Mix Mash

Hi, I'm learning slowly to retopologise with 3dCoat but I have a few questions. 1) When I mport a model to be retopologised, does it need to be made into a voxel object first? 2) How do I make the base model semi transparent so I can see the polygons that appear 'underneath' the base model when I retopologise? 3) How do I change the material of the base model? 4) How do I hide/unhide parts of my mesh so I can retopologise difficult areas of my base model? Thanks. Cheers, Paul

The object I used to turn into a voxel object was a sword IE A hard edged object. I could have manually smoothed out the blade edge (which was the biggest issue with the ugly triangulation) but I'd risk losing my hard edges. Scaling up didn't work as well as I thought because the finer edged detail still didn't get better. The issue is that the voxelisation process blankets the object with a uniform spread of polygons so there is no fair distribution between the areas that need more polygons than others. I was hoping that voxelisation of an object was an easier way of getting a mass boolean unification done than with Lightwave (the boolean tools in Lightwave suck with lots of polygons and intersecting objects) when I first bought 3dcoat but I found out the hard way that the process is different. It would be nice to be able to have a boolean function in 3d coat that is a mix of ordinary boolean operations and voxels. Here's how the process would work for a unification process, for example: 1) the mesh object is imported into 3DCoat and all hidden polygons are deleted. 2) the program detects all intersecting polygons (Meshlab is an open source program (I think!) that can do this) and turns them into visible voxel polygons. None of the regular non-intersecting polygons are changed. 3) the new voxel polygons are then turned into ordinary polygons which give you your seamless mesh. OK, I admit that it is a naive and simplistic approach but, to me, if something like this could be implemented, it would make this program much more powerful.

I think that one good way of improving it is you can provide guides to give general flow. For example, you would have something like retopology menu that gives you a tool to draw lines on your model (just like the stroke tool in retopo). Once you draw a few of these guide lines, the new quadrangulate tool would create a quad mesh which flows based on the guides you provides it. OR You could have something like Zspheres where you create a skeleton inside your model that would be used to determine the new quad flow. Saying that, however, this could be a good way of auto retopologising models. Use you have an automatically retopologised model, you can just edit it later. Cheers, Paul

From my interpretation of the voxels used in 3d Coat, voxel objects are created using the volume of all three axes of the object you import. However, sometimes when you import an object you can get ugly triangular geometry because the voxel process is based on a uniform distribution of polygons. So, certain edges and curves do not translate well. In this case, I was wondering if it were possible to have voxel creation based on polygon surface flow rather than the current uniform distribution method. I'm not sure how difficult it would be to implement something like this but I believe that voxel meshes would show up better and more accurately. Cheers, Paul

That's OK. I just make sure I don't set my smoothing too high and pick a decent alpha and it ends up fine. I'm still messing around with the program and finding its ups and downs. I won't be using it to make any heavy sculpting but I will need to figure out some basic stuff to get what I need. Anyway, thanks for your offers of help, though. Cheers, Paul

Hi, I just bought 3dcoat a few days ago and there are two things I need to ask. 1) I'm running the directx version of 3dcoat on my laptop (3gig ram, Windows Vista, 512 gig vid card, etc...) and whenever I use the program, my system runs at full speed like it's going crazy. Is it supposed to do that? No other programs do that to my laptop unless I have a really heavy workload. In general, I have no problem with my other programs, just 3dcoat. 2) I was trying to smooth out a voxel model the other day but I kept getting a 'ring' artifact around the edges of the brush even when I went for maximum edge smoothness. What do I do to make sure that the smoothing works properly like in Zbrush. Thanks and I appreciate any feedback. Cheers, Paul