The.Great.ESCape

In any case, I have to take off for now... thank you for taking the time to respond to my inquiry. I definitely prefer low poly texturing in 3dcoat over Zbrush. The programs have some overlapping functionality, but also have different strengths and weaknesses depending on one's workflow/preferences. I do wish the applink would be resurrected, but that seems long deceased at this point. forgive the somewhat off topic rambling... will check back later.

That's the problem with tiling "intentionally obvious" patterns and cube-mapping on organic models. So far it appears I can get a clean asymmetrical result or a smudged mirrored result. I lean towards the clean result, but I'd rather have both if possible. The mirroring also seems to only work when brushing on, and is ignored if filling using surface materials... at least that's how it has been working for me.

After further experimentation, I have realized that it will mirror... just not with UV-Mapping. I was trying to use UV-Mapping for continuity's sake, but it doesn't look too shabby with cube mapping except for looking smudged where the projection angles overlap. Here's a very simple lace material I was playing with. Not much to it, but it looks good for what I was using it on. Lace 001.3dcpack

Is there a way to apply a smart Material Symmetrically? I've tried searching and haven't found anything particularly helpful. The reason I am asking is because I have made my own patterned smart materials to texture some clothing and I would like it to mirror across X in some cases, but while I can brush symmetrically it's not mirroring the pattern just the brush strokes. So, the projection remains the same. If it's not currently possible; I'm sure there are many other applications in which such functionality would be useful.

I may stand corrected as I have read that Blacksmith 3d has smear/smudge tools that can blend across UV seams. I have not tried it personally....I would be curious if anyone has it and can comment on it's implementation in that program and whether they have found it useful or not. Perhaps it would make a good example.

Yes, polygroups basically do for sections of a single mesh what the Voxtree does for multi-mesh objects.

I suppose someone might as well remove this thread given the seeming lack of interest.

Given the advances in 3D-Coat's surface mode, it might deserve it's own dedicated tab at this point. This would be a great time to consider adding some sort of polygroup feature as well. Boolean results could then form a polygroup which could be used for special polygroup based editing (i.e. perform smoothing, extrusion, inset, hide/show, freeze (useful for both painting and sculpting), or convert to UV). Splines would be another great way to create polygroups. The ability to merge auto generated polygroups would be good as well. Polygroups could also aid in auto-retopo's ability to create more precise edge loops in desirable areas with the right algorythms I would imagine. Layers are great are great for organizing different objects grouped together. Polygroups are great logically separating and organizing different sections of each object's surface. I know they haven't really been implemented yet due to the voxel centric concept of 3D-Coat, but with the surface features coming into their own lately, I thought it might be worth revisiting the idea. I'm loving how smooth the surface mode boolean results are with lower memory usage than voxel mode. I just think we can leverage those for even more advantages. Off topic, but would be awesome if we had a room for operations similar to what Groboto/Mesh Fusion do. It looks to me like you are using similar methods at the seams at any rate. The ability to be able to change the position of any object used for boolean operations after the fact is pretty awesome for creating different variations. Even with Mesh Fusion retopo is often needed, so the triangle mesh in 3D coat wouldn't really even make it that much worse.. I imagine something like that would probably mean a major upgrade though. Still, it would be pretty cool.

+1 Definitely agree. Would be great for painting too, not just geometry.

Pressing shift when painting with the paint brush applies a blur effect which has a similar result sometimes... The smear/smudge type tools used for blending usually do blur, but they also usually have the ability to drag color along the brush's path while blurring. The amount of color being dragged is usually also adjustable by a strength setting.. There is a smudge tool in 3DC, but it's more like a nudge/liquefy tool as it does not actually blend.... basically localized brush radius image warping tools (think Power Goo). I would love to see something similar to PS Mixer brushes and the infamous finger blender added to 3DC's texturing arsenal. I've yet to see any 3D paint package with a similar tool... though maybe Mari or something has it. I have not tried all that are currently available.

I'll happily add my support for a smear/smudge tool. I use those types of brushes a lot when painting in 2D

I can send from ZB 4r6 to 3DC 4. Getting anything back into ZB is problematic though... normals/visible faces get inverted and it's not smart enough to automatically choose compatible image formats for textures or get them get them back into ZB properly. Ideally the applinks would automatically filter out incompatible options when sending assets back to "original application" even if that means having the user selecting what application before sending it back. I've had limited success getting models back in, but I've yet to successfully send results from using PTex back to ZB which would be very nice to be able to do since ZB is yet to adopt PTex. These apps would be very complimentary if they communicated easily. As is have to export and flip some things around to get something back into ZB. Then again I am not an expert and maybe I am missing a setting. If someone else has things working it would be awesome to get a point in the right direction.

More or less... except that converting back would only be necessary if sculpting the ghosted portion were desired... else the original portion could just be re-joined after sculpting the non-ghosted portion.