michalis

"But can you start an AO bake in 10 seconds flat? " In blender? In 10 sec I can bake millions of poly, all textures. What I don't understand here is that coat bakes some kind of AO, I missed something here.

I only copy these AbnRanger. Take your time Andrew, do what you can. No need to have a new build every week.

Congrats 3dartist or greg!!!!

OK artman, we can't understand each other now, maybe in the future. As for giacometti, don't expect me to post the whole DVD here, try to find it, one of the best. Face him, lol he was a great man anyway. A philosopher also. Self biography of deChirico is great too. Movies about picasso, especially when showing how he paints in slow motion. So we like almost same artists but have different opinions, thats not bad at all. I'm older than you thats all, have a look here http://www.cangelaris.com/art_zisi.htm Haikalle: you're right, I'm trying to show how I see 3DC, what kind of workflow we may expect, what's the 'nature' of this app, why all these weak points exist. Its easy to say I want a voxel modeler with a zbrush behavior, then convert this to quads, paint it etc etc. And most important, all these working smoothly. If this can be done, then 3DC will be the best app ever. For the moment I wish a simple combination of two or three tools, an optimization of topo and uvs rooms. Thats all for the moment.

When I say crisp sculpture I mean something completely different. Its about simple crisp precise forms. Precise! These above are just random effects. Precision is the heart of art. Some alpha projections, pores etc are not my concern. This is essential. This is much crisper than these examples above http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?app=core&module=attach&section=attach&attach_rel_module=post&attach_id=6936 but all these are still rendered in voxel room. I didn't managed to export this 'crispness' to other apps though. IMO if you believe in 'pores' go for a zbrush license. A base 'box' modeling and a surface zb sculpt is the best way. If you believe in real sculpture then you're in trouble. Thats why I bought 3DC the second day I tried it. Many bugs, lot of work, optimization is needed but its a more appropriate approach. Now I can export it in zb and do some fine details, some precise simple lines. You may not like what I said, but thats what I believe my friends. Please don't misunderstand me, not an offense. I'm not interesting in VG, cinema and comics industry, that's for sure. Feidias, picasso, giacometti, deChirico, rodin, degas, ancient Egypt, Americas etc etc are my references. And the only tool I'm asking in this topic is a nice flattener .

"A statistics panel for selection similar to lightwave for points, poly, ngons, etc in retopo room" yes, that would be great Talking about performance, I can't say much working on a 2 xeon 16 threads mac. This is the worst performance I ever seen from an app! I'm wondering why a 1 sec job for a python blender plug-in takes minutes in 3dc or crashes (subdividing quad cage). I can't move a 3k faces island in UV map, tooo heavy ??. Python is not C you know. You have to see how 64bit blender build performs on this same machine. A terrible performance in topology room (1-4 fps), the same time, a fine performance in a 5M voxel room (single layer ~50 fps). ??

I have some more problems though. Question: after finishing with surface (voxel) mode do we have to turn to voxel mode before go for retopo etc? I had a crisp enough sculpt and in the end I returned to voxel mode, had to smooth it, finished with a typical not crisp 3DC result. For the moment do what you can in voxel mode (never surface mode) do some topo, increase resolution of the cage as much as you can (unfortunately not too much), export this quad mesh to zbrush, reconstruct sub levels and have a nice and creative day. Later you still can import the obj again and paint textures in coat (if you like). And still, I enjoy working with these two apps together. In a few months you'll be able to do it in blender too (instead of zb). (I already did it) 3DC offers some possible workflow that is not working (or has many bugs) for the moment. I can't live without voxels and have to re topo and re sculpt again, thats OK. I haven't seen any crisp sculpt in the 3DC gallery so far! If there are some, these involved zbrush too. Lets face it. After all zb has some reputation... I maybe wrong but I'll say it again haikalle, avoid surface mode!

What's happening in real clay sculpture world? Most of the time we add clay and cut it to shapes. Thats why scrape and flatten are important. "What i beleive we are talking about is a brush that not only pinches but creases also, concave/convex dependant on the alt stroke. Just like the displacemnt brush can work in ZBrush." this is really important too. The most important though is the move tool. But here we are in the voxels world, I'm not sure that a smooth and precise move operation is possible. There's a 3d grid behind. All these tools work fine in a traditional surface environment (zb like). What is really happening when trying to adopt geometry or bake a voxel model to a quad cage? Is this a voxels to tri mesh operation? Have you tried to export this hi def tri model and adopt it in a quad cage in Zbrush? In blender (better here)? Lot of artifacts. Anyway 'traditional' surface sculpture works fine after all these. Here is all the power of zbrush, the best, the more precise tools. In my dreams: A voxels based sculpture (precise tools), painting (not a quad based like ptex), finished. My nightmares: retopo, cages, Uvs, seams, retopo again, and again. The challenge: Model a realistic piece of rock, a crisp one. Not more than 5K faces please.

I agree haikalle, I noticed too. Voxels is a different world, I'm not expecting a zb tools behavior.

A mixture of fill (+ctlr) and Scrape tool. With some more modifications maybe. This is the closer to the flatten tool of zb. One of the most important real sculpt tools.

Andrew Think this way, could be four daughters... but again... , OK, congratulations Andrew once more. This is happiness.

the above photo shows how a seam is visible, what you see here is one island unwrapping. Normals are inverted as you can see. Seams are always visible especially in low def maps. But these normals here are wrong. IMO This is a bug of baking process in 3dc. v2.3.10 or 11. This is not happening in blender or zbrush. It doesn't look OK at all.

After wrapping the texture in blender (or anywhere else). "To me they look quite ok" Try to have a closer look, there is a significant difference between the two 'bleedings' the one is just a blue color.

Thats a strong portrait. What about some modo fur? I guess it is a zbrush sculpt. So you retopo in 3DC and the what? projected the model... its something I never did right.

Have a look, when no bleeding then seams are visible.

Just auto quadrangulation auto uvs for per pixel painting. See the seams. Visible, not only in normal map but in color map too. What else can I try?

"You may understand Ptex as other method of UV mapping. Use "Merge model into scene with Ptex". Then you may export object and textures including 16-bit displacement and use obj+textures in Blender. Recently Javis explained how to use ptex in applications that don't support ptex. I looked more on your previous post, it looks like you was using not recent build. In one of builds there was problem with snapping subdivided mesh that can cause black spots as on your picture. So please download 3.2.11." I used 3.2.10 beta. Snapping + symmetry is a little tricky, isn't it? 3.2.11 now, but returned to 3.2.10. Normal maps seams are visible again. Like in some older versions. (mac version) "If I understood you right you want to use combined workflow - displacement for low frequency details and normalmap for high-frequency details. But if you intend your models only for rendering, why not use middle-poly mesh with around 30-80K to estimate shape and normalmap for high frequency details. This will be very easy with coat, just export mid poly mesh and normalmap. It is possible to use combined workflow, but it will require more steps including baking tool. In general in this case you need to export normalmap for midpoly mesh, then use baking tool to bake difference between smoothed lowpoly mesh and smoothed mid-poly mesh." Yes something like this (http://www.3d-coat.c...?showtopic=5360). Unfortunately middle poly mesh around 30-80K is not enough. After 3-4 subdivisions a 150-300 K should be expected. A somehow multires model is what I want. "Please link me to the topic where it is described." I already did this Andrew, read my thread in WIP topic. http://www.3d-coat.c...opic=5523&st=20

Thank you Andrew, you fixed some of my problems here. Unfortunately I still can't work with it because of more serious bugs (or they aren't?) 1. Seams in normal maps are visible, I didn't edit them just baked. 2. I must have a really dark environment in voxel room, else textures maps are burned (see photos) I already returned to 3.2.10 beta.

@ iangregory You are not alone out there. I bought my book in 1997

Explain please. This is not clear to me. Here's the menu. I don't see any 'merge for ptex', I'm not interesting on ptex anyway. Just a decent true 16 bit displacement map. If this is possible. This is the third scenario about disp_maps. You haven't convince me. No logic you see. I need a full quality disp_map. I'll use it in blender (3 subdivisions). I also need a normal map for this third subdivision level. This and only this. The ONLY way to have some quality render of a sculpt. http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5360 Of course I can export in zbrush and do it. But I really love 3DC http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5152&view=findpost&p=40570 Why not a tutorial? If you help me understand I could write one. I still have this issue with symmetry in retopo room. Nobody seems to care. Weird !!! Retopo is useless for me. BTW "it looks like you used Texture baking tool", But I didn't. You may not understand what my problem is. It looks like this. As you can see I'm trying hard, I'm not trying to model just an orc or something silly... let me ask you this. Do you have a mac there? Did you tried to model something like a 5 M voxel there and retopo? Voxel room works just fine. This only.

No taros, I'm posting the problem here, as I posted some stages of sculpture. This may be interesting to someone. I still want to make a tutorial with all these odds involved. Why not?

Back to this topic. http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=086043 watch the second video, a friend there made the model. ZB has a fast renderer, it exports this as alpha transparent scene. I'm wondering... it may be more useful than we think. At least for dark scenes. lol

OK taros. But at least I had an answer here. Questions and bug reports are in every topic here. Have you noticed? In this particular topic even some guys shell their license. Well, this is not an open source community. Where is the manual then? About all 'essential' and critical details that make an app useful. All these questions help 3DC to be a better app, thats my opinion. Time to think what makes a particular GUI better than another one. So, this is on the topic alright.

Phil, If this dis map is adopted from voxels then you have to write a tutorial, or instuctions. This may work as disp_map, its too heavy contrasted though for this purpose. Please... the workflow I mentioned above is somehow wrong, I don't know...

Hey man, no, I don't take it easy... this forum is full of bug reports, thanks anyway. The model is a 5M voxel. But have a look in 'wip' I solved the problem. Symmetry did it. Has something to do with what you reported about subdivision etc (relax... ) . Symmetry, definitely doesn't work OK on the mac version, I have to do some relax tricks. LOL I lost some crispness though, thats bad. First, please 3dCoat guys, fix symmetry problem! 3.2.8 or 3.2.10 or 3.2.10 beta mac (topology room) About displacement issue, its a challenge for me now. Show me a displaced model from 3DC and I believe that this is possible (displ the way zb or blender does, not just silly bumps). The whole workflow (tex baking) looks like completely wrong approach IMO. If I understood correctly: 1. We can't bake dis_ from the voxel model directly. But we can bake normals (weird) 2. we have to wrap a hi def skin (topology), then export it, use it for tex baking tool. 3. I have (mac version) to delete everything in paint room first. 4. Nothing special though because I can't use a 5M retopo skin on my mac (crashes) Now, voxel export has a different scale than the topo model. I can't use the voxel export for baking or something... If these are correct, I don't take it easy, eh and this sounds like really terrible GUI.