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New Sculpt > Retopo Room


David Schoneveld
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I'm sure its easy when you know how to do it but sculpting something then going into retopo room, it makes no sense how to get going retopologizing your voxel sculpt. There's no intuitive way to begin, everything you click on seems to do nothing (because its expecting a mesh to be there already). Exporting and importing you get the wizard which is easy, but I see the voxels when I go into retopo room/ Why do I have to export/import it to get the wizard? Why can't I click something like "new retopo mesh from sculpt"? start right there? Since you can switch into the retopo room and see your sculpt it makes sense that you'd then be able to retopo that sculpt w/o any extra i/o. If there is a way I'd like to know how to do it, but even that said I'm saying its not easy to figure out and should probably be more obvious.

Edit: Found what I was looking for but it should DEFINITELY be an option in the retopo room.

post-12687-0-44829700-1344288797_thumb.j

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I was having a hard time grasping what exactly it was you were asking, but I see now you were talking about the AUTOPO (Auto Topology) tool. I agree. I've said that a dozen times here, but it's fallen on deaf ears. Auto Retopo DOES NOT belong hidden in a right-click menu, within the Voxel Room. It is unintuitive to have such a major feature tucked away like that. It belongs in the Retopo Room, with a prominent Sub-Section, just like UV's. Same problem with the UV Texture Editor in the Paint Room. It is hidden in a menu list (should be a little icon in the tool panel, to toggle it on/off).

UI Design blasphemy, I say!!! :D

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Hi guys,

my first post here! I finally found the motivation to dig into this cool sculpting app...

Yet I have to start off criticizing: I'm having a very hard time figuring how to move/convert objects from one "room" to another.

This is the one major problem I have at the moment. It's simply not intuitive.

The moment you recognize that the UI is arranged around different "rooms", the first question that arises is: how do I convert data?

After digging around I found the right-click-layer menu > AUTOPO, to convert voxels to polygons.

But how about vice versa? If I start a scene by loading some polygon object into the paint/sculpt room, how do I convert it to voxels, without exporting/importing?

Is this even possible?

My suggestion would be some self-explanatory button in every room, maybe with a left/right arrow on it, to convert the model to the next room.

Thanks and best regards!

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This is a great point, I feel this way too. It should be more intuitive and self explanatory how to go back and fourth between rooms. I know there will be technical questions to ask to do that, but still we should figure something out that would make sense.

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As soon as I get my microphone in the mail, I'm going to try and do a few tutorials covering the overall workflow, as I know it can be a bit confusing to new users. In the meantime just know that the Paint Room, the Tweak Room and the UV Room are pretty much 1 major segment. The Voxel Room and Retopo Room are another, and were added later in 3DC's development. There are so many tools, that they are divided into major workspaces/rooms, with context sensitive menu's. One of the main goals in the V4 cycle will be (unless things change for some reason) to unify the app into one singular workspace...with an Outliner type of panel, to sort between the different objects in the scene.

You don't have to convert voxels into anything. Just think of it as a clay object, and if you want to export a dense triangulate mesh directly to your app, then you don't necessarily need to retopo. If you are working on a model that will just be posed and rendered, for example...no real need to Retopo. You can paint on the Voxel Object and export it directly.

Be sure to make use of 3D Coat's Youtube Channel:

http://www.youtube.c...r/PILGWAY3DCoat

You can check out Greg's Ghost tutorial series to get a decent grasp of the overall workflow....from Voxels > Retopo > UV > Paint

Greg Smith's "Rat from Scratch" series is another good resource that also covers Autopo (Auto-Topology):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeQ24qvWGB4&feature=BFa&list=PL603B0C27026099E3

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Thanks, AbnRanger!

Bit by bit I'm getting the hang of it. Some more questions...

1) Subdivision level

I had to use Mudbox as well recently. Simple workflow, quite straightforward. No voxels, of course.

In Mudbox, you can import the low-poly object and subdivide it a few times, then export it back with the option if the base mesh or the subdivided mesh should be loaded.

When you import a lowpoly mesh into 3D-Coat (voxels aside), I can set the subdivision level in the import dialog.

Now how do I change subdiv level during the session? Just can't find this.

2) You say it's possible to paint on the voxel object. How??

I watched the videos, also some others, and the problem is not so much understanding the tools, but the basic workflow.

Cheers,

Eugen

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You don't have a multi-subD layer workflow in 3D Coat. If you want to be able to step up and down resolution levels you can do that in the Voxel Room with the Multi-Res tools...

...and if you need to Blend Layers of normal map or displacement map relief, you can do that in the Paint Room. It requires some understanding of the overall workflow in 3D Coat. You could actually bake normal or displacement maps (onto a Retopo Mesh) out at different stages of the voxel sculpting process, using the Texture Baking Tool (in the Retopo Room/Workspace), and once you're ready to merge the model into the Paint Room, you could then import those maps and blend them as you see fit.

It's not quite as straight forward or as elegant as the workflow in MB or ZB, but having the ability to sculpt with Voxels, Dynamic Subdivision (LiveClay), Poly's (moderate level sculpting/transform tools in the Tweak Room), and Image-Based (live normal map and displacement map painting) tools is pretty powerful in its own right. Some of us have been pushing for the tools in the Voxel Room to be mirrored to the Tweak (Poly Sculpt) Room, and enable a true sculpt layer (per object) system, with layer masks as well. With Pixar releasing their Open SubDiv technology to the public (having CUDA and OpenCL support built in)...maybe that will compel Andrew to consider it.

As for painting on Voxels (Vertex Paint), it is actually rather easy. Make sure you have a recent build, go to EDIT > PREFERENCES > and click SHOW BETA TOOLS. Your Voxel objects should all be present in the Paint Room. Once you've painted it all, you can bake all the color and specular info (stored in the vertices) down to a Retopo Mesh, or you can export it directly via fbx. In you host 3D App, you just need to enable Vertex Color in your respective viewport configs and add Vertex Color maps in your Diffuse and Specular Channels of your materials/shaders.

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