels, LC? Just thinking this would be a handy thing.

Not sure how that would work on a Retopo mesh. Retopo is a stage further along in the process.

[Polygoon]

The retopo mesh can be used for hard surfacing armor and the like on characters or just general hard surfacing. This technique is used before a final retopo or can be used in a reverse fashion like how in ZBrush you bake a higher Sub division's details to a lower subdivision.
In Zbrush you have "crease" for hard edges, but it can be time consuming and awkward. 3D Coat, with its very nice edge selection ability , would make it a very attractive alternative IMHO.