AbnRanger

I'm not that impressed with the chips for the simple fact that the only tangible difference is "Mainstream" (aka. Budget Consumer) Graphics capability. It's not anywhere near enthusiast-level graphics, and thus doesn't provide any real value to someone using it for 3D applications and such...let alone high-end gaming. I was hoping we'd see 8-core CPU's out this time of the year, but it doesn't look like that will be happening until late 2011 at the earliest.

Thanks, Andrew. It seems to be working right so far.

Sounds like a good time to delete the options.xml file...seems to cure a lot of little quirks like this. When you click the little "+" icon in the materials pallet, you can point to images and it will load them individually. I'm not sure if 3DC stores all the brushes and materials within your pallet in RAM or if it just stores a thumbnail (creates a link to your HD). But I generally never load a whole folder in the pallet.

Painter will work. When you have multiple layers in PS or Corel, Gimp, etc., saving a JPEG, PNG, TIFF, TGA will automatically flatten/merge down all layers during the saving process. When you export a model out of 3D Coat you will get the 3 different maps (Color, Specularity, and Depth) in the same directory that you designate for your mesh (OBJ, LWO, etc.)If you have time, watch the series Greg did for his little Ghost character (for a game). You'll pick up a lot, as he goes through the whole process, from sculpting his character in Voxels, to retopology, to UV editing, to Painting and exporting.

Nice....I wonder if this might allow Andrew to introduce a new structure for representing voxels in 3DC. Instead of having to resample a containment mesh, the voxels would have texture via this sysnthesis method. I'm not sure if the potential for speed increases is great or if this would take more calculations per brushstroke and more RAM. It seems like using texture map driven shaders, you could affect the volume with the texture settings within the shader.

Yes, I think I understand. When you merge from Voxels to PerPixel Painting, you are given the opportunity to bake an Ambient Occlusion map, which is essentially captures subtle shading (shadow) details and puts them on a separate layer. You can tinker with it's contrast, opacity and such. You have 3 channels (maps) per layer (Color, Specularity, and Depth). No matter how many layers you have, upon export, 3D Coat will flatten all the Color (channel) maps into one image file, all the Spec (channel) maps into one, and the same for Depth. So, for example, if you made a little dragon and had some scales and such...when it Bakes the Ambient Occlusion map, that is what will help highlight the scales and all the little detail you sculpted. That, again, will get flattened onto your Color map. In Photoshop you can overlay the Spec map (as Screen or other similar blending mode) above the Color map, and then save it out as a PNG, JPEG or whatever format you want. Hope that helps explain things a bit better.

I understand, but if a person has to "skin" (or smooth bind in Maya) a character with these spirals, they are going to "lay hands" on the modeler who gave it to them...and I don't mean in order to bless them, either.

Well, I'm guessing you are referring to Open EXR files with those channels embedded. That is convenient for compositing purposes, but I don't know that it's all that helpful for any other tasks. I not aware of such an option in 3DC. It wouldn't be practical for direct object export, but if you wanted those channels available when rendering a turntable in 3DC, I could see why you might want the option. However, the renderer in 3DC isn't intended to be as full-featured as you would find in a major 3D application like 3ds Max. There, you can set Object and material IDs, etc. so you can access just those elements when compositing. That is way beyond the scope of 3DC's capability/purpose.

I agree on the issue with spiral edgeloops. I think it kills Autopo's usefulness. I rarely use the tool because of this very problem. It doesn't look messy, but trying to clean this up is a nightmare. The algorithm should close loops by default, regardless of whether you apply closed loop guides or not.

I sent you the model I was working on...I also noticed a memory leak (or problem with 3DC climbing in RAM usage, but as soon as you save>exit>start 3DC again and open the same scene, it's MUCH lower) that has been reported by Phil. I have noticed major differences at times, but when I try to get it on video it may not be as dramatic. I am not sure if this is a bug, or 3DC's memory dumping procedure not being optimized. Try to see if you can spot it when you run tests in the future (with Windows Task Manager open). Like the scaling, it doesn't occur all the time....just randomly.

That's odd. I've been using 260.99 for a while now. Never noticed anything. Maybe just a bad install the first time or something. I don't have that described behavior on 260.99. It's very fast until I reach a large brush radius or increase the resolution beyond a medium-high amount. That's why I try to keep the model as low res as possible for as long as I can, and only increase it as needed to move on to higher levels of detail (same approach you take in either ZB or MB). At that point, you shouldn't really be using large brush sizes, anyway. But when you do need to make large scale adjustments, working on the lower res proxy is ridiculously fast and you can generally jack up the brush size a good deal. You also have Surface mode at your disposal, which is a good deal faster than Volume mode. It's really just a matter of getting comfortable with the tools/different modes.

Personally, I don't much care for iPads and such. Bigger IS usually better, IMHO, when it comes to PC performance, and to get the most out of 3DC, you need serious hardware (RAM, CPU, Video Card). This is one reason why I don't even like the small towers you find from the major (store bought) PC Brands, like Dell, HP, Gateway, etc. They don't have any room for proper airflow/ventilation, nor expansion. Laptops have come a long way, but there is still a HUGE gap in performance...especially when using CG programs like 3DC, 3ds Max, Maya, etc. Even with a top end system, there is much more optimization still needed (in 3DC) for voxel sculpting to hit it's stride (if it's going to be considered as a serious alternative to ZB and MB in this market). I think it's on the threshold and perhaps new approaches such as dynamic tessellation would work...I just don't see how it would with Voxels, though. Perhaps one good target for Andrew (maybe make it's introduction coincide with the release of v4) is to finally mirror the Surface Mode engine/tools to the current Sculpt Room, and there, it might be possible to utilize dynamic tessellation. Even without that, I still would love to see the Surface tools and engine in the Sculpt room

Yeah...I'm going to have to install an older version until this gets fixed. I think 3.5.07 was the last good one. This bug practically makes caching and Multi-Res unusable. Still hoping CUDA gets optimized for volume mode so we don't need to use Multi-Res as often.

I have a GTX 470, and I don't know what you mean, with the claim that the CUDA version is slow. It's slower than non-CUDA or just not as fast as you thought it would be? When he finished up the brush engine work in Volume mode, Andrew stated that CUDA worked but wasn't optimized yet. I've been waiting for that to occur as well. However, performance in Mudbox and ZBrush is also slow....when you try to use large brushstrokes on very dense meshes. That is why you have subdivision levels. In 3DC you have Multi-Res that works essentially the same way and for the same reasons. Use it, and you'll be surprised how fast it is. There is a bug with the cache/proxy in this last build or two, so you may want to use build 3.5.07 until that get's ironed out.

+1. I'm hoping for CUDA optimization in Voxels first (Andrew said that would come after he did some important bug-squashing). But after that, this would be next on the list.

Andrew, the reason you can't repeat the proxy scaling is because it only does it randomly. Just now, it did it again. I selected x8 and then cached the layer to reduce RAM consumption, and got the following result. It is misinterpreting the reduction as a command to scale the proxy x2, x4, or x8. The object was in voxel/volume mode when I cached the layer.

Not reporting a bug, really. Just mentioning that what Andrew has already stated was fixed, is actually still recurring...randomly. I've not been using Cache to Disk or Multi-Res anymore since this has been occurring so frequently. It's a shame, cause I normally do 1/2 of my sculpting on the proxy.

If you're signed in, you can see it (toward the bottom of the English forums). There is also a 500mb 3DC/Photoshop Brush library available with a single download (I would recommend downloading and installing "ABR Viewer" as a compaion utility....as it lets you browse sets before bringing them into your pallet). Lots of grunge goodness, cracks, splats, broken glass, etc. If anyone has anything they care to add, feel free to post there with a link. Adrive.com is a good file storage resource (50GB free, no waiting, no strings attached). Anyone with skin/animal hyde brushes, who doesn't mind sharing...that would be a welcomed addition.

Thanks...there are quite a few shaders being shared in the 3DC Exchange Library thread/section. There are some eye shaders among them. You can of course, right-click on the material and select "edit current shader" and replace the image with one of your choosing. There are a few that allow you to adjust scaling and more. I had eyes in the dragon, but you can see how the body scaled up so large that you can't really see them. The bad thing about this bug is you can't undo the scaling...you just got to hope you remembered to save your work before it happens. It seems that what it's doing is, instead of REDUCING 2x, 4x, 8x, it's scaling by that amount.

Well, that may be the case....but this is what happens when you lob a flaming cocktail onto a Fireworks stand (with Anti-Military comments). Just trying to dispel some of the fallacies espoused here.

Andrew, the Proxy scaling (on it's own) is still a recurring problem. 3.5.09A Win 7 64 w/CUDA. This has the potential to flush a LOT of work down the drain, or have to keep wrestling with the application to scale it back to the correct size and make it fit with other elements/layers.

Yeah...it's about money. We all know that Afghanistan is on the verge of overtaking China as the global trade leader, right? And Iraq? We've spent far more than we could every hope to recoup, in any silly conspiratorial oil-grab. All the conspiracy theories make for great for comedy, though. I remember sitting down at the table at a friend's house, and his in-laws were over...they were talking about how Bush devised this crazy scheme to blow up the towers on 9/11 and such. I honestly thought they were smoking dope or something, cause you HAVE to be either ridiculously stupid, or ridiculously high to entertain some of these stories/claims.Just because the US HAD some relationship with Saddam and the Taliban decades ago, doesn't mean a thing. THINGS CHANGED...what part of that is too difficult to comprehend? You never heard the term "The Enemy of my Enemy is my friend"...it doesn't require a hidden conspiracy for dynamics to change. Libya got nailed by us, and now our relationship is considerably different. Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, and we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki...now we're allies. What else you got? Oprah Winfrey is hatching a plot to assassinate Obama with cyanide muffins, and take over the presidency as the first black woman in office?

Wow, things are so much clearer now! We should all just fly over to the middle east, get on a bus, and join hands with the poor little, misunderstood jihadists (who are sharpening their knives and praying for the opportunity to get their hands on and decapitate a westerner, today)....and sing "Kumbaya" in 3-part harmony....all while wearing tie-dye shirts, and paying homage to "Mother Earth?" It's so simple, really. We just need to UNDERSTAND that the people who want to kill us for religious conquest reasons, are really just desperate, out-of-work Joes. It's not the moral perversity of Western Culture that enrages them. It's all about sharing and caring, guys...

You can do that already...Autopo first, then select poly's you want to redo manually, delete them, and rebuild. Also, the Strokes Tool is like a mini Auto Retopology tool on it's own (that's why early on I suggested Andrew make Autopo essentially the Strokes tool on steroids), as you can draw your guides/strokes and hit enter for it to construct the poly's for you.

I have a problem with losing ALL my custom hotkeys every single time I have to delete the Options.XML....which has become a routine occurrence every other new build or so. I was having glitches in my UI, and instead of reporting it, I deleted the Options.XML file and it fixed it. However, we need a way to save our custom hotkey layout outside of the options file....Andrew?