GED

good work what did you use to bake the high to the low?

haha this last guy has a really good cartoony weight to his face.

What I dont understand is what the renderer is doing. When I hit render I lose the cast shadows shown in the viewport? then it starts to flash different brightnesses on the model and finally finishes the frame of animation with the model looking 98% the same as it does in the viewport with no cast shadows? then it moves to the next frame, is this everyone elses experience too? I would rather have an export turntable option which outputs a 360 turn table rotation straight from the viewport with cast shadows. Maybe I just dont understand what the renderer is for.

nice retopo work rodney brett, thanks for the tip about using large polys, I hadnt thought of trying that and was just manually dragging out one poly at a time(still loads faster than max with no polyboost). I agree with the others, in fact I would be happy to have all the tools that are currently in the V3.0 alpha just have them all in a nicer GUI and all tools feeling professional and well refined with powerful texture painting(not relient on mesh density but actual textures) and all imports, exports and conversion tools working.

nice work, looks like you nailed those wierd shapes, are you going to take it further?

thats more than we should ask for, thanks for all the hard work!

thanks guys, heres an experiment with the new release Ive still got some bugs with the ctrl z undos just erasing everything from the viewport and changing the tree view but other than that its great work from Andrew. heres a very quick test of the new subtool management, its great how the voxels seem to automatically conform to one another even on different layers...I wonder if that would be annoying with some projects though? maybe an on off switch for this feature would be useful i dont know. I imported the kungfu dude obj from an old mudbox sculpt I did into the merge voxel menu, placed him with the transform and then dumped a sphere on his head, he doesnt look happy about this hehe

nice jedwards, can we now import a hardsuface mesh from max as a new subtool? so far Ive managed to get voxel sculpts to work in layers/tree but I cant seem to import objs into the tree? during voxel sculting if I ctrl z sometimes everything dissappears...all models just gone not sure what I did. Ah umm I press ctrl z more than once and all items in the tree turn into "root" and then everything is gone.

does this forum not allow external img tags? well heres the latest pic anyway

I found out that there is already something similar to what I described in 'merge - transform' but that only lets you move rotate and scale one object at a time and then when its set in voxels you cant move or rotate or scale it anymore. I want to move a large collection of primitives around in the viewport and then hit enter and get them to all turn to voxels at once. At the moment I have to place them one at a time and just hope I got the proportions/angles or position right because they are then voxels and cant be changed.

thanks wailingmonkey, this is great fun for anyone who felt limited in their creativity by traditional 3d sculpting. I did a quick sculpt last night before bed to test out using the snake brush for some hair, about 45 mins really excited about the subtools/layers stuff coming soon

this sounds incredible, Im amazed at the pace of development.

hehe cool little cartoony animals, would be nice to see them rendered together in a big scene :P

Request: this might be a little unnecessary so feel free to ignore but it could be really useful if it works well. Im thinking Voxel sculpting is great but we need a way to quickly lay down a fairly good base shape to sculpt on. So heres what I imagine, you select non voxel primitives and move, rotate and scale them into position in the viewport to create the basic silouette. Then just like curves you hit enter and it all turns into voxels and blends together a little to create one big voxel shape. The same thing is possible now but we would have to arrange the primitives in a seperate 3D app and then import as obj as you can see with the yoshi made of spheres in this thread http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php...5268&page=4 the sphere tool currently in 3D coat is good but its more like a brush and really difficult to use it to make a base shape as you dont really know where the sphere will appear in 3D space. edit: actually this might not work well with symettry so that wouldnt be so useful

my home system( amd 3500+ 2GB 8800GT) usually gets up to about 2.5 million polys in zbrush 3 or mudbox 1 before it starts to become slower and harder to work with. I wanted to see how far I could push voxel sculpting a character before it becomes too much for my system, I got up to 3 million triangles and didnt find it too hard to work with but there was a little lag. heres that same character with increase resolution and a bit of sculpting and a stupid amount of detail brushes just as a test. I would normally spend alot more time and care sculpting than this lol

yeah I wasnt impressed with MB2009's elitist system requirements, they really arent doing their product any favours. I still really enjoy the feel of sculpting in Mudbox 1 and 2009 and the interface too. The 3D paint isnt really amazing in Mb2009 but a nice addition. Havent spent much time using 3dc to sculpt or paint or retopo so I cant really compare the apps properly but voxel sculpting is a clear winner for me.

thanks for the response James I used UVlayout for my last big gameartisans challenge with deadpool and it did a really good job but I found it really frustrating exporting all the models seperately so that I could get to all the hidden areas and then reimporting after uvs and attaching all the models. is there any other way, can you just export it all to uvlayout in one go or something and still get to the seams/polys? yeah Im thinking it would be nice to import high poly hard surface stuff into 3D coat and then build a voxel model around it for the organic parts of the character, they would have to be seperated from eachother by layers or something but it would be really cool. Then retopo in 3dc and use xnormal to bake some maps

nice retopo work, I havent tried the uv tools in 3d coat yet, you say you prefer uvlayout still? is there any reason? this app has sooo many tools! =0 wow

heres one I did during lunchbreak at work last week.

I tried out the 3.0 alpha for this past week in some spare time and Im loving it. Heres my first creature volumetric sculpted from one sphere, its just the basic forms so it was about 2 hours in 3D coat to make this dude. Tried to use the rendering tools too, the cast shadows seem to look good in the viewport how come they dont come up in the render?

thanks andrew fantastic tools youre making here, thanks for the tips, Ive only played around with grow and thaw alot so far, I tried the other brushes but wasnt sure what to expect them to do so its hard to say if they are working well or not, they seem fine to me. I am so impressed by your efforts, you guys at 3D coat must be seriously gifted. heres a wip of some alien creature, made from just one sphere and grow and thaw in about 2 hrs still having trouble with the brushes strength so I was switching between cuda on and off haha

I think Ive found a workaround to my last problem I posted here - switching cuda off has got my inverted brushes to be much more powerful and responsive but now I have the problem philnolan has shown in his first video when cuda is off. so my experience so fat is something like this so cuda on = good positive brush weak negative brush cuda off = wierd/lumpy positive brush good negative brush.

just wondered is anyone else having issues with the inverted brush(holding ctrl) being very very weak compared to the power of the brush without holding ctrl? is there a way to change settings or workaround this...like a seperate setting for inverted strength? otherwise I will just have to wait till I have a new computer and try again then

Hi Im using alpha 42 at work the voxel sculpting seems to work fine there I have a q6600 2GB ram nvidia 8500 genius graohics tablet at home I have amd 3500+ 2GB ram 8800GT wacom graphire4 I find the normal voxel sculpting brush fine but when I hold ctrl...which is supposed to invert the brush function...it seems to do a smooth function rather than invert or have very little power. This makes it pretty impossible to do any voxel sculpting at home.