pavig

Thankyou Andrew. It is always good to see progress in the application. Please do not be upset by criticism by your (often passionate) users.

Mac build appears to be missing some assets (or have a screen rendering issue).

In the brushes panel the triangle shaped brush paints polygons. You can use that to freeze the areas around which you are painting, or if you're blocking things out, just paint with that.

What I'd really like to see is an autopo-fill tool; i.e. manually topologise the parts you need, then select an area and get autopo to fill in the gaps. This would make correcting or rebuilding topology much easier, as you would only need to manually build topology in areas where edge flow is important. Just a thought.

AMD Radeon HD 6970M: Chipset Model: AMD Radeon HD 6970M Type: GPU Bus: PCIe PCIe Lane Width: x16 VRAM (Total): 2048 MB Vendor: ATI (0x1002) Device ID: 0x6720 Revision ID: 0x0000 ROM Revision: 113-C2960K-152 EFI Driver Version: 01.00.507

Mykyl, access for assistive devices is usually used for assistive devices for the disabled. Many developers use it as a way to patch in alternative control devices into the system, so either hardware keys on tablets and other controllers, macro or automation utilities etc. Lots of very useful stuff uses it, but the occasional misbehaving application has issues. I often have a hard time choosing whether to have it enabled or not. I also still have longstanding issues with 3dcoat visual display bugs, both on my macbook pro and current generation iMac. Perhaps if we could gather together all those having mac graphic problems we could get someone to help us figure it out. The issue seems to be a problem of incorrect opengl shaders, and may have been caused by some other application installed previously. We would need a mac opengl guru or someone familiar with the system, to allow us to collect useful debugging information and sort it out. The 3D-Coat team has been very quiet about mac graphic issues, which is a pity, as several of mine are showstopper bugs.

I have a similar machine and have had the same problem since installing lion on another machine. Enabling 32 bit rendering and realtime rendering and moving the model around sometimes fixes the issue. Check the texture uv editor in the paint room. For me that produces wrong coloring and moving glitches. See http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8504&st=0&p=65594&fromsearch=1entry65594 This has been a longstanding problem for me on both the iMac with a radeon chip, and a macbook pro with NVidia chipset. It started with a software update just immediately the lion release. Evidently this only effects some mac users.

1) In 3d-coat masks are known as "freeze". You can paint them in the paint room, and on voxels in surface mode. Unfortunately you can't paint them on voxels in volume mode, but that's not a huge problem. 2) Layers in 3d-coat paint and sculpt room are effectively morph targets. They can be masked by other layers, so yes. 3) 3d-coat brushes are a lot more complex than just alphas, they can include channels for color, alpha, spec and depth, so yes. 4) 3d-coat can load multiple objects, but the way it's done and managed is not intuitive so I have not used it much in my work. I would like to see a tutorial on this. (Anyone?)

You will find the latest betas at http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6634 or by browsing the "new releases and betas" forum. The latest stable release can be found at http://3d-coat.com/download/ (you will have to log in) The latest beta is 3.5.27 (at the time of this writing.) Windows users get an update about once a week. Mac and Linux users get less frequent updates, (which is better as they tend to get milestone releases with less bugs.

re: 2) Surface mode is a lot faster, so is good for doing large edits to the model (eg. move, pose) which would otherwise slow down in voxel mode. You also get access to some awesome tools such as the mud tools. These work insanely fast - effectively realtime - for live sculpting. I use mud a lot when doing freeform work, as it lets me scribble freely on the model without any lag, and seems to help a lot with constructive anatomy. Surface mode is also ideal for doing very small detail such as surface pores and wrinkles. Surface mode also allows masking, so it's ideal if you wish to make precise edits to tightly defined areas, e.g., extruding muscle mass etc. So, proxy mode: useful for changing shape without breaking surface detail. Surface mode: useful for masking, roughing, or tight surface detail.

JimB real time painting of image panes in 3d-coat is already in the beta tools, so not far off.

Be careful how much you subdivide the cloth before simulation. You can stop simulation and subdivide further before applying which will smooth out the mesh.

I have recently been experiencing graphical errors as well. See http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8504&st=0&p=65594&fromsearch=1entry65594 It doesn't crash 3d-coat, but does have a similar "graphic driver" type flavor. My issues popped up after an apple update several weeks before the lion release, but have followed me to a new mac. For your model though... it is possible it may be a different bug. Check where the origin point of your mesh is. If it's very far outside the bounding box of the actual mesh, it may be causing 3dcoat to glitch out on load. If other models import fine it may be something strange with your model. It wouldn't surprise me though if it was a lion bug. Apple has recently released another beta update to developers which includes graphic driver updates. Hopefully we'll see that soon.

point your pen at the surface and hit tab, that becomes the new pivot point

I have had an ongoing problem with display of the Texture UV Editor window. This problem developed a while ago seemingly at random and effects all versions of 3d-coat for mac. The window appears to have the wrong shaders attached and rolls a texture across it like freeze view. Deleting and reinstalling hasn't helped. Has anyone else had this problem? More on this thread http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8504

Most of the tools allow you to use multiple folders for various options. (use the little arrow at the corner of the tool pane) Does this help?

Voxel room is for voxels. Sculpt room is for modifying meshes. So potential workflows: Vox room sculpting (voxel sculpture)> retopo > paint room in micro vertex (is now a mesh) > sculpt room (to correct distortions from using surface displacement painting, or minor corrections to the mesh to improve mapping. So the sculpt room allows you to correct meshes without having to use voxels. You could use it on imported fully painted meshes too if required. That is how I usually use it - to tweak a mesh I have imported from another program for painting.

Ensure you install the stable version before the latest beta. Installing a beta version isn't advised until the stable version has laid down the groundwork. I have run into launch issues from doing this.

Testing 3d-coat in OSX Lion. It seems to be working fine. The nice thing is other 64 bit apps seem to be working a lot better too, making the system much more responsive. (late 2008 macbook pro with 6 gig of memory)

Hi all. Has anyone tested the latest 3d-coat builds under Lion?

If topological constraints in ZB cause you grief, you'll love 3dc. It is a much more natural environment for organic sculpting. With a ZB workflow you often need to break in and out of ZB to play with topology if you're doing freeform work. Voxels have no such constraint. The difference is that there is no difference between fine surface bump painting and broad strokes in ZB. Using voxels you map out your broad strokes first, and can produce fairly fine detail, but you (usually) wait until you've turned it into polys before painting fine bump detail or color. This two step process has advantages and disadvantages, and is the main frustration ZB users face in learning 3dc. Once it clicks though, it is a much more fluid workflow for character or organic modeling. I would like to go back to using ZB occasionally as there are a few things it does extremely well, but I find I don't miss it very much using 3dc. Both z-brush and 3d-coat are extremely idiosyncratic applications though. There's nothing quite like either of them, as they both evolved out of niche tools. You will probably find the 3d-coat way rather strange until you get to know it well, but behind the quirks is an extremely powerful tool. Once you become comfortable with voxels, you'll wonder how you ever worked without them.

First things first: Run disk utility (applications>utilities>disk utility) and repair permissions on your hard drive. This message is about 3dcoat running into a permissions issue, which should not happen, and is probably an issue with the operating system. If you continue to have the problem, ensure you installed 3dcoat under the same user as your home folder. If you work in a networked file system environment you'll have to talk to your administrator about ensuring permissions are correct. If worse comes to worse, trash 3dcoat and download the latest stable version. Install and run that to create the required directories in your home folder. Then download the latest beta if you wish and install that over the top. It's funny, as I came to 3D-coat from Zbrush. I had waited around for 9 months for them to fix a showstopper baking bug on windows. It wasted literally hundreds of hours of my time. Then I realized their mac version, which I wished to migrate to, was released half finished. It was going to be a year before it was in parity with the windows version and usable in my pipeline. In the time it took pixologic to clean up a couple of minor issues, 3D-coat developed voxel sculpting. Despite bugs it worked, and it solved the problems I needed to solve which had wasted so much of my time previously. 3D-coat may not be the most polished application from a UI perspective, but that's what you get when you choose to run true multi-platform software. As a mac user we are used to a fairly clean user experience, but there are linux users here who are delighted to have 3dc in their seldom supported OS. It can't be easy keeping all three platforms active, and a few rough edges are to be expected. It could be worse; messiah studio mac version runs by using the linux windows emulator, so to use that awesome app you have to navigate the most frustrating aspects of windows, mac and linux all at once. The team are very quick to address any critical issues. Once you learn the idiosyncrasies of the application (which is true of most complex software) it works pretty well.

UV Unwrap of models with previously marked seams is not working correctly. The unwrapping code seems to be ignoring some seams. I will test further and see if I can get a repro.

The mac version usually trails the windows version by a few days. Rather than releasing them both at once, they seem to compile the windows version first and see if there are any showstopper bugs. On one hand it means mac users have to wait a few days longer than windows users. On the good side though, often any problem issues get fixed before the mac beta becomes available. This is great for mac users Don't worry, 3d coat gets updated quickly and often, so you won't have to wait for long to get the latest features.

The Intuos 4 probably came with a rocker button. I have mine set with the top of it as right-mouse click, and the side closer to the nib as middle click. Under pen options I'm using click-and-tap method rather than hover-click, as it is more precise not having to fiddle with pen buttons while finessing the pen. Most people map them the other way, but I find the top rocker easier to find reliably with my fingers, and use rightmouse a lot more than middle mouse. I don't mind fishing for the other button to zoom and scroll. For keys (i am right handed so it may be more convenient to reverse) Left Side: ctrl, cmd, shift, opt/alt, pan/scroll Right Side: Display toggle, tab, escape, delete, undo With these I can do most things without taking my hand off the tablet, and having the modifiers on the left, and action keys on the right, lets me double hand to do things like alt-tab etc. Using this setup I can do 90% of my work without having to hit the keyboard for modifier keys or common commands, and the pen can duplicate most of the functions I would hit the mouse for. Oh, touch strips - I have them set up for scroll and zoom. They work with modifiers too. I may tweak this setup specifically for 3dc a bit, but it's generally good. Refinements I've been thinking of are, putting in a radial menu for the popups I use most often; eg. e-menu, color picker, brush picker, ref images panel, etc. Hope this helps.