Member run Posted January 14, 2010 Member Report Share Posted January 14, 2010 Andrew, Switching to Voxel/Surface mode on a layer is instant, which makes sense since I believe what we're viewing on screen is a polygonal tesselattion of the voxel field's surface. But if any edits are done in Surface mode switching back to voxels can take a very long time at higher voxel resolutions. I've noticed that this conversion is single threaded. (At least it is on Win7, I haven't checked the Linux threading yet, though Linux "feels" faster). Is there anyway this could be made multi-threaded? This particular slowdown probably happens many places in the program; the merge functions, the new freeform primitives, etc., so any speed improvements would have wide ranging benefits. Thanks, Jeff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member asche Posted January 14, 2010 Member Report Share Posted January 14, 2010 yes, thats a good point ... i am getting quite frustrated in the last couple of days too .... sculting something with 10-15 mio triangles and switching from surface to voxels mode takes like 15-30 minutes ... doing retopo and merging into the scene takes FOREVER ... even making the retopo and drawing splines over the surface and making faces takes more than 45 minutes! (i dont know how long it would take, i tend to shut down the app, because there is not so much time left for that project) i have to dump 3dcoat for the moment and use mudbox for that project, there 50-100 mio polys dont seem to be a real problem ... thats sad! i would really love to see speed improvements in these areas ... maybe concentrate on speed for the next stable release ? (if anyone wonders about my system : i7, 2.67ghz, 12 gb ram, nvidia gtx 285) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taros Posted January 14, 2010 Report Share Posted January 14, 2010 I am using Win7 too and checked the issue. Unbelievable: The complete surface mode works really singlethreaded, the back to voxels conversion, too! What would happen if this mode would work multithreaded? Imagine this... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted January 14, 2010 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted January 14, 2010 I noticed that merging into scene in the retopo room while in surface modes takes quite a bit longer than merging into scene in voxel mode. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member asche Posted January 16, 2010 Member Report Share Posted January 16, 2010 i am getting more and more the impression that the main area of improvements should be speed for the next couple of betas ... working in one mode is much fun ... sculpting in voxels is the best sculpting experience i have ever had ... switching from voxels to surface mode is almost instantly ... back though, is a pain! even sculpting in voxels with a small brush is quite fast with about 4mio triangles ... but increasing the brush size by 50% suddently makes everything unusable ... not like one would expect, gradiently getting slower ... i made a test and exportet a 2.5 mio triangles mesh from the surface mode, a 100mb .obj file ... it takes 3.45 minutes to open in mudbox, using 250 mb ram ... at over 1 hour and 22 minutes gone now i am still waiting for it to be imported in 3dcoat, using 4 GB ram at the moment ... converting such a mesh into voxels again (because sometimes i am getting very weird spikes in surface mode that can hardly be smoothed out, so i have to switch back) is almost impossible ... putting such a voxel sculpt in retopo room, exporting it into the painting room with something like 200k polys takes forever too ... i can hardly stress it enough, that these things make 3dcoat look far inferior to programs like mudbox (cant use zbrush, my brain wont accept the UI), despite all the glory of the 3d coat sculpting tools ... if i sound like a broken record please shut me off Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Member howitzer Posted January 17, 2010 Member Report Share Posted January 17, 2010 I don't think there is anything wrong with being a broken record in these circumstances. Speed is a major issue... surface mode is extremely useful, but the conversion speed is a pain. But considering how fast as Pilgway release patches, I don't expect this to be a problem for long. Until then though, don't feel guilty for reminding them about it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taros Posted January 21, 2010 Report Share Posted January 21, 2010 To pilgway: This issue is really important. Please, don't forget it. Maybe not for the 3.2 release, but it would help a lot to have more speed while voxel<->surface mode conversion. Best wishes Chris Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member 3DArtist Posted January 21, 2010 Advanced Member Report Share Posted January 21, 2010 One idea that could help speed up the conversion is an option to merge only frozen (sf.Freeze tool) areas on surface to voxels. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Taros Posted January 21, 2010 Report Share Posted January 21, 2010 One idea that could help speed up the conversion is an option to merge only frozen (sf.Freeze tool) areas on surface to voxels. It would accelerate the progress already, if the routine would use all cpu cores and not only one single... But it is a good idea to remember where changes were done and convert only this parts to voxels. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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