NinjaTaco

It's not my engine.. It's a commercial engine. The indie version is $200 and the pro version $1500, the difference being with realtime lights being able to cast shadows and materials with surface reflections. It's much easier to use than UT3 and source. In terms of technical sophistication I am not sure how it compares to UT3. The nice thing about the license is that there are no royalty fees if you try to sell your game or whatever it is you make, unlike source and UT3 which have various things in the EULA where you have to surrender certain rights in order to use their engines. My trial version is about to run out and so I'm probably going to just buy the indie version as the advanced features aren't things I would really use anyways. With anything, try before you buy. They have a trial version that allows you to save. Basically you just create a project folder and drag drop your FBX files into the project folder and it loads them up into unity and view them instantly. You can use prebuilt scripts like the first person controller to walk through your levels. It does all of this stuff pretty fast. Here are some really complicated demos built in unity that you can view through your browser. The island might take some time to load or might chug some as it streams in. As for models with lots of triangles, I know some people who built levels with millions of polygons and it still ran smooth and the graphics card was nothing special... Unity uses bones for animation and you animate in whatever package that supports FBX. You can use normal, specular, diffiuse, and it also supports parallax mapping. The avert fate demo is pretty cool. but you'll have to download it to try it.. http://unity3d.com/gallery/live-demos/tropical-paradise http://unity3d.com/ The unity forum where there are many people who know more about it than I who can probably answer your questions more thoroughly. http://forum.unity3d.com/

The creator of zbrush owns a patent on the method for masking stuff on surfaces. Not sure what it entails or if Andrew can implement such functionality in 3dc and international copyright laws and enforcing them is concfusing.

A few days really isn't that long to wait. A year or more, yeah that is a long wait. Realistically one build is always going to be completed before the other is completed. It is in the best interest for all users that when a build is done it be released so it can be tested. Delaying the release so that users of another platform don't feel left out is a bit silly. It's two days. Delays are apart of the market place and I just accept them. If Andrew is going to release the latest build of 3dc in some other language other than English, that is something I will accept. Similarly to how some movies are released in the US market first and then received in other countries much later. When I was kid, I remember all of the latest nintendo games and systems hitting Japan months before they hit anywhere else. I know a lot of mac users would be very happy about getting the latest version of any software two days later. If you are going to stop using a wonderful application like 3dc because of a tiny wait then I am afraid no one can make you happy.

Not sure 3dc has such a feature.. If you have access to maya, softimage, or cinema4d. All these have baking tools that should give you the options you want. In Softimage (xsi) it's located in properties under rendermap I think. Just remember that in this menu checking on means to disable (contrary to common thought, where checking on means to enable). Final gathering thought is not supported with rendermap. Cinema4d has bake Object which is my favorite baking tool at the moment because it's fast, you see the results as it goes, and you can do multiple sets of textures for multiple objects at a single time. It also has the older method bake texture. Maya also has good baking ability and final gathering does work with baking. It's a bit cumbersome though and it can crash very easily and when it crashes there is no easy way to tell. Not sure about 3dmax but it wouldn't surprise me if it did have baking tools, everthing else does...

It was an old project that was meant to be a game for timewarner to advertise their cable products, but somethings happend and well. I figured I might try to make a different type of game with it. I didn't build the water or sky. (although I could if I wanted to) I just went with prebuilt stuff in the engine. Everything else though, models, textures, baked lighting I was responsible for. You can construct projects inside of the unity engine and have it output a file that will load up in a browser as long as the client has the unity player plugin. Unity is similar to source and the UT3 engine that it can be used to construct games and simulations. Unlike source and UT3, models are very easy to drop into unity and view. You just have to use FBX format. Here is an early test version without hardly any textures except for a theatre wall that has a color and normal map. I decided to not bother with normal maps as it would take longer. http://www.cgbig.com/RW.html

Bug... In UV mode. When using alt to rotate the camera while the "mark seams" tool is active. A seam will be marked on the release of left click while you still hold alt.

Has different water now. Textures should be a higher res now as well. Same link as before. Also added a boat with particles trailing behind. Haven't textured boat yet. still redesigning it.

Not sure if this has been mentioned. But uv unwrap is missing. Apply UV doesn't work, it just asks to save uv map. Load does nothing.

The clone stamp tool sort of blurs the image it's cloning. Not a lot. But with continued use it does sort of obliterate the usefullness of the clone tool. When I reached the bottom I moved over some and started again from the top, cloning the previous text created. If it can't be fixed in 3d.. It'd be nice if it could be fixed in the the texture editor window. Also in the texture editor window.. Sometimes I like to paint with the wireframe on and when I adjust the radius size in the texture window it also moves nearest uv vertice. It's a minor problem.

Hey, that looks pretty nice.

I own a zbrush license and I haven't used it much. Although the interface is frustrating, the more frustrating thing is the somewhat illogical workflow. For example painting in layers, if you want to delete a layer you need to make it invisible then delete it otherwise it is applied to the base mesh. Another problem are the zspheres. Zspheres are somewhat broken. In fact you can see Meats Meier break zspheres in one of his free videos, too bad he doesn't tell you the workaround. If all you want to do is sculpt and make normal maps, it's very strong in that area and I haven't had had any problems with zmapper with the exception of speed. If still interested in zbrush. Meats Meier put up a bunch of free zbrush videos in hd quality. http://www.3dartspace.com/index.php?option...view&id=304 As for silo. (I also own a license to this one... regretfully) Although it's cheap. Just be sure you plan to use it for organic modeling. Although they advertise their product as being able to do architectural and hard modeling. In reality it's a very poor hard modeling tool. The snapping tools are somewhat bad, they either work sometimes or not at all. The topology tools are okay but just about every other application with topology tools does it better. Basically silo 2 is a poor man's solution for modeling and sculpting but it does nothing better than any other tool that specializes in those areas. The two programmers at nevercenter haven't updated the software in about 6 months now or maybe longer. There are tons of bugs and silo 2 has been in development now for 2-3 years I think? Nevercenter has recently started devoting their time to making applications for iphone. So given the history, if silo doesn't fulfill all your needs right now, it probably never will. You get what you pay for.... 3dcoat has awesome painting tools. Lots of flexibility. Great price. The topoology tools are way better than silo, although it could use some work in this area, it's still very usable. 3dcoat has a very competent and intelligent programmer building the software. I don't own a license yet. But I will very soon. I've been using the alpha and it's much friendlier than bodypaint.

This was an old project that was revived. About 85% of the geometry had to be rebuilt, UV mapped, textured, and baked in 2 days. I wish I had more time to spend on it. But I decided to live a bit dangerously and use the alpha dp for the painting process. Luckily it didn't impose too many problems and probably sped up the painting process. (Although there were a lot of camera navigation problems that hindered the painting of some textures) http://www.cgbig.com/RWBen.html You will need the unity web player to view it in real time. You can right click to full screen the image. Standard first person controls. w=forward s=back a=strafe left d=strafe right. camera pitch and yaw controlled by mouse. If you fall off, just reload. This is supposed to be for a boat racing game.

It's not worth your time. I think we can sometimes be consumed with being right that we forget about our main objectives. Besides, most 3d artists are usually married to the first piece of software they learn. Then there are artists who are married to the hype or the artwork that is being produced in that package. You can't tell me that the pixologic gallery isn't full of amazing pieces. Migration only occurs when users are not satisfied with their software. Also everyone is able to say they've tried softimage or lightwave or maya but there are very few 3d artists that have gone all out in production using one piece of software. The most unfortunate thing I see more and more often, is a lack of credit for the artist. When someone sees a good piece of 3d art. Everyone asks, what software? As if the software made it all happen and that the artist is just someone who tags along and takes credit for the work. Anyways, 3dcoat is an awesome piece of software and if they can't see the potential, that is fine. It's their loss. Just make good work with the software that you use. The results do the preaching. This also the same philosophy I use for preaching the gospel, by living a life that honors and glorifies God. They see what God does in my life rather than me having to tell them. The results do the preaching.

Feature I miss from old painting. Being able to delete the active paint channel. In the old version you could have depth turned on and press delete and it would delete the depth. same for color or specularity...

Possibly AO for the heavily subdivided mesh. It's nice to do an ao pass then apply it to a low poly mesh and edit it. I'm not sure you would be able to do that with DP.

I'm no sure if this is related to importing of displacement. But it would be helpful to be able to import displacement for further editing and be able to paint with the tools in 3dc. Also it's nice to be able to use an AO pass on subdivided surface and edit the AO pass somewhat in it's own layer. All while taking that heavy mesh detail and transferring it to a a lower poly model.

Version. a68 regular. Quadcore intel vista 32bit Brush creates blockiness sometimes in depth mode when painting across surface at extreme angles. Smudge tool behaves awkwardly when smudges surface along the edge of the application window. It creates a harsh line for depth or transparency for color. Keep going Andrew.

Probably the last version of the gator.

Lightwave modeler has a tendency to hide shading artifacts mostly due to the awkward shading engine which doesn't always display and shade geometry properly. Also depends on how you have smooth shading set in lightwave. As I already mentioned and others mentioned. It may or may not show up in the final rendered image, it depends on how the quad is tesselated during render time, also it can change in some instances depending on the angle of the camera. For best results try to avoid topology that stresses polygons in awkward ways such as your example. You are free to do as you wish, I just do not see it as a shading bug in 3dcoat. Just trying to help you out.

I think some of the issues you are having would be resolved if you didn't stress the polygons so much. If I tried make those types of polygons in xsi, maya or c4d, it could potentially result in some strange shading artifacts. Part of the reason why it might is because when the computer is rendering stuff to the screen it is essentially breaking down everything into triangles. For some game models if shading artifacts are appearing on the surface, just simply splitting those trouble areas into triangles will actually fix those problems. They can also disappear if you are using subdivision surfaces. I would be careful about judging the appearance of models using lw modeler. It tends to shade in ways that hide trouble areas, and they may not show up until the camera hits a particular angle in a rendered animation (which is the worst time for such things to show up). In fact yesterday I was noticing such a problem on the shading on a cartoon tank game model while in c4d. I looked at the original model built in xsi and didn't display as awkwardly as it did in c4d but it was displaying with a little discontinuity in xsi. I just split the area into triangles and the problem area shaded correctly. You might find this video helpful. It's about shading. http://www.guerrillacg.org/home/3d-polygon.../smooth-shading

Also, PS Allows a bit more control for rigid object maps. I have a hard time getting repeating shapes in equal distances on most objects. I end up having to guess most of the time. Or is there a trick to getting linear repeating forms in 3dc?

I think there is something wrong with the way xsi handles normal maps from other applications. I tried the compound. I got better results but not quite right. Like you said, I ramp it up to high and it looks blown out and wrong. A strange effect I noticed was that some areas of the normal map were dipping in where it shouldn't be and some places were actually behaving correctly. This seems like a really old problem with xsi. Either the SI team or the Mental images team is to blame, or either there is some magic trick to getting it to work. I tried the normal map in cinema4d. It worked fine given I increase the intensity. I had to get rid of the ridges on the chest it created an odd optical illusion in both xsi and c4d. Like the rises sometimes look like dips and the dips look liked ridges it all changed based on the lighting scheme, I think normal maps probably don't work so well when placed on a surface that is rather convex. My last rendering using xsi. Still not quite right.

It'd be nice in the UV mapping tools that when unwrapping the mesh that the user could specify certain parts of the mesh to have a priority over other parts. For example. I have game models that that are designed water tight because the game engine requires them to not have any holes. When a game object is designed water tight there are areas of the mesh that might not be seen by the player or won't be seen easily. So it is somewhat inefficient to give all areas the same priority in texture resolution when some areas may not be seen. So if the user could specify certain areas of a mesh get a larger piece of the UV space than other pieces this would solve the problem. This would increase the texture resolution on certain sections of the mesh that the user defined as more important than other sections. Also I'm not sure if 3dcoat supports multiple UV layers. But if does it doesn't. It'd be a nice feature to have. Multiple UV maps allows textures of varying resolution to place across the surface of an object.

Basically this would be a masking tool that falls into the category of other tools like the, More on brightness , cavity tool, more on heights tool. This tool would recognize contrasting colors defined by the user. Then it would create a masking border between the two contrasting colors that could be set by the user. This a very specific task and I totally understand you are very busy at the moment Andrew. I appreciate your hard work and dedication.

I think this would fit well in 3d coat. Integrating it into the workflow is what would make it apart of 3d coat and not just a side application. It'd be nice to load up images, turn them into some kind of bump data and stamp it on the surface of your object.