michalis

Thank you Garagarape. What really terrible was to decently UV unwrap these hair snakes.

OK, another view, after retopology. And some tints.

Obviously it's quit wrong. Not just these columns. So, what is wrong?

I could have some fun too. (many issues for me in 3dc...) I also use 3dcoat for voxels, or for paint room. (not really for UV editor, blender is much more advanced) But not for full sculpting, not really. I prefer blender, dynamic topology works fine for 500k, though I sculpted 1-1.2 M (there s a trick ) It tends to look crisper than 2-3M sculptris or LC. I love the brushes you see. And the no autorelax thing. It's important. I usually retopo, shrinkwrap and go for millions of ply (multires sculpting). Here, new blender builds may surprise you, they perform similarly or better to zbrush. 25M quad poly maintaining excellent zb like performance is not bad. A free application, but never forget to donate. I also own zbrush. BTW. I'm a small collector of such sculpting apps. I don't have MB but I tried it. Can't spend more money though.

I need to bake a relief, a panel on a single quad face-plane. Please don't ask why it has to be this way, it has to. So, here what I did. 1. One face in retopo room with simple unwrapping, easy. 2. Bake into PPP with displacements. 3. ask to export displa map 32 bit exr. Results: wrong map showing only the outer parts of the valleys . Expected. Then I discovered that I can tell 3dcoat what depth it should calculate. There is also a fine preview when doing this. Baked again, this time I have an almost correct displ map. But: What are these two wrong columns there?

Official blender 2.67 is out anyway http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/

You know beatkitano, you can never call someone troll, when he gave his money to buy the application. Whom gave his/hers money to help development of this specific app. Is this clear? I hope it is. We don't just talk, you see. We gave our money. Quite a difference. I don't know what you had in mind when posting this.

No talking with both Abnranger and Malo. The first is just spoiling words as always use to do. The second is ignorant of blender, obviously. You can try to ignore me. Please do.

Sorry for the late reply @the candy-floss kid" Indeed, blender can bake from multires. It's the most precise way for excellent displacements. Any other method is approximated and provides blurry maps. Same goes for normal maps but it's not a big deal, as these are approximated anyway. Blender still bakes under the old blender internal (scanline like), unfortunately it doesn't interpolates these maps, you have to bake 4k or 8k and resize after. OK, blender bakes them fast. It also bakes AO maps from multires (goood) but it takes sometime. So, with the exception of lack of AA, expect similar quality maps to zbrush. Seams are almost invisible. About retopo. I believe in two retopo procedure. One for sculpting needs, a second for animation purposes. About auto retopo: it could serve the sculpting needs if it could create very low poly base cages. Like 500 for a head. It can't. It doesn't take much time to manually do it. (On the medusa head I posted on wip topic, well, it's very hard to retopo it and harder to make good seams. ) There are simpler quasi autopo procedures though. like decimate at extreme settings, do a few more work using decimate brush (LC, Dyntopo, sculptris). Then, there's some fast trick to convert it to quads if needed. Both 3dcoat and blender have their tricks-tools to fast add seams manually on this. Excellent base for shrinkwrapping on top of the original mesh, converting it to a multires mesh for further sculpting. Yes, 3dcoat lacks of multi resolution sculpting room. This alone is killing me. There is great potential on this, if Andrew will go for such approach. I can only imagine how innovative solutions he could add there. Multires is never as friendly as it should, even under zbrush. (I admit it, the "rebuild subdivisions" is a beauty) I was hopping for a v4 3dcoat with a real sculpting multires room. Yes, we have it under blender, but we also have dyntopo, Uvs, edit mode, retopo tools, painting textures, stencils... so... my point is: what to do with 3dcoat except of painting textures and some voxel sculpting?

Why I should try it? Is this what I'm looking for? Is Y the depth? or is it Z? If you have any example, please, this UI is completely confusing for me.

Enjoy the summer Andrew, it is summer there right? @all About the render room etc. A simple test: Sculpt a relief and bake it on a single face plane. I need 16 or 32 bit displacement maps, please. The only missing is the render room / parallel camera, render and export depth map. Do you have any other idea on how to do it? I need 4096x4096 32 bit exr or 16 bit tif at least. (linear color space of course)

@Andrew Summer came very early this year in greece-cyprus. Enjoy the sea. Stay away from your laptop. @beat, No I didn't mean you. 3dcoat doesn't provide the few simple optimized brushes I need. (in voxels they are OK - almost) Nothing spontaneous though. Except the boolean related (voxels are great on this as expected) It doesn't provide some improvements in render room. If you could just read more carefully for a moment... I asked, wished, for the ability to bake depth on a single plane. This is ridicoulously impossible for 3dcoat. This can be happen in render room, where else? It doesn't provide a full functional sculpting room (multi rsolution) and baking from multires, (the only presize method) It has some serious difficulties painting on 4k maps V4, well, long way to go, to earn this v4, patience. IMO

I like them all. Awesome flow of shapes.

You live in a wrong century (for the wonderful painting) About the dragon, I wonder how it could look under cycles, real GI and real SSS. Possibly amazing.

Thanks tony nemo, garagarape. Retopology finished more easily than expected. Uvs now, which isn't easy, too many seams.

OK 3dcoat is not for illustrators. It isn't for some weird artists like me, who believe in a future 3d development. (can't explain further) It is made and is for videogame industry workers only. Is this what you are trying to say? 3dcoat isn't for auto retopology either, no further development on this problematic more or less part. Not for professionals. It's not for presentations - demos. Better export 100M voxels as obj to another app for rendering. LOL Really? What about its great great parametric brushes? Their behavior? Their fine tuning? What about the multiresolution sculpting? The quality of the displacement maps? So, a 3dcoat v4, without multiresolution capabilities, baking displacement maps of great quality. (not very professional at all) With the same render room. (not for amateurs LOL) BTW is not the first time that some well known gentlemen call the people who isn't working on videogames amateurs.

However, A study on a famous sculpt. My version because a medusa is more a depressed angry woman, her hair become snakes somehow, not an almost child or something. A blender sculpt, cycles (new SSS is all about this test), vertexpainted in 3dcoat (patina). I started to retopo it but it will take some time and I become lazy LOL

I prefer the 3dcoat render room. Much more real to me. A good preview. Indeed, a fake fast sss effect could be helpful. SSS tends to eat crisp details sometimes, it's good to know before it's too late. (the BPR shines but it's also a big lier. Most of these fantastic crisp Z details will be lost under a decent GI, sss renderer). Never faced that similar difficulties with the 3dc renderer. After all, 3dc renderer is capable to render small scenes too. Zb BPR can't do this.

It's important to know what blender build you (we) are using. New commitments took place recently. One is about fixing an issue in sculpting. No need to apply (ctrl+a) rotation and scale now. In any case, take a look on transform/N panel first. Does it look OK? I've noticed weird behavior recently. Especially when importing from other apps. Everything looks OK but rotation panel indicates wrong. Now, cycles became the major render engine. I wonder how an applink will handle it. The only needed is to import all the textures data. The rest are upon the node editor. Even an auto export all 3dc layers as individual textures may be enough. There's a long roadmap in cycles. It will end on baking cycles capabilities. You may realize how many possible combination can happen via nodes. Some maps can be used as values, controlling other maps mixtures. So, a 3dc layer where cavity is painted etc etc . See my point?

In any case, it's an amazing video, I posted it to a lot of friends. Very well done!!!

Abn, this is a good question. I wonder though, a good GPU, and a good CPU stand for many apps, not just for blender. Have in mind, the new implementations in cycles, as fibers-hair, new cycles SSS, some experimental volume shaders, these all are running under CPU only. OK, it's a matter of time to run under GPU, I guess so. Still, complicated scenes, using lot of textures, maybe lot of poly faces, may not manage to run under GPU. 2 or 4 GB or VRAM may not be enough. What will happen if displacements start asking for subdivisions, you can't say. The big boys on the other hand, insist to run under CPU only (render farms) Funny, after seeing all this development, I decided to upgrade my previous old nVidia to a good (second hand) ATI. Indeed not cycles cuda rendering but what a performance under OGL. Cycles sculpting and 3dcoat work just great. I depend on my CPUs (dual xeon 16 threads) and the 24 GB or RAM. A three years old (at 2.4 Ghz!!) setup that renders complicated scenes maintaining ~2/3 of the best cuda 570-580 GPUs. So, I wonder. Such CPUs may be expensive but they stand for any app and they can render any scene. For some reason, xeons run surprisingly faster than i7 under renderers like cycles. Then comes the heat you know. Xeons are running cool. Even under a greek hot summer ( >104F). Imagine what temp we'll face in a CUDA GPU after a few hours of rendering. These Xeons stay bellow 131 F after 5 hours full thread rendering. (under this horrible greek summer, avoiding air conditioning - I hate it) We're talking about animation rendering, right? Because on static scenes - viewport real time rendering, powerful CPUs are still your best choice for many reasons. Then comes the OSL. Great stuff but runs under CPU only. What I mean Abn, not the right time to buy a GPU for cycles only. Buy a good - modern GPU anyway, for all your apps.

Did I? When? Just some experiments, nothing serious. Many new things to learn under blender. The new (wonderful) SSS implementation, already turns everything upside down. The way we carve for instance. As close to what really happens on traditional marble sculpting for instance. You can't transfer the measurements of a clay sculpt to marble. it results to something like melted ice cream. It's very well known that Michelangelo used to carve directly on marble. Oh my... Such ideas made me to prefer to sculpt in blender only, avoiding zbrush and 3dc as possible. I mean, I may use 3dc voxels etc for sculpting but after a few viewport interactive cycles renders, I will resculpt in blender. (dyntopology) You have to carve surprisingly deep on marble... Then, a visit on a good museum, and yes, yes, they were carving deeply. Such miracles may be irrelevant to a professional VG artist's needs but it's a technological gift, I call it education. Your egyptian comes great, David, I already commented it in blenderartists forum.

Nice models. Free indeed. Full on non manifolds. And, terrible topology. As expected from such sources. Not good, sorry.

Free sculpting? Do you mean freeware? Why should I think this way? I spent my money on 3dcoat, zbrush, and on some donations to specific blender developers. Regarding sculptris, it's a dead app already, thanks to pixologic. I hope I'm wrong. OK, it's only my opinion, but sculpting under a pathtracer-environment, especially after the new wonderful implementation of cycles SSS, is very important to me. Starting a 3d sculpt-sketch, blender dyn-topology is the more spontaneous tool I ever had. Brushes are excellent, simple and parametric. Great control. For more than 300k dynamically tessellated mesh, I can jump into 3dcoat for a better performance. Maybe. Or, on the other hand, I can directly go for re-topology, multiresolution and projection-shrinkwrapping on the original mesh. Now I can sculpt up to million faces, maintaining great performance. (better than in zbrush if I may say so). The benefits of multires sculpting. Bake down n-maps displacement maps etc from multires. This is the only, the best way for precise maps. Still, having great previews under SSS GI rendering. Do you see my point? Here is a fast test. On how to carve on a piece of marble. SSS and GI eats carving. If you ever tried to carve a piece of marble, you understand what I'm saying. So close to the real thing then.

LOL Good point bisenberger. Try this BA forum thread http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?267023-Up-to-date-complete-tutorials I started learning blender seriously, when I joined a blender community in athens. Became a friend to people who are developers of blender parts. Started camera chats, giving courses on sculpting, talking about art etc etc . This is all about blender, a democratic community. Anyway, download latest builds here (not a fast server, unfortunately LOL) http://builder.blender.org/download/ New real SSS cycles node implementation is just marvelous. Hair and SSS, n-maps and displacements bumps, a pathtracer supporting CUDA, an interactive render window. Rigging, animations... What else do you need for your presentations? 3dcoat and blender: two powerful UV editors, two retopology systems, voxels and surf mode on one hand, dynamic topology and multires sculpting on the other. Wonderful new texture tools implementation in blender, unification of sculpting-painting tools (this is important) , so, two texture systems too. Time for art.