AbnRanger

Are you talking about the FREEZE brush/button in the SURFACE BRUSHES section of the tool panel? If so, yes, you can use it, because when using Surface Brushes, 3DCoat temporarily suspends the voxelization process and the user is merely working on the outer mesh (that would normal adapt to changes in the voxel volume). Keep in mind, though, that once you create a mask (using the Surface brushes FREEZE tool), you will lose that mask IF you switch to a Voxel Brush. As long as you continue using Surface brushes, the mask will remain intact. This video will help explain a lot of that:

Yes, the Freeze brush/Freeze Selections do not work with Voxel brushes....because it is a completely different paradigm/platform than polygonal/surface sculpting. The VOX HIDE tool can effectively act as a Freeze/masking tool, but to this point, Freeze masking only works with Surface mode (or with Surface Brushes while the layer is in Voxel mode. Now that we have Voxel Paint, hopefully Andrew can enable the Freeze tool to work with Voxel Brushes also. If you want this, shoot support an email (support@pilgway.com) in order to make the feature request.

I wasn't implying that you were a programmer in any way. I was just using the video as an example, to point out that hopefully Andrew can use a tool to help him identify where this bottleneck is. I made the same case to him a few years ago, that you are making now...so, we are in agreement. However, back then, Mudbox did not have the ability to paint different maps simultaneously. I don't think that is changed, but feel free to inform me if it has. If you wanted to paint color, you had to do that one channel at a time. The paint stroke (in Mudbox) might be fast (with a huge brush), but the whole painting process is not. It's terribly inefficient and tedious. In 3DCoat, you can paint with 4 separate channels (Color, Depth, Glossiness, Metalness) in one single stroke. In Mudbox, if you could paint 4 separate maps/channels simultaneously, at 4K+, you would definitely notice some performance dropoff, compared to painting one at a time. So, while I totally agree with your point about large paint brush radiuses in 3DCoat...in general, I was just trying to say that in fairness, comparing the speed between the two applications is almost comparing apples to oranges. Yes, they are both fruits and both have Vitamin C, but that is about where the comparison ends. Same thing applies with comparisons between painting performance in 3DCoat and Mudbox. 3DCoat has a much heavier load to carry (painting with 4 simultaneous channels = 4x 4K/8k maps + live PBR materials and Viewport rendering) than Mudbox. Sure, Mudbox might be fast painting one 4k or 8k color map with a huge brush, but what about painting a Glossiness Map, then a Metalness Map, and then a Normal/Displacement Map? How long would it take you to create full PBR textures this way? About 4x as slow as doing the same in 3DCoat, at least. In 3DCoat, you can paint PBR textures of a model in a single click (FILL BRUSH). In Mudbox, you cannot come even close to this; and when using a medium sized brush radius, 3DCoat's painting performance seems very robust. It just appears to drop off dramatically when very large brushes are used. Please make sure to send support an email about this topic, as Andrew is usually too busy to read through threads like this.

I am pleased to see a quick fix...but, there still seems to be a small hiccup. When hovering over the thumbnail > the individual channels appear in a small popup. In those channel thumbnails, they are still very dark. I will mention this to Andrew and see if he can fix those, too.

You are very welcome. I am glad Andrew fixed it so quickly.

Yes, I agree with you, although I do think Mudbox would not perform quite as well if it had to paint Color, Depth, Glossiness & Metalness. I would hope that Andrew could optimize the performance (especially with large brush radius'...it is actually very good, in my experience, when a medium radius or smaller is used) to where it works more efficiently, even with the CPU engine. Perhaps there is some sort of software "stress test" to see exactly where the bottleneck is occuring, when large brushes are used.

It's already reported to Andrew. Hopefully something to correct this will be in the next build.

Yeah, I have never really messed around with editing the brush alphas in 3DCoat. I tried to contact Andrew and share my screen with him, to see what he had to say, but the internet speed is very slow....thanks to Russia bombing civilian utilities.

You are very welcome. Gumroad sends an automatic email, whenever there is something downloaded, but there was no email notifying an update to the pack. By the way, the brush alphas are very dim and hard, if not impossible, to tell what type of pattern it is. For future brushpacks, would it be possible to increase the brightness of the alphas? I tried to edit one and the color layer was so faint that no matter of adjustments would brighten it. I am not sure how to edit them on my end, to change this.

I did get an email, so I think it works.

Thanks for the Brush/Alpha pack, Flavio. That is very kind of you.

I don't know why, but the Renderman integration only renders one UV set, so if a person has a model with more than one UV set, it won't render them all. I reported this multiple times to Andrew, and for a few years now, but it has gone ignored every time. If other people report this, maybe it will get noticed and the attention it needs. Renderman is too good of an asset to leave unattended like this. With that said, if you use Vertex Paint on a Sculpt Model, it will render it properly...however, really dense meshes will crash the Renderman Integration. So, don't try to throw a complex scene with 20+ million polys at it. Other major limitations is the lack of a SHADOW CATCHING Shader/Material (in 3DCoat's render room)....Renderman integration currently does not allow Interactive updates....and users cannot render a turntable with the Renderman integration like they can with the default 3DCoat Render.

Flavio, is your Brush pack available? I know so many people asked about it, in the comments to your Sculpt Sessions videos. It would be nice if the ones they see used in the videos, were made available, regardless of whether they are sold or made free of charge.

I raised the same issue with Andrew a few years ago, using Mudbox as an example in the same way. A new GPU brush engine has supposedly been in the works, in the paint workspace, but there were a few issues that had to be dealt with before it could be made available in a public build. I know the developer working on it, was asked to do some other things in the app since...like adding GPU acceleration to some of the Voxel Brushes (that had been notoriously sluggish....even though they were CPU multi-threaded). It made a huge difference in those brushes. Hopefully, the new GPU brush engine for 3DCoat will have the same kind of impact. I think Mudbox's paint engine is GPU accelerated to some degree, and perhaps Substance as well. Nevertheless, one reason why the performance is so different when using large brush radiuses, is that 3DCoat stores 4 maps for every layer, whereas Mudbox only paints one at a time. Still, I hope Andrew can dig deep into this topic and find some ways to optimize the large brush performance and the Sliders (color, depth, glossiness and metalness), even with CPU multi-threading.

I agree, but the UV room is essentially a companion workspace for the Paint Room, so to remove the UV room, he would have to merge/fuse PAINT OBJECTS with RETOPO OBJECTS. I have been asking for this for years....to better simplify the app and make it easier for new users to learn.

I am not aware of a current equivalent to Infinite Depth, but feel free to copy and paste the contents of your post to an email to support@pilgway.com. It may be something Andrew can do rather quickly. The Move tool already has a special mode, where holding the CTRL key will let the user move along the surface normals...something I use all the time. Perhaps he could put a checkbox for both in the Tool Options panel.

This is probably a result of a "fix" in build 50, relating to Missing tablet strokes after double tapping the cursor point. Maybe Andrew can fix his recent fix. 3DCoat-2022-50 Thu Nov 17 01:05:11 2022 +0200 - Fixed problems related to unicode names of the files. - Fixed problem of thin surfaces for molding tool, free period for the molding tool extended till the end of 2022. - Missing tablet strokes which start from double-tap under Windows - Constraint angle for E-mode shapes rotation with ALT+CTRL placed in preferences->Tools - Alt may rotate the E-mode shapes: ellipse, rectangle, lasso. CTRL+ALT may be used to constraint the rotation. Space moves the shape in screen space. - Fixed problem related to voxel primitives (sometimes adding had no effect) - The retopo mesh may be used as the lowest multiresolution level. - Adding the lowest multiresolution level completely rewritten to ensure good quality of details transition from low level and backward. Undo issues fixed.

Yes, Andrew has been re-working the Multi-Level Subdivision, so it was never presented as a finished product. This is part of the Beta process with any software, and especially public betas. The developers go through many reports of issues before major new features are considered "polished."

I reported this to Andrew recently, also. Hopefully he will fix it soon

No, but feel free to submit this as a feature request to support@pilgway.com

MAC builds typically are compiled after the Windows builds are released, because Andrew develops all builds in the Windows environment. Sergii takes those builds and ports them to MAC/Linux

I meant that I had suggested changing the name of the Pose tool to something more descriptive, like "Advanced Transform" or "Pose-Transform." Zbrush already has the name "TransPose" which would be the most descriptive name, but Pilgway doesn't want to copy unique terms from a competitor.

That is correct. The upgrade is basically 12 months of updates, and your permanent license simply means you can use the last version/build released within that 12 month period, perpetually. So, if you were to upgrade today, you would get all 3DCoat 2022 updates and 2023.xx (whichever is the last build on October 13 2023). I hope that clears things up a little.

I went back and re-read your previous post about this issue. Could you try one last thing? Go to the GEOMETRY menu and de-select INCREMENTAL RENDERING. When you said it was as if it was skipping frames, that instantly made me think of this issue...something I experienced randomly in the past, but multiple times in a given sculpt session. Incremental Rendering is supposed to help performance, but I think it is not noticeable on most newer systems where the CPU, GPU and RAM are relatively robust. I personally leave it unchecked on my end. I hope that helps. If not, please send this video and explanation (how to repeat it) to support@pilgway.com. In the Email title make sure to mention the word BUG. Reported bugs are supposed to get urgent priority...even if Andrew is working on something BIG (and he is...performance improvements in the Multi-Resolution workflow and Subdivision Levels).

I suspect it may be due to the very thin nature of the object. In the toolbar (top of the UI), there is a list menu to the right of AUTO-SNAP that lets the user select what type of snapping they want to use. If you experience more of these snapping problems, try a different snapping mode and see if that works correctly. I would probably try the SNAP TO OUTER SURFACE. I find these kind of snapping issues to be very rare, actually, so hopefully this will be the last time you run into such a problem.