zogthedoomed

interesting work around. Thanks.

A very powerful tool for sewing together islands by their shared edges. On the UV map you select an edge or series of edges of and island (island A). It simultaneously selects the shared edges on another island (island B ). When you press the Sew and Move button, Island A is completely moved to island B, the shared edges are merged and island A distorted to best accommodate the edges that are shared. Very fast and powerful way of joining islands together, such as a hand to an arm.

Thanks. Don't know why I've not checked that video out fully.

I'm trying to UV this character and parts of the mesh are proving difficult to reach yet on the UV preview I can see exactly where I need to adjust the seam. Am I missing something? Is it possible to use the UV preview to mark seams? Cheers.

Thanks Pavel. That looks really useful. I'd be interested in an ENglish version as you seem to have a lot to say.

What codec was it done with? I'm only getting sound atm.

I think going head to head with Zbrush and Mudbox would be a big mistake. Mudbox has the backing of Autodesk and Zbrush of Gnomon and they both have more resourses. You won't compete with them and will either end up playing catchup for ever or forcibly bought out. Best bet would be to go down a complimentary line. Promote the use of 3DCoat WITH zbrush or Mudbox, not instead of. Most importantly get the backing of the zbrush community instead of alienating them and making them feel that their investment in zbrush is wasted. I use 3DCoat for the things I can't do as quickly in zbrush because of the core nature of zbrush but then I still use zbrush for the things its better at than 3DCoat.

The only program I've used that does it right is Lightwave. The imaginary trackball that you rotate in the same way that 3DCoat and many other programs use PLUS .. if you click OUTSIDE the imaginary trackball, ie outside of the circle of control .. you rotate the camera around the viewing direction, effectively the BANK value in LW. I must lose so much time trying to rotate a model into just the right place (especially given the way shading can make some areas difficult to see) yet I know in Lightwave it would be two clicks and no frustration. Honestly give it a go in Lightwave and you'll see how easy it is.

Haha ... school boy error. The retopo mesh I was trying to import was empty. Seems I'd clicked Export Selected instead of just Export and I had nothing selected. Now I've done it right it works like a dream. cheers.

I just know this is going to come back at me as a school boy error but .. My plan is to have a default topologised head mesh that I can load onto a reference mesh and quickly reshape, recut and detail to suit. However, once I've loaded my reference mesh and imported my retopo mesh I just get the requester to 'place object and press ENTER to merge'. How exactly do I 'place object'? I can't find a button and nothing I do seems to put the object to the workspace. And I thought merging, in the context of 3dCoat was when you converted something to voxels? All I want to do is drop a low res mesh in on top of a high res and have it conform to the high res so I can continue retopology. Not convert anything to voxels. Cheers.

Thanks Leigh for taking the time to do that. Much appreciated. I'd been avoiding moving to 3.5 because I'm fond of SubTool Master and TPoseMesh but I thought I'd take the plunge and compare the two. Doing exactly the same operation I got different results. 3.5 works as I would expect and as you showed in your video but 3.1 consistently gives me the larger mesh so I think it is an issue with zbrush 3.1's OBJ exporter. I'm pretty sure it enlarges it on export. Either way 3.5 works a treat. So thanks again.

Ah right. I misunderstood you. 4. should be Export the HI RES mesh to an obj. 5. Import that back in on top of the original high res. This scales the high res up to match the retopo by making use of the Unify command that is automatically applied to every exported OBJ. Right so I understand what happening now. The scale problem actually happened when I initially exported the high res for use as a reference. It unifies the mesh before it saves the obj. Totally stupid thing to do and there appears to be no way to stop it so you can't guarantee the size of your exported mesh.

Thanks very much for the reply and pics. I've only used Mudbox in production and haven't tried to get zbrush files out before now. Your first reply is exactly what I did. No problems there. I'm still confused with the second though. I've tried all sorts of combination of importing/exporting/appending and been reading the many many suggestions on ZBC but have yet to find one that works. Can I just clarify your suggestion. 1. Have the high res tool loaded. 2. Import the OBJ. (the retopo mesh from 3DC) 3. Append this to the High Res as a subtool. (This is the point were the scale issue is apparent. 4. Re export the retopo subtool to obj 5. Re Import to the subtool.

For the record it appears to be a known Zbrush issue although I'd still be interested to hear of anyone's solution.

Thats good. Thanks fro the reply.