PolyHertz

Glad to hear Andrew and his family are OK. Hope the rest of the team is doing well too!

Right now none of the applinks (other then for Blender) have been updated for the latest versions of their applicable software. Pilgway needs to contact script authors to ask them to update the applinks every so often, but its been a while since they've done that. The Blender applink is a special case because it's being updated on a completely volunteer basis. I have a 70% complete update of the 3DSMax applink I could finish up for release, and have said before I'd be happy to update/re-write the Maya applink, but haven't heard anything from Pilgway Staff.

If there is no layer/paint information for a pixel it wont be drawn (that is to say it'll be transparent). So yes, if layer0 is the only layer on your stack you could just erase parts of it to create transparency (or assign another layer as its clip mask), but if any other layers above it have assigned color values to a pixel then it'll be drawn / not transparent. The main purpose of Layer0 is to act as a flood fill so that the model isn't fully transparent / invisible by default.

Layer 0 itself is not ''reserved for 3DC use only", it's just a normal layer, however there are some functions that have a design flaw where they rely on a "layer 0" existing and having certain colors to function properly. The correct solution for this problem is for said functions to be fixed, not to lock down the layer they're relying on (as that'll just confuse new users further).

@sprayer Turn off texture filtering and see what it's actually doing. Blur brush only samples up to a specific (very small) pixel radius, the sampling doesn't expand with a larger brush only the number of pixels that blur is being applied to (so at the higher the texture resolution the more its effects diminish over a given area). People have been asking for Pilgway/Andrew to fix the blur brush for probably a decade atp. I've tested it on the latest beta and it's still got the same problems as ever. In fact, I've brought up this exact same issue myself several times over the years, and even reposted about it again a little over a week ago over here:

Wouldnt weld only be applied between the new patch and border/open edge verts? What purpose would there be to processing every vert on the mesh like that? Looks like a design mistake.

On/Off state of 'Steady Stroke' in paint room is often ignored by Airbrush and Pen tools, acting like it's on even when it's not. Also ran into a weird bug with the user interface where when a menu was dropped onto some other they all went into sort of animation where they slowly move upward until they're all squished at the top of the screen. Resizing also doesn't always work and it seems to get confused if you want to widen a menu or move up/down within it.

These are all old feature requests / issues, but with the upcoming 2021 release I felt it might be time to bring them up again, and hopefully this time someone in a position to resolve them will take an interest: 1. Paint masks (that can actually be transferred between 3DC and Photoshop as masks, unlike the current 'clip mask' system) 2. Layer thumbnails 3. A blur brush that works on modern texture resolutions (current blur brush effect has diminishing strength the more pixels its applied to) 4. Access to pressure curve for opacity 5. Ability to rotate/flip 2D paint view ("texture UV Editor") 6. Ability to paint outside UV shells/elements when in 2D view so we can fix seams ourselves when 3D-Coat padding messes up. 7. Option to paint directly to the screen before projecting like Bodypaint/Mari/Toolbag4/etc.

Hey everyone, been quite a while since my last post. With the upcoming release of 3D-Coat 2021 (aka. v5.0) I thought it might be time to update this applink. That said, I'd like to first know; Is there still any interest in this? If there's no interest anymore then there's no reason for me to spend time updating it after all.

Yea, NVMe drives being significantly faster then SATA based drives is well known. However it doesn't matter that much since SSD speeds are not a serious bottleneck to overall system performance. You'll only really benefit from NVMe tech with very specific workloads (such as constantly reading/writing huge numbers of files, or maybe if using the drive as a scratch disc for certain programs). If your system supports NVMe storage and it doesn't cost much more then a SATA drive you might as well get one, but don't expect an overall user experience improvement similar to the jump between a mechanical HDD to a SATA SSD.

AMD will be showing off the next generation of Ryzen CPUs on Wednesday at CES, so I'd wait 2 days and see how that goes before deciding on a new CPU.

There are some new rumors regarding the upcoming Zen2 CPUs that I thought you guys might be interested in. Seems the combination of 7nm and chiplets may have been enough to allow AMD to double Ryzens core count compared to Intels similarly prices CPUs again (like with the first Ryzen), as well as being able to reach 5ghz+ on their higher end SKUs. Some of it sounds almost too good to be true, but the video I linked below is for a guys whose predictions and analysis are generally quite accurate. Either way, we'll probably find out in about a month whether they're true or not (during CES).

Can you make a video showing what you're doing when this error occurs? The applink was re-written from scratch for version 2.0 , and I put some special attention into making sure it was Max 2012 compatible (though with various features disabled). So atp I need to see the issue happening before I'll be able to guess what could be the cause.

Whoops! Seems I only uploaded the mcr file, sorry about that! Updated the link in the first post to the full zip file (or just click here ) As for the one on the main page, that will be getting updated soon (I might release one more version before that happens), along with new tutorial videos showing off how all the features work (thanks go to Don for those).

Version 2.1 released! Release notes can be seen in first post. I've removed the links for version 2.0 because of bugs, and it is highly encouraged for anyone using it to download 2.1 instead. Download v2.1 here.

More then likely you just need to adjust how your script handles the map gamma (The Max applink materials all take gamma into account to avoid this issue).

EDIT: All version 2.0 links removed due to several notable bugs. Check the first post for version 2.1 link and release notes instead.

EDIT: All version 2.0 links removed due to several notable bugs. Check the first post for version 2.1 link and release notes instead.

Yea 3D-Coat determines the projection angle based on the normal of the surface directly under that center point so it can't work outside of it. The best solution for this would be a brush setting that let you paint normally into a screen space buffer (like in BodyPaint or Mari), or a 'use normal closest to center' option, but currently stamp is probably the closest available alternative.

Hey guys just a heads up; Thanks to Pilgways support I will be releasing an update to the applink sometime soon. It will give the applink support for Max 2018-2019 and 3D-Coat 4.8 , as well as add some new material related features and a revised user interface. I'll be looking over all the issues users have reported in this thread as well as via pm or email and doing what I can to address them. Also, if anyone has material presets they'd like to see implemented in the default configuration let me know and I'll see what I can do

Yes! Thank you so much! I've been hoping to see this bug fixed for years, so glad to see it's finally happened

Hmmm. If it's not auto-switch that's causing it my next guess would be that 3D-Coat itself is having problems deleting the import.txt file and thus every few seconds its thinking a new one exists. The solution would probably be to run 3D-Coat as admin (right click on 3D-Coat icon > Run as Administrator ).

Oh I see. Yea I have the same thing in the Max applink for layer, pivot position, pivot rotation, bounding box (selection brackets), parent/child hierarchy, and selection set. However, normally I don't use that method when painting and instead use a 'import only materials' function where the applink reads through the obj file to get the names of the meshs and their materials, then reconstructs and applies the materials without importing any meshs. I figure why import the models if all you need are the materials

Just fyi, obj files don't support vertex groups but they do support poly groups. Blenders obj importer/exporter can map the verts to these poly groups but the grouping discards any isolated verts for obvious reasons. Thought it was worth pointing out for anyone that decides to use that feature. You mentioned supporting vertex weights, but afaik 3D-Coat doesn't support them (It has no rigging system after all). How is that being handled?

Despite all the issues the zbrush user interface has, it does get one thing right; user customization. Every individual button/slider/info-bar can be rearranged, and users can even make their own menus/panels. Though that said, it doesn't let users customize viewport navigation in any meaningful way (unlike 3D-Coat ).