AbnRanger

Glad to help...once you start approaching 15-20mill polys in the voxel room (with 4GBs) you will want to do any further detailing in the Paint Room (after retopologizing the model), where you have another, more memory efficient method...image-based sculpting, where your depth channel is painting live normal maps (Per Pixel Paint mode) or displacement maps (micro-vertex mode), allowing you to see the deformation/depth details in real time. This too, is where a new card will start to pay dividends.By the way, when you do upgrade your card, I would suggest getting a model that has excellent aftermarket coolers installed from the factory, such as these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125338 http://cgi.ebay.com/Palit-NE5TX470F10DA-GeForce-GTX-470-1GB-320-bit-GDDR5-/220659248658?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item336050ee12 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127513 http://cgi.ebay.com/MSI-nVidia-GeForce-GTX470-GTX-470-Twin-Frozr-II-1280MB-/290471606868?pt=PCC_Video_TV_Cards&hash=item43a174fa54 This one has lower clock speeds in the specs only because it is not overclocked from the factory. That doesn't mean it's not as capable as the ones that are. They just let you do the OC'ing yourself, via their OC tuning software. This lets you overclock a lower priced model to give you roughly the same performance as the higher priced model above it. The ones with the stock coolers don't cool nearly as well and thus don't have anywhere near the same headroom to overclock.

I forgot to ask one very important question...what OS are you using? If you're on a 32bit one, you can't add more memory anyway. In that case, upgrading your card might be the only optionSince Andrew overhauled the Voxel sculpting engine this summer, to allow broader multi-threading, you would notice a greater boost in performance with additional cores and more RAM. CUDA helps in a few scenarios, but CPU and RAM are far more important throughout the entire application. Your Render times in C4D would speed up accordingly as well. The one drawback with Voxels, if you must find one, is that it is heavily reliant on RAM...the more you have, the more you can push the tools. I have 8GB and in some cases, that's not enough. You can use Cache to Disk along with some efficiency techniques to better manage what you have, but in my own experience, you're pretty limited in voxels with only 4GB or less. The reason for that is just the Volumetric nature of voxels. It has store more data than just vertex locations in space. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7ZJX9Nfy8w

I'm thinking, take that budget (for a 470gtx) and look about on EBay or Newegg for a CPU/MB/RAM upgrade. You can find an AMD black box 955 (black boxes are highly over-clockable)AMD Quad Core CPU_$150: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103808 MB_$52 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813130290R 8GB DDR3 RAM_$150 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231308 That's about $350...in the ballpark of what an NVidia 470gtx would cost.

It mainly boils down to what graphic interface your motherboard has...AGP or PCI Xpress. The later became the new standard a few years ago. CUDA will make a pretty good difference in Voxel brush speed, but the main performance hingepin in voxels is RAM. If you can upgrade that to 8GB or more, you're much better off going that route with your money.

Once you've selected the one you want, 3DC doesn't automatically apply it. You have to click "Apply UV Set" once you've made any changes and are ready to move on.

You asked the same question in a separate thread also. Didn't get the answer you wanted? If you want only Andrew to answer, maybe PM him. It might help to google-search "hyperthreading" and find out how it works. Whatever is multi-threaded will get some degree of performance boost. The question is how much.You can look on Tomshardwareguide.com to research the CPU's you're considering and see how well they do in the benchmarks. There is usually an "Applications" category that lists 3ds Max rendering benchmarks and that is usually what I go by. A 6 core AMD should outperform all but the most expensive Intel i7's (the $1k models, which are 6 Cores themselves), and cost a lot less. When I can afford to, I am going to take a look at a pair of the 8-12core Opterons that are priced lower than the Highend Intel i7's. They have lower clockspeeds, but the number of Cores for rendering are just overwhelming. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819105265&cm_re=opterons-_-19-105-265-_-Product

Windows shows in the Task Manager window that they are separate cores (even though they are not, physically)...so, it should for areas that are multi-threaded.

You can bring a model in and detail it, a more traditional method, or take a reverse approach with voxels. You'll find that the auto-retopo feature makes a TON of sense for many objects. But manual retopo still is the better option in many circumstances.

I disable the User Account Control upon first installing Windows 7. I hate that darn thing. It's more trouble to the user than it is for any would-be hackers.

I'm pretty sure you can upgrade it to commercial later by paying the difference. That's how ZBrush handles it as well. You should be able to contact sales@3d-coat.com and let them know when you purchased the ED version. The difference will be based on what the commercial version costs now, not in the future.

I use my SpacePilot with 3DC almost everyday, and have had no difficulties with it. May be a driver glitch. Try downloading the latest driver for the device if you haven't already and installing/re-installing it.

Congratulations and nice work on the mainpage.

Andrew, a longstanding problem I have noticed in the Voxel Room has been the transform gizmo often times not being centered on the object that is selected in the Vox Tree. The workaround up to this point has been to create "copy space density" and then merge the layer to that. That gets old and tedious really quick, it's not intuitive for a new user, and frankly it's not an answer for a professional application. For DAZ or Poser, maybe....but not something that will be used at major studios. Can you at least simply this process by having a "Reset to Object Center" in the Parameter Panel that does this process for the user, that way it's just a matter of one click to correct?

Some plugins did, but they used PhysX. Max's main dynamics engine is Reactor from Havoc. It has an interactive window instead of using the viewport.

The hits just keep coming: http://area.autodesk.com/blogs/ken/3ds_max_2011_subscription_advantage_pack_revealed_iray_physx_substances I generally use finalRender (which already has an interactive preview renderer built in, as of R3), but it's nice to have so many good options to turn to.

I can see one thing for certain that I'm going to have to start using my seat of Mudbox for, and that is the new posing tools. At first I didn't think they were anything different from 3DC's, but this video shows in fact that they are more fully developed. I haven't been able to get any decent posing (for characters anyway) with the Pose tool in 3DC. It takes some real patience and skill to massage something workable. It's good for a number of things, but I can see right now that it's waste of time trying to pose characters, when MB has better developed tools to handle the task. No worries, though. Each application has their own unique strengths and I'm just going to have to learn to fit MB into the process, at certain points, more often.

I've never had anything like that. Weird....Here is another test. Auto-Retopo, once you experiment and get a grasp of what settings work, it really can save a bunch of time. But the one problem I do have is that many times, it spirals edgeloops, so it's very difficult to get clean UV's and it can make cleanup a PITA sometimes. It's hard to expect perfection from an automated process, when you have so many different variables for the program to account for.

For those that are new to the tool, I put up a very quick overview of it...until something is officially added to the Voxel Video manual. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcZ7N_-8NFM

I noticed the same thing, and it's one of the many things I wished were cleaned up. The Move Vertice tool should perhaps have it's own cursor that is small by default, and when you switch to another tool you go back to the same brush size you had previously. Or have the picking/selecting vertices based on a fixed distance from the center (maybe have a very small and fixed inner circle just for selection or Move Vertices tool), not based on whatever falls inside the brush radius. That will prevent the user from having to switch back and forth.

Michalis, why do you have to be so set on bashing this toolset? There are a number of objects where it works so well that I have to giggle a bit...and then others where it gets close but just not quite there yet. Why can't you try to be part of the solution instead of taking every opportunity you can to take a swipe at Andrew's work? I've had some issues in the Retopo room and some nasty crashes, but instead of coming here and throwing a fit for everyone to see, I just get with Andrew about the problems, and he does his best to fix them....that's why you have 3.3.14D. If you want solutions, make it as easy as you can for him to get straight to the problem. I don't like having to stop what I'm doing to upload a large file to a sharing site (adrive.com is the best one I have seen thus far), and make a screen capture video...it usually takes me about 10-20 mins to do all this, but it probably saves Andrew hours of investigating/diagnosing where the problem lays.

No matter how good Blender gets, it will always be viewed as a non-industry standard toolset...and students can download the whole Autodesk Creation Suite for free (while they are in school, naturally), as a relatively new education initiative by Autodesk. Very smart on their part, as it cuts the legs out from under piracy (to a large degree), and it's like getting kids hooked on your product, knowing they'll be inclined to stick with AD once they graduate and start work.Nevertheless, I still think more and more smaller studios and freelance artists are going to get wise and get it in the pipeline somewhere...it just makes too much sense financially.

Yes...Right-click the layer and select "Extract Skin" > Hull using Voxels or using Surface...as Phil mentioned, and yes, you have a setting to adjust the thickness.

With a 4GB limitation, there is no doubt that ZBrush makes more sense to detail with...but 8GB's or better, you can get a ton of detail, although much of that could be done more efficiently (in terms of hardware resources needed) in the Paint Room (with live displacement or normal map painting).

That is what Surface mode is designed to do...give you the speed of polygonal sculpting, and for the most part, it does just that. However, 3DC would become even more versatile with the Surface mode tools and engine mirrored to the Sculpt Room. I think a good goal for v4 would be perhaps a few major additions like this and multi-thread the rest of the application, then go into some deep consultation with some ZBrush veterans like Leigh Bamforth, Bay Raitt, J. Edwards, etc...to help refine the brushes and sculpting toolset.

Really nice looking cinematic and game. Love the pen outline on the characters in the game itself.