AbnRanger

Bake to the Paint Room, and you can use the basic sculpting tools in the TWEAK room to smooth parts of that mesh.

Yeah, I've been asking for a PATH DEFORM option (for the Pose tool) for a while now. It would be especially helpful for modeling vehicles where you need more nuanced control.

That would be awesome.

Was that really necessary...to start hurling personal insults? You can disagree with my points without that. I gave a solid basis as to why your arguments have been heavily skewed in favor of ZBrush. Because you highlight shortcomings you perceive in 3DCoat yet fail to mention or consider ANY shortcomings in ZBrush. It too has limitations in each different mesh type and workflow...and it too requires a number of "work-arounds." My point is that if Zbrush requires workarounds, to deal with different mesh types, why is it only a problem w/ 3DCoat? If you need to periodically snap the Quad/Retopo mesh with the brush, why is that such a hassle...and having to lose SubD levels + Sculpt Layers and base mesh, in order to convert to Dynamesh > use ZRemesher not a hassle? I personally like 3DCoat's approach better. You don't. Fine. We can agree to disagree. The reason ZBrush is so entrenched is because they carved the digital sculpting niche years before anyone else came along; and being the first meant practically everyone in the industry heard how great it was and started using it, because there was no alternative. That gave them not only a huge head start before Mudbox, then 3DCoat came along. If Mudbox had been the first, it probably would have created an entrenched market foothold and would have been the dominant sculpting app at this point. Taking on an entrenched market leader is extremely difficult. Just ask AMD. The goal of 3DCoat isn't market dominance in the area of sculpting and probably never will be, but to provide extremely competent tools in the areas of Sculpting, Retopo, UV and Texture Painting. Just being very close to ZBrush is sufficient for a lot of artists, especially those who don't particularly like ZBrush's odd UI, or like me, who choose not to use it much because it has no 3dconnexion device support. I find it hard to work in any 3D app without one. It feels like working in Photoshop with a mouse. Being in the same conversation as ZBrush, when the topic of digital sculpting comes about, is actually a pretty solid achievement for Andrew, considering how far it's come, and the fact that 3DCoat doesn't specialize just in Sculpting or just in Texture Painting. He has to spread the development time and effort and doesn't have a tenth of the staff Pixologic has.

Very cool stuff.

See, that's what I'm talking about. You skew your argument in favor of ZBrush, by dismissing it's limitations and workarounds, while magnifying and exaggerating those you perceive 3DCoat to have. That's precisely why this discussion is going nowhere. I've already shown video tutorials on how to get the most out of Conform Retopo, and it mentions that it only works with....LARGE SCALE TRANSFORM TOOLS (by design).....which is what you NEED it for. You don't need it for most brush sculpting edits. All you have to do for brushing is periodically hit a hotkey to instantaneously switch to the Retopo Room > tap the area you brushed (3DCoat Projects/Snaps the quad mesh to the changes) with the BRUSH tool and in 3 seconds flat you are done. Knowing you can work this way and totally bypass the Retopo stage, means you only have to model ONCE. No piddling with ZRemesher a half a dozen times > Retopology > Export to Substance Painter for texturing. You can do all that in 3DCoat, in a fraction of time.

Thanks Andrew. There was a reported bug regarding new HDRI panoramas being converted to greyscale.

On the contrary. It was a complete bashfest of 3DCoat before I chimed in. I simply wanted to give 3DCoat a fair shake. That's it. It's a LOT better than you let on. I really like the CONFORM RETOPO feature, whereas you and others criticize it. Why? Because I can take a model done in a host app like Max or Maya, with proper topology for animation/game engines, and have it conform to all the sculpting edits I make....rather than having to convert the same low poly mesh to dynamesh > dynamic tessellated mesh > Zremesher > dynamesh > Zremesher > Projection > Manual Retopo. In 3DCOoat, I don't have to fool with all of that! The same low poly mesh I imported can be the same mesh I bake to, and all the time it's being shaped/conformed to all the proportional and surface changes I may make (in the Sculpt workspace). Just because that quad mesh is in the Retopo Workspace means practically nothing. THAT IS A FASTER WAY TO WORK! Especially when you factor in the use of a 3DConnexion device (it's easy to discard its importance if you don't use one, but that doesn't make your claim valid, because you don't realize what you are missing). We are talking about an hour each day, shaved off, not having to stop > navigate > stop navigate thousands of times per day. Being able to add PBR textures and sculpt at the same time on your high poly mesh...rather than having to export the model out to Substance Painter also saves a lot of time. But you never factor that into your criticism.

I am starting to think it could be incredibly useful for hardsurface work, too, because with modeling tools added, it could let users create easier and cleaner bevels and such, plus quad booleans with a lot less calculations, etc.

If you prep your low poly model properly before importing it into 3DCoat, it won't need a super high resolution. That's where we differ. There is a right way to work in 3DCoat and a wrong way. When you know that, one can work a lot more efficiently than you claim. When I saw how you were using CONFORM RETOPO MESH, I just had to stop. You said "It's very problematic...this just doesn't work right....I know you know a lot about 3DCoat, have a good deal of experience and have contributed a lot, but it wasn't working right because you weren't using it right. You don't use Conform Retopo Mesh with two completely different meshes and completely different shapes. That's begging for problems.

I understand that, but CONFORM RETOPO is actually a feature I requested of Andrew so we would have a means of having a Quad mesh conform to the Sculpting changes we might make, and it works really well for me. It was never intended to make two different meshes with totally different shapes, conform. I just had to say something the moment I saw that. I don't think it's fair to Andrew to claim it doesn't work well when it's not being used properly. None of the video tutorials showing how CONFORM RETOPO works, demonstrates it being used that way. Can we at least agree on that much? I'm coming around a bit, but not because I think 3DCoat falls short the way you think it does. It's mainly because I think it could be a great asset to poly-model with, right in the Sculpt Workspace. Still, it would be a massive undertaking and I'm not sure Andrew would be willing to do that.

If it has UV's AND texture already on it (which is a somewhat rare case because it reverses the normal workflow), there is already a decent workflow for that. In these videos it shows how you can do just that, and still keep your UV's and textures.

Bottom line is this....if you don't prep your model (with supporting edgeloops around hard edges and details) BEFORE IMPORTING into the Sculpt Workspace, you make your job that much harder. The technique I showed above (using Voxels to fix subdividing problems) is a usable "work-around" for dealing with a model that isn't prepped properly.

I tried to show new users how to properly import low poly meshes, especially uber low poly meshes, and it works. The best practice is to PREP YOUR LOW POLY ASSET BEFORE IMPORTING INTO THE SCULPT WORKSPACE. It's a lot easier to do that than for Andrew to spend a year developing a quad SubD mesh option. The other issue is you try to use a bad example to demonstrate supposed shortcomings of the CONFORM RETOPO MESH option. You bring in two completely different mesh states, with entirely different poly counts and shapes. That is using the tool in a way it was never intended. Subdivide the mesh the way you want in your host app and import the mesh into the Retopo Room > Sculpt Room go to GEOMETRY > RETOPO MESH TO SCULPT MESH. Now you have a perfect copy, one quad mesh in the Retopo Room and a Triangulated Surface mesh in the Sculpt room. If you are going to use an example to show a tool's shortcomings, please try to make it practical, and not an extreme case where few users would even attempt. Having said this, I am starting to see some practical benefits of possibly adding it in the future, as it would allow more control when modeling in the Sculpt room. Maybe after Andrew comes out with V5. I think he needs to have someone who can either bugfix while he works on the core architecture for such a feature. I hope he consolidates the Paint & Retopo Meshes into one unified mesh (he could then remove the Tweak Room and remove the UV tools from the Retopo Room) in the same development effort. That way, any quad mesh in the Sculpt room would be the same Mesh that exists in the Paint and "Topo" room. All of this would take a colossal effort on Andrew's part.

Thanks for taking the time to create the video. I'm halfway through and I already have to objections. Early on, you say "This is supposed to be the equivalent to stepping up and down subdivision levels, but I disagree." How so? It uses a DIFFERENT APPROACH than traditional SubD levels, but it accomplishes the same goal. That is to reduce the mesh to a lower poly version to make Large scale edits (which are normally slow to do on higher resolutions) and still allow the user to keep any smaller details they made to the higher poly version. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. You showed an example where you import an extremely low poly mesh > INCREASE RESOLUTION. Triangulation does poorly in such cases, especially when the model is not prepped properly in one's host application, using extra edgeloops to preserve hard edges and details. If you import a prepped mesh, it will subdivide with much better results. So, it's somewhat of a bad example to show the shortcomings of an app when the user doesn't take the necessary steps to prepare the model to be subdivided. It's often the same with 3D apps in general. When you subdivided in Blender, because the model didn't really have those supporting edgeloops, it smoothed poorly as well, when subdividing it....just not as poor as Loop (Triangulated) Subdivision. In 3DCoat, this is how you would handle an uber low poly mesh on Import.