polyxo

Feedback to developers: It's a great addition which makes a lot of sense for Voxels. I don't think Vox Ray tool is a particularly descriptive term though. Comparable tools in CAD software use names like (interactive) Clipping Plane, Section Plane / Tool. Maybe worth a thought? The tooltip should point out that this is essentially an analysis tool which doesn't actually slice the model.

To be fair – you are using Surface mode here. When working with Voxels there's indeed no Masking available.

Hint: If program is available in version 4.x already and a feature is available in other modelling modes for a long time.. there’s more than just a slight likelihood that this feature wasn’t simply forgotten. It is instead tremendously likely that others have missed that feature too and that the issue got discussed before. Masking for a volumetric geometry representation is totally different from freezing mesh vertices, which only describe the outer shell. Thus far one has not come up with a method which makes sense – I as a Layman would also say “why not simply freeze the surface mesh and make it somehow impact the underlying voxels which fill up the volume”. But it’s likely not that easy!

While I greatly admire the underlying programming skill I have to admit that I quite doubt the technical value of the sketch based topo shown in those clips... Does it really make sense to follow the template volume that closely for creation of the initial patch? I found greatly more attractive to see loser tessellation in those patches and the main focus on proper loop structure in adjacent patches and on avoiding poles (extraordinary points) if somehow possible. A closer fit could get obtained by subdividing and reprojecting the cage in a later step. If one rather wants to display a closely matching remesh result in realtime, one might consider dynamic reprojected (shrinkwrapped) catmull clark subdivision built into the tool.

A very useful feature! Thanks.

The question is what one would gain by reading the mentioned propritary formats that can't get stored in .obj or fbx. I'd say nothing, at least not in 3DCoat. Rhino's .3dm format is actually documented and can get read and written by third party programs. This is great for other Nurbs programs, such as MoI or Solidworks or CAM-programs for milling. But would supporting the format make sense in the case of 3DCoat? No. Not until 3DC natively supports Nurbs that is. The render-mesh which is stored in a Rhino file is the same you would get with a simple .obj. Other formats, such as .max are indeed closed source but one again would not profit from what 3DSMax stores in its Modifier stack or animation data. All 3DC can handle is mesh data and that's available in exchange formats too. The same logic applies to other programs you list.

3DC shows identical import dialogs in various work scenarios. The problem about this is that some entries apply to one situation, others to a second workflow. Non matching entries aren't greyed out or hidden, which may be a source of confusion. An example is the Import for PPP dialog which is both shown when importing an external mesh for painting. The same dialog appears when baking a Retopo Mesh to the Paint room. The parameters which which need to get adapted to the repective use case are in the red box.Most of this stuff makes no sense for baking.

Shaders: The new Shaders in the Sculpt room look very cool but a lot of them simulate surface structures via Normal Maps. That's not very practical for those who want to create as smooth as somehow possible geometry. If the result is going to be 3D printed or otherwisely physically produced all digital smoothing trickery may cause some unpleasant surprises: Machines use flat shading, all the way ) I think users were usually better off when default shaders would't embellish the triangulated surface mesh but rather helped creating smooth shapes. The Cavity and Bulge colours are such helpers, stripe projection was another one, which is commonly used in CAD to evaluate transition smoothness.There still could be a second folder with fancy shaders with normal maps and such. GUI: It's unfortunate that shaders in the Paint and Sculpt Workspaces use different GUI's. I see that the underlying technical concepts differ, but both editors should get consolidated visually and get called with the same hotkeys. The Sculpt Shader GUI comes with some bad Typos btw. See attached screenshot.

I'm also used to the Zoom behaviour you describe.But there's an easy fix in preferences. Just set the Zoom speed to -1.

You will need to keep your license. Pixologic has pretty recently changed its licensing. One may no longer resell licenses. This new rule is not conform with EU law, which says that all perpetual software licenses may get resold, but they are far away and simply won't issue the license transfer.

If one does something in this direction I would suggest abolishing the term "room" too.There's no rooms.The most broadly established term for such in computer graphics is "workspace", ; it also has its origins in the physical world, but works a lot better.

Fwiw...You are correct that obj can deal with custom normals and Blender since 2.74 may retain normals assigned in 3rd party programs. I however got far better result with fbx when bringing CAD files (with non standard geometry from a mesh modellers point of view) into recent versions of Blender. Having the fbx option in the Applink sure can't hurt and results in smaller files + potentially faster load times.

Obj supports groups of all sorts. You can tell Zbrush to get rid of them in the Tool/Geometry/Export - Panel. Try that and see how it goes.

Hard to judge, without seeing the file. It might be Polygroups causing this (Dynamesh may keep existing groups).

.27 DX repeatably crashes here with any of the sample models provided loaded (PPP, default settings) as soon as a PBR material starts its AO calculation. Smart Materials without AO seem to work.

@ Shadow Catcher – this option would indeed greatly enhance plausibilty in quick shots with 3DC's internal renderer. Here's a thread where I brought this topic up some months ago.This is about as good as I could get, admittedly after a lot of twiddling with imported white groundplanes / setting background to white / using alpha channel. Still quite splotchy shaddows...

Well, I would not insist, but a control which skips meshes on export would effectively make these entries redundant. One could still export single textures or any combination of them and use Presets for each, including preferred file format. Just sayin... Yup, several renderers have this, they listen to file changes.

Thank you for the introduction of export presets! Some additional suggestions: A check box which toggles export of mesh data was nice.That way one can skip re-export of meshes, in case one has 3DCoat output already loaded into another program and only has the need to move updated textures from the Paint workspace to another program. With this in place I think one could even remove the Texture Export Options in the "Textures" Menu Entry, Was it thinkable to call Export presets from Hotkeys and to suppress the Export dialog? Such could make sense, in case one has 3DC textures already hooked up in another program and has some final paint tweaks to make, with the preview renderer running.

Yup, multiscreen setup here too. Images get dragged from Adobe Bridge maximized on one sceen into 3DC on another screen. Good that the reason was found.

Map drag and drop to the Material Editor still doesn't work here (Win7 64). Behavior seems unchanged since 4.5.22.

Thanks Digman, I never use any program in non maximized state but I gave it a try. On my end this doesn't get drag and drop to work either.

Great adddition, I can not get it to work though. When I drag an image from Windows Explorer or a DAM into one of the map slots nothing happens or I get the Popup which offers me to create Alphas, Strips etc. What also doesn't work and would be helpful was dragging a already loaded map from one slot to the next(or getting a dropdown with all referenced bitmaps to choose from). Another thing I found useful: Doubleclick on the Shaderball opens the Material Editor.

Thanks again! I too don't use that room a lot but sometimes a material appearance in the paint room looks so nice that one wants to have a good snapshot of it without first re-engineering that look in another render engine. A simple to use control about ground shadow which even worked without an actual plane loaded, an alpha channel and a Zbuffer pass sure were helpful.

Thank you Digman. I have now tried this but found very hard, likely impossible to get the result I'm after: Not a large drop shadow as in your sample but just a subtle shadow near the object, just enough to make it appear sitting on on the ground as in typical for High Key Product shots. In Zbrush it's a push button action (see attached). I think adding a Lighting Preset which spits something similar out would help greatly for anyone who wants to composite 3DC render output. PS: I guess it was not you who added the best answer badge – but shouldn't this (if at all) get done by the one who asked the question?

I've tried importing a ground plane, that helps avoiding the model being lit from underneath, but the shadow I got didn't look good / give the model the appearance as if it was sitting on the ground.