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Yup, the DX version always put my video card to a stress, even with simple scenes. With NVIDIA Inspector I was able to force 3DC not to exceed 60 fps, and since then everything has been quiet inside my workstation, and power bills a little bit lower.

You need to use Smart Materials set to Camera Projection.

Double check if Ignore back faces is turned off.

Nobody is interested in this challenge? Come on guys!

It looks like the address of NVil forum has changed to http://samardac.com/NVil-Forum/

Don't worry. They said that NVil will still be developed. I believe R3F is a little side project of theirs, though I'm puzzled about its target audience too.

Yup.

Instead of erasing layer 0 to get transparency, you can simply hide it. --- Ok, I just noticed Taros has already mentioned this.

3D-Coat Community Challenge #14: How will we look like in AD 4016? Technology influences our lives and our lifestyle. We all find ourselves dealing with more and more advanced machines and electronic devices every year. From basic consumer products like smartphones, through intelligent cars, to wonders of the anticipated human organs 3D printing. According to Moore's Law, the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Does this law apply to other categories of our life? Many science-fiction films from the 50's to 80's pictured flying cars, cybernetic limbs and space travel to be available for everyone as early as in the year 2000. Those prophecies were wrong, because in 2016 we are still mostly driving petrol fuelled cars cars, a lost limb cannot be fully replaced, and starship travels to nearby planets are still far beyond our reach. How do you think an ordinary civilian will look like in AD 4016? Two millennia from the present day? Will he be a farmer growing potatoes while striving for survival in a post-nuclear winter, a worker drone living under a constant surveillance in an Orwellian-like future, a chubby consumer with a permanent connection to a global network through his anti-grav saucer, or maybe a transcendent being that is a pure energy? How do you imagine yourself... ourselves in two thousand years from the present day? RULES OF ENGAGEMENT: 1. The goal is to create a character that depicts a civilian from AD 4016. 2. Most of the sculpting and retopo work should be accomplished in 3D-Coat. 4. All texture work must be done in 3D-Coat. However you can use Photoshop or other similar 2D software for projection painting, etc. 5. Use any software you like for rigging and posing. 6. Any rendering engine can be used to produce the final image. 7. The scene must have at least one "character", which of course could be anything, depending on how do you think we will look like in the year 4016. 8. The scene must have a background, either a matte painting or a 3D one (it can be rough as it's only to provide the context). 9. If necessary, provide a brief textual description of the AD 4016 setting, that would justify the strange appearance of your character. 10. HAVE FUN! Deadline: 23rd of October 2016 (Sunday), 23:59:59 GMT.

Haha, awesome!

Some sculpting tools have a checkbox called Conform Retopo Mesh. However most sculpting tools don't have it, so you'll have to tweak your retopo groups manually after you're done fixing the highpoly mesh.

I'm afraid the method I described is, at the moment, the only one that allows for sculpting through multiple meshes. Tools like Move, Pose and Cutoff already have Through All Volumes option, so maybe other tools will get it too eventually.

Aw, Tim! You arrived almost exactly three years too late with that throne. There was a community challenge back in 2013 where you were required to sculpt a king's throne. You'd stir up some waters with yours, man. Excellent work!

Can you provide a rough example?

The possibility to edit your posts expires after an undefined time. Just create a new post with updated images. That's a common thing on almost every CGI forum I'm attending.

Aw, what a cute. I love it. Whether you'll encounter trouble with retopologizing the cloth or not, will partly depend on your scene scale. Apart of that, I find it's easier to retopo a clothed character when I make a combined voxelized copy of it just for the retopo purpose. So the cloth and the body gets merged together into one volume. Yay! No more backface vertex snapping! Well, just in theory... The problem is, the thinner the cloth is, the greater voxel resolution one will require... and the greater the voxel resolution is, the greater the probability that the body won't merge with the clothes... So snapping to clothes' underside can happen in such cases, unless you manually close external gaps in voxel volume in order to make the volume watertight. And then fill voids and close invisible hulls to fill any "air pockets" that are inside that watertight volume. Oh, humanity.

I'd import the scanned data directly to Sculpt Room, as a surface (with Import w/o Voxelization flag enabled), and then try to fix the missing geometry by using either the Geometry->Close Holes command or Fill Holes tool. Then I'd massage and tweak the recreated surface until it's smooth and seamless. And only after those actions are complete, I'd begin retopologizing the high poly mesh in the Retopo Room.

There is a way to do it in 3D-Coat. Convert all of the VoxTree volumes, that you want to sculpt through, to surfaces (if they were in voxel mode, they would physically merge together, and you probably want to avoid it). Then, move them (without booleans!) under one selected volume of your choice. This will allow you to sculpt through them with any of the surface tools. To separate the merged volumes after you're done, use Objectify command. The catch is, that you will need to manually restore original names of those volumes and recreate their hierarchy. So, depending on their number, it might be a nuisance or a nightmare. https://www.dropbox.com/s/1724b93wi9sgu8q/sculpt_through_multiple_volumes.mp4?dl=1 On the video I linked up, I'm using a custom script to put all volumes of the default mannequin to root level, and then batch group them under a single volume. This is just to save time on the demonstration. You can do either: - use Parent function to parent your volumes you want to sculpt through under one volume and then, kind of, collapse it without booleans using the Merge Sub-Tree (no booleans) command. - or select each volume to be affected, and move it to your target volume with a Merge (move, no booleans) command. You can also copy your volumes (without booleans too). Anyway, either way will work.

IMHO resampling works best with voxels only. I never ever use it on a geo that is in surface mode. Decimation FTW.

Okay, I'm almost done with writing the subject of the next community challenge. I'll post it in a day or two.

3D-Coat allows for tris-sculpting and poly modelling. It doesn't support NURBS per se, so if you require a 'perfect' G3, you can try to achieve it in a polygonal discrete space by carefully aligning your vertices of your surfaces (with Catmull-Clark subdivision in mind). Or, just import a tessellated pre-made base meshes from Rhino/MoI.

There is no direct equivalent of polygroups in 3D-Coat. You could store freeze states or pose tool selections, but due on-the-fly changes that are being applied to mesh structure by most of the tools, those states will quickly become unusable (unless you hold yourself from using LiveClay tools or surface tools with "Remove Stretching" flag enabled).

The tip with the brush is priceless. A hidden gem of sorts.

I'm currently on vacation. Maybe someone else could come up with a subject of the challenge? Otherwise, I will be posting it after Monday.