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Klaus Nordby

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Everything posted by Klaus Nordby

  1. Ouch! I was thinking of going Fermi soon, upgrading from my ancient, primitive, non-CUDA GTX 7600 GS. I have even already bought Octane, to get their pre-release half-price. Maybe it's prudent to wait until Nvidia ships updated, non-beta drivers. I already worry about whether going Fermi is smart, given its heat and noise, I don't need additional worries! Some vendors are starting to ship non-reference Fermis now, which have different and better cooling solutions, I might wait for a larger selection of those. Any thoughts, folks?
  2. Congratulations, Andrew -- with the new, great, huge apartment! And oh yes, with that other little thing, too, I guess. ;-)
  3. Javis, I'm taking one of the Ptex videos now -- much talk at the start, but now it's getting more visual! I do wish you'd learn to turn OFF the damn default gradient in the UI, and use a totally FLAT shade: (A) gradients take up more bandwidth and ( the video compression makes the existing gradient flicker and generally look crappy -- it just gives a poorer impression of 3DC than it would have been with a plain, flat viewport background.
  4. OK, Andrew, we now have nearly ten votes for this feature -- so we expect this update on our desks on Monday morning! :-) And yes, the ZB-way of masking is just brilliantly easy -- so just nab it!
  5. Sculptris is brilliant! Except . . . it produces nothing but triangles. If such adaptive tesselelation could be made to produce quads -- wow!
  6. Constrain front-side-top-bottom view with Shift, like in ZBrush! Yes. Exactly that. Please. Soon.
  7. I tried it briefly now, it's pretty darn slick! So, since we're not living in a full-Ptex world yet, and we therefore have to create those hateful UV-maps, this will work pretty well for most of our UV needs. Until Ptex is universally usable.
  8. Since inexpensive 3D computer monitors and goggles are now reality, and all modern graphics cards (at least nVidia's) can output 3D, vendors like Pilgway and Pixologic should waste no time in giving us real 3D modeling display on our screens! The second Andrew implements this in 3D-Coat, I'll rush out to buy a 3D monitor for sure.
  9. Whoah, sexy! I've not yet tried the beta build, so it was great seeing a demo of what this newfangled Ptex stuff means in practice -- thanks, Phil! I'm so glad I've never yet wasted a minute of my life on learning to making UV maps -- for it now looks like it would have been wasted time. :-) All praise to Andrew for implementing this at super speed -- and we should also be very grateful to Disney, for open-sourcing this game-changing new technology.
  10. I don't even have a CUDA card, so I can't yet test Octane. But I'm certainly watching this fascinating GPU rendering stuff closely, and will buy a CUDA card when the next nVidia generation comes out in March or so. I might even plunk down the modest fee for Octane, just to support it and try it out on some projects -- even though what I really want is for my beloved Maxwell Render to come out with a GPU version! No matter what happens, we 3D guys have good times ahead!
  11. Wow. Fabulous! Soon I can forget whatever (very little) I know about UVs! In the whole world, only Javis will miss UVs. :-)a
  12. OK, I promise to everybody I won't gripe about the rendering banding again until I have tested with a new and better GPU. :-)
  13. Phil, settle down -- no offense taken. :-) It's just that I'm no computer graphics amateur (though I am a newbie in 3D!) and therefore I am utterly fanatical about things like monitor calibration and graphics settings. So it's just super-unlikely that my graphics setup should have some hidden variable which makes all look great in all graphics apps -- except 3DC. There's clearly serious banding in 3DC's renderings, and they have been there since I first began using the app half a year ago. Of course, I have zero idea what causes this banding -- could it perhaps be some obscure DirectX problem in my slightly-ancient graphics card? Maybe. But it ain't baby-stuff like monitor settings.
  14. My good man, I have an Eizo hardware calibrated pro monitor and I spend 10 hours a day in Adobe's apps -- and if I'd had monitor issues which created banding, I'd KNOW about it, and fix it (I've been a digital graphics pro since 1990, so no rookie I :-). But all my gradients are super slick everywhere -- except in 3DC's render room.
  15. No, for, from what I understand, I need a better GPU -- my 7600 is too old and puny.
  16. Now that Andrew is giving the rendering some love, I'd like to voice a long-standing -- and still-existing -- problem with the 3DC renders: the terrible *banding* I always get on all smooth materials/surfaces. It simply makes for chronically unusable renders. Sorry. When will this matter be investigated and fixeded? Until it is, I see no point in trying to make any final renders in 3DC, only quickie dummy tests. (I'm using Win7 x64 and non-CUDA version.)
  17. Oh boy, I loooooooooooove the new Primitives! Especially the Freeform ones. And that slick, simple-to-use freeform deforming cage -- can't we get that also for normal editing of voxel objects? It would make it so easy to *predictably* deform voxel objects.
  18. Congrats to Andrew for solving this thorny issue! And happier voxel-times to the rest of us!
  19. I can't subscribe to that way of thinking at all: I want ALL my tools to be as good as possible in EVERY respect. That we now suddenly have fine Boolean operations in ZB is great news for all 3D artists -- even for those who don't use ZB at all, but prefer 3DC for all their modelling, as it will make the Andrew & Co. work hard at coming up with great new 3DC features, which I'm sure they'll manage to do. Competition benefits EVERYBODY -- and it's senseless to "pray" that Product X doesn't get some feature to work.
  20. I got my new copy of ZB 3.5 R3 (what a ridiculous versioning!) tonight, and have played a bit with it. For me, THE BIGGEST improvement are the easy, high-quality Boolean operations -- it's now, finally, possible to model a face and its hair separately, and then merge the two subtools into one, so I can smooth the hair flawlessly into the head. This has always been impossible before in ZB, so this is a huge step forward. I was also able to work with models with about 33 million polys, without undue slowdowns -- though it's still a 32-bit-only app, alas. So, there are some good news in ZB land!
  21. None of the non-CUDA download links works for me. Have tried two machines, nada, only the CUDA versions starts a download.
  22. Hi Sean, welcome! This can only be Good News for 3DC! I'm the designer of 3DC's PDF manual, so I'm not wholly ignorant, I like to think, of user interfaces myself. I have only one axiom to plead: do not impose a hard-coded color scheme/theme on us in *any* UI element, let us choose this ourselves. I absolutely HATE it when an UI imposes blue-shades or green-shades or pink-shades on me -- for I want nothing but acres and acres of neutral, gray-white-black colors in my UIs, which won't interfere with my color vision. But hey, let the visual morons who want to ruin their color vision with a Hulk-green UI have their way, too, if possible. In other words: please make a color-flexible UI.
  23. This is a very, very cool and potentially hugely useful sketching approach! And I certainly vote for getting something like that into 3DC -- where much of the infrastrucure clearly is in place already. Go, Andrew, go -- stop working on all this boring UV stuff, give us more and better voxel sketching-modelling tools!
  24. I use one 30 Gb Vertex SSD drive as my Win7 x64 OS drive and another 30 Gb Vertex as my applications drive. That makes for VERY speedy, snappy operations, as the OS and the apps don't compete for drive bandwidth. For instance, *every* Adobe CS4 app starts in 2-3 seconds. For cheap mass storage I use old-fashioned hard drives, natch -- you can get 1 Tb drives for a song and a dance. Anyone who does any serious, pro-level graphics owes it to himself to get SSD drives, they're simply wonderful! Small, silent, cold, fast -- what's not to like?
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