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This is my latest personal work. Well, it's a sort of fancy self portrait, that started as a simple 3D photogrammetric reconstruction and evolved in time to this finished illustration. 3D Coat role was retopology of the face itself, as i found it more suitable to the task due the inherent raw mesh asymmetry. Used also ZBrush, Agisoft Photoscan, modo and Photoshop for final compositing. Hope you like it! Cheers! Umberto

Thank you Don for your tips! I'm eager to see the upcoming tutorial on this topic! Cheers! Umberto

Sure. Please allow me a few hours as i don't have the mesh/textures here.

AbnRanger, first of all please note that i don't want to upset you, it's not the purpose of my post. I used 3DCoat with success before and i like the tool, so i don't want to detract anything or criticize. I'm simply a non-professional user of 3DCoat that doesn't know every aspect of the tool (well, i know very little of it). That said, i appreciate so much what you write here (and yes, i did read the user manual, not entirely but i read it), and i start thinking that maybe there is a misunderstanding. From what you write, i understand that i should use Retopology room, and this involves having a hi-res mesh used as static reference and a low density mesh as retopoed one. I write this because when i try to import the hi res mesh as retopo one, 3DCoat warns me that there are too many polygons and that the workflow would be slow. And it is. So, is't not so much applicable to my case. What i need is to load a huge mesh with UVs, being able to sculpt/tweak it while seeing the applied texture on it (i use the texture as reference, so it's mostly a backward workflow if we can call it this way) then export the mesh with UVs unchanged. That said, these are the tests i performed: 1. Paint room: I can see the mesh with textures but cannot alter the mesh itself (i don't really need live clay at the moment, it just would be cool). 2. Sculpt room: I can sculpt the mesh but cannot see textures. 3. Retopo room: I could work on the mesh if this was not so huge, but could not manage to load textures. 4. Tweak room: i can alter the mesh while seeing the textures, but could not use the paint/sculpt room brush "auto masking". So far, the best way i found is tweak room, while being not able to auto mask. My question was only to understand if i'm missing something to this list or if 3DCoat is not the right tool for this task. Which doesn't mean 3DCoat is not a good tool (i like it and purchased it time ago). From what i gathered until now, looks like i cannot use 3DC this way. And that's not the end of the world, i just need to understand it. Please forgive me if i've upset you. Cheers! Umberto

Thanks AbnRanger, it's more clear now. Anyway, i need to stick to TweakRoom because i don't want the SculptRoom to wipe my UVs. Too bad i discovered that the freeze tool don't affect TweakRoom tools. With the move or draw tool i can affect the freezed mesh as it was not freezed at all. Noticed that the TweakRoom has his own select tool, which works differently and doesn't sport curvature effectors as in Paint/Sculpt. Puzzled on how i can overcome that. Moreover, i'm still puzzled on the mechanics that drive the mesh sharing between Rooms. While i can find documentation on single Rooms, i cannot find any docs about making them work together. Thanks! Umberto

Thank you Carlosan, Gary and Timmy. Now i figured out that and it's cool. I managed to freeze the painted curvature in paint mode, but that doesn't seem to affect the tweak mode (i can still move every polygon freezed or not, and i tried to re-freeze after switching to the tweak room). For the sculpt mode i don't know, as i cannot switch to sculpt mode without losing the model (and the import tool looks like it can import only from the retopo room, and still it's not working for me i don't know why). But i'm looking to use this workflow with the tweak room, as i need the UV to be kept. Thanks! Umberto

Well, i found a decent workflow to process the mesh. But this involves both 3DC and ZBrush as i load the mesh in ZBrush (OBJ format), mask by cavity and work on the unmasked part to enhance the depth of the surface. Then i need to export in FBX format (too keep UV sets, there are 4 of them) load in 3DCoat and re-save in OBJ format (because modo doesn't like FBX so much). If i could skip the ZBrush part it would be nice. Is there a way to get something comparable to "mask by cavity" in 3DC? Umberto

AbnRanger, i did try to do what you suggested but when i choose import from the tool palette and "pick from retopo", nothing happens. I expected the mesh to be transferred in the Sculpt room as you said. Where i'm wrong? On the othe hand i tried also Gary hint (use tweak room) and it somewhat worked fair (before and after screenshots attached). This may be good enougn if i don't push modifications too far. Would we awesome being able to subdivide when needed. Umberto

Thanks Gary for your hint. I did read the thread previously but i dismissed it after the first page because i tought i was not applying to my case Now i understand that what i want to achieve is not possible in 3DCoat. In a way or the other i will lose my UVs. Just to be clear, i don't really need to create/destroy polygons, i only need to move vertexes and edges to a better position, and looking for the texture to follow. It would be cool to use liveClay and make 3DC to re-arrange the preexistent UV's while splitting the polygons, but i understand that this will be an hard task. Thanks! Umberto

Sorry for bothering you all again, i searched in the forum and over the internet but looks like i'm not able to find my answer, and all my efforts lead to nothing. I need to import a hi-res model, produced with PhotoScan (2 million polys) and related texture maps. Textures are 4 x 8K bitmaps, mapped as 4 different UV groups. Object is in OBJ format, maps are TIFF 16bit. To ensure the object is correct, i loaded it into modo and i can see it correctly. I want to load the mesh and see it textured in the sculpt room because i need the texture reference to emboss some details that the 3D reconstruction smoothed out a bit. But i cannot load the textured object at all. I can only load the mesh. Moreover, if i switch from paint room to sculpt room the mesh suddenly disappears. Sure i'm not into 3DCoat mechanics, but i cannot figure out what i'm missing. Can someone point me to the correct procedure? If it is doable in 3DC? Thanks! Umberto

Issue solved. All was caused by my misuse of the import mesh tool. I always ended loading the same mesh twice. Cheers! Umberto

Thanks Michaelgdrs, I didn't consider that! Anyway, when i import the model from obj format, 3DCoat renders it in a strange way. If looked from the outside, the whole model is rendered fully visible but some polygons over the surface flash continuously, as if the object were composed by two overlapping surfaces with inverted normals. If i look at it from the inside, i see the correct surface as expected. On the other hand, if i import in ZBrush i see it as expected (invisible faces if looked from the outside, ok from the inside, as usual with reversed normal meshes). And, moreover, when i start sculpting from the inside, it suddenly flips the faces and i only see it correctly from the outside. I don't understand what i'm doing to cause it flip all faces. I'm working in surface mode.

Hi all! I'm working on a 3D model of a cave, built with photogrammetry technique from a set of 200+ shots of inside the cave itself. Then, the model was produced with normals facing the inside, and that's what i'm expecting to use for my final result as i need to render the model from the inside. But i have some issues sculpting in 3DC, it happened that it reversed all the normals (i selected the remesh tool). I need to sculpt around rocks to give them more depth and working from the inside will be the more intuituve way. Is there something i can do to ease the process? I attach a screenshot for better understanding. Thanks! Umberto