Advanced Member johnnycore Posted December 17, 2011 Advanced Member Report Share Posted December 17, 2011 Hey guys, Im currently sculpting a character, it currently has 3,6 mil triangles and my laptop is really having a hard time while my character is far from being finished.. Is there any way to speed up my workflow? I've tried chopping of the body parts and put them into different voxel layers, hiding the mesh in surface mode does not seem to gain performance either.. My laptop specs are: Intel core i5 520m nvidia Geforce 330m 1024mb 8GB DDR3 1066mhz Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member Spiraloid Posted December 17, 2011 Advanced Member Report Share Posted December 17, 2011 3Dcoat isn't really a laptop tool. for 3DC, you might want something more like.... win7 64bit 12 core,3.33 GHZ i7 GeForce GTX 580 512 Cuda Cores 24GB of RAM 1.5GB of Texture/video memory Wacom Intuos4 tablet DX11 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member johnnycore Posted December 17, 2011 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted December 17, 2011 If I had the money, I would have bought something like that.. well maybe something less overkill.. But im still a student though, will not be able to afford new hardware for a few months.. Im quite sure one can create great stuff in 3DCoat without a super computer.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted December 17, 2011 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted December 17, 2011 A few things to try if you have not done so. Run 3DCoat in DX mode or run GL mode if you have already tried DX. You can resample your voxel model to a lower voxel count. Resampling works to keep the detail you have added. The resampling is very good in the building stages of your voxel model as voxel count can increase very fast. Resample is located on the lower left side of the interface. Update video card drivers Try a non-cuda version I looked up the specs of your cpu and video card. Yes, you should be able to run well pass the 3.6 triangle count. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member johnnycore Posted December 17, 2011 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted December 17, 2011 A few things to try if you have not done so. Run 3DCoat in DX mode or run GL mode if you have already tried DX. You can resample your voxel model to a lower voxel count. Resampling works to keep the detail you have added. The resampling is very good in the building stages of your voxel model as voxel count can increase very fast. Resample is located on the lower left side of the interface. Update video card drivers Try a non-cuda version I looked up the specs of your cpu and video card. Yes, you should be able to run well pass the 3.6 triangle count. I've just tried the non-cuda version I dont really see a difference in performance, dont see much of a difference between DX or GL either.. But the resampling seems to be very usefull thanks! I can now sculpt bigger parts in voxel mode without my computer slowing down to much! In the end I might need to resample back to more voxels for the smaller details.. or do you recommend me to paint the smaller details with displacement in the paint room? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted December 17, 2011 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted December 17, 2011 Ok, a couple of ways to go here depending upon what version of 3DCoat you are using. Displacement for the details in the paint room. Good choice with a 4096 x 4096 texture map, though in the end the texture map size depends on what the final model is going to used for and distance from camera. Surface mode with beta tools enabled for the details. I would not use for production work as there is still some bugs in LiveClay and remove stretching in the beta version. Andrew and Raul are doing a good job of hunting them down and squashing them. It takes alittle while to figure out what combination of LC and regular surface mode brushes work good together. Be sure to have a saved backup version of your voxel model before switching to surface mode. Surface mode is faster than voxel mode. Since you are having trouble right now with voxel count, once you switch to surface mode you could not go back to voxel mode without losing your fine details created in surface mode. You do not have to go back to voxel mode to retopo and merge your model into the paint room. Here is link to a test I did when liveclay first came out. The candle stand shows LC details, the others images in the post are just non-detail doodles so far. Much as been in improved in LiveClay since I made the stand... http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8707 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member johnnycore Posted December 17, 2011 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted December 17, 2011 Yea I've seen this one, I love the amount of detail! I stopped using the LiveClay because when I go back to voxels the geometry looses some detail.. but now I see I can go to Retopo without going back to voxels first.. wasnt aware of this.. thanks! I think I also will be painting some displacement, too bad I got the educational version which allows me 2k maps at max, I think I can squeeze a couple of those by using multiple UV's.. First I will look at how far I can get with the help of LiveClay.. Once again, thanks for the tips! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted December 17, 2011 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted December 17, 2011 Spiraloid is right in the sense that you are going to reach limits faster on a laptop than you would a newer desktop. However, last year I bought Lenovo laptop that had the i7 and a decent ATI card, I bumped up the RAM from 4GB to 8GB, and for the most part, it rocks. Could get upwards around 20mill fairly easy without any major slowdowns. However, in your case, the memory is good enough to get a lot done and the card is ok, but the i5 IN LAPTOPS (only) is just a dual core CPU. You have to do your research on your machines. A lot of claims are made and oftentimes, it's just a ruse (marketing reasons, of course). Another example is the graphic card naming convention. Now back to Voxels. When you separate your layers, you NEED to cache them in order to save on memory. Just hiding them won't help. It's the 3rd little icon (to the right) on each layer. I'll make a little video on optimizing performance in the Voxel Workspace, and post it soon. In the mean time, use the Multi-Res workflow: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member johnnycore Posted December 17, 2011 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted December 17, 2011 Yea im using this all the time, it works for the bigger shapes but not on the smaller details, in my experience. But I dont really understand how it is multi resolution? You are only able to swap between two different resolutions am I right? About my laptop, I've bought it 1.5 years ago for my college back then it quite expensive it really was one of the better laptops at the price I could pay.. I will be getting new hardware somewhere in April, but for the time being I will have to work on this machine.. edit: Sorry my mistake, I tought this was the video from the 3dcoat website.. this one seems to be a tutorial/manual kind of video, its actually quite usefull thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member johnnycore Posted December 17, 2011 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted December 17, 2011 The multi-resolution workflow seems to speed things up significantly.. there were some things I did not know before watching the video you posted, I will definatly use this more in depth! Many thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philnolan3d Posted December 19, 2011 Report Share Posted December 19, 2011 I'll second the LiveClay idea. On my current head sculpture it was done entirely on my 2007 laptop. I have enough polys for fine details like lip texture but very few polys on the back of the head where I don't need them. There are still a few small bugs but for now I've been able top work around them I'm sure they will be fixed soon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member johnnycore Posted December 19, 2011 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted December 19, 2011 I'll second the LiveClay idea. On my current head sculpture it was done entirely on my 2007 laptop. I have enough polys for fine details like lip texture but very few polys on the back of the head where I don't need them. There are still a few small bugs but for now I've been able top work around them I'm sure they will be fixed soon. And your head sculpture is made with help of liveclay? How many polygons did you have on the head? Im working on a full body sculpt, when I have 10 mil poly's I can still sculpt very smoothly on small sections of the body such as the hands, head, and feet.. but when using a bigger brush sizes its slowing down my laptop alot.. but the multi resolution trick seem to help me with this.. I might try the LiveClay when I get home, on a demo of the Mac version at my work I dont seem to have the LiveClay somehow.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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