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Twitter discussion: What Andrew is currently doing.


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  • Advanced Member

looks like andrew added some PTEX speed improvements and expand and contract selection for PTEX texturing, VERY necessary for PTEX work IMO. Thanks andrew...

Looks like you beat nearly the entire industry in integrating PTEX into an app other than a render engine, congrats and thanks again!!!

hoping for multithreading for merging in voxels (so my screen doesn't freeze forever when using 4X & 8X res voxels) ;-) P.S. can anyone even work with an 8X res voxel object, wish I could :-( 20gigs of RAM 8x-2.8ghz

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  • Advanced Member

4x, 8x, all depends on what you started with. If I start with a 40 triangle mesh my 1st gen iPhone would be able to handle 8x. :p

I get about 0.5 FPS on a primitive sphere increased to 8x

and and endless merge bar when attempting to take ANY of my voxel sculpts from 4x to 8x

the same results appear for me in OSX 3D coat and Win764 3Dcoat as well(different boot on same CPU)

quadcore xeon 2.8, 20gigRAM, Radeon 3870 512mb

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Well I made this test object and you can see it's currently at 34x, but it only takes up 5 million triangles. My avatar orc was around 18-20 million before I retopo'd and started painting. You can see my specs in my signature.

wow!, something seems like it could be wrong with my 3D Coat install(win and mac) or my CPU, I cant push a sphere primitive above 8x, and you can do sculpting on a 34X voxel object, something seems very wrong here...

I also want to thank you big time for taking the time to reply and test this, your help is much appreciated :-)

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I was just trying to point out that the 8x number doesn't really mean anything. I scaled up the model and the 34x dropped to 4x. What really matters is the triangle count.

thank you again for the help :-). Given your reply, may I ask what triangle count you can "max out at", meaning how high can you push it(on your system) before a merge bar will just sit there and process forever, 10mil, 15mil, 30million? I'm speaking specifically of the poly count in voxels mode(i know voxels arent polys). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

any other users that can chime in on this would also help :-) Thanks a ton

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thank you again for the help :-). Given your reply, may I ask what triangle count you can "max out at", meaning how high can you push it(on your system) before a merge bar will just sit there and process forever, 10mil, 15mil, 30million? I'm speaking specifically of the poly count in voxels mode(i know voxels arent polys). Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I can comfortably work at a 20-25 mil safezone "per layers" range and up to approx 3-5 layers + a resonable assortments of 2mil sub-layers.

Navigation is slow.But brush speed is above 60fps.

50mil trees approx.

I have an old quad with Gtx280 and 6gig ram.Nothing out of space here.

(of course at 20 mil you use small brush,its not even a limitation it is just well...the way it works.

We get perpetual even topology and crazy 3d editing tools but we need to downsize brush half each time we increase res.It is a small price to pay.Anyway,we will see multires soon in surface mode Im sure.

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I've only gone as high as about 25 million before it was just too sluggish to be usable and I moved on to retopo. I've never had it just hang like you say, I don't think.

wow, even on my win7 64bit 3Dcoat I haven't been able to get it up to 25mil, or even past 20mil(i'm pretty sure. 3D coat usually starts to get VERY slow when its RAM allocation gets around 2.7-2.9gigs, on OSX and Win7-64bit. Again I have 20gig of 800mhzDDR2 RAM, and an ssd that I have much of my win7 files read and written to. Very odd that you can push it that high, when I cant even merge in an OBJ above 20mil without the merge progress bar stalling(for over 12 hours) after about 2.7gigs of RAM is allocated to 3D Coat, and I've been trying this since V 3.1 on both OSX and Win7-64. Most 64-bit 3d/MoGraph apps easily blast past the 2.7gig RAM line well into the 8+gig territory, for me.

Odd, others(Artman as well) can push it above the 20mil line. i'm holding out for a fermi GTX480 card soon, get rid of this ATI card, although it still does a great job in most 3D apps, its a RAdeon 3870 with 512 of ram and.

Thanks for the reply Artman & philnolan3d. I'm enjoying 3D coat far more than the other sculpting apps I use, love the retopo too, however my need to merge in OBJ's at over 20 million seems to be holding things back for me :-( My OBJ's arent 20mil of course, but, to bring them in with enough res in the vox tree, I have to push it well over the 10 mil mark before I start getting the med/high level details in the exported OBJ.

Has anyone tried to merge in an OBJ with the polycount in voxel mode being over 20million, or just created objects within Voxel mode that end up being above 20mil? MAybe it just an import/merge issue with pushing the polycount that high.

I too heard the rumor of multires in vox surface mode, that would be SWEEEETT.

wish merge was multithreaded. Wonder what the memory paging in 3D Coat is like.

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  • Contributor

wow, even on my win7 64bit 3Dcoat I haven't been able to get it up to 25mil, or even past 20mil(i'm pretty sure. 3D coat usually starts to get VERY slow when its RAM allocation gets around 2.7-2.9gigs, on OSX and Win7-64bit. Again I have 20gig of 800mhzDDR2 RAM, and an ssd that I have much of my win7 files read and written to. Very odd that you can push it that high, when I cant even merge in an OBJ above 20mil without the merger bar stalling after about 2.7gigs of RAM is allocated to 3D Coat, and I've been trying this since V 3.1 on both OSX and Win7-64. Most 64-bit 3d/MoGraph apps easily blast past the 2.7gig RAM line well into the 8+gig territory, for me.

Odd, others can push it above the 20mil line, i'm holding out for a fermi GTX480 card soon, get rid of this ATI card, although it still does a great job in most 3D apps with its a RAdeon 3870 with 512 of ram and.

20 mil is a chunk...I mean its resonable to wait 10 min for it.

Try increasing virtual memory instead maybe :huh: Its just a stupid suggestion.

I have it at 20gig.

I tried it and if I remember it wasnt that long...4-5 minutes maybe

But anyway,what I mean is maybe your max is like 19mil or something :)

Its really a benchmark value,i mean the last STage..hte one in which you scult only in surfacmode.

Any realistic object can be recreated with a 10mil tree(cutting operations ect..).

any organic madness can be created withn a 10mil with brushes.

10mil head.8mil torso.2mil strap.4mil gun.8mil booths.1 mil boothsornements...ect...

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I'm curious why you need to import at such a high resolution. If I'm going to import an OBJ (or LWO in my case) I usually import at less than 1 mil and gradually increase as I need to from there.

BTW this thread is getting a bit off topic, really should be continued elsewhere if it's not about Andrew on Twitter.

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  • Advanced Member

I'm curious why you need to import at such a high resolution. If I'm going to import an OBJ (or LWO in my case) I usually import at less than 1 mil and gradually increase as I need to from there.

On my one of my current projects I'm actually using 3D Coat to import a nearly finished 3D mesh of a figure so the voxels can automatically watertight her for 3d printing, and of course do some extra sculpting cleanup in 3D Coat before exporting ;-)

The figure is complete with eyelids, fingernails, all the usual female figure details... and I cant seem to get 3D coat to import/merge her in above 20 mil, thus, details like the eyelids come in jaggy, and lacking the res I need when I go in to smooth out the jaggies. If I could just get her in there with a bit more voxel res, she might import and look closer to her OBJ exported appearance, and I would then have enough vox res to properly smooth out her eyelids.

Again, I GREATLY appreciate your help, as the whole increase/decrease density/size VS increase resolution in 3D Coat isnt as intuitive as I would like, and the manual IMO lack thorough explanation in this area(IMO).

Sorry for getting off topic, i've created threads, but not many respond(akaik) to many of the threads on the forum with this particular question, figured I'd take advantage of your wisdom while I could. :-)

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  • Advanced Member
Again, I GREATLY appreciate your help, as the whole increase/decrease density/size VS increase resolution in 3D Coat isnt as intuitive as I would like, and the manual IMO lack thorough explanation in this area(IMO).

I agree, i have had problems with slowdown in the past when increasing i think this type of stuff might be a good idea for the video manual series maybe so you have a simple mesh and it shows how to go up in quality without slowdown on most computers. It seems mostly for the voxel tools right now but commonly asked subjects like this would be great also for that if they like this idea.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • Advanced Member
More good news for my family - I finally payed 100% for new flat for my big family.
:yahoo:
Good progress on Ptex files import - I was able to open sample ptex files.

What is the main advantage of being able to save\load ptex files? Loading into a renderer?

Multiple painted versions of an object?

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From the official Ptex site:

Ptex uses a custom file format that is designed specifically for efficient rendering. A Ptex file can store an arbitrary number of textures along with mipmaps and adjacency data used for filtering across face boundaries.

If you export the textures the way 3DC does now you can end up with a lot of texture files, instead this would allow just one .ptx file. Now we just need more software packages and renderers to support. .ptx

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  • Advanced Member

has anyone else noticed Andrew's recent tweets? Looks like a new build with proper PTEX export is coming soon, not that I have a renderer or 3D app that can use the format, but cool nonetheless.

Here's to HOPEFULLY multi-res for the vox room ASAP! A feature I and many could use in our daily workflows.

Thanks for everything Andrew, hope the new flat is treating you well.

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  • Advanced Member

Regarding the post I just made previously:

I think Andrew might be playing chess... Has anyone else considered the mention of multires for the vox room with regard to the following?:

PTEX + Microverts for displacement over the voxtree layer using automatically generated UV's from PTEX = voxtree multires?

Consider how "easily" PTEX could "intelligently/automatically" subdivide for the "multires" addition in the vox room according to an average of the surrounding normals of a given poly-region for a specific "volume" of voxels(to measure the needed complexity of that given region of the PTEX map, ala localized adaptive subdivision). Genius!

Using PTEX and an average of the surrounding normals of a given vox point in worldspace you could get automatic/"intelligent" subdivision or decimation of a PTEX region (based on how the user is sculpting that particular region of the vox tree layer) for adding a "dymanic" microvert layer on top of a voxtree layer for... ta da Multires in the voxroom!!!

My apologies if this sounds like a wild 3DC laden rant ;-) I wonder, doth Andrew partake in the tactical-style of application development? Hmmmm

Please Andrew, multires in the vox room soon! I need high detail meshes with the dynamism of voxels if you can do it, and we know you can :-)

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@ifxs

Are you talking about a ptex'd multi-res sculpt-able poly "skin" that conforms to the outer generated triangular mesh of the voxel volume? :blink:

I am indeed kind sir, just a concept that could be a conceptually working candidate for multires in the vox room, using the method i described you would be able to use PTEX IN THE VOX ROOM for microverts displacement, conceptually

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That sounds very intriguing. Conceptually speaking, there would be a mechanism to preserve already multi-res-sculpted areas while allowing new areas to be added from additional voxel sculpting?

If we could generate the poly "multi-res ptex'd skin" layer (create and modify in retopo room) to allow for specific poly flow would be useful. In essence, retopo the voxel volume, attach the retopo polys to the voxel volume, the poly's would then follow the surface changes of the voxels. If holes were created in the voxel volume, just recreate the mesh of that area in the retopo room.

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  • Reputable Contributor

Yes, sometimes it hard to understand the short twitters. I think the snapping tool is really a just a part snapping in general anyway. As is right now any tight polygon areas(number of vertices close together) and you get a mess in that area which you already know. This is really true if you resnap as you sculpt in those areas. Any improvements would be a big help.

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I hope that Andrew implements a parallel version of "Surfacing" tools in the Sculpt Room, so that any work that is done in one is mirrored in the other. Multi-Res in both would be great.

Likewise! Bring it on Andrew. :brush:

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