Eric Cosky

Lack of dual monitor support is something I'd like to see addressed, even if it just means allowing windows to be positioned outside the main window instead of always being child windows. I think it would be tremendously useful if users were able to provide their own variation of fx/cg shader used by the paint room with a toggle to switch between the standard and custom shader. This would allow us to paint models that rendered the final texture data (color,specular,emissive,normal) in custom ways as needed by game development. This would mainly be useful for animated effects. The current architecture of supporting only color, specular, emissive and normal channels is a pretty big limitation as compared to Mudbox's more flexible channel support. It would be very helpful if we were able to define the texture channels we want, assign them to a UV set, and bind them to inputs of the display shader which would be customizable per scene (with a default setup that behaves as it does now).

Thank you - I never wanted to bother asking for an upgraded file dialog but this has been a small annoyance in 3DC for quite a long time and I'll be glad to see this get updated.

This is a very welcome change. I've been dealing with these artifacts for a long time without realizing the cause, always assumed it was my fault somehow. I also use 3DC primarily for painting low res game models made with another tool (Softimage) and I'm glad to see this fix show up.

I can't speak for Andrew's plan for scripting, but as a programmer myself I will say that providing a C++ API could be the basis for adding support for any other language. It is also a lot easier to start with because you can generally just make functions that already exist within the application visible outside the app as opposed to building an intermediate layer that has to speak both languages and handle the transfer of data between both worlds. IMHO it makes a lot of sense to start with C++ and build support for other languages on top of that layer.

Speaking of delay & lag, one of my biggest long-term complaints about 3DC is how often the app is unresponsive with little or no indication of what is going on or how long it might take to finish whatever operation I just triggered. This spans pretty much the entire app when any expensive operation is performed, I presume because the basic app framework has the UI processing done by the same thread doing all the heavy lifting. While some of these operations do have (pretty easy to not notice) indicators in the status bar, most commands don't. In terms of the quality of user experience, I think it is a pretty big deal to have the app window visibly grayed out by the OS because it isn't handling input events in a timely manner. Every single time I wonder, did it crash again? Should I wait longer? Will I be going to the task manager to kill it? It would be really nice to see this improved someday, but I do recognize that this would probably be a lot of work and may never happen.

It would be really useful if Sketch had an option to use greyscale images as a bump map (with minimum/max thresholds) instead of just an on/off stencil so I could paint some elevation details in photoshop before importing it. Or perhaps there is another way to do this in 3DC already?

What is the trick to making this work? I have a model with about 20 uvsets/materials in the UV room and I get a a huge number of images being exported. I don't see any options anywhere for merging them at export. This was an model imported for PPP, and as a result there is no retopo mesh (and incidentally why there are so many materials.. it seems to have made one for each Softimage cluster), maybe that is messing me up. I was hoping the "Export UV sets as tiles" was the feature, but toggling this seems to have no effect. Thanks for any info

Andrew, can you please let us know if a crash that is submitted via crash handler + automated webform submission is sufficient for tracking, or is it better if we also create a Mantis report to make sure it isn't lost in the process somewhere? For example, this is the one I just sent in which seems legit; I can make a Mantis entry if necessary but I'd rather not make more bug tracking work for either of us if it isn't helpful. Thanks- Comments: Crashed after deleting object in paint room, returning to retopo and hitting apply symmetry. Bug report: Version:3D-COAT 4.00.BETA9C(CUDA)(DX64) Memory status: OK pointers: 62345 Video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 Ti nproc: 8 (1)object: (C:\\dev\\Shipyard\\main\\Apps\\SquadMiner\\Content\\3D\\SquadMinerXSI\\Scenes\\Actors\\FlareGun\\FlareGun_Assets\\FlareGun-crash.3b) vert: 0 poly: 0 rt:256x256 undo: (277) SMLC LPUS LPUS LPUS LPUS LPUS LPUS LPUS LPUS tool: RetopoTool NumMeshLoads: 1 Time since mesh loading: 4205 s VoxelTool: 41 RetopoTool: 1 UV_Tool: 1 41D20BDA d:\\tempbuild\\3d-coat\\uv_mapper.cpp line 1940 [+44], ClusteredMesh::ApplySymmetry+3738 4015D4F3 d:\\tempbuild\\3d-coat\\retopo.h line 21 [+0], RetopoTool::ApplyTopoSymm+35 400FEE39 d:\\tempbuild\\3d-coat\\simplewidgets.h line 537 [+17], wpcallback::call+537 41E0AF7D d:\\tempbuild\\3d-coat\\simplewidgets.cpp line 926 [+24], BaseWidget::CallCallbacks+621 41E21723 d:\\tempbuild\\3d-coat\\simplewidgets.cpp line 1518 [+21], Widgets::ProcessWindowsMessages+1171 4016F20B d:\\tempbuild\\3d-coat\\simplewidgets.cpp line 6460 [+10], IntfWidget1::OnButtonDown+219 41BC5540 d:\\tempbuild\\comms\\cwidget.cpp line 465 [+44], comms::cWidgets::HandleInputEvents+1424 416DA979 d:\\tempbuild\\main.cpp line 126 [+0], comms::cMain_OnRender+265 41BAEC69 d:\\tempbuild\\comms\\cwinmain.cpp line 607 [+0], cWinMain_OnRender+217 41BAEDEF d:\\tempbuild\\comms\\cwinmain.cpp line 1983 [+0], cWinMain_OneIterationOfMessageLoop+367 41BB120F d:\\tempbuild\\comms\\cwinmain.cpp line 2264 [+0], WinMain+4847 40434E17 f:\\dd\\vctools\\crt_bld\\self_64_amd64\\crt\\src\\crt0.c line 263 [+33], __tmainCRTStartup+391 7745652D line 0 [+0], BaseThreadInitThunk+13 7789C521 line 0 [+0], RtlUserThreadStart+33 7789C521 line 0 [+0], RtlUserThreadStart+33 General information: Exception code:C0000005 3D-COAT 4.00.BETA9C(CUDA)(DX64) Memory status before run: Memory load: 66 TotalPhys: 4293378048 AvailPhys: 55443456 TotalPageFile: 4289892352 AvailPageFile: 1390338048 TotalVirtual: 4294836224 AvailVirtual: 4117700608 Memory status after crash: Memory load: 70 TotalPhys: 4293378048 AvailPhys: 3811983360 TotalPageFile: 4289892352 AvailPageFile: 1726304256 TotalVirtual: 4294836224 AvailVirtual: 3241013248 AvailVirtual: 3241013248

Yes, quite some time ago in fact which is why I never even considered these features to be a permanent part of V3. You're right though, naming the builds V4 beta would have made it more clear however I don't agree that the lack of clarity here is enough to justify giving freebies away to people who couldn't be bothered to read the manual. Andrew deserves our support, and if people want to get bent out of shape over this then I would personally consider that to be an unfortunate and unjustified overreaction. Not that my opinion matters at all here.. and it is just my opinion. I couldn't agree more.

I would just like to quote version 3.7 of the 3DC manual, from November 2011: "24.0 Beta tools Edit->Preferences->Show beta tools. Beta tools are mostly intended to be in the next V4 but if you want you may enable them." While clearly people have different ideas about the meaning of "beta", and perhaps Andrew could have made his intentions more obvious with different messaging in the application itself, I don't think it's very fair for him to have to grant V4 features to V3 users just because of a misinterpretation that could have been cleared up by looking at the manual. Just my 2 cents. Edit: I suppose it could have helped to mention "beta features will be disabled when V4 comes out", but really folks what other programs have you ever seen that didn't disable public betas when the final version is released? It seems reasonable to give Andrew a pass on this even if you think it was an oversight considering all the stuff he has done to make 3DC and his open relationship with his customers what it is today.

Andrew I think your current policy & plan regarding beta & disabling v4 features in v3 is perfectly fair & reasonable. Anyone familiar enough with 3DC to go in and turn on the beta checkbox, followed by the essential trips to the forums to figure out how to use the new features could only believe they were part of v3 if they are deliberately ignoring the obvious fact these are beta features for the next version. It is an almost universal fact that beta versions of significant software expire in order for very obvious reasons. A closed beta will not provide as much feedback as an open beta, and 3DC would only suffer as a result of the reduced feedback. If there is anything at all to be done to improve the communication of this - the need for which is questionable at best imho - change the label on the beta checkbox to say "Beta test features for the next version" and make a dialog that pops up when it's turned on that says "Beta features are a work in progress for the next version. Do not enable this in a production environment unless you are willing to adapt to unforeseen stability issues during the beta process and intend to purchase the upgrade because there may be backward compatibility issues. These features will be disabled when the next version is released.". IMHO anyone who thinks this policy is unreasonable is in fact the unreasonable one.

Thanks for the update! I get the same error though, unfortunately.

Good to know, thanks!

Thank you for making the larger new icons+labels optional. As a 1080p display user the real estate of the big icons is not something I can afford, and I still prefer to use the text buttons. On a related note, it would sure be nice if the app's main menu were in the title bar like Photoshop CS6. The app's main titlebar is wasted space that I'd like to use if at all possible.

Just have the original high res painted mesh visible in the paint room and use Merge with NM (per pixel) with your reduced mesh in the retopo room. This will cause the object in the retopo room to be copied into the paint room as an object, baking the texture sampled from the objects currently visible in the paint room in the process. The docs do a poor job of explaining this, but that seems to be how it works. I am pretty sure there other ways to bake textures in 3DC but I've never looked into it much, it was hard enough to figure out how to do just this much.. It's really hard to tell from the docs what is and isn't possible with respect to baking textures, it seems to be mentioned only in passing as if people only needed to be reminded of something they already knew how to do as opposed to it being a significant feature that warrants a detailed explanation of what is possible and what specifically to do to use it.

I'm no expert at 3dc but since nobody else responded, I'll try.. but take all this with a big rock of salt because I'll probably be a bit off somewhere. I think what might work best for LOD is to export your mesh (don't bother with texture/uvs) to another program that has poly reduction features (which is probably most of them). I use Softimage, and I would use the Poly Reduce command to let me dial down the poly count while keeping the general form. Then export that model to OBJ. In 3DC, with your high-res model already painted and loaded in the Paint room, go to the retopo room and import the OBJ as a reference mesh. Unwrap the new topology (== create a new, different uv set), taking the time to manually place seams if you want, then use the "Merge with NM (per pixel)" command to bake the texture found in the object in the paint room to the new UV set. Obviously you'll want a suitably smaller texture for this lower res uv set so the lower LOD model will provide better performance (smaller textures = better perf = why you do low lod in the first place). Check my thread history for a few links on related topics, this is something I've had some trouble figuring out myself and people were kind enough to help out with.

Hi, I recently created a model that uses a mirrored UV set and it looked as intended in 3DCoat, with both sides of the model showing the normal maps correctly. When exported to Softimage, I found myself having difficulty getting the normal maps to look correct and I eventually found this to be the result of tangents somehow not getting set up or otherwise reaching Softimage correctly (the apparently typical problem with mirrored tangents flipping the normal map shading angle). I have since been told that the obj format doesn't support tangent data, so this would explain part of the problem. I eventually wound up exporting half the model and doing the symmetry in Softimage which allowed it to work correctly. I'd like to avoid this next time around though, so I'm curious if anyone has had more success with FBX or LWO formats while using mirrored UV sets with normal maps. I made several attempts with those, but had the same results as the OBJ format. Maybe I missed something though. Anyone out there have better luck getting mirrored normal maps out of 3DCoat? It would be nice to know if there was a particular format known to export the correct tangent data for mirrored UVs. Thanks for any feedback,

Thanks!

I'm trying to figure out a good reason why I would want to use virtual mirror mode instead of just plain old symmetry when doing retopo for a model. What's the practical benefit? It seems like it should be pretty similar to regular symmetry mode. The docs don't even mention this feature. I was doing a retopo with virtual mirror mode enabled (not intentionally) and somehow managed to lose some retopo work when I turned it off. I think it might be because I didn't "Apply symmetry" before doing something else. So now I'm a bit hesitant to use the virtual mirror mode and I'd like to understand this better. Thanks for any comments

I've had a couple crashes in 3.7.10A in the retopo room related to collapsing edges with symmetry turned on. The auto-emailer submitted the callstacks. Fortunately the "save on crash" logic worked so I didn't lose anything

Always like to see more resources like this

Thanks that was the problem

Thanks guys! I knew it had to be simple. One problem though - I don't actually see the Add Rotation field! Maybe this is a bug in 3.7.10A ? Please check out the attached screenshot. I have a point selected, and the "Add Rotation" simply isn't there for me. Any ideas?

Is the curve tool working for other people? I am not very familiar with the tool but I am finding that the "apply" button for the voxel room Curves tool isn't creating voxels in the current version. I could be doing something fundamentally wrong though, I haven't used the curve tool much at all. PS. If anyone has a moment to help me with a couple newbie questions regarding curves, I made a thread here - thanks.

I've been trying to learn how to use the Curves tool in the voxel room. It looks like a very useful tool but one thing is really holding me up - I can't figure out how to reliably control the rotation of the object along the spline. Many of the shapes, such as the first "Dragon4.obj", have a spike or other feature that needs to be oriented correctly for it to work for a given curve. I've tried to use this tool every now and then for a long time and always gave up before figuring this out so I am hoping someone can give me a few pointers on it. I've tried the rotate tool (visible when "apply to whole curve" is set) and it rotates the points on the spline, not the shape extruded along the spline. Often times, when I do find a control that has any influence of the rotation of the extrusion, it rotates so fast for even slight changes in the curve point positions that it is uncontrollable and seemingly just a side effect of the spline manipulation, not a specific "rotate the profile". I haven't yet seen anything that rotates the extrusion that doesn't also move, rotate or scale the spline itself. I am sure I'm overlooking something simple & fundamental here because I've seen plenty of examples of people doing things that are clearly the result of well controlled use of the curve tool. Can someone help me out with a few tips on how to use the curve tool effectively? Thanks