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I got some serious problems in the latest build using the retopology tools. Can't create quads using Point And Faces tool, and Strokes snaps to already existing vertex and in general works a little crazy. I'm on my 32 bit laptop. Anyone else?

-> http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6367&view=findpost&p=48465

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Updated to 3.3.14 (Win only, Mac & Linux - soon)

- I disabled possibility to transform volume in proxy mode from surface to voxels to prevent loses. It changes nothing in workflow but prevents random loses while working with proxy.

Aaaaah, thank you, I can now use the proxy function without worrying of losing hours of work because I acidently pushed enter by habit (surface to voxel) :)

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I'm curious what you mean by "semi realtime". The painting always been fully real time for me going back to the first version I bought early in the 2.x era, only the displacement had a slight delay (when you let go of the brush), but now that's real time too.

Well Phil, last time I've tried it (it's been a couple months and considering 3DC's dev speed this is a long time :)) there was a sensible delay between the UV-viewport stroke (which's 100% realtime) and the stroke actually showing up in the 3D view. With well laid out UVs it's quite handy (for instance, to get perfectly aligned color stripes) to brush on the UV view while you keep looking at the 3D-view result, that's why I keep both views tiled side-by-side all the time in the paint room. Anyways, maybe my experience it's just another side effect of the sluggishness of the paint tools in general.

If there are no points in pen then you will be able to add quad.

Yes, it was changed in all retopo tools to get better control over points picking. Agree, it may be unusual on the first glance, but if you know this rule... it will help a lot to get better control.

All this "brush radius controlling pinpoint operations" concept is kinda disorienting tbh. I found it by mere accident and it has led to needless additional frustration - having to increase and decrease brush size just to carry out this or that operation. I've also read a couple comments from users that think the software is bugged because of it. It makes little-to-no sense when you're using a single-item-picking operation and have to watch your brush size. Worst case currently is when you try to split an edge and have to lower the brush size until it fits the middle of the edge to pull it off. Now, I thought points-and-faces wasn't even working, since I couldn't for the life of me use it to create quads while working yesterday, then I read here that it's just a case of reducing the brush size again? Oh my.. :( It's not as if we can keep the brush size to one, since we generally need to smooth and brush-nudge poly areas. I know the previous behavior was very inaccurate and shaky, but there must be a better option. Maybe a toggle between both? :unsure:

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At least it I know it wasnt just me being stupid now. Yeah I think it might be better if it just had a slight radius round the center of the brush where it jumps to the vert instead of being dependant of the brush size. I think Wings3d and Silo has that sort of behaviour.

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All this "brush radius controlling pinpoint operations" concept is kinda disorienting tbh. I found it by mere accident and it has led to needless additional frustration - having to increase and decrease brush size just to carry out this or that operation. I've also read a couple comments from users that think the software is bugged because of it. It makes little-to-no sense when you're using a single-item-picking operation and have to watch your brush size.

I was one of those users, using the Strokes tool the stroke would snap to any geometry that fell inside the brush radius. I figured this was a bug and reported it. It would be a pain to check the brush size every time I use this tool.

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I was testing the new turntable tool and noticed the same thing I noticed when I was rendering them out myself. When you render animation it is extremely slow. For example with my current model the real time render or just hitting the Render button without real time takes about 20 seconds before it looks good. However with animation or the new turntable tool it's about 2 - 2.5 minutes per frame and that's with the number of rays set just high enough to look nice. It's also very difficult to get out of it. I could sit here hitting Esc. repeatedly for a good 10 minutes before it eventually stops.

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At least it I know it wasnt just me being stupid now. Yeah I think it might be better if it just had a slight radius round the center of the brush where it jumps to the vert instead of being dependant of the brush size. I think Wings3d and Silo has that sort of behaviour.

Yeah...in order to make clean up less of a hassle with trouble spots, usually when relaxing or subdividing the Retopo mesh, I asked Andrew if he could enable us to select a vertex anywhere on the mesh. In Max, Maya, etc...people coming from these programs expect to be able to select verts from any angle (with the option to disable selection of backfacing elements). So the answer was to allow a vert within a given distance of the cursor to be selectable, no matter where it is on the mesh. The way it was happened to be a major PITA when trying to clean up the occasional rats nesting that would occur (especially on relatively dense meshes). Many times you'd have to fight with the program to find an angle where you could get to the stray vertices. You still can't seem to be able to select a vert that dips beneath the voxel model. You have to turn the voxel object's visibility off, first. At least we got the Vox Tree in the Retopo Room to do that more quickly.

So if Andrew can make that based on a fixed distance from the center of the cursor, that could perhaps fix the problem. That way it's not dependent on brush radius

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I was testing the new turntable tool and noticed the same thing I noticed when I was rendering them out myself. When you render animation it is extremely slow. For example with my current model the real time render or just hitting the Render button without real time takes about 20 seconds before it looks good. However with animation or the new turntable tool it's about 2 - 2.5 minutes per frame and that's with the number of rays set just high enough to look nice. It's also very difficult to get out of it. I could sit here hitting Esc. repeatedly for a good 10 minutes before it eventually stops.

I tried, but speed of rendering is the same if I rendering animation or rendering manually...

Try to render turnable (animation) while being in render room.

And it could be goo to get the model to reproduce the problem.

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3.3.14

I have problem with Add/Split in retopo , sometimes it works fine and let you cut anywhere and sometimes it snaps to vertexes and it's impossible to get rid of this vertex snap (like I want to cut in the middle of edge)

Looks like snapping to vertex in this tool is too strong if edge length is small, maybe there should be snap strength option for this tool.

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3.3.14

I have problem with Add/Split in retopo , sometimes it works fine and let you cut anywhere and sometimes it snaps to vertexes and it's impossible to get rid of this vertex snap (like I want to cut in the middle of edge)

Looks like snapping to vertex in this tool is too strong.

Snapping to vertices depends on pen radius, so you may control better what do you need - edges or vertices.

Actually it is helpful only in Add/Split, so this behavior will be removed from other tools to avoid misunderstood.

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I tried, but speed of rendering is the same if I rendering animation or rendering manually...

Try to render turnable (animation) while being in render room.

And it could be goo to get the model to reproduce the problem.

I've been noticing this for a long time now with any dense voxel model I've tried. The current one (below) is about 17 million tris.

I tried to record a video but the recording messed up the times. So here I made screenshots allowing it to render for exactly 22 seconds before taking the screenshot (I have a timer). You can see the realtime one is much further along than the animation rendered one in the same amount of time.

2010-09-02_0505.png

The full turntable I made took at least two and a half hours for 36 frames.

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With models thumbnails there is small issue - they are not 'interactive' at all, they don't have any mouse over animation or selected state indication (like 1 pixel white border around thumbnail to indicate this item is selected)

It would give 3DC better feeling if all thumbnails in all panels would have mouse over animation.For example in Zbrush if you mouse over any alpha,brush etc they will highlight with 1 pixel white border around them.It gives,nice interactive feeling.

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With models thumbnails there is small issue - they are not 'interactive' at all, they don't have any mouse over animation or selected state indication (like 1 pixel white border around thumbnail to indicate this item is selected)

It would give 3DC better feeling if all thumbnails in all panels would have mouse over animation.For example in Zbrush if you mouse over any alpha,brush etc they will highlight with 1 pixel white border around them.It gives,nice interactive feeling.

Why do they need to glow? If you know what you want, click it. That's just my 2 cents...I'm all for add functionality, but not so much, for frills.
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Why do they need to glow? If you know what you want, click it. That's just my 2 cents...I'm all for add functionality, but not so much, for frills.

It would be a nice touch, but it would be on one of my lowest priority list. But maybe it just takes a minute to implement, so who knows...

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Why do they need to glow? If you know what you want, click it. That's just my 2 cents...I'm all for add functionality, but not so much, for frills.

I do think mouse over feedback is a great feature to have, especially for newcomers, but I have to agree with AbnRanger when we don't even have real time progress bars!

Seriously, what the hell is with 3DCoat's progress bars?? Every artist I show 3DCoat to and that tries to use it always complain about the fact that it might take 5-10 seconds just to show the progress bars after clicking on some commands, even auto-retopo. Believe it or not, I've actually seen a bit more anxious artist hitting ctrl+alt+del to finish the application once in such a situation.. :o

Not to mention that when the operation completes before the progress bar box shows up, you get zero feedback about what happened - especially if it was an operation that led to no result, like for instance performing relax on an already relaxed island. It's just as if the program went to zombieland for a moment and then back, with no warning.. :(

You know what I've got used to do to know when the program had completed some operations? To put the mouse pointer over a different menu option than the one selected. As soon as it highlights I know the program is back to his externally-conscious state. Ouch..

That all might sound funny and minimal, but it's a serious issue that makes the program seem quite unprofessional. If the progress bar box showed up instantly for such operations, even if stuck at zero% for some time, this kind of frustration would be completely removed.

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You know what I've got used to do to know when the program had completed some operations? To put the mouse pointer over a different menu option than the one selected. As soon as it highlights I know the program is back to his externally-conscious state. Ouch..

Its funny,I use this workaround too. :)

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You know what I've got used to do to know when the program had completed some operations? To put the mouse pointer over a different menu option than the one selected. As soon as it highlights I know the program is back to his externally-conscious state. Ouch..

+1 Great minds think alike? :rolleyes:

Another problem that I find particularly annoying is the progress bar sticking at 99% finished for a longer time than than the first 98%. If the final 1% takes longer to complete than the first 99% then obviously the 99% was only 50% or less. Every time that I experience this I begin to wonder if the program has gone into an endless loop and I feel compelled to kill it and start over. The only thing stopping me is the knowing from experience that I will end up in the same place. :(

P. Monk

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Progress bars should have 'cancel' button to cancel operation if it takes too long like in autoretopo.

The problem here is that I'm not sure how well it would work. For example in the render room you can hit Esc. to cancel but I usually have to sit here hitting it repeatedly for a couple minutes or longer before it stops.

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Yes, I noticed it as well in render room, in fact I stopped to use it because sometimes I couldn't switch render off at all.I thought it's a problem with 3DC reading ESC key and reported it as a bug but it seems some operations make 3DC not much responsive.

BTW @Anrew in 3.3.14 there is a bug - Quads tool snaps to reference geometry polygon's edges.Sometimes quads draw on surface but randomly it locks and starts to snap to geometry polygon edges which is very annoying.

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I don't know much about programming but it seems as though internal stuff like calculations take priority over user input like clicks and keyboard presses.

BTW I see a problem with the new brush size issue in the retopo room. The brush size is very small for some tools which I don't like but I understand why Andrew did it. The problem is when you try to make it bigger, either with the bracket keys or with the mouse, it starts lagging behind the cursor. you can see in this little video the brush follows the cursor just fine, then I hit the ] key a bunch of times to "make it bigger" and there is a big lag. Then I hit the [ key to "make it smaller" and the lag goes away.

http://screencast.com/t/Yjc3YmM1Y2

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Progress bars should have 'cancel' button to cancel operation if it takes too long like in autoretopo.

I agree. Any operation that has a progress bar should also have a large "Cancel" button right square in your face so you can hit it at any moment if it's taking too long.

The problem here is that I'm not sure how well it would work. For example in the render room you can hit Esc. to cancel but I usually have to sit here hitting it repeatedly for a couple minutes or longer before it stops.

This should be fixed. I call that a bug. It's annoyed me for a while but luckily I don't use the render feature too much.

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Density masking for the auto-retopo feature only works when importing meshes. If I try to quadrulating a voxel mesh, nothing will happen when I try to mask off areas at the density stage in the wizard. It'd be great if I didn't have to export it.

Also I noticed if you delete you retopo result and try to do it again a second time, 3dcoat becomes unstable and crashes.

Sorry if these points have been raised already, just to many pages to go through to check.

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Density masking for the auto-retopo feature only works when importing meshes. If I try to quadrulating a voxel mesh, nothing will happen when I try to mask off areas at the density stage in the wizard. It'd be great if I didn't have to export it.

Do you have any way to reproduce it? It seems to be working on my end here with various vox sculptures.

Also I noticed if you delete you retopo result and try to do it again a second time, 3dcoat becomes unstable and crashes.

Sorry if these points have been raised already, just to many pages to go through to check.

I can confirm that, it causes some instability when repeating the autopo tool. Build 3.3.14, Win7 64bit, 64bit DX CUDA version.

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Autoretopo is generally unstable, it would be great if it would be done more stable and reliable.It often crashes 3DC without warning or it never ends (it will calculate for eternity), especially with objects created by axial symmetry.

It would be great to have sharp edges modulator for autoretopo, it follows voxels sometimes to accurate and autoretopo mesh looks like smoothed without sharp edges.

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