Mistale

Great detective job puntoit! I'm as confused as you are, if it's any help... I think the possibility to get what we want is already in place, it's just a matter of getting the correct information from Andrew or someone else on exactly HOW to achieve it.

I've done some tests in Modo today, and must say that it's my new favourite for high-poly => low-poly baking. Both a clean AO bake and a full final color bake looks spectacular, and specular highlights bakes without a problem...

Thanks! It looks good, but unfortunately I have no way of incorporating 3DS-Max into my workflow... But thats definately the kind of solution I would need. That's about the same polybudget as I have. So far, the solution that has gotten me closest to a good result has been to bake from high-poly to low-poly in Blender using full render. The thing missing at the moment in Blender is to be able to include specular highlights into the bake. If you sculpt inside Blender instead of in 3D-Coat, specular can also be baked from a high sub-div level to a low by using some special nodes for the material on the object, but it won't work when baking from one object to another. But since shading looks even better inside 3D-Coat, I really miss not being able to get the same kind of fidelity into a texture.

Thank you both for your thoughts on the subject. I've been testing baking lighting inside Blender instead, and that works but I would still prefer if that functionality was available inside 3D-Coat.

Hi, I really love the results you get when baking AO / normal-map from retopo to paint-room. But if you're going to use the low-poly object inside a game-engine and don't plan on using a bumped shader, is there any way to bake ALL lighting into the diffuse color of the texture? Meaning shadows + highligts etc. from the current light setup inside 3D-Coat. I get that it would only be viable for a certain light-direction, and that's ok by me. I just want the texture to look as good in a certain view-direction as it does when the normal-map is used inside the paint-room. I'm not really content with the way baked AO looks with flat-shading, so any help with the above (or ideas on complementary software that supports baking of lighting) is really appreciated! Otherwise I'll have to resort to manually painting shadows and highlights, but I'd rather choose a more automated workflow. Without it, I can't really justify making a beatiful object in 3D-Coat when I still have to re-create all details manually in the diffuse texture for the low-poly. Thank's in advance! Anders

Thanks for your effort! In this case I'm modeling sharp jagged rocks, and I see no other way than placing the seams at the edges.

Thank's a lot alvordr for taking your time answering my questions! My replies to your answers are in the quote below.

@photonvfx: Thank's a lot for your thoughts on the subject! That cleared it up quite a bit. I'm more used to the world of parametric cad in my daytime job, so it's great to hear how a typical workflow may look in this type of industry.

Hi, I've been using 3D-Coat on and off since I bought it last year. It's a wonderful product, but there are a few unsolved (for me) questions that prevents me from using it for *real* work. I'm finding it difficult to get a grip on the preferred workflows for different tasks since there's so many ways to the same thing, and I don't have enough time to really learn all the ins and outs of every combination. I mainly do low-poly modeling for mobile games, so that's the area I'm interested in stream-lining using 3D-Coat. Questions about sculpting: - What's the best way of keeping multiple 3D-Coat files in the correct scale through-out the entire pipeline? ...Should I change the voxel density (doesn't seem to be working, reverts to 1.0)? ...Or res+ A LOT to get enough resolution for the scale I'm working in? ...Or use measurements on export of retopoed mesh (I guess that's a no-no if you want to merge voxel-layers from different files to check an entire scene)? Questions about retopo: - Is there really no way to mark an edge as hard or apply smoothing-groups to faces inside the retopo room? Since I do really low-poly work, a lot of the defining features of each model depends a lot on whether an edge is hard or smooth. I've read that smoothing groups can be applied upon import of meshes, but I've found no information about smoothing of edges on a mesh created in retopo room. Questions about paint room: - I've read on several sites that voxel-based painting is implemented. But when I try to use it, my voxel layers turn to surface mode upon return to voxel room. Is that how it's supposed to work? When I turn the layers to voxel-mode again to adjust something on the model, all paint disappears. If this is the intended behaviour, does that mean that painting must wait until there's no more work to be done in voxel-mode? - I find the shading used in the paint room really strange. Especially for low-poly models. Perhaps it's just because I haven't found out how to define lighting or if it's even possible. I don't know how the shading is calculated, but for me the sides of the model turns almost black, and it's just the forward-facing faces that are somewhat evenly lit. Low smooth shading seems to be gentler than the standard shading, but I find myself switching to flat shading almost all the time to be able to see what the object really looks like. What I would really like is to be able to use different standard shaders such as vertex-lit or pixel-lit, and define ambient and diffuse (including directional) lighting in the paint room. Possible? - How do you paint *on* edges in a good way? If I try using any brush, it always switches between applying paint on one OR the other faces, not evenly across both connected faces. My use-case is hand-painted textures where I might want to have a highlight running on top of some of the edges. What I wish is that the stroke would be projected on the model using the current viewport orientation, and disregard which face the origin of the brush is currently resting on. Is there a setting for this somewhere? - Same as above, but more regarding UV-seams. Is it possible to draw *on* the edge of a UV-island inside the UV-editor? When I try, the brush symbol disappears as soon as I get close to the seam, and if I try to paint as close as I'm allowed with a small brush, there will be a small unpainted section left at the seam. - How does drawing using lines or curves really work? Nothing happens when I try to paint using them, but the new spline-based painting works flawlessly. Is there something that needs to be done before using those modes in the E-panel? - Is there a way to get a decent result with the "Calc occlusion" command? I've tried using several hundreds of ray to get good AO, but I think the results look mostly like a sports stadium with shadows from several spotlights rather than the kind of AO you get from baking in xNormal or Blender. Questions about general workflow: - What's the preferred way to deal with changes in the model introduced later in the pipeline, perhaps even after rigging of a character in another application? Is it best to leave 3D-Coat out of it and deal with it in an ordinary modeling application, or is it possible to import the mesh, adjust it inside the retopo room, and then export it again without losing information from a 3rd party application? A lot of questions... BTW I don't mean to bash 3D-Coat in any way! I'm really in love with the freedom it allows when creating, and I just want to be able to get a firm grasp on how to use it for my particular use-case. Thank's in advance! Anders

I tried it now, it's about the same result as with obj. The best results seems to come from importing in surface-mode, and then increase the resolution in voxel-mode. I guess that subdividing the model on import would work equally good, but it's hard to do on my computer with a model that has 500.000 - 1.000.000 polygons from the start. It takes much longer time than subdividing it afterwards by increasing the voxel-resolution.

Yes, I guess that's what I'll have to do, and then resample at a lower res afterwards to keep the curvature but avoid the super high density.

Hi, I've been using MOI 3D lately for building solids with class-A surfaces, to be used as base-meshes in 3D-Coat sculpting. It's working great, but I have one concern: When exporting the mesh from MOI 3D I've tried to raise the number of quads/triangles as high as I can, and often export with a maximum angular difference of less than 1 degree per face. That means A LOT of tris / quads per object. However, on import into 3D-Coat, either in voxel-mode or surface-mode, the imported object looks faceted no matter what density I choose for the voxel-layer or what size I bring the object up to on import. What I wonder is if 3D-Coat takes any notice of the included vertex-normals inside the OBJ-file that I import, and if so, are they used for any sort of spherical interpolation of in-between positions across the imported tris/quads? What I hope for is that it does and that I somehow haven't found the option for it. As it is right now, I have to subdivide the mesh until the faces are ridicolously small to make it appear ok in 3D-Coat. If I import for retopo or painting, the mesh looks gorgeous because of the normals that MOI 3D exports along the mesh. Best regards, Anders

I'm having the exact same problem, and it's causing me to not being able to use 3D-Coat on my Mac. The strange thing is that everything worked fine for a day or two with Mountain Lion before I got the same symptoms as ekunzendorf. I have a Mac Mini 2.5 i5 with Radeon graphics and 4 GB RAM. Help would be really appreciated!