3D-Coat 3.0 ALPHA

[philnolan3d]

That's strange, I just went to download the CUDA toolkit/drivers for my laptop. nVidia says my laptop's card (8600m GS) works with CUDA but the driver installer wouldn't install, it said "no compatible hardware found". So I downloaded the latest normal driver instead, which was released yesterday. Am I right in thinking the latest drivers should include the CUDA support?

[Juan Carlos Montes]

Andrew, beta 44 simple don't read any of my old VS models .

Anyone have the same problem?

[GED]

yeah Jaun I just tried recently and none of my old 3D coat 3B files opened in release 44 simple

[Andrew Shpagin]

yeah Jaun I just tried recently and none of my old 3D coat 3B files opened in release 44 simple

Enter to VS and then open model.

[philnolan3d]

I just installed 44 so I tried loading 3 pre-44 sculptures and they all worked fine.

oops, didn't see Andrew's post. I must've already had VS open when I did my test.

[Juan Carlos Montes]

Enter to VS and then open model.

Thanks Andrew

[Andrew Shpagin]

Updated to V45 - both cuda/noncuda (excuse, only Windows, I have not setup notebook for OSX compilation still, I hope to do it soon)

Changes

1) Support of PLY & STL

2) Much better export - see RMB menu. Also you don't need to press "To polygones" to export object.

3) Possibility to use some object as a patten for curves and merge tool

4) Many new patterns for merge tool and curve profiles.

5) Bugfixes

I will go to Moscow for tomorrow (one day), soon I will be back.

[artman]

Great -extract skin and extrude are now perfectly working for me with alpha45-

[JulesD]

Is there a new way of scaling the textures?

It use to be hold shift key and right mouse button and scroll mouse.

But all that does now is resize the brush circle.

[kay_Eva]

My performance is down by a lot ever since 43, 42 was a lot faster

it's slowing down before it gets to 3 million tris

I have a Q6600, 8GB RAM, 64bit Vista, and 8800GT 512 thanks!

before where I'd get 200fps idle 100fps sculpting @ about 15 million

now I get about 20fps and the brush is slow

[philnolan3d]

I noticed something strange about the past couple of versions. When you Increase Res the size stays the same, which is great, but the shader gets brighter each time until eventually it's so blown out that you can't see what you're doing.

[akira]

My performance is down by a lot ever since 43, 42 was a lot faster

it's slowing down before it gets to 3 million tris

I have a Q6600, 8GB RAM, 64bit Vista, and 8800GT 512 thanks!

before where I'd get 200fps idle 100fps sculpting @ about 15 million

now I get about 20fps and the brush is slow

Hi Kay, maybe the reason of your fps dropping is similar to this one:

http://3dbrush.kriska.hvosting.net/forum/i...ost&p=11861

hope it helps.

akira.

[SonK]

Alpha 45 export function is fast, thanks for adding that Andrew. I did notice it also exported the voxel sphere even though i deleted it from the scene tree.

[TOXE]

Hi Andrew,

Say hi to Moscow, don't see the hour to test the new beta, list of improvements is really nice!

-TOXE

[mocaw]

Should I disable areo in Vista? Will it help? Problem is...XSI NEEDS it in vista to work correctly in some instances...

I'll give it a try and see if there is any improvement in speed...

[kay_Eva]

Hi Kay, maybe the reason of your fps dropping is similar to this one:

http://3dbrush.kriska.hvosting.net/forum/i...ost&p=11861

hope it helps.

akira.

unfortunately it doesn't seem to effect anything, thanks anyway though

Right now the brushes are so slow it's actually pretty tough Move brush is just super slow in particular but they are all slow now unlike in rev 42 but I suppose it's a bug

Edit: I moved back from alpha 45 to 43 and in 43 the red_wax, skin, etc shaders don't work at all, however the speed of the brushes is back to being good again, so maybe there is some connection there, To me it feels like CUDA probably isn't kicking in in the later alpha

[patejdl]

unfortunately it doesn't seem to effect anything, thanks anyway though

Right now the brushes are so slow it's actually pretty tough Move brush is just super slow in particular but they are all slow now unlike in rev 42 but I suppose it's a bug

Edit: I moved back from alpha 45 to 43 and in 43 the red_wax, skin, etc shaders don't work at all, however the speed of the brushes is back to being good again, so maybe there is some connection there, To me it feels like CUDA probably isn't kicking in in the later alpha

The CUDA option doesn't seem to add any benefits here too. 90% of the brushes work about 2x slower on CUDA (8800gt) than on my Q6600.

So my question to Andrew is : Is it a bug or just does ot needs more time to be optimized?

[geo_n]

The CUDA option doesn't seem to add any benefits here too. 90% of the brushes work about 2x slower on CUDA (8800gt) than on my Q6600.

So my question to Andrew is : Is it a bug or just does ot needs more time to be optimized?

I think andrew mentioned that cuda seems to work better on slower machines with good gfx card and that quadcore systems have less benefit if gfx card were not on par with cpu spec. Maybe cuda will be fast on quadcore plus quadro cards.

I turn it off in the office where my rig is the same as your qc6600 with 8800gts and at home as well with qc9450 with 8400gts. Anyway its alpha so cuda is far from optimized for every pc spec.

[BluEgo]

I think andrew mentioned that cuda seems to work better on slower machines with good gfx card and that quadcore systems have less benefit if gfx card were not on par with cpu spec. Maybe cuda will be fast on quadcore plus quadro cards.

I turn it off in the office where my rig is the same as your qc6600 with 8800gts and at home as well with qc9450 with 8400gts. Anyway its alpha so cuda is far from optimized for every pc spec.

I have a 8-core and a quadro 5600, and CUDA doesn't benefit the sculpting experience. I think it should be optimized yet.

[Haider of Sweden]

Hi everyone,

sorry if my question has been asked before.

The Voxel thing, that's when you create new geometry without needing to redo your topology right?

If so, then it means this feature is only available in the beta, right?

[philnolan3d]

Hi everyone,

sorry if my question has been asked before.

The Voxel thing, that's when you create new geometry without needing to redo your topology right?

If so, then it means this feature is only available in the beta, right?

Which voxel thing are you referring to?

[lc8b105]

Hi everyone,

sorry if my question has been asked before.

The Voxel thing, that's when you create new geometry without needing to redo your topology right?

If so, then it means this feature is only available in the beta, right?

Hi! First welcome to join the community!

About your question, may be you want to see this page:

http://www.3d-coat.com/v3_voxel_sculpting.html

[philnolan3d]

Oh yeah, sorry Haider, I didn't mean to sound rude, I just thought you were talking about one specific aspect of the voxels. Welcome! Feel free to ask anything not answered on that link. Also check out the Volumetric Sculpting Development forum.

[The Lorax]

I'm using 45simple on Windows and getting the following error on startup:

Reinstalling did not fix.

First time I've seen this error with 3DC. Anyone else having this problem?

Thanks,

The Lorax

[Andrew Shpagin]

I have a 8-core and a quadro 5600, and CUDA doesn't benefit the sculpting experience. I think it should be optimized yet.

8 cores!! really powerful. I will optimize CUDA but not now. I can't wait to start quadrangulation...

It is venture, no guaranteed result...

[Andrew Shpagin]

I'm using 45simple on Windows and getting the following error on startup:

Reinstalling did not fix.

First time I've seen this error with 3DC. Anyone else having this problem?

Thanks,

The Lorax

Download latest DirectX distribution from Microsoft site.

[philnolan3d]

Oh wow, I didn't know that was how to solve the DX problem. Here's the download link.

http://www.gamesforwindows.com/en-US/About...irectX10-a.aspx

Edit: Installed it and Wow! DX works now. I've been complaining for the past, like, 4 alphas that the DX version didn work. I didn't even have to reboot after the install.

[Haider of Sweden]

philnolan3d: It's all right! No offend taken

lc8b105: Thanks for the link. I saw it since before. It's just, I am really not sure if voxels are so cool as it appears so I wanted to make sure that I understood it correctly.

I got the impression that this technique lets you add geometry directly on the mesh, without doing it "the old way", where you had to do it on the base mesh. And if you started to sculpt, it would be too late to add new geometry.

If this assumption is correct, my next question is; Is this feature available in the beta or also in the previous version?

[philnolan3d]

If this assumption is correct, my next question is; Is this feature available in the beta or also in the previous version?

Only in the alpha, but if you're looking to buy, you can buy the current version and then continue to use the alpha as much as you like until 3.0 ships, at which point you'll have to upgrade, which is pretty much just paying for the new features, not buying the whole thing all over again.

[mocaw]

Cuda helps my system...but I have a $40 card! I've noticed that with it enabled, while I can more easily carve out things in a higher amount of voxels, the responsiveness of my cursor goes down in terms of visual feedback. Does this make any sense? It seems to help for texturing quite a bit too, but maybe that's not cuda related?

In other words- I'm able to do a lot higher voxel count with better interaction with the model (including screen moves), but the cursor is kind of jumpy even when the results are not.

I can see why a lot of people with nice systems would seem put off- but from my very elementary understanding of how voxels work and are processed there are underlying reasons why GPUs are better for processing them then current CPUs.

While not the reason- think of it as if you wished to play a game (realtime app) without a video card or GPU like functions. Can you imagine how slow it would be? This argument will likely change in the future, but for now...well it looks like GPUs process certain data MUCH faster than Intel or AMD CPUs. I'm sure if John Carmak or the like was on here they could go into greater detail as could Andrew- but I'd rather have him spend the time on the program then trying to explain the "magic" behind it.

Personally I think it's great to only have to buy a 150-400 dollar video card to increase my performance instead of trashing my whole system and starting over. My current cores, when outside XSI and not rendering, sit idle far too often as is. I'm not saying that upgrading to new CPU's is a waste of money- far from it, just that this might be one instance where resistance is futile since voxels, from my understanding, are very different in how they are effectively processed.