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simmsimaging

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Everything posted by simmsimaging

  1. I've been out of the loop a bit lately and am just seeing all these posts about voxel painting. I'm wondering if this is supposed to replace the other two painting methods, or are those still slated for the improvements we were discussing not long ago, and that Andrew acknowledged needed some love? /b
  2. Fully agreed. LC and voxels are cool, but I bought 3D Coat to, well, coat stuff. I gave up on the paint room updates and bought Mudbox 2012 just a few weeks ago. There are still some things that 3DC does better but the speed is great and the simplicity of the interface is refreshing. I'm not totally happy with it, and am not sold on the long term just yet, but I feel your frustrations anyway. b
  3. I have asked about this before. Basically you need to be able to paint with white, or some other colour in the depth channel (or spec for that matter). It's not supported and I don't think I received any indications of whether or not it ever would be. Hopefully you can drum up some interest in it, as it's a major gap in the workflow IMO. /b
  4. And that's one of the things I don't like about it - can't please everyone My feeling is that there are too many half-baked avenues for most of the stuff I have seen in 3DC. It's suffering too much from trying to be all things to all people with all workflows. That's my POV anyway, although I know that issue has been beaten to death on the forums... On topic though: I have this same loss of detail problem with 3DC. Either i lose it in voxels moving from surface to voxel (although that is partly avoidable with higher res) even then I tend to lose all the fine stuff on exporting to the paint room. Auto-retopo doesn't seem to give me very good results on complex shapes. Retopologizing isn't something I've gotten any good at mind you, but even when the mesh is close the finer stuff seems to go out the window. I've had better results exporting a dense mesh out of the voxel room and remeshing it in Zbrush. The advantage to that is you can get sub-d levels back in the game, so you can actually UV and paint it still, but the detail holds up much better.
  5. Great work on the new features.! I'm more of a lighting/render/materials guy so I don't have much to show in the way of modeling (always used 3DC just for texturing) but I'm really loving the voxel/LiveClay workflow for creating liquids. Here's a current one I'm working on for a chocolate splash/swirl. Just pulled it all out of a cube primitive and really didn't take that long. Some other fluids that need to be thinner/finer might be more difficult with Voxels/LC but I haven't tried yet. This mesh is around 10 million tris and would need more to get a lot finer than it is now. Anyway, I've been using Zbrush for this a lot lately and even with dynamesh there are issues for me with getting fine enough detail (due to the res cap in dynamesh). In many ways it's easier to get what I want with 3DC these days, which is a great thing IMO. That said, I'm all for simplifying the UI and various pipelines possible with 3DC. It's a bit chaotic in there /b
  6. Just bumping it again I'm on a new job with another set of elements/logos that need to be positioned in 3D space and I'm constantly back and forth to Photoshop tweaking. Even a simple move tool for layers would be a huge asset. Filed a mantis request as well. /b
  7. So I had a look at ABNRanger's UV demo vid that was posted the other day - thanks for that, it's a nice overview of the methodology. I think it helped clarify where we are differing too. The points in your process where you are working on things like fingers and toes, where you need to click an endpoint edge, then a starting edge, then shift-click to join them: that is the part that I think could be simpler with the "paint" pre-select of the sort in Unfold3D. Your approach works of course, but it does depend on multiple clicks, and some experience to visualize the flows and put those end points in good places on the first try. What Unfold would let you do is click your start edge, then as you hover over and trace out the line you wish to mark it would highlight it as you go, so you would draw out the seam and it would flow point-to-point as you painted along. When you got to the end point you would click and it would create that seam all in one go. Of course you can also just click a starting edge then go straight to the end point and it would try to connect them up by the shortest continuous path. I just preferred the 'paint along' approach of pre-selecting because sometimes the path it chose was not the one I liked/wanted, particularly on long runs with less than perfect edge flows. Having the point-to-point paintable approach is, I think, also just a whole lot faster when you have messy meshes that don't have nice clean edge flows where the full edge loop function of 3DC falls down (as did the loop function of Unfold of course) This is function that would only enhance what is already possible in 3DC and make even your worfklow a bit faster/easier. A true paintable selection is possible too, and can also make for pretty quick selecting/deselecting, but even just adding the first option would be great. I think with that minor tweak 3DC would have probably the best UV mapping tools I have ever tried - it probably already does /b
  8. I'm good with leaving it up to Andrew, and the general level of demand. /b
  9. Have to agree with the last few posts: I think you are assuming it will be slower based on experience with a different tool, and it just doesn't necessarily apply. I am not guessing that it can be faster, I *know* it can be, for me anyway, because I have used both. Anyway, if Andrew can see fit to add a more flexible point to point, or a paintable pre-select based on a similar approach, it would be great. It doesn't need to replace the existing toolset, so you don't have to use it if you don't want to. /b
  10. Sorry, it's actually called Unfold3D. You can see a vid on their site that shows how the interface/selection works: http://www.polygonal-design.fr/e_unfold/tuto9.php I understand that paint selections can be a hassle on dense meshes, but they are super fast for cleaning out (de-selecting) areas and can be quicker than repetitive shift-clicking. I know the shift thing in 3DC and it works pretty well. Unfold had that as too, but it also had the option of holding shift and as you moved along a seam it would pre-select up to the point you were at, then when you clicked down it selected the edges along that path. I haven't used Max's point to point, but this one works very well and is super fast. 3DC cannot quite emulate that without multiple clicks. Some meshes and selections would matter more than others. Anyway, it's one of those things - if you don't use that method and don't like it then so be it, but it's far from useless and would be an improvement upon the 3DC tools if it were there as well. Another thing of use that Unfold had was marquee selections to quickly select/de-select large blocks at once. That would be nice too. /b
  11. Actually I think I understand it pretty well, but I still think painting selections is useful. I used that method all the time in the program I used to do all my unwrapping in (UnwrapUV) and the painting of edges for creating shorter loops etc is very handy and I find it means less click related mistakes. That program also had a slightly cleaner method of doing point to point selections. The current 3DC way is workable for sure, but adds an extra step. It would be better to select a starting edge, and then to be able to just hold down a modifier and click the end point and have the loop go to that point, instead of having to define a start and end edge and then shift-click the loop between.
  12. I updated to this version and 3DC is crashing my computer totally when trying to import a mesh for per-pixel painting. Memory usage goes through the roof and the whole computer just bogs down to the point I have to just force-restart it. Tried it with two different .obj files - same result. Also happened when using the app-link script to send it from Max. I have not had time to look into the Mantis thing for bug reporting so I'm just noting it here. /b
  13. I made a new scene and tried again and I was able to do 8K as well. Not sure what happened, but previously there was no 8K option - the list just ended at 4K. Anyway, if it happens again I will save the file for you. b
  14. Yes, basically. I would like to be able to paint with black as well as white (or any colour for that matter) to create variation in the spec map. Right now it will only paint with white, or erase. You can lower the specularity slider and paint over it with darker grey, but doing it that way sets a maximum value that is not pressure sensitive so you can't create very nice subtle gradients very easily. To be able to do the same in th depth channel would also be a great benefit, for all the same reasons. /b
  15. Thanks - that provides a different functionality again - basically the same workaround I already use, which is to paint a colour map to be later used as spec. Thanks for the tip, I didn't know about that function, but it doesn't fill the gap for me still /b
  16. I would happily make it part of this topic Something to consider about this: it is not *just* about how long it takes, it's more about how it affects the flow of work. Anyone who deals with creative processes will know what I mean: you get into a groove and you do things you just can't or don't do when it's broken out into separate chunks. For me it is very much a question of driving the process into the background so I'm not even aware of it. Painting colour in 3DC is great this way, but depth and spec are pretty simplistic and just can't keep up with that flow. I know this particular aspect of 3DC is fairly small to some people, but it's an important part of the texturing workflow, and if you are going to put the tools in there you might as well go all the way Just my POV, but I would love to hear Andrew chime in on it. Thanks /b
  17. Have to disagree with you on this one It's not about old or new ways, just ways that make sense. You can think of spec as more or less shine, but no matter how you think of it, in the end you have to create that with greyscale values, so being able to *add* blacks is a necessary component. Only being able to "remove white" to add black (or add less shine as you put it) is just a clunky way of doing it by comparison and involves flipping brushes and tools and makes it harder to do it with good creative flow and it is harder to get the nuanced tones that make for more subtle mapping. It's no different than painting layer masks or alpha channels in Photoshop, and I toggle between painting black or white constantly in that process. Anyway, to be able to freely paint and flow through the creative process you need a smooth interface, and this one just lacks IMO. Andrew: any chance of adding this functionality or is the discussion just moot anyway ?
  18. Thanks Greg - getting warmer for sure The spec slider combined with eraser does provide the functionality I was missing - but there is still something cumbersome/funky about the workflow this way. Using a tablet, you can't paint "less spec" over "more spec" by adjusting pressure, so you have to either manually reset the Spec value or erase. It's a lot of manual toggling around and loss of pressure sensitivity etc so it's not a very smooth way to paint, compared to just toggling between white and black and simply painting. This is how I do it now: making a new layer in the Color Channel and painting a black and white map that I later use as as Spec. Is it possible to implement a simple system so that when painting in Spec only the brushes respect the paint swatch colour? Thanks again for the info though: it's a huge help just to be able to do it at all b
  19. Sorry - meant to also say: thanks for helping with this! b
  20. Yep, I'm trying to paint live in the Paint Room, but the Spec can only seem to be toned down from white to nothing, but I cannot go back in and paint black etc. It's either white or nothing, unless I am using a Material that has an image map in the Spec slot, in which case it will paint that texture in. I am definitely only painting Spec to test it (depth and color are off) and I am looking at the spec channel only. Is there a way to go in and paint black (or any colour for that matter) back into the spec channel ? Nothing works (i.e changing the paint colour to black only affects the colour channel, spec is still white). This all applies to depth too btw! b
  21. I am pretty sure this came up before but couldn't find an answer: Why can we only paint white into a spec map? It's not a very useful channel if we can't texture it with shades of grey like the colour channel. Generally I just have to create a new colour layer and paint a spec map as a separate thing, but it would be nice to be able to set the spec colour separate from the brush colour and hit that at the same time. Even just to be able to go back in and paint in some grey/black to tone down specularity would be useful. Am I missing something? b
  22. I'm just getting around to trying this out again - kinda gave up on Ptex at first I can't seem to get the Texture Bake options to allow me to bake a map larger than 4K. Is that a built-in limit or am I missing something? b
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