AbnRanger

I sent Andrew a bug report with video capture and scene file...that was a few days ago, and he's been fairly silent, so that means he's likely hard at work fixing it among other improvements.One thing I noticed on his Twitter page, was that he's enhanced the Strokes tool. I asked if he could allow us to make clean straight lines in a "Point to Point" fashion (click start point, hold SHIFT, and click second/end point). I think that would make Retopo work on non-cylindrical shaped objects much faster and cleaner from the start...removing a lot Clean Up, having to go back and manually straighten up your topolgy. We'll see in the next build, I suppose.

I'm using the latest (3.3.04 x64 w/CUDA), as I reported a number of things which Andrew has since fixed. What are some of the issues you are having, now? I noticed that the Strokes tool likes Voxel Volume mode better than working on a cached or surface mode model. And if you have trouble with the Points and faces tool, I found that adjusting the "Additional Extrusion" up a bit, tends to make it work better in those circumstances. I usually can bring it back down to 0 shortly thereafter, without any real issues. It's still not 100%, but it's not been nearly as bad as it was a few builds ago....and I'd say it works predictably now about 95-98% of the time.

And that's why you do it....right?

It sounds like a lot...and when you are up against a tight deadline, you might feel like you don't have time to go through these steps...but really, it takes about 10-15min for me, and you'll get something actually done instead of posting on here and often seeing little to no response. If it's a bug, it's best to get these things directly under Andrew's nose, so to speak. He does respond pretty fast.Jing may be a good one to try first, as it gives you a free screen capture app and will host your videos for free. I use BB Flashback Express (it's free)...and upload the videos to either youtube or Vimeo. As far as sending files...they can get pretty big, so look at Adrive.com (50GB free and no ads...no download wait time). I zip the files before I send them to Andrew, so to save space and upload time. He says that when he gets a bug report, he generally drops what he is doing and investigates it...so, it's well worth taking the time to go through these steps. It helps you and all of us.

The only problem I have with trying to do hardsurface sculpting in Voxels, is that it essentially doubles your workload, if you have to Retopologize the thing. But with organic work, you want to use the Voxel clay to create details, and you can quickly generate a base to work from.It's cool to see what can be done with Voxels, in regard to hard surface work, but when watching Leigh's tutorial on the Scorpion (from Avatar), I was thinking the same thing...it's not very efficient for production purposes. Very nice work on the Audi, BTW.

You can report this in the Bugfixes threads, and probably get aquicker response...and also, if you could record a quick video example (you could use JING, or BB Flashback Express, Camstudio, etc.), as that helps Andrew see exactly what is happening. And if it is really a major issue for you, you could PM or e-mail Andrew and send him a copy of the file, so he can try to reproduce it.Otherwise, what will often happen is he and others will chime in with a "Works fine for me." Plus, make sure to mention what OS and whether your version is CUDA enabled. It sounds like it could possibly be a graphic card driver issue, so you can try to eliminate that from the equation by updating your drivers, perhaps. For me...I notice a performance hit when wireframes are on (it gives your card more work to do), and I try to leave them off, and only turn them on when or if I need to examine the mesh. It is not a good idea to try and sculpt with it on, in my opinion.

+1. This is why I bought the PowerNurbs plugin for 3ds Max, as it makes this kind of work exceptionally fast and clean. It also has the added benefit of being able to export clean IGES and CAT(Catia) models, that manufacturers can immediately work with. That's a selling point for your services...taking concept/marketing models straight to production, so they don't have to pay someone else to re-model it in a Solid Surface program (like SolidWorks for example).Now, if you didn't have to retopo manually (auto-quadrangulation rarely ever works well for me), that might be a different story. But in the final analysis, different tools have different strengths. Hard surface modeling may be doable in Voxels, but it is not the most efficient method to get from start to finish. You have NURBS now in LWCAD, do you not?

It's my understanding that initial point releases (3.x) are supposed to be deemed "official"...and everything in between (3.x.0x) is considered Beta builds.

Cool....the reason I ask is that I had a lot of trouble baking a decent normal map almost a month ago, and I spent nearly 4 days troubleshooting when it should have only taken 4 minutes (or less). Turns out, it was a bug, and Andrew quickly fixed it. During this time, I was thinking of doing a direct export straight out of the Voxel Room, and trying to bake the normal map within Max...but I was afraid to send something that dense over, and using Poly reduction would likely force a loss of some detail.So I've been thinking about perhaps using the Displacement Modifier in Max (which essentially applies the displacement to the object in the viewport, driven by a displacemtn map) to bake a good AO map from, instead of using 3DC's AO. That's why I was asking if you guys were doing the same, or what method you were using.

That's fine, but I think we were right to point out that it (Multi-Res working in Surface mode) is simply how Andrew chose to implement it....instead of laboring for several more weeks or months to try and force a square peg through a round hole (going Multi-Res through Voxel Volume mode), we get it in our hands much more quickly. Andrew said a week or two ago, here, just how he was going to try to approach it. As far as losing work, I agree, and that's why I mentioned that temporarily disabling the ability to switch would be one way to solve that.

I really don't care....if we could ever get the merge times reduced down to manageable levels. I thought something might be happening on that front when I saw the merge progress bar appearing when using a large brush radius (I thought it was automatically Merging after each brushstroke, so that the final merge isn't such a colossal wait)

I see...maybe greying out the voxel/surface icon temporarily, so you can't switch modes until you un-cache the layer, would be the quickest fix, I suppose. It's playing with fire to do that anyway, when you KNOW the Multi-Res feature is operating through the Surface mode. It's best, unless Andrew wants to change things, to just inform users (in the Manual and Video tutorials) how Multi-Res works, and what it's current limitations are. As I see it, right now...it's looking pretty good. I'm always happy when I get some extra horsepower under the hood...even if that means I have to hit a switch to get it.

I'm sure Andrew would like to talk to you about it. He mentioned possibly supporting it well over a year ago, but he's had bigger fish to fry. However, there are many of us here that would love to see something develop on that front...as the Novint Falcon is relatively inexpensive.

You're playing with my words here, Phil. What's the point in doing that? I'm talking about baking a AO map...the term "Baking" isn't just for collecting everything onto a diffuse/color map. You BAKE (render...is that good?) normal maps, displacement maps...and yes, you BAKE out AO maps.

I understand what you're saying, Phil, but it's comparing apples and oranges, I believe. What I'm talking about is, let's say your Orc bust, for example...the merge to PPP prompt in 3dc clearly states that you CANNOT bake shadow/AO detail (the small details that aren't going to show on the mesh itself...like little horns, wrinkles, small crevices, etc.) from a normal map as it does not displace any geometry...therefore you miss the opportunity to get AO in all the little details you spent time on in the Voxel Room. The only way, then to bake an AO map outside of 3DC with those tertiary details contributing/casting shadow detail to the output, is to have a mesh dense enough to cast those shadows/details during the baking session. The reason I asked what you guys did, is I was wondering if you exported a dense mesh to do that, or were you able to somehow get the AO baking to occur after it calculates displacement, or something. Again, a normal map gives the texture baking tool nothing (geometry) to work with as it is merely a 2D trick.

Can you show us a video where you are LOSING your changes when you uncache your model? Again, in order to give us the feature we asked for, it merely requires that the layer switch into Surface Mode to do it (most efficiently). Is it really a show stopping issue to click the little squiggly line and switch it back to volume (if that is what you want)? It's neither complicated, nor confusing. Multi-Res and caching needs to switch to Surface mode to do it's thang'...I'll take it, and with a side order of fries, to go.

If you have no detail in your model, you aren't getting much of an AO map...that's what I'm talking about? If you say you are baking in LW, what exactly are you baking from?

You get the prompt in 3DC that, in order to bake occlusion, it needs to do so before merging the model in a low poly state...if you don't use that, then what detail are you baking from....exporting to an extremely high-poly model to LW or XSI? I'm just asking...if there is a way to bake detailed occlusion maps from a displacement mapped model, then I'd like to give that a try.

Well, if you guys remember, Andrew said it was probably more realistic to try the Multi-Res in Surface mode than Voxel Volume. If I have to make an extra click just to get back to Voxels mode (in order to get Multi-Res functionality), I'm good with that...as long as it doesn't make me wait all night or blow up my model. By the way, it did go back to Voxel Volume after caching, before the Multi-Res feature was added, but I'm sure Andrew decided the trade off (having to switch into Surface Mode for the Cache and Multi-Res in order to get it to work properly/more efficiently) was well worth the inconvenience of an extra click.

So, how do you bake outside of 3DC without having to export a super dense mesh to bake from? That's the advantage of doing AO from Voxel's before the normal map is made. That is, if the results looked right.

You have the tools to do that, without the need for cylindrical mapping...select edgeloops and "equidistant"...and BAM, you got your nice flat square island in just a couple of clicks.It was a tool I requested that was present in Polyboost, a plugin for 3ds Max, that was integrated in Max 2010. Really fast way of straightening out the mapping of distorted meshes/UV's.

Great work, Andrew...on the voxels and fixing some of the Retopo issues. I did some more experimenting/testing to see what I can do differently to avoid some of the issues, and I discovered a couple of helpful tips.When I was working with the strokes tool, low density voxel models tended to have the strokes come out on the other end of the object, or just about anywhere it wanted. I was about to do another bug report on it, when I tried the same thing again with the higher density version, and the problem went away (for the most part). Also, I was having very similar problems with the Points and faces tool...not working. Again, I was about ready to send a bug report, but strangely stumbled upon a remedy...that is to adjust the "Additional Extrusion" amount until the problem subsides. I don't why that is necessary, but it worked. Hope that saves somebody from some of the frustrations I had been experiencing. Now, if only the merge times between Surface mode and Voxel volumes was minimized (so we could step between the modes without trepidation), we'd be set.

I got the same thing, but I noticed it only happens when the brush size reaches a threshold in size...I thought it was some new mechanism to accelerate the brush speed working with extra large brush sizes. I think overall speed is up somehow...not to even mention the multi-res tools. My only gripe is with the inconsistency in the Retopo tools currently, as you can tell.

You should be able to re-import the mesh into the Retopo Room and have it snap to the voxel model, without issue, as long as you didn't make any dramatic deformations

I had a similar incident about a month ago, where I spent the better part of the day wrestling with the same issues...and finally found it was some Points and Faces dots hanging out in space not too far from the model. How they got there, I don't have a clue...but I cleared the layer they were on and everything went back to normal. However, yesterday....I had no such luck. No dots hanging out in space and I even went so far as to delete EVERYTHING but the voxel model itself. I mean, I went into the Retopo room and went Nuclear on it. Then started with a fresh layer. From that fresh layer, you see the layer I was working on in those example videos, I linked to. I tried everything I could possible think of. Even installing multiple version of 3DC, going back to 3.2.01 EDIT:I posted some new video examples to show the results in the Retopo Bugs thread....Well heck, why not show just one for squirts and giggles?...In this video, it's just one example where I've tried 3 times to get the strokes tool to do it's job, and it decides it would rather fight me instead....waited 20 min the first time, and I exited the program...same thing for the next two tries. Is no one else having any issues? Just me? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fhZR28qJmY