3D-Coat 3.3 updates thread

[philnolan3d]

I'm still hoping the Voxel room gets renamed to 'Sculpt', the old sculpt room gets removed entirely, and the new sculpt room gains the ability to work seamlessly with polygon and voxel meshes. Drastic I know, but think about it for a moment.

Can anyone explain to me why you wouldn't do this? What use is two sculpt rooms when there's only one Andrew? surely he would surely find it easier to deal with changes to just one consistent room. I mean that's what's happening anyway, right?

The current Sculpt room allows you to work on a model you've imported from another app without converting to voxels first. So you can export it back out with the same topology you already had.

[AbnRanger]

Mudbox is a detailing program. The idea is that you're supposed to create your base mesh in Max or Maya and then take it into Mudbox for detailing.

I think what he may be talking about is the fact that you need one mesh with evenly spaced poly's to sculpt with in MB or ZB and then you need another mesh that has edgeloops properly placed for clean deformation when animating. So, that at least means considerable topology adjustments if not retopologizing another mesh altogether.

Compare that to starting a model from scratch (with freeform primitives and or the Curves tool) in voxels, and retopologizing your mesh for animation...or build your base mesh with edgeflow that suits animation and import that into the Retopo room. Either way, you still only deal with topology ONCE, and the detailing work you do in Voxels is the same you'd do in MB or ZB. It's just as efficient if not more so, in my opinion.

[splodge]

Splodge, I really surprised to hear that level of cynicism over Voxels and the Retopo tools, coming from you. I get frustrated too, sometimes...but I have to say, in practice, it makes a LOT of sense to utilize Voxels for sculpting. The ability to trim and cut away sections of an object, with no concern for topology is phenomenal. And wasn't it you that informed me some time ago that you could import your base mesh into the Retopo Room and essentially use that as your Retopologized mesh? Now that you can temporarily disable Auto snap, any major deformation changes done in the Voxel Room, you can re-adjust your mesh to fit in the Retopo room.

Voxels are great. It's the Retopo part that I'm not happy with.

What's changed for me is that I've become dissatisfied with 3D Coat's decimator and quadrangulate options. So now I'm left looking at the retopo room and asking myself why? What's the point? Why don't I just go and create my mesh elsewhere? Wouldn't it be quicker and easier?. Of course voxels free us from the problems of topology, but once you've created your voxel model then it's off to spend several hours in topology hell (retopo). There's no escape. If anything there's more topology to deal with when painting quads onto voxels.

[splodge]

I think what he may be talking about is the fact that you need one mesh with evenly spaced poly's to sculpt with in MB or ZB and then you need another mesh that has edgeloops properly placed for clean deformation when animating. So, that at least means considerable topology adjustments if not retopologizing another mesh altogether.

Compare that to starting a model from scratch (with freeform primitives and or the Curves tool) in voxels, and retopologizing your mesh for animation...or build your base mesh with edgeflow that suits animation and import that into the Retopo room. Either way, you still only deal with topology ONCE, and the detailing work you do in Voxels is the same you'd do in MB or ZB. It's just as efficient if not more so, in my opinion.

Of course you need to create the topology at some stage. But in regular poly modelers you can create the topology as you go along. And in some cases you don't even need to touch parts of the topology. Example - you want to add an eyeball? Just add a mesh sphere and it's done. But do the same in voxels and later on you're gonna need manually turn that eyeball into a mesh in the retopo room. So very often in voxels you're applying mesh primitives to help make certain shapes and then later on you're having to manually turn those shapes back into meshes again.

[Javis]

That's what my point was earlier.

Why bother even retopologizing the eyeball? Use the tools that are going to be easiest/quickest for the job at hand.

To use your example, when I create eyeballs, I use a temp vox sphere to make sure I have a spherical eye socket. Once complete with the vox end of things, I don't even waste my time with that eyeball, I create it in my respective application (in this case Messiah or LW) and go from there. Also, I only do part of the eyelids and mouth with retopo in 3DC, because it's much easier to than go into a modeling application and create those areas in a quicker fashion.

This kind of stuff is really just a given, maybe I'm taking for granted that fact.

Anyway, the point is, voxels are good for some things, and not others. Use it for what it's good for and not waste your time on the thing it is not!

[Tinker]

Btw, making "bro quality" model with Z-brush of Mudbox assume retopology phase after all too. Your first LODs will never fit final detail satisfactorily on complicated model.

Some top row stuff even made with sculpt-retopology-sculpt, check zbrushcentral for that.

[digman]

One has to consider the artist himself and what his likes and dislikes are which color all our views, part of being human. Like myself, I really like painting, I rather paint my own models,so I have to model but its not my favorite, hence I use Hexagon. It works like I think. Now, I rather create a voxel model and retopo it than to model it in a 3D modeling program. Now, for me retopoing is not a pain sometimes tedious but modeling is the same too. I'm also like geothefaust, I will use what tool I need to get the job done. Some thing are easier to whip out in Hexagon than try to create it in voxels... We have an arsenal of programs at our disposal for whatever we need.

[jedwards]

Voxels are a godsend for this program. I do way less poly modeling upfront because of them and am really grateful to be able to use such an amazing toolset. Retopology is a necessary evil, but preferable to building meshes in 3d. Anyone who doesn't retopo by hand mustn't be doing any production or animation work that demands fine control over vert and edge loop placement. You are effectively tracing in 3d, which is faster than building a mesh by hand, and far more accurate than having to eyeball your low rez mesh to match your high rez. Any improvements and evolution of these two toolsets are welcome, as it can only make the workflow faster for me. I rarely ever need to build a base mesh first and then import it. Waste of time for me.

The biggest hurdles I have with 3dcoat these days are with the lack of decent AO baking and auto-quadrangulation. Better to send a high rez mesh over to zbrush and decimate it there at the moment. It really sucks that I can't bake a decent AO map in 3dcoat yet though. It breaks the workflow at a critical point, which means I tend to spend more time in zbrush doing detail work since I can decimate that really well and send it off to maya to bake all my maps. I'd love to do more detail work with voxels but the program needs to evolve more for that to happen.

You can do some pretty amazing hard surface work using booleans too in voxels. I think with a few more additions in this area you could build just about anything with voxels. Being able to have more control over primitives during their creation would go a long way towards making custom boolean objects and other hard surface components too. I'd like to see more modeling tools in the retopo room and have it named to something more representative of polymodeling in general. Adding primitives to this room would eliminate the above mentioned problem with having to retopo and eyeball or import external geometry. The retopo toolset is already a highly specialized polygon modeling kit. Why not expand it and allow even more possibilities. Just change the name to "modeling" or something more general.

[Tinker]

"... and succed with it. It is most important part of all voxel sculpting, I am much happier now with it's speed and quality."

Enough to tease us. Let us try

[AbnRanger]

"... and succed with it. It is most important part of all voxel sculpting, I am much happier now with it's speed and quality."

Enough to tease us. Let us try

I'm not sure the parts have come in and the engine has been put back together yet...so, I wouldn't try to rush the man.

[mocaw]

Some people want control, and some people want to be "artists" all the time I guess. Well, AFAIK, the more you relinquish control over to the auto solutions the more your work dies a slow and ugly death of looking like, and working like, all the other automated creations.

I guess some people here want "box shot" for sculpting and modeling?

Personally I like options...because nothing is perfect, and when your up against that deadline, or have a tough problem, its always nice to know there is another way to approach the problem. Nothing is perfect and nothing is fixed, so it's best to adapt and have an open mind as things progress.

So yeah...give us those great auto topology work flows etc...but let us not throw out our options so soon without a proven, field tested solution that truly does render the "old way" as completely obsolete.

[Amber]

The biggest hurdles I have with 3dcoat these days are with the lack of decent AO baking and auto-quadrangulation. Better to send a high rez mesh over to zbrush and decimate it there at the moment. It really sucks that I can't bake a decent AO map in 3dcoat yet though.

Better AO baking has been one of the most requested features for quite a long time.I hope it won't take it to 3DC 4.0 to improve it because it's really core feature and should be done as soon as possible now I have to do it in external app it would much easier and faster if I could do in 3DC.For me paint engine is slowing me down - switch layer visibility in paint mode is slow,same with layer blending modes and fill tool,big brushes etc. and it's very annoying 3DC for every uv_material is creating a separate texture I have to combine them later in 2d app there really need to be an option to have them on one texture.

if speed of paint could be fixed and better AO bake would be done it will greatly improve 3DC texturing experience.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Updated to 3.3.07 [beta] (Win+Mac, Linux - soon)

Changes

- I made multithreaded merge. The merging procedure was rewritten almost from scratch to be scalable. It works much faster, consumes very low amount of memory and produces better quality of the mesh. Also I worked couple of days over making all surface-merging-based tools like move, pose, surface->voxels transition to work clean and I hope I succeed with it. It is most important part of all voxel sculpting.

- I made possibility to choose texture resolution if you want to export ptex as usual model+texture. Look it in change local res tool.

- There is new checker in Ptex export/import menu - "Flip ptex quads" for better compatibility with renderman.

- There was lags in voxel tools when something big was changed due to Undo info saving. I made saving much faster, it speeded up many tools.

- Retopo meshes will be automatically cleaned up to avoid non-manifold topology that caused hang-ups during unwrapping and many other problems

- I made that if you are trying to save file to write protected location you will be warned to prevent loss of data.

- CTRL+SHIFT in merge tool will lead to intersection.

- Smoth with SHIFT will work correctly in Move tool.

- I made possibility to change the color of wirefrime (preferences).

- Retopo mesh will be optionally shown in render room to help in making demo reels

There was many core changes, so be careful and keep backups even if I have tested and checked all carefully.

[AbnRanger]

Updated to 3.3.07 [beta] (Win+Mac, Linux - soon)

Changes

- I made multithreaded merge. The merging procedure was rewritten almost from scratch to be scalable. It works much faster, consumes very low amount of memory and produces better quality of the mesh. Also I worked couple of days over making all surface-merging-based tools like move, pose, surface->voxels transition to work clean and I hope I succeed with it. It is most important part of all voxel sculpting.

- I made possibility to choose texture resolution if you want to export ptex as usual model+texture. Look it in change local res tool.

- There is new checker in Ptex export/import menu - "Flip ptex quads" for better compatibility with renderman.

- There was lags in voxel tools when something big was changed due to Undo info saving. I made saving much faster, it speeded up many tools.

- Retopo meshes will be automatically cleaned up to avoid non-manifold topology that caused hang-ups during unwrapping and many other problems

- I made that if you are trying to save file to write protected location you will be warned to prevent loss of data.

- CTRL+SHIFT in merge tool will lead to intersection.

- Smoth with SHIFT will work correctly in Move tool.

- I made possibility to change the color of wirefrime (preferences).

- Retopo mesh will be optionally shown in render room to help in making demo reels

There was many core changes, so be careful and keep backups even if I have tested and checked all carefully.

Thanks for all the hard work you put into this, Andrew. Is the Multi-threading CPU only or will CUDA-enabled cards be able to get in on the action (multi-threading operations)?

[Andrew Shpagin]

Thanks for all the hard work you put into this, Andrew. Is the Multi-threading CPU only or will CUDA-enabled cards be able to get in on the action (multi-threading operations)?

It i not dependent on CUDA.

[haikalle]

speed up is increadible. Thanks a lot Andrew. I think that you are ready for Siggraph

EDIT: if I start with basic voxel sphere and auto quadrangulate it. I don't see the retopoly mesh

[vil]

Andrew, the news are amazing. Multithreading and performance improvements in these core parts is exactly what I as a user want the development to be focused on, to make same stuff in shorter time :)thanks for that.

[philnolan3d]

I tested the multithreading real quick. A 16 million triangle object took only maybe 4 seconds to convert from Surface to Voxel mode and it retained the detail. Really nice!

[PalSan]

Good update

[PalSan]

Maybe now and layers can be implemented?

for Paint Room.

[PalSan]

and make brushes more accurate and better with multicore optimization

ready for Siggraph )))

[run]

The multi-threaded merge is very nice, thanks Andrew.

This is such a big step that I feel a bit guilty about asking for more, (but only a bit )

Voxel Primitives don't seem to have received the multi-threaded makeover

(or perhaps don't benefit from it greatly).

Try creating a voxel layer, increase it's resolution to 2x or 4x

and create one of the freeform primitives and you'll see what I mean.

I had hoped they'd be a part of this reworking, since at their core Primitives

do the same thing Merge does; convert a polygonal surface object to voxels.

It's actually the first function I checked, I really hope it's next on list.

(Or if it is already multi-threaded it gets some specific optimizations to boost

it's speed.)

Again; even without that, big huge step, thanks a lot!

-Jeff

[polyxo]

Quadrangulation does not work here, regardless what output-option is chosen.

No mesh gets created, the app switches to the Paint-Room which is empty.

I even did a complete new install. Anybody else seing this?

Cuda 64 Win7

[Tinker]

Awesome! Thank you, sir

Вот это обновление, прямо в яблочко! Работает великолепно!

Давно же ясно, что именно в мерже сила 3D-Coat. Воксельное моделирование - вот что покорит аудиторию на сиграфе и умы консервативных збрашеров

[run]

Quadrangulation does not work here, regardless what output-option is chosen.

No mesh gets created, the app switches to the Paint-Room which is empty.

I even did a complete new install. Anybody else seing this?

Cuda 64 Win7

I can verify this; Quadrangulation is broken in CUDA win7 64 Ultimate.

Will download non-CUDA 64, and give it a shot too, but I might not get to it for awhile.

[polyxo]

Also here objects stay in Surface Mode when switching back to Voxels.

(typical folds/spikes occur when smoothing ).

[Taros]

speed up is increadible. Thanks a lot Andrew. I think that you are ready for Siggraph

EDIT: if I start with basic voxel sphere and auto quadrangulate it. I don't see the retopoly mesh

Bug posts into the support area, please.

[polyxo]

I can verify this; Quadrangulation is broken in CUDA win7 64 Ultimate.

Will download non-CUDA 64, and give it a shot too, but I might not get to it for awhile.

Quadrangulation doesn't work here with the Non-Cuda version too.

[artman]

I made big changes on a -4xproxy of a 18 million polys sculpt,uncached,sculpted in surface mode with Large brushes for a good 5 consecutive minutes

and merging time to voxel was very very fast on my puny old quad.Dazzling improvement.

Congratulation for bringing voxel sculpting to the next level.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Re-uploaded to solve mentioned problems

+ correctly working cavity in PP mode.