rsquires

Thanks. I ended up taking a different tack which was cutting chunks off a cylinder primitive and then cloning it and moving it around. Once I got a shape I liked I scraped edges and then finished off with a surface polish through a stone texture mask. Worked ok. I will try your suggestion as well though.

In the render viewport when you select a light colour it gives you the exact opposite of the colour you choose. This is using the HSL1 colour picker. I have tried others and they all give the same value. However it's not quite so simple as that. If you choose pink at the NE setting of the hue wheel you get the correct colour. Equally if you choose green in the SW quadrant it seems to be correct. Other positions are not the colour you choose. I am using 4.0.04A on a Mac Pro with Mavericks 10.9.1

I have for about a day now been trying to emulate this attached look. I found this example on the web and it is just the look I am after. From what I can gather it was done in .... ( yes I know we shouldn't mention it) zbrush. When I try to emulate this look with the tools in 3D Coat it always seems to come out softer on the edges and to be honest I haven't got anywhere near something I am satisfied with. The tools just seem blunt in comparison to what is being achieved here. For instance the scrape tool doesn't really shear the surface off even with soft scrape turned off. It seems to create a more curved look than a very harsh scrape. The plane tool which I have also tried just gives massive artefacts. Is my mesh not dense enough? So if anyone has any tips about how to go about this within 3D Coat I'd appreciate it. For instance should I rough in the gross shape as a voxel and then switch to Liveclay or surface mode to carve into the mesh. Also the examples I have seen are not near this in terms of quality. There is a subtlety to this and finish that I find very difficult to emulate. And if the answer is use zbrush then I'd appreciate the feedback. This has nagged me for so long now it's not true. all the best Richard

It's partly setting up tools that I am finding tricky. I guess I should just find a brush I like and stick with it. Just seems overwhelming at first

Is it just me or are there just too many different panels that you have to go through to customise your brushes. I am not one to limit the abilities of a program and it is truly astounding what you can probably create with the options available in 3d coat. But it does seem that you need to have a very deep understanding of the brush parameters to customise. At present I see 5 separate areas that you need to visit to truly adapt all the parameters of a brush. There is the tool itself, the alpha of that tool, the tool options like jitter and spacing, in cases of Live clay we have another level of tool options, over the standard ones and then also the general brush options like radius fall off etc at the top of the viewport. Doesn't anyone think this is counterintuitive. In Photoshop for instance all parameters are in one palette, and in that palette I can save a copy of my custom brush. For some reason I have to open a presets window to save brushes and sometimes when I am in the paint room I can't see some of the alpha brushes. To me this is just plain confusing, where did my brush go! I am sure some of you will chip in that Zbrush is way more complicated, but I think there should be some sort of level system that allows for newbies to experience 3d coat without having to see the infinite possibilites of the brush system. So Basic, Intermediate and Expert system wide settings. It is really overwhelming and I have to say put me off using it at the start. I really had to work very hard to like the system and I am still not %100 with it. So this is the first impression and as we all know first impressions are very important. A system that starts out easy to use then reveals itself, is sometimes better than one that throws everything at you. Infinite possibility/customisation which is the very worthy goal of the program at the moment is all well and good but if people are put off by the complexity then you lose interest. I downloaded the excellent penpacks that re invent the custom surface tools into a really strong list of tools, and it has been said these should be the default tool pack. This seems like an excellent idea and is a good example of what I am trying to say here. For instance the carve tool in the Voxel room is really harsh at it's default setting. Why is that? Am I doing something wrong? It should work really well out of the box rather than have to be adjusted to work half way decently. Anyway I do really like 3D Coat and the powerful tools it allows at a fraction of the price of the Mudbox and Zbrush, I just think some fundamentl usability issues are being overlooked in the pursuit of adding more and more to the program. all the best Richard

Is there a way to paint out seams. At the moment I seem to be only able to control click each edge to disable it, and I'd prefer to just paint across the ones I don't want. You seem to have to be over an edge and click it to delete it from the selection. Any help would be appreciated

This is a fantastic tutorial. Although it says it's for new users the 3D Coat user experience I have had had has always been patchy because fundamental things like this are not in the manual, ( what manual there is). A great deal is assumed of the user. These should be included at the top of the list in my opinion. Digman explains the very basic functionality in such a way that it hits the spot perfectly.

Any chance of a tutorial on the new auto retopo tools. I had a quick go and it looks impressive but drawing splines on the object and connecting them up since when you move round you have to break the loop was tricky. What is the workflow as it looks to be very impressive.

I guess it comes down to how you go about modelling with voxels. I would like to use voxels all the way from large changes and structural sculpting, right down to pore details but I guess that's not quite how it works. It just seems that there are lot's of tools in the voxel area and many video explanations bear this out where you can pretty much do everything down to very fine detail. Maybe I need CUDA.

Well at least that put's my mind at rest. Perhaps there is a way for 3D coat to kick in the merge after a stroke or user defined time. I guess that might hold things up but by cutting up the merge operation into manageble smaller chunks it does help. I'd like to sculpt and 3D coat would know I am working and not merge automatically. Then inevitably you pause rotate the model, check what you have just done, etc. 3D coat would then kick in with the merge in the background. Also changing brushes might be a good time too. I am sure there is a good reason for the current workflow, but I think it could be improved to save the long merge times at the end

I am really keen on the surface sculpt tools as they are responsive and just feel better on my system than voxel sculpting. However I am not quite sure whether I am doing it right. Usually I work in surface sculpt mode and press the return key ever few strokes to bake the previous surface sculpts to voxels. I find if I forget to do this then when I do change back to voxels there is a wait of about 30 seconds and a spinning beach ball as 3d coat calculates the voxels. Is there a magic button somewhere that bakes the voxels as you go or do you always have to press the enter key? Or am I doing this completely wrong. When you watch some of the tutorials it seems like the enter key is never pressed to bake the voxels as you go. I'd just like some clarification on workflow as it confuses me slightly all the best Richard

I think I have worked it out. What I did instead of clicking merge for per pixel painting with normal map, I chose "merge into scene microverts". I then output a displacement map with the settings below. I really don't know if this is the correct way but it seems to work for me. I am going to do another test of this workflow and then may do a mini tutorial to explain. all the best Richard

I too am having a really hard time getting my head around this and would like some help if possible. To re-iterate what I'd like to do is create something from scratch in the voxel room. Sometimes I might have made a very rough base cage in say silo or C4D but I'd bring this in and sculpt to a finished model. Then when I'm happy with the voxel sculpt I'd take it and re-topo to a more manageable mesh. Once the mesh is complete, and I have arranged my UV's in 3D coat I then want to simply output a displacement map. To me this is the difference between the more detailed voxel sculpt and the low poly mesh I have just created. Here are some images of where I have got to. This image shows the original voxel sculpt then the retopologised mesh with UV map sorted out. This image shows the painting window with the normal map and occlusion render applied to the model. This looks fine. But the inset square image is the displacement map I get from exporting a displacement map in the retopo room. As you can see it is completely unusable but it looks like it's calculating a displacement with bits missing or overlapping. I have tried all methods but really I am coming to the point where I am just giving up on this. There has to be a way to save the difference between the lower poly cage and the voxel sculpt without jumping through hoops. Any help would be very greatly appreciated all the best Richard

I think I have been doing things wrong, but I'd like to know if it's possible to use the normal map baked out from a voxel sculpt and convert it to a useable depth map for SPD in Cinema 4D. I know I am doing something wrong as every time I export a displacement map from 3d coat I just get a 50% gray texture. There is no depth because I haven't painted any but I'd like to use the voxels depth to do this. How do you convert the normal map to a displacement grayscale that cinema 4d can use. If I use the normal map it's ok but I get rounded edges and it inflates the geometry. any help would be greatly appreciated