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Well because like i said there is no real reason for the poll. It's like Toyota putting up a poll asking if you'd like them to do a free upgrade on your car that doubles it's fuel efficiency. There is literally NO REASON for anyone to vote anything other than yes. He already said he will implement it, so i just don't understand what anyone can say to you to make you happy?

Yeah i understand what you're saying definately. But to be fair a guy from a very large London based visual effects company was interested in PTEX here on the forum, so it might have been a very good business decision to offer support for it this early. I don't move in those circles (i'm just an amateur!) but maybe it could be a real selling point for some people. I am behind you 100% in asking for multicore support, and i saw Andrew added a reply in the 3.2 Update thread saying he will defintately work on it, but it's going to be a really tough job so i think it's something we'll just have to wait for. For me personally Voxels are literally the only thing i am buying 3D-Coat for, everything else is a bonus - but i haven't noticed merge times to be an insurmountable issue. It seems to take maybe 5 minutes to make a 16m poly volume from an imported mesh, which does seem a long time when you are twiddling fingers waiting for it to happen (like watching a kettle boil!) but it's not enough to put me off the program. For you it may be a much bigger issue if you have to do this several times every hour. I think it's just important to remember that the program can't be perfect for every usage scenario at all times, i'm looking forward to painting on voxels more than anything else, and i realise that's REALLY a small 'market' atm. So basically i think Muticore support (if it will really speed things up a lot) = AWESOME! but for now i'm willing to give Andrew the benefit of the doubt that it's not something he can do right away. Hope that makes sense.

No PTEX is not of any use to me. I only started using 3D-Coat 2 weeks ago so i'm not aware of what was put on hold while it was being worked on. How long was Ptex in development for?

No offense but i don't think a poll is really necessary. This is not a question that anyone would vote 'no' to. I think the only thing that matters is how hard it would be to implement, and would it actually increase performance as much as you might hope? It could be a 3+ month job for all i know, and i'm not sure many people would appreciate a freeze on other developements. From what little understanding i have of multithreaded programs, not everything actually benefits from multiple processors. Some tasks scale close to linearly with the number of cores, some actually run slower. Of course if it really would scale linearly with the number of cores then it would be amazing!

Aha no problem! I think the expression you were looking for is 'by all means' - your English is very good, there are a lot of expressions that are confusing even for native English speakers!

Thanks Andrew, i thought maybe my video card was the problem, i will get more ram instead and see how things work out (good news for me, much cheaper upgrade!). I am on Windows 7 64bit.

I have a quick qeustion for Andrew if it's not too much trouble. I am trying to decide what to upgrade on my computer first to get some higher performance for 3D-Coat. I'm not talking about merge time, just FPS with fairly high detail model (8-16m poly). Currently i have: Core2Duo E6750 2.66ghz 4gb ram ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB Now at the moment i can work on a model of about 16m poly's without dipping into page file, so i am guessing that CPU/GPU are the best option. Can you advise me which one will be a better upgrade to increase sculpting performance? If the answer is GPU i will go for an Nvidia card for CUDA support, do you think it's worth waiting for the new Fermi cards at the end of March? Thanks a lot. BTW, the performance now is actually very good considering my system is old, it would just be nice to get a bit more responsive control at higher detail.

Yep as i understand it SVO is some kind of 'nested' compression format for voxel volumes. They can't be deformed (like for destructable environments in games) so i assume they can't be sculpted either atm. We would just be taking models created in 3D-Coat (or another voxel modeling app) and converting them to SVO for use in the game engine. This is a very interesting engine i found also: http://atomontage.com/?id=home It uses some kind of multi-res voxel volume for the terrain that's not using SVO, and it supports real-time destruction/deformation of the voxels. I'm not sure if it takes a cluster of voxles, averages their color and shape information and then fuses/removes them as you step down the LOD, or whether the LOD is all precomputed.

Sounds intriguing

Looks great! The skin detailing is really nice.

+1 This would defiantely be welcome!

I sent Andrew an e-mail yesterday regarding the option for a pure voxel rendering option in the voxel room and he very kindly replied, he said there was no immediate plans but he was curious why i thought it would be a good idea. From my thinking a pure voxel rendering option could actually allow for a 'crisper' sculpt - obviously it won't be peferct for every situation and it would look much rougher when you zoom right in (using cube primatives anyhow, of course you could represent each voxel as a sphere or somthing, maybe some user customisation options there would be great). I find the polygonal skin mode we have now is excellent for organic work and medium-fine detailing, but it does have a slight tendency to smooth out very fine details of only a few voxels width/diameter. The option to switch between polygonal skin and pure voxel render for a given project would very useful i think, and if i could be made to run faster than the polygonal skin mode that would be a double win. Of course Andrew is the expert here, and he knows better than me how much developement time would be needed for something like this, but i think it's an interesting idea at least. He also confirmed that voxel painting will be implemented at least on the surface level. I know it was discussed here some time ago but i just wanted to see if the idea was still alive and kicking - very excited about this as i don't plan on baking much of my voxel work to polygonal meshes. (i know i'm in the minority there, but it's still a nice tool to have).

Good find, thanks a lot Phil

I didn't realise merging was not yet optimized for multiple cores, very happy to know that there is room for a massive speed boost in the future! I agree completely about the voxel room, this for me is the #1 reason i am likely going to buy the program. I also agree the problem with the very fine detailing comes from the polygonal skin. I imagine if every voxel were actually displayed as a cube or spherical primitive, the capabilities for fine detailing would increase massively without the smoothing caused by the mesh laying over the true shape. Maybe there is a chance of using DX11 tesselation to improve the resolution of the current skin, and at the same time reduce the complexity when viewed from a distance? Certainly would be awesome. I really do hope there is the possibility of different rendering options in the Voxel room. A higly optimized polygonal skin mode similar to what we have now, and a 'true' voxel volume mode. This along with per-voxel painting would be the ultimate solution i think. My brain is melting at the very thought of it I am currently running the ZBrush and 3D-Coat trials simultaniously, but so far 3d-Coat is by far the better program for me. ZBrush is still excellent of course, you only have to look at the work that has been produced with it, but voxels are just so much easier to work with and the concept is completely intuitive.

Oh yes i know many companies have used voxels back in the early 90's even - i'm not suggesting Carmack invented their use in games. But what he is talking about are voxel objects of close to the same density (maybe even higher?) possible in 3D-Coat being rendered real time in a game engine for first person shooters etc.. That has certainly never been done before. He already implemented fully virtualized textures in ID tech 5, you can have 8k textures for all your character faces if you wanted and 128000x128000 textures for terrain with no performance hit or texture management concerns. Next step is voxels, and i can't wait to see what happens. Tim Sweeney from Epic Games is also talking about voxels and other volumetric options for the next gen consoles. Who knows maybe this stuff won't pan out in time for the next gen consoles, but if it does 3D-Coat could be in for a massive amount of new business if they have comprehensive voxel modeling tools all ready to go and well optimized. Some early info on ID tech 6: "id Tech 6 will use a more advanced technique that builds upon the MegaTexture idea and virtualizes both the geometry and the textures to obtain unique geometry down to the equivalent of the texel: the Sparse Voxel Octree (SVO). It works by raycasting the geometry represented by voxels (instead of triangles) stored in an octree. The goal being to be able to stream parts of the octree into video memory, going further down along the tree for nearby objects to give them more details, and to use higher level, larger voxels for further objects, which give an automatic level of detail (LOD) system for both geometry and textures at the same time. The geometric detail that can be obtained using this method is nearly infinite, which removes the need for faking 3-dimensional details with techniques such as normal mapping. Despite that most Voxel rendering tests use very large amounts of memory (up to several Gb), Jon Olick of id Software claimed it's able to compress such SVO to 1.15 bits per voxel of position data."

Sorry to reply to an old thread but this topic is something i am very interested in. Firstly let me say i am not a professional, i am new to modeling but even with my limited experience i already think voxels are truly amazing! If you would definately plan to add this feature i would buy the program today (i already am 99% sold, but i still have some time left on trial to decide). In my opinion, coloring of voxels should be done directly on the voxel volume, the extra memory footprint does not concern me and i agree with others who have said that memory only gets larger and cheaper each year. Also i would like to see a new render mode in the Voxel Room which shows the actual volume you are sculpting/painting - IE small cubes for each voxel, even if this is significantly slower than using a polygon 'skin' i think it would be extremely useful (especially for painting). I have read in several articles that John Carmack (iD Software) is already planning to use voxel volumes for environment and static models in the next game engine iD Tech 6, so i think voxels will actually find a direct application in realtime rendering sooner than we might think. 3D-Coat is already so far ahead in terms of voxel modeling and this feature will only increase the advantage. Here is an interview with John Carmack talking about voxels: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=532 And here is a video of early an tech demonstration from an iD employee: This voxel painting feature is my #1 request - please make it happen! PS. I hope i don't sound rude or arrogant, i don't mean it this way, i'm just really excited about this possibility!

Yeah sorry i know Marc said 80, i was just responding to Kay because i wasn't sure whether they were commenting on the 20+ numbers or the super high resolutions. I think you make a good point splodge, here is my system spec: Intel Core2Duo E6750 2.66ghz 4GB DDR2 RAM ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB Windows 7 64Bit Home Premium 3D-Coat DX64 ~30m is impractical. FPS = 1-2 for medium sized brush strokes, ~5fps when rotating the model. ~20m is better. FPS = 5-10 for a medium brush size, 10-15fps when rotating. ~16m is optimal. FPS = 20+ for medium brush, 30+ when rotating.

I managed to get 30m today experimenting with the surface tools, but it was completely impractical. I am getting 1-2fps at this resolution even using a medium brush diameter, maybe an Nvidia card with CUDA could make some difference until OpenCL is supported.

I have Windows 7 64bit, 4GB ram and i can't get far beyond ~20m triangles before it becomes un-usable. I'll have to give Linux a try but i have an ATI graphics card and apparently their drivers are very poor.

Yes it's only the thin details that give me the problem with merge - but i will learn eventually how to get the details with sculpting/projection instead i think. Here is a quick render of new model made this morning for fun (made with Google Sketchup for speed), it's a kind of Art-Deco radio type of thing. You can see that at default model scale even when i increase density in VoxTree volume (8x), the details come out poor, but if i scale the model 10-16m it can work very well (some small artifacts on the radial lines, but easy to smooth with very light pressure). One thing i noticed though when i tried to render this, the yellow box that comes up (custom size) is totally out of line with finished picture, maybe this is a known bug?

Cool thanks digman, i'll have to give that a try. I grabbed Blender because it was the only free 3D app i knew of, and the documentation is good, but it is really much too complicated for the basic things i am doing! About the merge times, yes you are definately right, at lower levels it calculates very quickly, but if i merge an object with ~16m triangles it takes a while. I also tried doing a 24m merge just to see what would happen, i ended up closing 3D-Coat through task manager as it just kept going and going and it was having to use the page file a lot. I have a Core2Duo 2.66ghz with 4gb of ram, so maybe upgrading to 8gb might be worth it. I don't have the money for an i7 system at the moment so i'll have to learn what i can handle complexity-wise. The first models i have been experimenting with are just very geometric doodles, but i was surprised at how well they can be represented with 8m voxels or so. The only telling areas are radial lines etc.. but with some very light smoothing they look great too. I have yet to scuplt anything organic (just been doing surface detail experiments), but i look forward to trying that.

I managed to fix my issue, turns out that a ring of edges were indeed not connected properly, even though they appeared to be physically joined. Just tried several merge operations with the fixed mesh and it's working great, the results at higher voxel density are really quite impressive! I think i'll have to upgrade my computer if i buy 3D-coat though, some of the merges have taken 10 minutes - it reminds me of watching my brother rendering images on his Atari ST when i was a kid Thanks again for your help guys, it's all bit confusing at the moment, but i'll get there eventually - i hope!

Thanks for the help guys, i'll try subdividing the mesh a few times first. If it doesn't fix it i'll spend a couple of hours going over Blender again and see if i can figure this out, if not i will post the model for you to look at.

Sorry i should have been clearer in my post. It's not an open mesh, it's a solid object made only by subdividing faces and extruding etc.. It seems to happen mostly on circular or irregularly shaped faces that are drawn in from the surface (hope that makes sense). I also tried the 'close mesh' option on import but that didn't seem to alter anything at all. Like i said i am literally just getting started with modeling (4 days in so far!) so perhaps there is actually something wrong with my mesh to begin with. I was just wondering if this was a known bug, or does the merge function usually work perfectly if everything is ok with the source mesh? If so i will have to read some more Blender tutorials and try and find what i'm doing wrong. That's a shame about the Voxel painting! My mind literally exploded at the thought of it lol. I would really like an alternate rendering mode to show the true voxel form of the object, but i understand that the current polygon method works very well for organic modeling. Oh well maybe in the future it could be added - it's certainly not a deal breaker.

Hello everyone, i just found this software recently and i've been having a lot of fun with the trial and i'm seriously considering buying it. I have run into a problem though which has stopped me in my tracks and i was wondering if anyone can give me some advice/suggestions. My problem is with using a mesh to create a new voxel volume. I have tried mutliple different import formats (obj,lwo,3ds) and experimented a lot with scaling and increasing the density of the volume before i create the object, but 3D-Coat always seems to create some very strange artifacts. Generally the profile of the mesh transfers well, but concave surfaces seem to get filled in most of the time, and sometimes the artifacts they create (lots of 'stepped' patterns and holes) will be projected to the opposite surface of the model. Is this a known problem, and has there been any word on fixing it? I'm very new to modeling so perhaps i'm doing something incorrectly, but this feature is absolutely amazing when it works right and would have me sold right away if it worked reliably! Another thing i was wondering about is the possibility to paint directly to the voxels in the future. I understand that 99% of people only use the voxel models to bake normal/displacement maps for low poly meshes, but i think it would be a very nice feature! I have read that some game engine developers are thinking about using voxels for next generation engines (for world objects and anything that doesn't need to animate) so perhaps this might actually become very relevant in the next few years. I am guessing that it won't be possible to add this while 3D-Coat renders voxels as polygons for sculpting, but maybe there could be an alternate rendering option to show the 'true' voxel volume? Anyway, thanks a lot for your time! The software is really amazing, and if i can only fix this problem with merging meshes i will be all set!