Acord

Hahah! Congrats on getting a jump on your insanely overpriced, inferior competitors!

Okay, this is interesting... I imported the obj file into a different program, and the UVmap was totally messed up! I re-exported it, and now it imports fine. I guess what I was doing was equivalent to telling 3DC to use the UVmap on an object that didn't have any?

I also have this issue, and my imported UV map does not tile or have overlapping UVs at all. It IS a single mesh in multiple parts. I do wish to keep my original UV layout though, because the auto-unwrap for 3DCoat is wonderful, but best used on organic objects - and this one is strictly mechanical.

Unity would probably be a very good bet, although the amount of DRM crap that installed itself alongside the demo ticked me off to no end and was difficult to remove. The resulting bad vibe I got from that lost them a sale, since the software seemed pretty solid otherwise. ShiVa seems pretty good, although to be fair I haven't played with it a whole lot. At least it didn't crap up my computer like Unity did. Link: http://www.stonetrip.com/ If you're looking for something more in the 2d arena, I highly recommend Construct. It destroys Torque 2d(or whatever they're calling it now) in every way and it costs nothing. Link: http://www.scirra.com/ As a matter of fact, unless you are an experienced programmer, I would stay away from Torque products. They are all aimed at coders and not artists, and you MUST have the source code due to the VERY infrequent updates and bugfixes.

Bug in voxel hide tool, 32-bit SIMP: Inverting hidden selection for me hides ALL of the sculpt, instead of reversing what is hidden. This has some GREAT potential though!

Works fine. I've never been sure what the allure of quads was, outside of the fact that arrays for faces in sculpting is easier for lazy programmers to do. Originally, they were important for things before normal mapping came along for lighting purposes, but they are sort of an old deal now.

kk... 1.) Lay out UV clusters at 90 degree angles. Turning them in a different angle seems to baffle a few of the engines. 2.) Big seams. Try to put them on natural divides. If your model doesn't have these... 3.) Manually paint over the seams with color 128,128,255. Use a fuzzy enough brush and they aren't real visible. Today's experiment: Bake to an intermediary model or two with the same UV layout. Most modeling soft will let you subdivide without losing seams - unfortunately, 3DC does not do this with the retopo. UV Seams vanish when it is subdivided. They don't show up as bad when going from high poly to sort of high poly - in theory. Rinse and repeat in your modeling app until you get to the low poly version.

from layer 0? Still haven't tried it - I got reasonably good results laying the uvmap out differently and then manually editing out the seams. It's next up on the list

Hmmm. Yes. I should try that. I thought z-bias was just as a visualization helper...

Nope - it failed. I think I just need to redo the UVs. Other things I've been thinking of trying: 1.) overlapping edges near UV seams, baking the normal map, and then deleting extra edges and then exporting to a low poly model. Not sure how well that's going to work, but the theory is sound. 2.) "zeroing" the normal map edges by hand. It's a last resort and removes detail near the seams, but it always works. The RGB color for this is 128,128,255 just in case anyone is interested. But I'm trying to do things the hard way here

If the normals don't appear correctly in the engine, then this may actually be more an issue with the engine than anything else. For instance, I use the Cube 2 engine which is *very* picky about normal mapping: If something has UVs which are not laid out in an upright manner then the normals always appear wrong. The workflow I use: From voxels: quadrangulate to paint From paint: same as described above When I dump into paint, I usually go for @ 1/2 million to 1 million tris, 2048^2 texture map, 5 million "apparent" tris, AUTO UV mapping, and it works fairly well. Here's the last thing I worked on: And the normals baked to the low poly model show up correctly in just about any 3D software I care to try. Here is the low poly bake in the cube 2 engine though, which likes the MD5 format: And you'll notice that there are definitive seams there. Basically, any uv cluster that isn't straight up or down doesn't seem to work right or bake right. I'm still experimenting with this stuff myself - the color and spec maps are always spot on, but the normals are giving me fits. Since there's some odd uvmap distortion when 3DC creates a UV map, I've been doing the UVs externally to keep them stable etc. Today's experiment will be baking out to a world space normal map and converting it to tangent space with xnormal, although I'm pretty sure it's doomed to failure

at the very top: Textures -> Texture Baking Tool uncheck the box that says "use current lowpoly mesh" and you can select a model to try to bake to by choosing one in the "mesh to receive projected textures" field. I've had pretty good luck with it so far.

I was thrilled to accidentally run across the tiling texture preset, but after using it I have a few suggestions to make 1.) show borders on the texture. It's difficult to see which of the 9 planes is actually being painted. 2.) allow a customizable grid setting for making tiling textures. I say this because the game engine I use to demonstrate and build stuff in works in 8 unit increments. 3.) when working on a tiling texture, a single large directional skylight would really be appreciated. 4.) It would be good to be able to bake a combined texture with some shading, pre-applied AO etc, but maybe I just haven't found this feature yet. 5.) Brush rotation needs to be customizable. As is, the brushes rotate in such big increments that the feature is not very useful. It should probably also have it's own place in parameters or something. I haven't found a way to get to it without mapping a shortcut yet. Sorry if there are any of these features that I haven't found yet that are already there - I'm still learning, but the more I use, the more I like

Retopo bug: I retopoed a sculpt with symmetry, leaving the center open. I applied symmetry and sealed the mesh around the center. Later on, I decided to redo part of the retopo. I worked in symmetry again, and when I applied it, it created overlapping polys throughout the center of the retopo. Not a big deal and easy to fix, but it seems like a bug.

It would actually be good if there was a symmetry button for voxels that worked similarly to the way that the symmetry button in the retopo tool works.