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V4.1 BETA (experimental 4.1.17D)


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Oh "wish time". Great...

Some nice up to date shaders would be great. The existing shaders are not enough and fulfills very basic needs.

zBrush lives from its great shaders... I support Phils wish to get some better presentation abilities. The render room was not supported for a very long time.

But as always: bug fixing and clean working features have priority.

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Yeah...I thought Octane might be a good plugin alternative, instead of Andrew wasting his time on the Render Room. But after Otoy bought them out, they've gone up significantly in price. The plugin for Max was about $180. It's now over $400. So, there goes that option.

Nevertheless, I can just as easily use the applink for 3ds Max to send it there with textures and render something for presentation, as I would tinkering around in the Render Room. It already is good for basic previs or quick prototyping. Pushing it further steps beyond the boundaries of what 3D Coat is known/meant for. Most everyone who uses 3D Coat uses a 3D program with an advanced renderer. 3D Coat's responsibility is to get the model and it's texture maps ready for the rendering stage. If ZBrush wants to step beyond it's boundaries and do hair, render, etc. I don't see why 3D Coat....with just one developer to do it all....has to follow suit. Not with so many other needs on the plate.

Once it grows to the point that Andrew has more development help, then I would not mind some of these areas being explored. Pixologic has enough staff to do this. 3D Coat does not.

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what im trying to say is, no one will buy 3dcoat ONLY for rendering. its not what 3dcoat is made to do.

just like no one will buy zbrush for its rendering capabilities either. also, zbrush is a bit bitterent since they started out as a "artist" friendly tool.

they where trying to get sculptors who never opened a 3d package before, making awesome images and rendering them out.

definitely not what 3dcoat is going for here.

3dcoat was made to be part of peoples pipelines, not the only program they use, so adding a renderer is not going to do much to it, cause everyone has a better renderer already. so wasting dev time to make a better renderer just so people can make prettier pre viz images instead of focusing on core tools seems a bit off to me.

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Most of my .3b files would make 3d coat hang at load or give an out of memory error.

While using the 'Open' Menu command or CMD-o does not work, if that same file is in the 'Open Recent' menu and loaded from there, it works just fine!

As it turned out, the problem was related to the Ctrl/CMD-O hotkey combination for calling the Open File Dialog. It manifests itself only under Linux and Mac OS X. The builds of 3D-CoatV4-BETA14A for Linux and Mac OS X have been updated. If you experience such problem please download the images again.

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what im trying to say is, no one will buy 3dcoat ONLY for rendering. its not what 3dcoat is made to do.

just like no one will buy zbrush for its rendering capabilities either. also, zbrush is a bit bitterent since they started out as a "artist" friendly tool.

they where trying to get sculptors who never opened a 3d package before, making awesome images and rendering them out.

definitely not what 3dcoat is going for here.

3dcoat was made to be part of peoples pipelines, not the only program they use, so adding a renderer is not going to do much to it, cause everyone has a better renderer already. so wasting dev time to make a better renderer just so people can make prettier pre viz images instead of focusing on core tools seems a bit off to me.

Pretty much nails it, IMHO.
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what im trying to say is, no one will buy 3dcoat ONLY for rendering. its not what 3dcoat is made to do.

just like no one will buy zbrush for its rendering capabilities either. also, zbrush is a bit bitterent since they started out as a "artist" friendly tool.

they where trying to get sculptors who never opened a 3d package before, making awesome images and rendering them out.

definitely not what 3dcoat is going for here.

3dcoat was made to be part of peoples pipelines, not the only program they use, so adding a renderer is not going to do much to it, cause everyone has a better renderer already. so wasting dev time to make a better renderer just so people can make prettier pre viz images instead of focusing on core tools seems a bit off to me.

I agree, besides you've got to remember that zbrush was an illustration app before getting it's 3d functionalities. It made sense that their rendering engine needed to be more solid to render stills (you can still flatten your models in zbrush for those who forget it.).

3dcoat was not (till now at least) made to be an illustration platform.

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Personally I don't agree on focusing on one aspect of a program to improve for the longest time. For example Newtek focused on the lw renderer too long and that got them in dead last. Voxel for 3dcoat gets the most updates, its not going to change how zbrush is still the ONE sculpting app.

Imo the featureset in 3dcoat could all improve incrementally. Work on each feature and make it good even the renderer in 3dcoat. Stop focusing on tech that is not in your control, like cuda. More bugfixes is the most important.

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OK 3dcoat is not for illustrators.

It isn't for some weird artists like me, who believe in a future 3d development. (can't explain further)

It is made and is for videogame industry workers only.

Is this what you are trying to say?

3dcoat isn't for auto retopology either, no further development on this problematic more or less part. Not for professionals.

It's not for presentations - demos. Better export 100M voxels as obj to another app for rendering. LOL

zBrush lives from its great shaders

Really?

What about its great great parametric brushes? Their behavior? Their fine tuning?

What about the multiresolution sculpting? The quality of the displacement maps?

So, a 3dcoat v4, without multiresolution capabilities, baking displacement maps of great quality.

(not very professional at all)

With the same render room.

(not for amateurs LOL)

BTW is not the first time that some well known gentlemen call the people who isn't working on videogames amateurs.

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I kindof like the 3dc renderer too. Not as a replacement but in it's own right. Luxion has licensed it's engine to simlab for what seems to be not too substantial increase in price of the product, and they get "keyshot". But with that said, I dont think 3dc should try to be a "renderer" in such a saturated market. Maybe just some "power added" (As someone else has just mentioned in this thread) to the existing render room would be a killer addition during this beta.....

2 cents.

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The only thing I'd like to see with the renderer is a way to remember the settings. I use the same ones every time and its a pain to enter them repeatedly. Otherwise I'm quite satisfied with it.

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The only thing I'd like to see with the renderer is a way to remember the settings. I use the same ones every time and its a pain to enter them repeatedly. Otherwise I'm quite satisfied with it.

Oh man, I so totally agree!!!

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Im a little confused about the shader situation... while I agree an update to the UI regarding shaders is truly needed... and to separate SHADER from shader settings would also be nice... the idea that a shader + settings is a "shader" is obnoxious - but the shading engine is great.

1) I'd like to be able to have a shader adjustment box that allows me to adjust the settings of the current objects' shader

2) I'd like to be able to save those shader adjustments as a preset, not a whole new shader

3) I'd like to be able to "connect up" shader reference textures, rather than have them be a fixed part of the shader

Truly the shaders are actually VERY VERY powerful as they are GLSL and HLSL shaders - ANYONE can write one as simple or as complex as you like. The trick is to make them more functionally easy to adjust and use.

Who wants to always make an orange colored car? - uh, ok, so you copy that orange shader, edit the texture map in PS and now you have a blue car shader... so to have a rainbow of colors for the gamut of shader types, we have shader explosion... not so great.

Anyway - just my two cents... and for what it's worth, a lot of the limitations on shading are directly related to the fact that it's GLSL/HLSL shading - so all shaders have to be written in those shading languages... they don't really do light scattering or transparency very well.

OH that's another enhancement I'd like to see - better 2-sided transparent surfaces/see thu-ness. :) but that also might simply be a GLSL/HLSL limitation.

long and short - better shader/settings UI paradigm, and better transparency appearance, otherwise - the rest works really well (IMO) for the purposes I use it for -previs.

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since we seem to be discussing the renderer, I'd just mention that for me it is not a vital part of 3DCoat. As I render either in realtime engines for games or use LW or other rendering engines for real renders, for me I'm not particularly interested in stills only - I tend to only care about renderers that allow me to create moving animated stuff with other effects (like physics) and also often render passes which are tied into a compositing workflow (for when it's a render and not realtime). Therefore other than for WIP demos, 3DCoats renderer is superfluous to my needs. To me it's kind of like Poser Pro's renderer - in that it kind of needs to be there for integrated testing, but I hardly ever (read: never) use Poser's renderer for output.

Please don't consider this a flame war or a conflict, we are all speculating on 3DC's future anyway, but the things 3DC does do better than anything else (or equal to for a much more reasonable price) are namely: UV mapping, Retopo, Painting, (and for most people here it is a contender with Sculpting too). For those tasks it is really amazing (though here there seems to be a debate about the sculpting improvements needed) to me. Rendering (and to some degree the Tweaking room) are anemic to me and I personally can't fathom improving rendering too much. I mean, am I ever going to render animated, rigged characters with physics, or architectural stuff or anything else moving in 3DC? probably not. Though for stills and art photos and print - I can see that need (and it is a professional need) - that's just not my needs and currently not where 3DC's strength lies.

3DC is a vital tool in the arsenal of my workflow, but I can't see it being the sole tool.

just my 2cents... :unsure:

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OK 3dcoat is not for illustrators.

It isn't for some weird artists like me, who believe in a future 3d development. (can't explain further)

It is made and is for videogame industry workers only.

Is this what you are trying to say?

3dcoat isn't for auto retopology either, no further development on this problematic more or less part. Not for professionals.

It's not for presentations - demos. Better export 100M voxels as obj to another app for rendering. LOL

Really?

What about its great great parametric brushes? Their behavior? Their fine tuning?

What about the multiresolution sculpting? The quality of the displacement maps?

So, a 3dcoat v4, without multiresolution capabilities, baking displacement maps of great quality.

(not very professional at all)

With the same render room.

(not for amateurs LOL)

BTW is not the first time that some well known gentlemen call the people who isn't working on videogames amateurs.

I don't know if you include me in your debate but I'll answer this:

People use whatever software they want for their need, I'm not judging, but using 3dc for stills is ok TILL you reach the render room, there's definitely better (read more ergonomic, better output) rendering engines elsewhere.

That doesn't mean improvements shouldn't be made in that area, it"s just that SO FAR it hasn't been the path Andrew chose (I can be wrong but it looks that way).

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The only thing I'd like to see with the renderer is a way to remember the settings. I use the same ones every time and its a pain to enter them repeatedly. Otherwise I'm quite satisfied with it.

this

Im a little confused about the shader situation... while I agree an update to the UI regarding shaders is truly needed... and to separate SHADER from shader settings would also be nice... the idea that a shader + settings is a "shader" is obnoxious - but the shading engine is great. 1) I'd like to be able to have a shader adjustment box that allows me to adjust the settings of the current objects' shader 2) I'd like to be able to save those shader adjustments as a preset, not a whole new shader 3) I'd like to be able to "connect up" shader reference textures, rather than have them be a fixed part of the shader Truly the shaders are actually VERY VERY powerful as they are GLSL and HLSL shaders ..... better 2-sided transparent surfaces/see thu-ness. :) but that also might simply be a GLSL/HLSL limitation. long and short - better shader/settings UI paradigm, and better transparency appearance, otherwise - the rest works really well (IMO) for the purposes I use it for -previs.

this.

2 relatively small changes that would make a very big difference

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small changes, right

thats the point

If its possible... to do the small changes needed in another rooms before V4 release -not only sculpt/paint- can help a lot. :)

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This is one of the reasons I kind of prefer Zbrush's development cycle/philosophy, where they tend to ignore what the vocal minority/majority wants for new features, and keeps expanding on their own vision of the program.

There seems to be a handful of members who have in their minds that the software should be developed a certain way and that any attention given to areas/features not designed for their particular workflow are a waste of time. I think we can all agree that we strongly dislike bugs, but we desperately need to stop belittling areas of development that certain individuals perceive to be worthless endeavors. This is Andrew's software, and he can choose to add whatever features he thinks fits, and he can choose to focus on any area that he sees as a priority at any given time. Don't assume that because you use this software in a certain way, that everybody uses it in that same way and anything that strays from it is useless.

Andrew, keep up the good work, your software is invaluable to me and I always enjoy seeing where you want to push it next.

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A way to save render settings to their own file and then easily reload each of them, say via a drop down menu labeled "Presets", that is a perfect example of what I had in mind. Simple things which are quick and easy to implement (hopefully). The renderer in 3DC will never be capable of photo realistic output no doubt, nor complex like those which are. However I do feel it is missing some very basic... um, basics.

I find it's output can be quite similar to Marmoset with a bit of effort and luck; video game output is often what it looks and "feels" like to me. That's not necessarily a bad thing though and it should continue to embrace that instead of trying to copy others, such as ZBrush. Why reinvent the wheel? I too agree there is a lot of other stuff that needs to take precedence right now and for the foreseeable future, bugs in particular, but that doesn't mean the renderer should be ignored completely. For better or worse it's in there, isn't going away, and actually useful to some artists as we've seen. Perhaps it's time to consider hiring someone to help out for a little while?

Edit: Awesome post, b33nine! :)

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hiring someone to help or releasing the SDK -like Andrew said sometime ago- could be an option too

Angelscript is a good beginning to let the community to make addons...

and yes, output can be quite similar to Marmoset with a bit of effort and luck

The controls are there in the code... just let the user access it :D

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My preference is stability through reducing bugs first priority, UI doesn't matter, Renderer doesn't matter, more shaders/Materials don't matter.

The Tools/Methods should work as described each and every time they are used, no exception.

If a new tool or method is introduced it MUST be called a beta and labelled as such and don't remove the old method/tool until the new method/tool is completely bug free.

3DCoat development should be frozen and be thoroughly tested by as many users as possible for stability and bugs, as soon as all the bugs have been squashed the further development can continue, as long as new tools/methods are labelled BETA.

In this way you can market 3DCoat as stable with the user knowing that a particular tool/method is a new developmental beta, but the other (non beta) tools are rock solid.

Using this development method, users can use 3DCoat in a production setting, even though its the latest version, knowing that the beta parts of the application are well named and described.

T.

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Updated to beta15A. Several mantis issues fixed there. This build is close to release. 2-11 May I will get rest with my wife on Cyprus, if some critical problems with the build will appear, I will fix them by return. Please post everything you feel important to fix before V4 release to Mantis. Mac/Linux builds will be posted today or tomorrow.

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Updated to beta15A. Several mantis issues fixed there. This build is close to release. 2-11 May I will get rest with my wife on Cyprus, if some critical problems with the build will appear, I will fix them by return. Please post everything you feel important to fix before V4 release to Mantis. Mac/Linux builds will be posted today or tomorrow.

Thanks Andrew. Have a good time and get some rest (no laptop working on vacation :D ).
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@Andrew

Summer came very early this year in greece-cyprus. Enjoy the sea. Stay away from your laptop.

@beat,

No I didn't mean you.

3dcoat doesn't provide the few simple optimized brushes I need. (in voxels they are OK - almost) Nothing spontaneous though. Except the boolean related (voxels are great on this as expected)

It doesn't provide some improvements in render room. If you could just read more carefully for a moment... I asked, wished, for the ability to bake depth on a single plane. This is ridicoulously impossible for 3dcoat. This can be happen in render room, where else?

It doesn't provide a full functional sculpting room (multi rsolution) and baking from multires, (the only presize method)

It has some serious difficulties painting on 4k maps

V4, well, long way to go, to earn this v4, patience. IMO

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Rendering is so subjective anyway. I mean, you cant say that "photorealistic" or "GI" is "BETTER". I posted a 3dc render in a group effort on a specific mesh, among some of the heavyweight render engines, and a few people were asking what engine made it. It looked great and I spent very little effort on setup.

To label it worthless because it's not Max or Maya with all the bells and whistles, is kindof missing the mark. It's inique unto itself. It could also render a look that the max/maya crowd would have to try and "attain" to meet your vision of an object or character/scene B) .....

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I always treated 3D Coat Render Room only as a helper in basic previewing of high-poly models or how would your colour/spec/depth textures combo roughly look like. Something to show to your client/boss. I think that's what it was designed for.

It could benefit from some improvements, but in my opinion they should be improvements of what's already implemented. What I mean by that is for example:

1. The turntable, which I always have trouble setting up properly. I'm not sure how it works, but it always seems to put the camera aim point at the wrong place, so most of the time its completely useless to me. A moveable locator that would determine the centre of camera rotation would be a perfect solution here.

2. Visible DOF plane should be an infinite plane. For example, if you have a large character then you can't set the proper position of a DOF plane (at eyes), because it's to small and it's simply out of the viewport.

3. Lights should be visible in the viewport for easier manipulation.

Just my 5 cents.

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The best renderer I've used is Cheetah3D's and it's super easy to use and setup with lighting compared to Max or Maya. I've used all three, as well as others and I can say that 3D Coat's renderer isn't bad, but it definitely could use some work. Concept work is what I would personally use it for in its present state.

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