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AbnRanger

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Everything posted by AbnRanger

  1. Not yet for sale. It looks like it would have better tactile feel than 3dconnexion devices, but I don't it's an ergonomic design. It needs some sort of wrist rest and it leaves no room for added control keys. With a SpacePilot, I seldom need to reach for the keyboard. With this product, you'd have to constantly move your hand off the device to hit shortcut keys. Having said all of that, if they offered support for Mudbox or Zbrush they would likely find a market there.
  2. Oh, I see...yeah, there are only a few surface tools in volume mode. I don't even use them, and switch to volume mode instead. I thought he was referring to something else.
  3. It has nothing to do with being in Voxel Volume mode or not. Your screenshot shows that your toolbar on the left has a bunch of tool sections collapsed. All you have to do is click on the little arrow to expand them. On laptops, sometimes you run out of room, and have to collapse certain tool sections to get to ones beneath.
  4. Can you show a screen grab (you can upload one from the Help menu), so we have an idea of what's going on? I suspect that the pallet somehow is collapse and if you expand it by clicking the little arrow, it will open up again. It happens to me on occasion. Also, when you have issues like you're describe regarding your normal maps, please try using a screen (Video) capture to show the process. Jing is free and it allows you to upload the video to their site. This way we or Andrew can get an idea of what is going on in your scene. Sometimes it's a bug, and sometimes it's just a missed step or two.
  5. Nvidia cards aren't necessarily any louder than ATI's...that is not an issue when you buy a card that comes with aftermarket cooling straight from the factory (usually has heatpipes and twin fans). MSI, ASUS, Galaxy and Palit are often brands that do just that and factory overclock it. I bought a Galaxy 275GTX and have it heavily manually overclocked....and it's quite as a kitten. That would not be the case if it were a card with the standard reference cooling (plastic box with one small fan). I was a big ATI guy until I bought that 4850. I couldn't even use my compositing app, Combustion, with it...no matter what I did. I waited through several driver updates and nothing. Went out and bought an NVidia card, and it worked perfectly. I later upgraded from the 250 GTS to the 275 and have nothing but a great experience with NVidia cards. Reference models: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500157 Modified After market cooling models: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814261073 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127513
  6. I'm not certain exactly which brushes get the biggest bump in performance, but it's been my understanding from Andrew's past comments that all Voxel (Volume mode) tools are CUDA accelerated, except the Surface mode. I may be wrong, but I thought I heard Andrew state that Surface mode isn't CUDA accelerated....just volume mode. He did state that the biggest benefit when using a CUDA enabled card is when using materials or masks with large brush radius'. As far as the Fill tool and Smoothing, specifically, perhaps Andrew could address that question more directly. He is currently working on re-building the brush engine in 3DC and said he wouldn't be very active in the forums for a few days. So, I'm just passing on what I know in the mean time. If you use 3ds Max, you'll soon get a big benefit from having a CUDA enabled card, as 2012 is going to have iRay and PhysX integrated...both are GPU accelerated. Personally, I think Maya and perhaps Softimage will get iRay as well. The reason being is that Nvidia stated that iRay is included with Mental Ray licenses for their software vendors (Autodesk). This was last year. It wasn't released in time to make by 3ds Max's cutoff for new features integration in 2011. Sure enough the subscription customers got it recently in their extension pack.
  7. http://www.3d-coat.com/wiki/index.php/12.1_CUDA_BasicsIt is largely dependent upon the number of processing cores the card has and the memory bandwith, but the GTX 260 and newer would likely yield a very noticeable improvement overall. Just going from the GTS 250 (pretty much a repackaged 9800 GTX) to a 275 was very noticeable (it has double the processing cores), for me. So, I would seriously consider a 465 or better, if it's within your budget.
  8. Yeah...getting software updated at academic institutions nearly require an act of Congress. As for higher res carcasses...I don't see the benefit either. Andrew implemented some "coarsing" export features recently, but I've not used yet. Not sure if that would help you in this case or not.
  9. Very helpful tips there...I'm sure you'll have fun doing another one for the Maya/3DC Applink. The one for Max is pretty nice, with a dialogue box and a number of choices.
  10. Just that little added touch of professionalism is what sets 'em apart.
  11. +1.I think the term is intended as "AN official training resource" not "THE official..."
  12. You can also make a "Transparent" shader that you can use during the Retopo process. That will come in handy quite often. You right click on the default gray shader and select "Construct New Shader" > Rename "Transparent" > decrease Opacity to whatever level you want (you can edit it any time by right clicking the same shader and selecting "Edit Current Shader" and adjusting the opacity). You can have not only the vox tree panel present in the Retopo Room, but the Shader panel as well...for these very reasons. If one of your verts gets stuck beneath the surface of the voxel object, and you can't select it, then you can quickly hide the voxel layer and access it (I would also temporarily disable snapping...in the upper left hand cornet of the UI).
  13. I think what James is asking for, is having more full-featured modeling capability in the retopo room, that will aid in the retopo process. A Transform tool that lets you select elements and shows a transform gizmo is just one of those that is sorely needed, IMO. Extrude and Bevel/Chamfer/Fillet Tool is also needed. These aren't meant to be a replacement for modeling applications...but if you think about it, Retopology essentially is a process where you MODEL a lower res mesh. With that in mind, why not have more tools...tools any modeler is accustomed to, to model with?As much as I like the Retopo tools in 3DC, I've been considering doing the work in 3ds Max using the WrapIt plugin (and the built-in Retopo Tools in the Graphite Modeling toolset), for these reasons. They work in conjunction with the modeling tools already in Max. This are a good examples: http://www.veoh.com/search/videos/q/WrapIt#watch%3Dv17474105HTFwAd47 http://www.veoh.com/search/videos/q/WrapIt#watch%3Dv17365278F7KDMw8w http://www.veoh.com/search/videos/q/WrapIt#watch%3Dv173511813ErqdCaB
  14. Make that a 2nd vote. Like it or not, the Retopo room essentially is a group of modeling tools, and there are a number of additions I've been hoping for, for quite some time. Dot Ring/Loop is one of them (at the 1:35 marker): This little tool will make poly reduction a snap, and is sorely needed to cleanup the results from AUTOPO, oftentimes. Shell (Extrusion) Modifier: Single Click Points & Faces Tool (starting at the 1:10 mark, you can see that it is just a single click and drag, of a vert or edge, to create a face...whereas Points and Faces currently requires 2 clicks per face...a left click then a right click. Over the length of a model, that extra click = 2X more time spent): The retopology tools in 3DC are quite good, but with some of these type of improvements it would become industry standard, no question about it.
  15. That's a good idea and option too, but deleting the layer after a save will help keep your layer panel less cluttered, as they can get pretty complex after a while. Your link would be the thumbnail in the "Models" Pallet that appears when you click "Merge." Again, I like the efficiency of the Subtools workflow in ZB, and this gives you a rough equivalent to it. When you merge in 3ds Max, you have that option. That would be nice to have in 3DC.
  16. What I was referring to was the ability to:1) right-click a layer and have the option available to "SAVE TO .3B FILE"...not just an OBJ. That layer can then be deleted and removed from the scene until its needed at a later point. 2) have thumbnail previews of .3b files much like Andrew currently has for obj's and in so doing, the user essentially has the equivalent to ZBrush's Subtools...all components of an object or scene can be quickly saved out and later loaded from the "Models" Panel that appears when the Merge tool is activated. If it's a .3b file then the object could be merged at the very same state (resolution/position/scale/shader) it was saved as.
  17. I'm sure it uses the card that is displaying the application. You could still have a 2nd card running a 2nd monitor, but I am not aware that 3DC is yet capable of utilizing multiple CUDA cards.I think we can easily confuse dual card use for renderers and realtime modeling, sculpting work. They work differently, so it might not be nearly as efficient as you would think. Renderers can simply assign buckets or frames, but for sculpting...communicating between 2 cards might actually be slower.
  18. Yeah...it doesn't matter how many revisions you make to the scene file if the layer is no longer there. Autosave has no bearing, either, on an object/layer that you save out to a .3b file and then DELETE/REMOVE from the Vox Tree (to simplify your tree and scene, in order to further conserve resources). Voxel Sculpting needs this type of "Subtools" capability and workflow, as it's the most RAM dependent application I know.
  19. This is where a thumbnail for .3b files would come in really handy. This way the user could point to a project folder for the models/objects pallet and there is your 3DC version of ZB's subtools (I think that's how they work, anyway) ....all elements saved to a .3b file can be seen as thumbnails in the pallet....just drag and drop your objects from the pallet when you want them (dragging them would by default trigger the merge command). I think Andrew is already halfway there with the current object/model previews.
  20. I recently noticed that the ERASE tool in the Paint room is not multi-threaded and can be very, very slow...unlike the regular paint and airbrush. Is that still on the slate for your multi-threading efforts? The painting speed is very good since you multi-threaded it, but the erase tool needs some of that action, too. A few other questions/requests for upcoming releases: 1) Can we have the option to save a voxel layer straight to a .3b (native 3D Coat file) format from the right-click and "file" menu? That way we can quickly dump components off to individual 3D Coat files that can also be quickly re-merged at the same res and cache state that they were in, in original file. This would be especially helpful for 32bit version of 3DC or anyone using laptops. Caching helps a good deal, but there are still times where it would be better to dump the whole layer to a .3b file 2) Could we get a toolbar icon (inside the 3DC UI) for the Applinks we may be using? That is how GoZ is accessed in ZBrush, I believe...and it's quicker to access than having to constantly go through the file menu. 3) Is there any way we could get thumbnail previews of .3b files (basically a tiny snapshot of the viewport at the point where it was last saved)? That would be SO helpful, as I save several versions of my work on any given project. It's tough to determine just what state it's in without some visual reference (thumbnail). 3ds Max has that feature and I think a lot of 3DC users would welcome that ability. Thanks Andrew.
  21. It doesn't matter how much RAM you have on your machine, the current MAC version is still 32 and thus can only utilize 4GB max. I don't know if that is the source of your problem, but I have a file or two that crashes the program whenever I try to open it. I assume it got corrupted somehow. Other files open fine.
  22. I noticed that the BRUSH tool in the Retopo Room, is now "BRUSHES"...why is that (plural)? Typo, maybe?
  23. Pretty impressive...so is there native instancing, now, in LW 10?
  24. Nice sculpting job. I use to love to draw horses when I was growing up.
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