ohiovr

Andrew, Will cuda support in 3d coat 3.0 accelerate common painting operations or will it be only for voxel painting? I would really like to paint on my 10 million poly models at 30 fps or better right now I'm getting about 6 updates per second.

Ha.. 3dcoat does this already. I should rtfm more. hold ctrl on pens to paint them randomly nice.

remove curve control point anywhere (not just the last control point) along with changing the size of a curve point it would be helpful to be able to change the depth effect of the pen on a control point. anim (sequence) brush (paint with film loop brushes) random sequence brush (like an anim brush but random instead of sequence), good for plastering a ceiling, making grass, all sorts of things. user made database of custom brushes and strips on 3d-coat.com more procedural textures (example fbm noise) marque, lasso, texture selection tools, magic wand, stuff like that. blur tool, (sponge) image filters especially Gaussian blur hide curves behind geometry option for interactive gl and dx views some times it gets a little hard to see what I'm doing. uninstaller does not delete custom files like brushes strips materials or installer will automatically find those files in folders and add them to interface. Sometimes 3d coat will bug out and do something that I can't fix with the config menus and I have to reinstall. I end up having to re add all the content I've added up to that point. more control over specular layer information like replace value. Right now layers can only add to each other. I would like to have the ablity to paint to replace values just like with the depth channel. Specular and reflective shading at the same time / specular and reflection layer elements. Yeah I know specular and reflection are one and the same physical property, but not in programs like lightwave. faster depth painting, I'm getting interaction of about 4 updates per second when painting depth on 10 million polygon objects. Any optimizations would be greatly appreciated! Maybe when I get an i7 this won't be much of an issue for me but any improvement in this area in the meantime would be great. I'm currently using a 1.8 ghz core 2 duo, not exactly top of the line. thanks for all the improvements, 64 bit support was a surprise and hugely appreciated!! I'll buy the next version even if it doesn't have this stuff but it would be super if it did have some of these especially blur and more specular channel control.

Slightly improved hair (still working on it) 3dcoat was very handy in making the hairline. I don't know how I'd get by with out it.

64 bit support now for free! SUPER! Thanks! I look forward to 3.0

First of all I didn't model the head object, that was provided by make human. All I did was remap the textures in 3dcoat and apply a fast skin material to it. I think I might tweak the skin texture at some point. But for now it works. This is my first attempt at using fiberFX. I'm disappointed that the guides in layout aren't sufficient to part hair but on the other hand a buzz cut would be more likely on long missions anyway. I think the hair line could be improved it looks too much like a helmet head.

Thanks a lot akira! I will give it a try

That is pure awesomeness!

That's looking really nice akira! I am trying to get skin to look realistic here too and I've failed miserably. Could you share how you got the base color for your skin? Did you construct a 3dcoat texture material out of a photo? Or did you just work with solid colors?

I've got a make human head that I want to re texture. Make human's textures are pretty good (so far hugely better than my own) but I'd like to make higher resolution textures that feature beard stubble and other imperfections. With a little sub surface scattering make human's textures are nice.. here is a render of it out of the box with lightwave's fast skin material: My strategy has been to take pictures of my face with my 4 megapixel camera with flash lighting in multiple angles. With those pictures I find dissimilar areas of similar luminance and construct seamless textures. The area around the nose has a different look than the area around below the eyes. All in all I was able to make about 10 different textures from my photos. I adjusted each texture a little in hue, saturation and luminance so they blend well with each other with no striking boundaries. I then made bump map textures from the color textures ad hoc and not too carefully. So I got all my materials ready and as I start to paint them onto my make human head I'm startled as to how wrong the color is. It was all pink. This might have been because I had just washed my face to get rid of the oil that was reflecting light back from the flash before taking the source shots. So I got stock photography and tried to salvage my textures by using the match color feature in photoshop to try to get the colors looking more natural. That didn't work, the textures were too orange. Strange to me is that I'll wash my face, look in the mirror, and I'm not bothered much by any redness or pinkness in my skin. Coincidentally there is a material in 3dcoat that is just a picture of a mans face. I tried painting a little from a wide area of it onto my head model and the result from that looks all wrong too. I'd post the results but I'm embarrased by them and threw them away. I hope I'm not out of my league even trying to paint skin. Is this something a novice can hope to achieve with some persistence? Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Friggin awesome. I want a bronze cast of it

Ok. Well as a feature request I think it could be useful to be able to set an option in a layer such that specular values are overlaid (in other words over written, put on top, replaced), not added. Similar to the coolness of being able to choose blending options for color and depth properties. Throw in a few other blending modes for specular too....

For my space suit object I filled the whole suit with a max specular value. There are details I want to add to the surface of the suit that have no specular. I can tone down the specular for a brush and when I paint on the max specular coated layer the areas that I paint decrease in shinyness. This is fine. However what I want to do is add these details on separate layers. If I have a brush with no specular painting in an empty layer over top a layer with full specular no visible changes are made to the object's appearance. Does 3d coat have indepenant specular values per layer? What am I doing wrong?

quick someone get some beer to pour on it! Looks nice and slimy

Here is my first 3D coat project, a space suit based somewhat on the suits in the movie 2001: This is one of my reference pictures: view of the front: view of the back: view of the boots: The wrinkles were made with shaders.org fbm noise baked on and manipulated in 3D-coat, the suit lines were made with 3D-coats excellent curve editor. The boot stitching was made using a custom strip.

I think the $100 upgrade price is reasonable if the features are there. I bought 3D coat because of it's simple work flow and integration with Lightwave. Call me ignorant but I think the UV mapping functions are worth the 2.10 purchase price alone. I just bought the Lightwave 9.5 upgrade for $400 and that is about half the price of the full version. Will I upgrade 3D coat? That depends more on features (would I use them) than price (within reason, I won't pay $1000 for an upgrade I simply can't afford it). I've tried Bodypaint, Mudbox and zBrush and I like 3D coat better so I'm not thinking of buying those packages because 3D coat got too expensive. But I have to say the low price of the software was definitely a plus. I am amazed that only one programmer made this software. I hope Andrew can draw up enough capital to hire another programmer about as talented as himself. 10, 12 hour days can be extreme even if it is something you like to do.

Ah! thank you!

Hi Andrew, Great program you've got! I've got a request. I'd like an eyedropper tool for selecting a color or specular. That would be very handy. Thanks!

Do you mean to say it has already been implemented?

Every time I get a new 3d program I have to learn it's way of navigation. After using 3d coat for a few days and going back to lightwave it took me a few minutes to get used to lightwave's navigation again. There is nothing wrong with 3D coats navigational hot keys its just that it is different than other programs. I would really like a button that would say "emulate lightwave navigation hot keys" or something to that effect to make navigation in 3d coat the same as in lightwave. It would also be a good idea to have other buttons like "emulate maya navigation hot keys" and max and silo and blender etc etc. I wish all programs would have the ability to do this for sanity sake. BTW, if this isn't in the works does anyone know if I can change lightwave's navigation keys to be like 3D coat's? I know this request has been posted before. Consider this another vote for the feature. Please inform if this can already be done in the current build, I couldn't find the method in the manual or in the interface. Thanks

I think I am catching on. I've noticed that low subdivision amounts display jaggies even on the color channel. It appears that all drawing on the model is in reality vertex color painting and some kind of interesting translation occurs in the low poly view. I've noticed that a 4k x 4k texture created with a .3 million polygon subdivided object is going to look a lot worse than a 10 million poly object with a 2k x 2k map, even in the color channels. It would be nice if those in between vertices got intermediate values. Look at the difference between photoshop text and 3d coat text: 3d-coat: photoshop: I did not scale the images. You can see some pixel blending in the 3d coat image but it really isn't anti aliased, just blurred a little. I really like this program (I just bought it today). So I have a lot to learn.

I think the xbox 360 uses a three core cpu IIRC

I'm surprised to find the words 'anti aliasing" missing in this message board. Am I missing something? I'm new to this software. Everything I draw has big nasty jaggies at 2k res. It should be blurry before jaggy. I'm going to have to work at the highest possible resolution and step the image down in photoshop with bicubic resizing to get the results I want. Are there plans on having anti aliasing implemented in a future version? Seems kind of important...