brook

hi everyone, I am looking for a simple gray shader that shows polygons with no smoothing or depth effects. like you will find in most other apps. the only flat shaders seem to have depth effects which I can not use. does anyone have a solution for this? thanks.

as you have asked for I upload a test obj. this is a 300x300 grid. the grid I used in my test was 400x400 grid. but that file is over 16 megs. if you want that exact 400x400 grid file I can upload it to a server and send you a email link to the file. the last picture with load bugs are from trying import and resample test meshes. 3DC is giving errors when you resample a flat plane. so I extruded the test grid into a closed volume and resampled that to do the resample brush test. that file of the closed volume 400x400 grid is over 35 megs. again I can upload and send you the link if you think it will be usefull to you. keep in mind that these files are just a grid with sections of sine function applied with adjusted amplitude. brush sampling issues and brush engine seem to be a constant pain in the butt, very tough to get things working in smooth fashion. very sensitive. mudbox totally rewrote there brush engine from v1 to v2. zbrush it seems is rewriting there brush engine every version with new options for smoothing, sampling etc. and silo sculpting brush engine had same problems. @artman @michalis you are welcome. I had fun doing these test so no big deal. ultimately bugs are engineering problems. as an artist trying to explain problems or features to engineer it is helpful to 'try' to explain in a way that can be understood logically in terms of engineering problem. this way solution to problem becomes obvious and implementation of solution can be achieved. if this is not done everyone gets frustrated and artists sound like crazy people complaining that the digital clay does not 'feel' right. brushtest_plane_300x300.obj

your welcome. I am very impressed with the work that 3DC team is doing and it is my hope that there will be a competitive sculpting tool in 3DC. so I can use my copy along side my other sculpting tools in daily work. I do not get that as the default behavior for clay tubes brush see images below. when I dial up SD option in brush setting I get the result in your picture. clay tubes was not designed to fill cavities. clay tubes brush was designed to be clay tubes brush. people have found it a very nice brush to block out basic volume quickly. because clay tube has some artifacts the clay buildup brush was introduced. clay buildup has almost no bad effects on the mesh and is very nice blocking brush. after blocking you might use standard brush and clay brush along with other more subtle brushes to finish your sculpture. Below I have posted some more tests where I have attempted to get very close to what exactly is bugging brushes in new 3dc brush engine. as before I see sampling problems as the main cause of bugs that cause the artifacts and bad behavior. I can eliminate or introduce most of this behavior by adjusting sampling options in other software. these artifacts and bad behavior are not local to one brush but spread over most of the brushes. each brush function produces slightly different behavior as you would expect. the samples below show simple tests to isolate and observe behavior. these behaviors will scale to real sculptures. it is much harder to try and isolate the brush problem on a real sculpture which has millions of strokes layered on top of each other with re meshing etc. the point is to observer underline problems which cause brush behavior that adversely effect real sculptures. there is (1) comparison of brushes with wire frames (2) some sculpting bugs (3) a few surface mode mesh import problems I found while testing.

I have attached a details description explaining the bugs with surface mode brushes. and in general the attributes that could be changed in order to eliminate the artifact. everything is explained in the pic.

unfortunately that does not seem to be enough. In addition to the stroke problem I am also getting little spikes in surface mode where the brush can not find some verts. so when you smooth etc it gives spikes. I have to go into voxel mode and do some cleanup work to get rid of spikes. I figure these may be due to the fact that the brushes can't find the surface correctly. so if the stroke problem is fixed the spikes might be fixed also.

I have been doing some tests in 3.5.14x. I use mostly the retopo and uvs at the moment. those tool sets are developed to the point where you can reliably and quickly get work done. autopo also is looking even better with new options. the voxel sculpting work flow needs more refinement. the poly count is just about there. you can work with a 10mil poly model. that's a good benchmark. the memory usage is great and most of the brushes have a even level of speed . so on a high poly count model you can find the right brush size to get quick strokes and all the brushes work relatively at the same speed. the new resample in surface mode is a KEY development. surface mode is much faster at high poly counts then voxel mode. I find myself sculpting and subdividing in surface mode the then popping into voxel mode to remesh the surface and fix stretching polygon areas. then back to surface mode. it works because only the stretching polys are resurfaced and the rest are left untouched. over all as the poly count goes up more sculpting is done in surface mode. so at around 5mil polys 70% of the sculpting is done in surface mode. the new brush engine: the overall feel of the brushes in voxel room is quit nice now. the clay has a nice feel. in surface mode things are REALLY messed up at the moment. I started a thread in the voxel bugs forum. about the this. surface mode bugs thread with PIC basically the brushes are not staying on the surface. as the surface changes the brushes totally miss the changes in concavity and convexity. it seems to effect almost all the brushes. when your sculpting you can not get a consistent result. and the strokes have artifacts. so you might get half a stroke under the surface and half on top and big creases in the middle. or no stroke at all. It is very difficult to work with these brushes like this. I had to stop because you just cant get clean strokes that stick to the surface. and I think it effects smooth also. so the basic foundation of the brushes have some bugs. it looks like the stroke is not orienting itself to the normal/tangent correctly and updating in new positions. and the lighter the depth the worse the effect becomes. so doing very light detail changes are almost impossible. such as using brush alphas for detailing etc. so overall the new brush engine seems to work except for the fact that the brushes in surface mode have a problem conforming to the surface. if that is fixed I think surface mode and the brushes in general are looking quite usable.

I have been reading through this thread trying to get some info on whats going on with 3.5 and which beta to grab. but I see some serious forum RAGE with some of you 'contributors' with a heavy post count. maybe you guys should take a breather... 3dCoat is a commercial product and a business. nothing more then that. if you have a problem with your official 3.5.05 install then contact support with your problem. this thread should not even be open to comments. you all are extremely lucky to get a preview of what is "in development". posting bugs is helpful but posting demands for features and whining shows you should probably not post at all and take a break. unfortunately this sort of thing is almost inevitable because software bugs can be extremely frustrating. and new cool beta software can be addictive. that is why most developers do not have an open beta policy and forum like this. it is to distracting and demanding on the devs. reading through some of theses posts I would suggest that the 3dCoat team think about going to a closed beta. or locking there beta threads. these threads will inevitably turn nasty when people get angry over bugs. to the devs: you are probably doing yourself more harm then good with open beta at this point. closed betas are much more productive and allow you to focus on your plan with out getting distracted by thousands of requests and features. having a small number of testers who work in games, film, give you focused feedback on what is really important in those industries will give you a far more accurate picture of the weakness in 3dCoat and which issues are important in the industry in general.

I will post this here in case anyone is looking for the same answers. this is what I have received from 3dCoat support. is cuda faster in 3.5? "CUDA version is faster, but videocard should have at least 64 CUDA cores. GL version is faster than DX using latest drivers on GeForce 4 series and Quadro cards." which cuda drivers? "You just need to install latest regular drivers." it is much simpiler for 3.5 it seems. just install the latest driver and your set.

I was poking around a bit and I see that cuda is still recommended for capable graphics cards in the online docs. so I am guessing that there is still some performance gain with the cuda version or else the docs would be taken down. but I still can't find any recommendation on the drivers to use. from what I remember from 3.3 there was a specific version for the cuda driver and cuda toolkit That was posted on the site or maybe in the forums somewhere. can someone chime in here with what your useing? I see the current version at nvidia is 3.2 released in January. but Andrew might be targeting an older version which I think was the case last time. I am planning on installing 3.5.0 first so I have a stable install then maybe play around with the beta's. but I am planning on doing quite a lot of work so stability is first.

Hi everyone, I am in the process of setting up 3dcoat3.5 on a new win7-64bit workstation. which drivers are you using? It seems there is a new Cuda driver and toolkit on nvidia site. The last install I did was 3.3 and I installed the cuda version. but 3.5 is probably using a newer version but there is no info on this at the download section. I am also wondering if the cuda version is still under development. any help or driver recommendations would be great.

it looks like whats going on is 3dc takes the origin xyz 0 from the imported reference mesh bounding box scale. so when you mirror a retopo its center is adjusted to the center of the reference not the retopo. here are a few problems whit this: lets say you have a character that has one huge arm. but the rest is symmetrical. so you want to retopo "most" of the character symmetrical with a mirror and then make another a-symmetrical group for the huge arm and then at the end merge the groups and connect the a-sym arm. lets say your reference mesh is 99% symmetrical. most sculpts in zbrush or mudbox or 3dcoat are not 100% symmetrical at some point some of the points get jacked on one side but its so slight that you will never notice. so lets say that a small number or verts on one side moves the center of the bounding box 0.01% from where it would be if both sides were 100% symmetrical. you want to retopo the model with a 100% symmetrical mesh and everything will work fine. in both of these cases your screwed because your center seam is going to be off from where you want it (ie world x 0 in most cases). because its set by the bounding box of the reference mesh not the retopo. even if you mirrored in another package then bring your mesh back in to snap the center verts or keep working your not able to. because symmetry will mess up your center seam again. and you can't work like that. you have to be able to keep your center seam in the same spot and line it up in other packages. this is a big oversight. and effects most models that you would try to resurface in 3dcoat. is there a workaround for this? another type of symmetry in 3dcoat that does not mess up your center seam?

i have a 3dcoat retopo model that looks like it is correctly mirrored and is centered at world zero X. but when i export to maya the center is not at zero. is there a way to set the center to world zero in 3dc or is this a bug?

cool thanks. I can't figure out whats makeing it do that. some times it does it then it stops. i guess it could be a bug. if i can figure out how to repeat it then i will post a bug report.

hi folks, some how my resurface mesh started changing colors whenever I make a edit in retopo. its messing with my eyes.... when ever i cut an edge the mesh changes colors. is there a way to turn that off?

thanks. i thought there was a way to turn it off. have not been in 3dc for a bit. well i kind of got the transparency to work by using the semi-transparent shader. had to convert my model to voxel as you said. but it looks like there is backface culling so if the resurf goes under the ref mesh you can't see it. got another question. is there a wireframe only display mode for the resurface mesh?

hey guys I have a few questions about retopo room. can you turn off the checker texture display on an imported retopo mesh. can you set transparency on the ref mesh or change the shader? and the same for the retopo mesh. I cant figure out how to change the shaders.

I use zbrush and mudbox in a large studio that has a very rigorous animation pipeline and revisions on characters are numerous on almost every model. . Voxel sculpting for character poses some challenges in this environment.but before those issues are addressed I would like to see the core functions of 3d coat optimized. speed improvements for brushes, higher poly counts and stability. and could you please make a option to turn off the brush outlines.

I am currently looking into the displacement map workflow in 3dc. I should have some time next week to do some thorough tests. If anyone has more info, tutorials etc it would be great to post it. I have not found much searching the forums.

ah, very nice idea, thanks.

Hi there, Is there a option to bake 32bit displacement maps? It looks like the default is 16bit. is there a setting I missed?

It would be helpfull if the file import progress would show up in the info bar or in the tital bar the way other operations do. when importing large models its hart to know if 3dcoat has hung or is takeing a long time.