Jax_Cavalera

Well stepping into the future further and I figured I would update or add more here. Mixamo now offer us the ability to do 1 free character rig per week or month or something and it does a reasonably good job. The trick here would be that all you need to do is produce rigs that match a bunch of your 3D coat characters so each time you get a new rig it can be re-applied to other 3D models inside of Blender. I believe there is a tutorial out there that shows how to do this as well. It's not a great fix but I mean if you despise rigging like I do then this is always an option for those who don't wanna pay up the big dollars Mixamo Fuse are asking. There was another software being developed called Boner3D but that got canned so the creator advised me and the actual functionality contrary to what is in the online media does not work inside of the game engine that they are also responsible for so that's a shame because it was a really amazing piece of software being developed. Might be a while before any other viable 3D auto-rigging / semi-auto rigging software comes out. The only reason why I feel that Andrew would produce a superb rigging toolkit is because when you look at how well the Automatic Retopo tools are now and consider that rigging would be using a lot of the same toolsets to calculate weight maps as well as the placement of bones with only a few additional guides required to identify key points in a structure. Considering all of this, it may not be as big a job as has been previously thought now days and with hat functionality.. the only market competitor that comes close is Mixamo.. and they are asking $1500 per year for the privilege of using it. I don't believe that actual animation would be something that 3D Coat needs to get into as there are a LOT of 3rd party tools for the actual animating but to prepare your models for easy import to animating software or game engines that use animation re-targeting would be advantageous and definitely something more worth while to consider now than ever before. I guess the ability to still pose a character is one thing that might be helpful to include just so that you can test to make sure that your character is going to animate as anticipated but timeline based animation system would be going overboard a fair distance I would think.

Haha yeah it really threw me when I first made the transition but since getting use to the toolsets I do feel a lt more confident now and it is my go-to for sculpting work.

No worries, Glad it could help.

Just wanting to get the word out there that I've recently produced an animation kit that lets you create re-targetable Humanoid (Biped) animations inside of blender using Inverse Kinematics and easily convert them into Forward Kinematics on a Mecanim ready humanoid Avatar. Depending on which engine you are working with, other engines also allow retargeting animations so it isn't strictly speaking limited to use with Unity, however it is designed for Unity as the primary engine with respect to compatibility. It's currently being offered at a 50% off discount from the standard $30 price by entering the promo code FIRST2WEEKS, but this expires on the 17th October 2013 so I'm just putting the word out here before the discount period runs out for anyone who may want to grab it cheap. For more information, please feel free to check it out over at the Unity forums : http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/203298-Mecanim-Humanoid-Animation-Kit

I'm just wanting to see if there already exists a tool or set of tools that will allow for precision hard surface modelling inside of 3D Coat? Something similiar to Sketch-up would be great, not sure if I have overlooked this somehow along the way so am asking here before I go and make a feature request for such a toolset in case it already exists. I found that working with Blender for hard surface is good, but lacks some critical points : - Units aren't always value based but are at times a scale factor which makes it very difficult to keep things precise. - There is no visual snapping so to get any Hard Surface object modeled, it requires a lot of extra work in re-typing various values for surface heights or lengths etc. Useful things Blender offered, Box surface rendering, non-destructive smooth surface modifiers. (using this combination anything that I was able to create had a ready-made smooth version and a retopo version good to bake which is a big time-saver.. sadly everythign that was created did not have 100% precision to it like a sketchup model has) there is another software that executes Cad very well .. Form-Z. Does 3D Coat have any tools that provide a workaround or similar toolset to this as well where you can add 2D plane shapes onto the surface of another shape and extrude outwards etc..? Hope this makes sense what I'm asking about.

From what I've been told, a rigging system is in Andrew's thoughts but is not a pressing addition that will come any time soon. A great alternative is something like Blender. If you have a bit of cash then there are some even better alternatives you can look into as well.

This is a fairly detailed tutorial that follows step by step the retopology techniques I use to produce a baked low poly garment. The garment was created using 3D Coat's cloth tool so if you would like to see a tutorial that covers how to make similar items of clothing, just let me know and I'll set one up. I use blender for it's powerful modifier to achieve a task that would normally take a VERY long time without it. The results could have been cleaned up a lot more and several extra extrusion steps / subdivides put in place to ensure that it was a more usable finished result, however I believe that the finished product would work well for most games. Well, I hope you all enjoy this tutorial, I wasn't able to locate any other tutorials that cover this workflow I demonstrate and thought it's something the community could really benefit from. Thanks, Jax n.b. The video will be live in 6 Hours Time as it runs for 50 Minutes and covers all the steps from start of retopology right through to a finished baked version of the pants.

The stroke and Autopo tools do not appear to like symmetry, I believe that turning on symmetry has been the primary cause of faults with the stroke tool especially, it produces multiple overlapping retopo objects.

it exports in obj and one other file format i forget at this second what but ... yes it's really cool software.... and wow it is expensive I can't locate that cheap 99 dollar price these days, I'd say that was way back when it first came out. it's now around 400 to 600 depending on if you go standard or pro..

I know we now have a cloth tool in 3D Coat, are there any tutorials in 3D Coat for using this tool to make clothes? I'm finding that after watching how snug the clothes fit on the character mesh in Marvelous Designer, trying to achieve a similar look for a pair of pants in 3D Coat has been quite a challenge. I find that at the top of the pants they either sit way too loose or they get stuck inside the mesh, if only there were a way to have the cloth snap to the mesh before the simulation process starts, it would provide way better results.. then again it could be difficult to do things like flared pants .. hmm If the new EPS Import starts to work, we can then start to build up our clothing designs in 2D just like they do in Marvelous Designer and then have the mesh stitching for vertices applied.. and THEN have the design fit onto the mesh. Actually if you could add in those rings like you can with the strokes took in the retopo room but only 1 at a time and upon dragging it in, you then set it's influence... well pretty much the same as the pose tool in the voxel room though you can't use that tool right now to modify the clothing mesh until after it's already created... well not so hard hmm NVM I think i just figured it out hahaha you build the mesh and get it to look as close as you can preferably with the cloth not intercepting with the mesh.. then just use pose after you export the cloth.. and you should be able to pose it so it fits all snug. Does anyone know if for a game character, the clothes are meant to be a Solid Mesh ..where they have no open faces, or should they be as is created with the cloth tool so if you see inside the mesh it looks invisible? I would have thought that the later was what you do, but perhaps in most games now days it's better to have it setup so that it's an actual solid mesh... I am not able to find an easy way to retopologise things like a T-Shirt or Vest ... open or closed.. either way .. open.. it just glitches since it's not a closed mesh.. closed, it has a very close inside surface to the outside surface... or do you simply bake a retopo mesh that wraps around the outside only and uses influence spheres to map occlusion depth where the neck, arms and waist holes are? I'm pretty clueless to a lot of this stuff and am trying to figure out how the more experienced users create clothing and retopologize it. I would prefer to use 3D Coat for this if possible as I do not have the funds to afford something like Marvelous Designer.

Has anyone tried to use Autopo or Strokes with things like a Vest or T-Shirt or a Hat? I've found it is producing some unpredictable results where it creates multiple retopo meshes all inside eachother, it could just be a wrong setting I'm not sure.. it looks like Autopo and Strokes are only good for solid objects and not ones that have an outside and inside surface to them such as a vest.

I think that the the areas in need of most development are often the areas that Andrew calculates will boost the community the most in both number of users and quality of products being produced by these users. (if I had to take a wild stab in the dark this would be the thing that drives me if it weren't a direct translation of most popular as voted by the existing community)

Just an update here, I've tried to use the Default layer and change every other layer except the normals to Standard Blend. When I turn Ambient Occlusion's layer to Standard Blend the texture becomes a Grey Fill with no texture details I have painted showing up. When I have Ambient Occlusion set to Overlay it looks almost spot on to the colour that I've painted yet only when i have Volume 17 layer hidden.. if Volume 17 is showing, and set to Standard Blend .. the character looks like it has an odd Shine to it let me show in 3 pictures attached. Any tips for this are appreciated... thought I had this sorted EDIT : It appears that the Volume 17 Layer contains Specular information to do with the shine of the mesh.. not sure what blend mode it needs to display properly as it is currently masking out my texture layer.

I'm not exactly sure where the bug is yet but same problem here, it doesn't like to retopo a mesh that has any self intersections from sculptris. It produces invisible or no retopology and did not allow me to scale up the ref mesh prior to retopo. Looks to be that the fix for self intersections on sculptris meshes is not working as it keeps saying I need to fix them after I use the remove self intersections command. Hmm if it happens consistently with a few other meshes I'll put in an official bug report that identifies this as a specific action = reaction every time problem.

Congratulations on getting the release completed and pushing through the tougher times. The work you do is greatly appreciated by all of your users and I'm sure that we all would love to help ease this burden when times are tough if we can. Thank you for the new release and for the work you have been doing on the EPS content, I was not aware that things had become so intense in your personal arena and am glad that you have taken on board a positive attitude. Keep up the great work and I hope that you never have to feel like your community are not here to support you if you ever ask for our help.