L'Ancien Regime

I'm really glad you brought up Groboto in this thread kenmo. You got me thinking about it and Mesh Fusion sold to Modo and Alexei Vanzhula's Soft Boolean. Basically what is this stuff? It's a simple NURBS (well BREP?) program set up for doing booleans. As simple boolean operations the product and essentially it's no better or worse (well a bit more complicated jiggery pokerey) than what 3D Coat can produce. It's the translator that turns it into an obj that gets interesting when you start working with Seam Strips between boolean objects to produce bevels and chamfers. Now this is where 3D Coat falls down a bit. Sticking a curve on a voxel edge and then giving it a provisional edge is not that exact. However, 3DCoat has introduced NURBS to its mix. Now nobody expects Andrew and his team to produce a competitor to Rhino or even MOI3D, and rightly so since this market is saturated with a lot of newcomers right now. But what he could do is just give a bunch of nurbs primitives that can be altered in various ways, (length, width, caps etc) then set them up like Groboto for NURBS that can be assembled in Boolean structures that are translated into polygons with Seam smoothing and altering the width of the Seam Strips. http://www.groboto.com/v3-media/pdf/GroBoto Symmetric Mesh Notes.zip Here's Groboto's 60page Symmetric Meshes PDF that goes into great depth on this interesting subject I think it just gives some beautiful results though as a stand alone it's a bit abstract and off the beaten professional use track, kind of like Teya Conceptor.

Yes but do Live Booleans have the same kind of bevel functionality between objects that Vanzhula's Soft Booleans or Groboto though? I just installed 2024.15 and went through the Live Booleans workflow and couldn't find that functionality. I see Soft Booleans not only has bevels and chamfers on intersection surfaces for both add and subtract but also has irregular bevels and chamfers as well In Live Booleans the only bevel that seems possible is the fillet on the cutting object that's being subtracted like the cube in this test Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to tell Pilgway what to do. I'm sure you've all got a lot of great ideas on your plate without me chipping in my $.02.

Alexei Vanzhula has created a kind of mesh fusion for Houdini and Maya. In his Modeler 2024 it will come with it embedded but in Modeler 2023 it's not included. You can buy it as an independent plug in for Maya and Houdini. It's only $30.00 USD. https://alexeyvanzhula.gumroad.com/l/soft_boolean?layout=profile

wow that old Groboto had a really nice look to it. That car looks really good. Thanks for sharing that.

AI is fascinating and I solve 95 % of my questions about 3D programs functionality from Bing CoPilot but I don't think it's worthwhile for 3D Coat to start building bridges to it unless that can be done with great ease and simplicity for the developpers. I haven't gotten around to UE5 yet (but I will) and so I'm not sure about the process for moving 3d Coat work to UE5, but I would rank that linkup a much higher priority than any AI image generator. Frankly I'm not that crazy about any medium for visual arts that doesn't involve any fundamental knowledge of human or animal anatomy or learning about how real world things are structured be they geographical, plant life, mechanical or architectural. Stable diffusion is sort of the death of the artist, not a new exciting tool.

Imagine you're travelling, to another city, to the country and you really want to work on 3D Coat projects from wherever you are, with say iPad Pro remotely turning on your computer at home from anywhere in teh world if you had a solar panel and Starlink. I've written about this here before, and originally it was only Teradici that provided this technology, The problem with Teradici was that it required a separate board hardware. There's a host of new options though and its very exciting because there's no longer any need for extra hardware. Most computers will support it. Only an inexpensive software solution is necessary now. I just looked up the prices for Jump Desktop, the most recommended option above and it's free to download to your Windows server at home and in the case of an iOS device for example it's $14.99for Jump Desktop from the App Store. That's a one time purchase price, not a monthly or annual subscription. For a Mac device it would be $39.99 For a Windows device like that home server it would be free for personal or business use. It only costs if you're buying it for a team and then it's $14.99. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jump-desktop-rdp-vnc-fluid/id364876095 And that's only one option.

2024.14 Update; "- The AI knowledge database is completely automated, updating whenever any text changes or a new tool appears, as soon as a valid hint is provided. Additionally, all new functions in the Python API automatically appear in the AI database." Wow, that's beautiful. I've been the biggest nag for asking for a superior 3dCoat documentation, but even for me, this is beyond my dreams. Thank you thank you thank you.

https://www.nextplatform.com/2023/12/20/building-a-hassle-free-way-to-port-cuda-code-to-amd-gpus/ https://www.phoronix.com/news/CUDA-On-CL-Coriander https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/porting-cuda-to-hip.pdf If it didn't take too much work or violate any proprietary intellectual material, it would be pretty cool if Pilgway developers included this option in its core program so that it was easily available to users downloading the latest version of 3D Coat

Voice Attack is only $10.00 It's pretty good. https://3dcoat.com/documentation/et/manual/interface-and-navigation/hotkeys/

I just discovered your mesh to NURBS functionality. Very interesting. I think I was one of if not the first to recommend that you go the NURBS route to make 3D Coat the full spectrum modelling software. There are problems in topology that are best served by voxels. Others are best served by polygons, or your variable density surface sculpting. Hopefully your NURBS package is in its infancy. Perhaps eventually it can even morph from NURBS to BREP. The same with your cloth. Once you go down that road all sorts of opportunities to use the physics of cloth as a modeling tool in its own right for phenomena that are best served by that technique. Whatever the case, thanks to the developers and Andrew for not only being workaholics but also for being forward thinkers at the cutting edge of 3D Graphics. Remember, Andrew was the first to come up with autoretopology and he did it after reading a white paper from SIGGRAPH and then developing and implementing it in 3D coat in about a month and a half. It was a remarkable achievement. I was at a Vancouver Siggraph a few years back and one of the top developpers for Zbrush was at their booth. I overheard him having a private conversation with someone and saying that they'd hired 27 math PhD's to develop their autoretopology tools. No such luxury for Andrew. Я щойно відкрив для себе вашу функцію перетворення сітки в NURBS. Дуже цікаво. Думаю, я був одним з тих, хто рекомендував вам піти шляхом NURBS, щоб зробити 3D Coat програмним забезпеченням для моделювання повного спектру. Є проблеми в топології, які найкраще вирішуються за допомогою вокселів. Інші найкраще вирішуються за допомогою полігонів або ліплення поверхні зі змінною щільністю. Сподіваємось, що ваш пакет NURBS знаходиться у зародковому стані. Можливо, з часом він може навіть перетворитися з NURBS на BREP. Так само і з вашою тканиною. Як тільки ви підете цим шляхом, у вас з'являться всілякі можливості використовувати фізику тканини як інструмент для моделювання явищ, які найкраще підходять для цієї техніки. Як би там не було, дякуємо розробникам і Ендрю за те, що вони не тільки трудоголіки, але й далекоглядні мислителі, що знаходяться на передньому краї 3D-графіки. Пам'ятайте, Ендрю був першим, хто придумав авторетопологію, і зробив він це після того, як прочитав технічний документ від SIGGRAPH, а потім розробив і реалізував її в 3D-платформі приблизно за півтора місяці. Це було видатне досягнення. Кілька років тому я був на виставці SIGGRAPH у Ванкувері, і на їхньому стенді був один з найкращих розробників Zbrush. Я підслухав його приватну розмову з кимось і почув, що вони найняли 27 докторів наук з математики для розробки своїх інструментів авторетопології. Ендрю не може дозволити собі такої розкоші. [img][/img] And wow, this is really good news. [quote] I'm still on vacation this week, but nevertheless I looked at everything. Thank you very much for your cooperation. I haven't digested everything yet. For me, the most painful issue is a user-friendly interface. Moreover, we are starting a completely new stage. Watch video here We get a lot of criticism for the development of low-poly modeling. But nevertheless, we are starting to introduce surface and solid parametric modeling. Naturally, I have a desire to make everything as convenient as possible. I already understood (thanks to our users) that it is better to make it more convenient than just creating many new tools.[/quote]

https://t.co/JalpvYmb2d https://wccftech.com/tsmc-partners-up-with-nvidia-broadcom-to-develop-cutting-edge-silicon-photonics/ Taiwan Economic Daily reports that TSMC, Broadcom, and NVIDIA are forming a partnership with the aim of innovating the "silicon photonic" industry. TSMC has been rumored to allocate 200 professionals for R&D, primarily focusing on the tech in silicon photonic integration into high-speed computing chips, which could potentially lead to a major breakthrough for the AI industry. TSMC is apparently highly optimistic towards next-gen silicon photonics development since the company's VP Yu Zhenhua has stated that the development could solve several problems currently existing in the industry: If we can provide a good silicon photonics integrated system, we can solve the two key issues of energy efficiency and AI computing power. This will be a new one. Paradigm shift. We may be at the beginning of a new era. The semiconductor industry sees silicon photonics as the future, mainly due to the benefits it brings onboard. The conventional "electricity" data transmissions come with compromised transfer speeds, & the industry is demanding 'higher computational speeds" given that genAI development has reached unprecedented levels. To cater to this, silicon photons convert electricity to light, which guarantees faster speeds with a cost-efficient method. Intel also recently detailed its latest Silicon Photonics silicon at Hot Chips 2023 which is based on RISC and features an 8 core / 528 thread config.

My name is Jon and I run the Asianometry YouTube channel. I started the YouTube channel a few years ago. I moved to Asia after spending a decade in San Francisco, studying business. While the most popular videos seem to be about semiconductors and high technology, I do make videos about economics and history. Great channel to keep up on high tech and semiconductors. His father was an engineer at TSCM. Really intelligent analysis not just of technology but the complex and arcane politics within TSCM ASML and other tech companies and how it affects us the consumers.