ajz3d

If printing the model on a 3D printer isn't your intention, I suggest to retopologize it into a simpler geometry before unwrapping. Unwrapping algorithms (ABF++, LSCM and GU) sometimes might become lost when dealing with triangles and n-gons. Especially if the geo is very dense. Of course, the lack of cylindrical and polar UV projection in 3D Coat is another matter.

What Tony said. I personally never use Virtual Mirror Mode because I don't like to be restricted to one side of symmetry plane only. Freedom all the way.

I hope this heralds a 'marriage' of 3DC and Houdini Engine. Or at least smoother exchange of data for processing between the two.

This limited time offer is €449, so it isn't as attractive for EU citizens as it is for people from United States.

I think someone mentioned that painting emission on an object will effectively turn it into geometry light. It's worth a try.

The main reason I wrote my post for is to let@Andrew Shpagin know that most likely everything that is required for this functionality to work in 3D Coat is already in it. All of the retopo stuff is most likely based on some sort of raycasting algorithms, and the decimation and smoothing are available in the sculpt room. So reproducing the HDA shouldn't require much of devs effort. Of course, the approach I took is naive and I tested it only on a couple of meshes, but I didn't run into any problems so far. It might be a good starting point.

Lemme light up that cigar, Mikey.

I had a similar problem with one of my models. I used one of the PicMat shaders during sculpting and it emphasized the details which simply weren't there. It's a problem that is also not unknown to ZBrush artists with its MatCap shader (MatCap Gray anyone? :)). Ever since I've made that mistake I mostly try to sculpt in a neutral lighting and PBR shader, or at least switching to it from time to time to inspect the sculpture. Anyway, this thread gave me a push towards finding a workaround for amplifying the details in 3DC without having to re-sculpt my old model. I do have a ZBrush license and I could import the model and use the macro shown on the video from OP's first post, but I don't like easy solutions. So I watched the video a couple of times, noted that it's all based on a base mesh (SubDiv 1) and MorphTargets and managed to reproduce it in Houdini. https://youtu.be/vLQi_oOVgAE 3D Coat doesn't use SubDiv levels, so I'm using a decimated and smoothed version of input geometry as a target surface for raycasting points of a highres geo. Raycast highres mesh then becomes the new base mesh. This is important because a perfect topology match is required in order to move (using linear interpolation) points of the base mesh to their corresponding positions on the highres mesh (point numbers must match). With linear interpolation I can overshoot their positions on a vector that goes from the base mesh to target mesh, and this is when the amplification happens. Regions to be affected by amplification (or reduction, which is also possible) can be painted out with a mask. Sometimes I have wet dreams of 3D Coat adapting Houdini Engine.

Unless someone will chime in with a better solution, if you insist on using brush alphas to paint decals, then probably the best solution would be to redo your UVs with the decals in mind.. Or paint from two opposite sides and try to blend the seam.

I'm sorry, but according to my experience, brush alphas won't wrap around the mesh because painting with a brush is camera-based. But hey! Have you tried painting over Texture Editor (Textures->Texture UV Editor)? If you have UVs set up correctly, you might pull it off.

Either find a good camera angle to use with camera projection or, if you want to do something extreme, like wrapping a decal 359-degrees around a cylinder, or some other surface with parts invisible for the viewport camera, you might try one of these workarounds: Use UV-Mapping projection instead of a camera one, fill the whole layer and then delete all unwanted decal repetitions. However UV-Mapping may result in a distorted texture if you have distorted UVs. You also have Spline Image Tool at your disposal, but it doesn't look like it supports Smart Materials. However, if you're creating non-PBR textures, it might do the trick. Personally, I've never used it so I can't say much about it.

I'm currently revising my scripts as some of them seem to be broken by two regressions and a recent change to ShowFloatingMessage function. In fact, scripts that don't use modal dialog callbacks or custom buttons you can fix by yourself, simply by editing each line that include ShowFloatingMessage function and adding false as its third argument. The rest of the scripts got replaced by new 3DC features, so I'm marking them as obsolete.

Sort of obsolete because since 3DC devs implemented "Pick from Retopo" into Sculpt Room's Import tool and Use Visible Paint Objects as Retopo in the retopo room, we can now move paint objects from paint room to sculpt room via retopo room.

Obsolete since version 4.7.07 of 3DC in which hotkeys for changing rooms were introduced.

Obsolete since the introduction of Unify UV tool in 3DC 4.7.10.

I've noticed a bunch of regressions in the scripting model. They pretty much break most of the scripts that worked so far. http://3dcoat.com/mantis/view.php?id=2296 http://3dcoat.com/mantis/view.php?id=2295 http://3dcoat.com/mantis/view.php?id=2294 There's also been a change in ShowFloatingMessage function which isn't reflected in the documentation. It now accepts three arguments, with the third, a boolean, being the recent addition.

Excellent!

You can report this bug to Mantis BugTracker (the link to Mantis is at the top of the forum page) or send an email directly to 3DC support. Or ideally - do both.

The idea is good, but I think there's a good chance that the voxel density required for this kind of "lossless" conversion in some cases would be so high that it would lead to frequent system instability caused by workstations running out of RAM. Or viewport freezing on low end cards due to insane amount of triangles queued for rendering. A total overhaul of 3D Coat's surface booleans system might be the only way to go. SideFX managed to pull off a similar task. They ditched their old cookie operator and completely rewrote boolean ops. The result is a boolean operator that I have yet to see failing a given task. On my feature wish list for the sculpt room, this overhaul is a #1.

I believe Color to Glossiness utilizes Copy Channels. However in 4.7.29 Copy Channels seems to be partially broken. I can't get it to work most of the time.

I think both devices shine in their own field. I wish i had more time to test them out.

@AndrewShpagin: Are Trello's or Mantis' feature requests taken into consideration by the DevTeam when it comes to define goals for the next release?

You can emulate shift selection using a script that looks-up visibility of layers and treats visible ones as being selected. It's a workaround, but it works.

I had a pleasure of testing Oculus Rift out on Saturday at Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology during the Long Night of Museums. Everyone was given about 3 minutes time to run around a fantasy world (which was a WIP student project done in UE4). The most satisfying moments were when I came in a close contact with some vegetation. The 3D effect really shined there, with bushes 1 feet away from me, partially obscuring my view, in contrast to the rest of the world in a background. Really cool feeling. However I have noticed one problem with Rift. My field of vision wasn't 180+ degrees, so wasn't completely immersed in the game. In fact the field of view was limited to about the same angle as what can be observed in Google Cardboard clones. Is this normal in Oculus? Anyway, later on I went to test out Microsoft's HoloLens. And holy cow! This thing is incredible. On a small arena, I was playing a game in which small floating robots were coming out of holes in the walls. Immediately after flying out of said holes, robots spread out on a whole room and began firing their fireballs at me, and I had to dodge the shots while firing death rays from my fingers! Every single 3D object felt almost tangible, like it physically existed beside me. This was friggin' AWESOME! Narrow field of view for lens that are responsible for presenting rendered objects was noticeable, but the fun factor was still absolutely amazing.

Ah, sorry. I wasn't aware of this Medium program. I thought you were referring to Oculus as a new medium that allowed for a new type of experience in sculpting, ha ha. Why a cut down version? Doesn't 3DC work out of the box with Oculus, with keyboard and tablet as standard inputs? Isn't Oculus treated by OS as another display device?