AbnRanger

And did you ever ask Juan about lag time and having to wait for merging and quadrangulation/exporting an object like that? Just because you can do some decent painting in Microsoft Paint, if you had the patience and put in the extra effort, but we all know how that compares to doing the same thing in Photoshop or Corel Painter....touche deuce.

Congratulations Andrew....you'll have a football team before you know it!

Ahhh. I finally found the culprit...There were two points hanging off to the side, in limbo. I don't know how in the world they got there, and I tried like the dickens to delete them earlier. I exported the work I had as an obj, then hit CLEAR to wipe everything out in the Retopo room. Imported the WIP mesh back in and the problem is solved. Can't understand how in the world that would happen, but I'm just glad to get it straight... I attempted to try it, fresh, on a simple FFD cube, and 3DC choked for over 30 min before I killed the whole program. All I did was hit increase (resolution) twice....didn't know that would bring 3DC to it's knees. http://www.3d-coat.com/files/screen/127304362455.jpg

Have you used it on anything with detail? I've wasted, again, the better part of the day wrestling with yet another problem with 3DC. Even when I reduced the model down to the point that it lost most of it's detail, it didn't change a thing. I removed all but the character's head, to keep the load on the system down as much as possible. I really am at wit's end. I don't know if this classifies as a bug or just another performance bottleneck.Here's the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGUfDbOJqRQ

Is anyone experiencing very slow performance in the Retopo Room, using the "points & faces", Quads, Delete edges, etc? I have a fairly fast system (quadcore w/ 8GB RAM and gtx 275...on Win 7x64 w/ CUDA) and even degraded a copy of my sculpted model down to 2x (approx 600k polys)...I tried it on a logo I was working on, and that seemed much faster, but for some reason, I just can't get any work done at this pace with this model. It takes several seconds for every poly you lay down or deleted edge/faces, etc. In Leigh Bamforth's Advanced Retopology DVD....he's going through those tools very quickly...and that was on build 3.1.12 I believe.

Yeah, I paid for the training on Thursday, and here it is days later without a word correct password. That's vintage Kurv..."give me your money now and when I get around to it, I'll give you the goods." Great business model, Wes!

I definitely in favor of it. I was thinking of mentioning the applink situtation over in the 3ds Max forum at CGSociety, but looks like you're way ahead of the curve on this. Thank you for your effort in this...

If it weren't for the content itself and the desire to support a fellow 3DC user, I wouldn't be dealing with Kurv at all. I'll leave it at that.

Did anybody else buy the Banshee Sculpting title and end up having a faulty password provided? I bought that and the Hard Surface/Scorpion title (which I had no problems with) and really like it, as it demonstrates how handy Voxels can be, for more more than just organic content. I e-mailed Kurv yesterday to mention them sending me a bad password, and haven't heard back from them. Par for the course, I guess.

Thank you a bunch for taking this on for 3ds Max users...I wonder if there would be any way to create a LIVE link like you have between 3ds Max and Combustion? If so, one could theoretically, paint in 3DC on one monitor and watch the final render results update live in VRay RT or finalRender R3.

We're pretty much in agreement...I have asked repeatedly for the Sculpt Room to get some love....perhaps mirroring the Surface Mode tools there, for the same reasons you mentioned, but also...if you did want to start out in Voxels, you could to your high detail work in the Sculpt Room (I would probably re-name them to Geo-Sculpt and Voxel Sculpt...to eliminate any confusion)

Actually, until the tools that are in the application are brought up to ZB and MB standards, there's bigger fish to fry than worrying about animation or polymodeling. There's plenty of work left to do in Voxels alone....let's please not try and distract Andrew with more fringe requests. This is a primarily a sculpting/3D Painting application...and it's meant to facilitate the major programs...not become one.

All the time...I've, on a recent build, hid parts of a model, and when unhiding, I get that extra cheese...free of charge, and I also got chunks missing on one saved version. On another, I got nothing....literally. Nothing showed up when I selected "Unhide all." When I tried yet another saved version, unhiding caused everything to vanish...even the parts I never hid in the first place. I report things, but rarely get an answer...so good luck with this one.

Got through over half of Leigh's Hard Surface/Scorpion material...learned some pretty cool things. Seems like it can come in handy for a lot of modeling tasks.

I remember reading where someone asked one of the Microsoft developers about the same thing regarding the flash drives, and he said they did extensive testing and that the drives should last roughly 10yrs or so...which is forever in computer terms. I think it's funny that it's roughly the same type of storage as RAM, but there are concerns about it's durability? Odd...I would think platter HD's would be more prone to wearing down.

Windows recommends at least a 1 to 1 ratio...in reference to RAM. So, if you have 4GB RAM, it works more efficiently if you use a drive with at least the same amount (I'm assuming it may be to enable the entire contents of currently stored data on RAM to be offloaded to the flash drive...this way it doesn't have to divide the contents between the flash drive and the HD).Having more than enough, and not always needing it, is better than not having enough whenever you need it. I got the 16GB Patriot XT drive, and it's frequently active when working in 3DC. You can see the little light flashing when active, and I noticed, when working in voxels, that oftentimes when I let up from a brush stroke, it immediately lights up and loads data for about 3 sec. So when smoothing, I'll often let up and count that and keep brushing away. Seems to keep things running smooth, whereas before it seemed like the longer I would go the harder it was to get consistent brush performance/response. I don't know if that was indicative of a memory leak or what...Andrew never answered back when I brought the issue up the other day. I may go and buy a SSD disk (32-64GB), and use it for my pagefile...and then use the Raptor HD that I currently use for the pagefile, as temp storage of any footage I use when compositing or video editing.

I've done some online research on the subject and found that you can take a relatively inexpensive step to boost system performance...especially when using 3DC, but the catch is that it's only for Windows Vista and 7. It's called ReadyBoost, and it's a feature of the latest version of Windows. Windows 7 allows more than 4GB and multiple flash drives to be utilized. What it does is use the flash memory as an alternate pagefile. Long sequential files can be as fast or faster on a regular Hard Drive (it's read/write times are generally faster than a thumb drive), but a HD bogs down when there are calls for RANDOM files. This is where flash memory shines. Windows supposedly determines which source will do which faster, and chooses that source. One thing I discovered is that your average thumb flash drive is actually relatively slow...around 3-5Mbps Read/ 2-3Mbps Write. Most thumb drives don't even list it's speed, so you have to do some digging online to find a high performance model. They aren't that much more expensive either. I would suggest an 8-16GB model. Here are a few examples: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220252 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220253 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220471 You'll be surprised to see how much and often this drive is used. You can monitor is by opening "Resource Monitor" in Windows (can click on it in Tesk Manager). I notice it's use many times in 3DC, such as right after a brush stroke, and the best thing is that you'll notice much less lag when you system approaches it's RAM limit. One note for anyone who uses this...by default many drives default to FAT32 (which has a 4GB limit), and I think it may be for cross platform compatibility (PC/MAC)...but if you have a thumb drive larger than 4GB, make sure to format first as NTFS, which will allow you to use the full amount.

Thanks...I couldn't find it when I went through the normal method of "Training> Pilgway 3D Coat> Official Guide"http://www.kurvstudios.com/3D-coat/hard_surface_modleing.php I noticed that the Banshee Sculpting title was available too, although somewhat hidden for the time being. http://www.kurvstudios.com/Merchant2/merchant.mv?Store_Code=KURV&Screen=CTGY&Category_Code=01-02-14 Wes needs to contract someone to do his Website maintenance, that or replace whoever has been doing it (fire himself? ). Leaving money laying on the table is not a good way to run a business....and that is precisely what he's been doing over the past few months.

Where? I looked all over the page and there still is nothing to click on to make the purchase

It looks like the page for that title is semi-ready, but there is no means to add it to your cart.

Any word from Andrew about the prospect of mirroring the Surface (mode) tools from the Voxel Room, over to the Sculpt Room? That could make life so much easier...

Looks very handy...I'll definitely take it for a spin once you post/release it.

Yes....it would be very much like Subtools. Something just has to be done to make Voxel Sculpting more efficient. Even with Surface mode...it's almost like you're stuck with 1990's technology and hardware, cause there is no multi-threading and there is no efficient method of offloading hidden elements/layers from RAM.Even though I've started using Mudbox for Sculpting high detail models, I decided to keep my license of 3DC, as there are some handy things that can be done in Voxels (and the rest of the program). But I still am eager to see some progress being made on the bottlenecks in the toolset. This is one of them. A simple "Cache to Disk" feature could help. I assumed, prior to this, that it was being offloaded automatically, but by keeping Task Manager open and monitoring Physical RAM consumption, I was highly disappointed to find that it wasn't. I don't want Windows trying to decide when to dump data for me. When it does, it's slow going. Windows doesn't know that a hidden layer should be cached, to conserve RAM and CPU resources. That's the application's task.

Lightwave was used at some point in Avatar's production, but that doesn't get me all hot and bothered for it all of a sudden...not when you count in all the other applications that had a bigger role in the same movie, and were used on numerous other blockbusters and games. I personally don't care to take on yet another application and have to learn it's in's and out's...not when I have sufficient tools for the job on hand.

Fix the under-the-hood stuff first, before we ever argue over some extra bells and whistles. Sculpting in 3DC is far short of MB or ZB, and until that changes, why are we asking for more fringe trinkets?