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Twitter discussion: What Andrew is currently doing.


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Well at winter in general it sometimes seems that things slow down a bit, however....

twitter.com/AndrewShpagin recently wrote -

I am working over better symmetry support in retopo tools. Now almost all tools will maintain symmetry correctly during process of retopo
It is essentialimprovement because you are able to keep symmetry not onlywith apply symmetry but keep existing UV or keep partial symmetry

twitter.com/Farsthary recently wrote -

Big LC code clean up and optimization, removing unused data structures and few wasted cycles :)
Started working over a general LC brush system that will allow to set most tools as a presets ...starting small to keep things manageable :)

By the way i suggest a topic title change to "Twitter: What the 3DC team is currently doing" :D

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twitter.com/Farsthary recently wrote -

All LC tools almost merged into a General tool, and as Spiderman uncle says: with great power comes a great responsibility, lots of options
require more complexity to achieve useful tools, many combination of parameters can lead to non very useful tools but users ask for this...
and presets can be the solution....
Almost done a new LC based (and will be integrated too into the GeneralBrush) Flatten tool, hopefully I will make it a bit more flexible :)

This was popular request in the past and it sounds like it will soon be in 3DC :D

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twitter.com/Farsthary recently wrote -

The Flatten tool looks great and will be very useful for hard surface sculpting. On the blog comments people also suggested a intensity slider -

Added intensity control to the LC Flatten tool , will work soon over making it more smoothing flattening experience ;)
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  • 2 weeks later...

I saw that tweet and I knew it was coming but it does make me think, this is going to be one more half & half thing. Unless you have very simple textures I can't imagine doing all of your texture painting in the voxel room. You'd miss out on a lot of features, so I'd imagine people doing some base colors in the voxels room, then baking to the paint room to finish. But if that's the case, why not just do it all in the paint room?

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Sometimes it's nice to quickly prototype something to get a feel for how it's going to end up...for that reason, I would be happy to have painting in voxel room.

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That would be fantastic. In my dream program I could finish my model (sculpting/painting) without touching uv and other unwanted boring stuff. It would

also speed up the workflow when you need to show your model ideas to your client.

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Retopoing and UV work will always be the major part of 3DCoat. The addition of having poly-painting with either a upgraded renderer or or a renderer plug-in that would support poly-painting materials would give us the ability to create illustration type of work or rapid prototyping inside 3DCoat without having to go through that process. Right now, I render the voxel model in 3DCoat's renderer and save that to a file. Open the image file in my paint program and create the illustration.

Though if you need the poly-painting, I'm sure in the end you will be able to bake your poly-painting to your uv set. Voxel sculpting changed the order of modeling process (not in all cases of course) so poly-painting just reverses the order. Paint first then transfer the painting to the retopoed uv set. Surface mode does not replace voxels, so I do not think poly-painting will replace the paint room. I see poly-painting as an additional tool increasing our range of creative options and output.

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I disagre with using dx11 but that's just my pov from work project, but I kinda agree with what AbnRanger said: I would like an equivalent to polypainting in 3dcoat (It would help for small things lkike painting eyes/brows for character for instance, to get a better feel for sculpting), but I agree even more that 3dcoat really needs to be polished regarding performance and quality of current toolset.

Remember guys, when mudbox 1.0 was released, it was VERY simple, ui wise and toolset wise, but it was working almost flawlessly. And now mudbox is the only widely used app next to zbrush. 3dcoat is slowly taking offand if it can have the same quality of toolset and performance with the current toolset, even if there's some missing options from the competitors, it will still be a kick ass tool.

I got into 3dcoat when it was on the leading edge and looking to beat zbrush/mudbox at their own game. Then it quickly became apparent, as updates piled up, that somehow it managed to be even more obtuse than zbrush, with performance well behind and the workflow in a very messy state. I have recently played with zbrush4 r2 and I have no idea how 3dcoat is going to compete now that the dynamesh stuff is filtering in from sculptris.

In my most humble opinion, 3dcoat needs a handful of professional artists to act as an advisory council on the direction 3dcoat should go and how the workflows should be reformed.

At the very least it needs to be RESPONSIVE on above average computers - at least on par with zbrush.

I can't handle using 3dcoat anymore, there are too many 'gotchas' and pitfalls in the workflow (it's worse than maya!). I check back from time to time to see if the rewrite has started or the workflow is being reformed but I just see a new toy (that probably barely works) added to a random pile of toys that all barely work.

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When I've had to fight with 3D Coat to get work done, those are my sentiments at the time. But Andrew generally fixes things pretty fast. Adding a bunch of new additions means more breakage of what was already working. We have to keep that in mind. We want loads of goodies, on a frequent basis but then when bugs inevitably arise from initial implementation of those, we view 3D Coat as a toy. Sad...and pretty much so. Because, in reality, when things are generally working right, 3D Coat is an extremely powerful application.

I think anyone discussing 3dcoat's direction recognizes its enormous potential and might feel frustrated as there is much refinement needed. I refer to the new features as 'toys' because they're neat to play with but don't stand up to rigorous practical application (like a tool would, compared to a toy). I also recognize some users have managed to untangle the workflow and create on a regular basis and as such 3dcoat is a tool.

It might seem like Andrew is trying to milk the practical extensible limits of the current codebase to be able to maintain a stream of viewers to his product. That's what initially pulled me in was the enormous growth it was experiencing (ie: the retopo era). At some point he's going to have to 'go dark' and rewrite or hopefully someone else is currently doing the rewrite in the background. I don't envy him, it's tough to generate attention when your product has ceased updating for a year or so while it gets reworked.

The future is always interesting ;)

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Ah, Let the discussions begin. The colosseum is filled, the crowd thirst for blood. The gladitors have arrayed themselves in arguments of iron. The swords clash with thunder and bring down destruction upon their foes. One is down! the crowd, eyes glaring rises to their feet. Strike the final blow, turn the brown dirt dark with his red blood.

The crowd sits with exhaustion, blood lust appeased but soon the hunger will return. Let the discussions begin.

A simple tweet and off we go... :p:

(The above is not a refection upon anyones reasoning and or opinions, poking fun at myself and humans)

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If you consider only the modeling/sculpting side of 3DC - focusing on the LiveClay technologies - several major milestones will soon be reached:

1) Speed of sculpting will be very fast and fluid - even on "average" graphically oriented machines.

2) A general yet customizable LiveClay brush will contain the settings needed to make nearly any brush.

3) Both freehand/organic and hard surface/precise workflows will be streamlined and optimized.

This absolutely concentrated development, by only 2 developers has been quite rapidly achieved, by industry standard, and whatever falls under focus in the next round will get the same treatment.

Good things take time.

Greg Smith

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I myself was focusing on reasons for having poly-painting, not the date to include it in a working beta version. I know Andrew had stated it as a goal to have poly-painting in version 4. Most of us who have discussed this today are very aware of the need to optimize areas of the program, fix bugs, old and new and address older areas of the program for updating. I was mainly happy to hear that poly-painting had not died on the vine...

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It's quite interesting to see:

There's users who claim that painting directly onto the HiRes, non retopoed/UVed Geometry is of limited use/can only serve prototyping purposes/ will not make accessible the full arsenal of the Paint-Room...

Those users are the same who regularly express great passion in disliking Zbrush (and that they don't touch that Program even with Gloves on).

I think there lies the problem. One can not seriously judge on Workflows one is not yet aquainted to.

You will not hear anyone who also uses Zbrush saying that Polypainting is overrated.

If one thinks in 3DCoat's strict Room Concept and considers neccessary that Painting Bump has a different Workspace than the one where Geometry is actually deformed this reasoning might seem logical.

Direct Painting onto the HiRes Geometry however in good implementation has none of the limitations which got brought forward. iI would essentially open up all what one currently can do in 3DCoats Paint-Workspace.

That's proven and being used for several years already.

That's the only thing I would like to contribute, I'll not take part in further discussion.

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I am reading this discussion with sadness. I was busy a lot of time with optimizing speed, making different tools more finished, fixing bugs from Mantis. Last weeks I was working over retopo room - not new feature but making symmetry to work in more logical way. Sometimes I was picking some time to do something new, but not often. And at least I picked now some time to one step to V4... Possibly I should stop to post to twitter anything but what is already finished.

Regarding improvements - I do first what I know how. You may require AO 100 times but if it is not easy on this stage of development - I will not do it because AO that you require is ray tracing based, I will need to move to raytraced render... or get really smart idea. Or 32 bit color or else... I do what is easy on this stage.

Regarding speed - it will be never enough. I spent a lot of time for this but have no idea how to do it again without spending months.

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Don't be sad Andrew, I, for one support what you are doing.I think this painting feature is another step in the right direction.Keep doing what you're doing, remembering you can't please everybody all the time.

Painting could be good for multi part voxel pieces or for simple things like painting logos or lettering on things like this.

18,000,000 tris. so far.Performance is great.

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Andrew, yes please do not be saddened... You know these discussion seem to crop up whenever a new feature is planned or talked about. Many in the last several postings had very positive comments about poly-painting, Even my poking fun at us all posting on page 27 addresses the issue of the this discussion over a simple tweet of yours about poly-painting.

Wow, great model, tree321

AbnRanger, your postings are intelligent and well thought out, but I do have to disagree that poly-painting is a novelty.

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Poly-Painting as stated before is great for illustration work. The details stay very sharp and you can see very small details that you could not capture even in a 8096 x 8096 texture map. Sharp edges are not handle very well with auto-retopo. If I create a complicated hard surface model for an illustration, I do not see the need to through the tedious manual retopo process to complete the illusration. Poly-Painting would free me from that process. I believe there are a large number of artist who would use it for that purpose...

Pre-polygon voxel sculpting changed our workflows, Do we not now sculpt in a lot cases and the build our mesh over the sculpt. This is completely different from only a few years ago. Poly-painting is only a natural extension of that process.

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We only have the best intentions in mind. I think we all want what we think is best for 3DC so we offer our suggestions. For example nice ambient occlusion doesn't need to use ray tracing. This old LightWave plugin works really well, but still works even with raytracing disabled in the render, one reason why it's so nice.

http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~goetsch/AmbOcc/

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About performance,I agree with AbnRanger,mainly for cuda.

After I switched to Linux I find performance really good,but (keep in mind that I say this without any intentions to make a debate) this Cuda stuff should really improved a bit.

Since 3dcoat started to use Cuda I changed some hardware configuration,from a 8600 gt to a a 9600 gt,after a 260 gtx and now a gtx 560 ti,and,to be honest,if I use the cuda version or the non cuda version the perfomance are really similar(I'm not saying that is equal but it's not perceptible the difference) so,imo,it's a wrong message given to customers(It's not great when you change your hardware configuration only for using with a program and after you realize that the improvements are not so many)

Anyway,from my point of view the program is improving day by day,so with the right time it will be mature enough.

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Personally speaking I think the advances over the past year have made a massive difference to 3Dcoat .

Ive been kind of off and on with 3Dcoat over the past year ,I used to use it only for retopo work as the paint room and voxels were slow and buggy.Now Ive tried 3.7 and Im very happy as I can actually use the paint room to finish my models and put that extra bling to my models.Also the voxels seem to be a lot faster and stable which is great for mechanical stuff which I see 3DCoat as the leader in the field.Zbrushs dynamesh isnt bad but the derived mesh is messy and causes a lot of poles in the mesh which aint good.

As a long time user of zbrush I think polypaint for voxels is a must have option ,being able to boolean together painted models I see as the holy grail for sculpting apps .And for those that see it as an unneeded option consider this ... imagine making a mechanical object with lots of nuts and bolts all over it.How tedious would it be to retopo and then paint the derived mesh, going to every single nut and bolt and paint each one over and over again...that is just one example.

What I think is needed is some kind of low poly mesh deform for voxels ,being able to retopo one section and use that as a cage to deform local areas would be awesome.I dont know if that is already available ?

Also being able to create curved surfaces from splines is also a must have feature ,things like birail sweeps ,extruding shapes along curves and the like to make complex models such as cars,planes etc .

just my 2c.

Andrew youre a legend.Thanks for all the great work ,Im very happy that I can now use 3Dcoat to its fullest in production.

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