Jump to content
3DCoat Forums

Rhino

Member
  • Posts

    20
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by Rhino

  1. Not a silly question! It's funny, I fleetingly noticed this option on the FBX exporter for the first time yesterday when exporting a model for another programme, but it didn't occur to me to try it with 3D Coat - you're right it does make a difference. And also, on the OBJ exporter, there's an option to export triangles rather than quads or polys, which also fixes the problem. Which is fine for my non-animated, hard surface, hi-poly-to-bake models. I am in your debt - you have saved me hours of manually connected verts to try to solve the problem.
  2. I'm using 3.7.18H DX64 (which comes up as 4.00.BETA1 in 'about'). And 3DS Max 2012 with the latest FBX plugin. I have 8Gb of memory, but like I said, letting 3D Coat auto-generate the UVs on import really sorted it out for me - it still takes a while to import, but I'm no longer running out of memory. Although I still have this problem with face triangulation from 3DS to 3D Coat. I often have to go back into Max and connect offending vertices to force faces to behave properly. I realise this wasn't my original post, but any help would be appreciated. In the meanwhile thank you both for your help.
  3. I tried allowing 3D Coat to Auto UV for me and this helps loads. But while I'm here, I often find that 3D Coat triangulates polys wildly differently from 3DS. So a face might look OK in 3DS, but will overlap in 3D Coat - any tricks to stop this from happening?
  4. I'm currently having trouble importing (into per pixel mode) an object I've created in 3DS . It's less than 5,000 faces but increases my memory usage (Win 7 64-bit) by over 3 Gb - is this normal? I've tried both FBX and OBJ files but neither seems to make a difference. My main trouble is that I need to import about 6 times as many faces but my computer keeps running out of memory and 3D Coat will crash out. I've tried triangulating the meshes and closing all faces but it's still no good. Curiously I can import an object of 5 million polys if it's something like a high density sphere. Is it because my shape has holes in it? Any hints as to what I should try?
  5. Sure. I'm creating hard surface game assets mostly, so I.... 1. Create high poly mesh in Blender or 3DS Max. 2. Import into 3DCoat (Per Pixel mode normally or Microvertex if I want to distort mesh), Auto-seam and apply UV in UV mode. 3. Paint model in Paint room (3DCoat) 4. Retopologise in retopo room (3DCoat), Auto-seam UV and export low poly mesh. 5. Export high poly model and diffuse / spec textures from paint room. 6. Import low and high poly mesh into 3DS Max or Blender and create cage for baking. Export both cage and low poly model again (to make sure vertex numbers match). 7. Bake textures in Xnormal (diffuse, ambient occlusion, normal, spec). Create cavity map from normal map in Xnormal and combine maps in Photoshop (multiply AO map onto diffuse and color burn cavity onto that). I should get into creating/adding hard surface stuff in 3DCoat, but I haven't had time to learn properly yet.
  6. How do you mean, exactly? My workflow involves baking high poly model details to a low poly. I use Xnormal to bake all the maps I need, including the normal map which you can use to generate a cavity map using the tools within Xnormal.
  7. Thanks Greg - using the latest beta solved it. Now happily painting in cavities!
  8. I can't seem to get anything out of the 'more in cavity' option in Per pixel mode, no matter what the scale setting. Is there a trick to it or should I just stick to Microvertex mode?
  9. Update: If I delete the objects that were originally in my scene, the new objects magically appear in the UV room. Any way to get them to appear without deleting my original objects? Update 2: OK, I've managed to get it to work. Simply click 'Delete unused UV-sets' in the top-left drop-down. It doesn't actually delete any sets, but somehow it prods it into working. Nuff said!
  10. I've been working on a project for a while and have just merged some new objects into my scene. They appear in the paint and sculpt rooms, but in the UV room I can't find them under any UV set in the drop-down. I've tried 'unhiding all' under the hide menu, but nothing seems to work. Any ideas?
  11. Mudbox was the reason I came to 3D Coat :/ It wouldn't go five minutes without crashing on painting multiple objects for me 3DC may have its problems. but it's a shite sight better than Mudbox for painting. Anyway, don't leave - you always offer helpful advice!
  12. Excellent, thanks guys, I'll give it a go - didn't notice that menu before
  13. Hi there, Does anyone know if there is a 3D Coat equivalent to the Mudbox 'dry brush'? Basically, it's a geometry-depth sensitive brush that only either, say, paints in crevices or along the top of ridges. To use it, you click to begin painting at a place on your model and move along an undulating (in height) surface, and depending on the brush's threshold, will only paint up or down to a certain height. Thanks!
  14. Hi Kid, Thanks for the reply - I shall try one of the methods you suggest. The reason I'm asking is basically so I don't get a really high polycount on objects that don't really need it, or have the lion's share of polys for tight details that don't benefit from being subdivided any more than they are. It's just a bit of a pain to subdivide bigger, less-detailed meshes before exporting from Blender / Max or whatever before hand. Having said that, I do like the way that 3D Coat handles the subdivision levels, and the way you can work on a lower poly version but then export a higher one for the purposes of baking stuff in xNormal, say. The other thing I love about 3D Coat is that where Mudbox used to crash on me 10-20 times a day, 3D Coat hasn't yet crashed once Thanks again.
  15. If I'm importing an OBJ containing multiple objects into 3D Coat , using either Per-pixel or Microvertex, is there any way of choosing which objects get sub-divided and which ones don't? If not, what would be the best way of getting a reasonably uniform geometry density across a model? Perhaps sub-dividing it in Blender before export? And can you choose to sub-divide after the initial import into 3D Coat? Thanks in advance.
  16. LOL...well thanks for the help all the same. I will look into Smak, but I think that you still need geometry to generate the AO, just like xNormal. @AbnRanger - thanks for your help, I will either generate the geometry needed or try CrazyBump.
  17. OK, it turns out that you can just paint black into the specularity channel of the upper most layer and it cancels out all other specularity in the lower layers, which is great - just how I would want it to work. So...any thoughts on the ambient occlusion part? Or am I better off importing my model into the Microvertex painting mode and actually generating the geometry that xNormal can bake an occlusion map from?
  18. I'm using Per pixel painting to paint normal map information and I want to also get the ambient occlusion that the normal maps would generate if they were geometry. I notice that there's a 'Calc occlusion' option, but that also bakes occlusion for the geometry as well, which I would rather do in xNormal. Is there a way to just bake the normal map occlusion? I see that Crazy Bump has a way to generate occlusion from a normal map, but it's something like $299 dollars for that one function, which is crazy money. While I'm at it, is there any way to paint 'no specularity' onto a layer? If I'm getting this right, you can only paint positive specular information and not negative. i.e. if I have specularity on layer 1, to erase that specularity information I have to erase the specularity on layer 1 rather than painting 'black' or whatever onto the specularity of layer 2. Is this the case? Thanks in advance.
  19. I'm trying to import an OBJ file with multiple sub-objects for microvertex painting. Is there any way to subdivide only certain subobjects as I'm getting an unnecessarily high polycount on parts of the model where I don't really need it? Also is there any way to subdivide these objects further once the import process has been completed? I might be tempted to use per pixel painting, but I'm assuming that any bump information I paint will not generate a good ambient occlusion texture when baked to a low-poly through xNormal. Thanks in advance.
  20. I would like to chuck in a vote for an Illumination channel. Coming from Mudbox, the Illumiation channel was very useful for game assets creation. As far as I can tell, 3D Coat surpasses Mudbox in all other respects apart from this one tiny detail!
×
×
  • Create New...