popwfx
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Posts posted by popwfx
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Anybody noticing that sometimes UNDO just doesn't work? You can hit it several times and it just does nothing. Been noticing that a lot lately. Doesn't always occur, but it seems that 3D Coat flushes the UNDO (temp?) file sometimes.
I have noticed UNDO undoes too much sometimes. Like I'll create a new layer, paint a stroke, press undo to undo that stroke, and paint a new stroke, and then look up and realize that undo, not only undid the first brush stroke, but also the new layer too, so my second stroke ended up being painted on the layer below - which is really frustrating.
And nope I didn't undo twice, there's something weird about undo, I can tell this because redo won't put that new layer back.
Though as far as I can tell my undo woes are only around creating new layers and then doing something immediately after that. Haven't noticed undo problems other than that-- well except for the new lag in performance around them and other UI interactions. 3.6 was much snappier than 4 for just about everything. I'm not sure why it's slower now. Though CUDA drivers were mentioned here as a possible culprit.
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Has anyone else experienced sudden crashes of 3D Coat without any error report? Mostly when working in Retopo Room. It's like, you work on your model and the next second you gaze at the desktop wondering what the hell has just happened.
After that, I have to reload my navigation preset because it resets. Also, view settings (or at least the grid display) seem to go back to default.
Nope no crashes in beta 10 yet, but you are scaring me, since I'm just about to do a lot of production retopo and my other side by side install of 3.718f is more buggy than 4 now so I've kind of abandoned it. I'd hate to have to install an old version of 3.5x or 3.6x just to get thru this retopo work. Keep us posted about your crashes please and what platform and version are you talking about?
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I hate to say this but Many times I have sat and Worked through Training plans and recorded HOURS of video that is obsolete very quickly and never goes further than the Cutting room. All too often i record pieces and find myself questioning my actions, not because I am unsure of my process but more so because the workflow feels a bit disjointed & confusing.
It is now more than ever possible to work through entire projects within 3D-Coat but things (to me at least) still feel clunky and the ergonomics of the application still feel confusing when trying to explain to new users. [EDIT its not that its doesn't work, the rhythm just feels wrong] I'm not trying to be difficult, Really I'm not, but I still feel, that things could be a whole lot better with a little work on consistency and standardizing a few areas. I know its easy for me to say that and consistency is possibly much more than a little work.
I agree, there are a non-intuitive things in 3DCoat - even though, overall, following the lead of Photoshop and other applications has been the right choice and makes things easy to understand. For people in graphics there is no other tool more ubiquitous than Photoshop - so following their lead (and hopefully improving on it) is the best idea for new users. The main thing that concerns me about discussions like there are here (and in other forums like the Lightwave forum) is that everyone is an armchair quarterback, looking at the UI from a very narrow perspective. Andrew is so awesome responding to all our needs, that there is a danger that the loudest voices will be the only ones heard. Now, please understand, I do not disagree with anyone's ideas here, however, 3DCoat seems like it is at the point where it really needs a full-time interaction designer. Not just people chiming in and saying - hey this is wrong and make it like this. I've been involved in enough big dev teams to know that having a really talented interaction designer on board, and planning the wireframes and UI interactions - after lots of usability testing, bug reports, and in direct consult with the users is the best way forward to a highly intuitive, very efficient and usable app. The interaction designer (in consult with the devs) should be making these calls. And if they are talented and listen to the customers, they can weed out the "quick-fixes" which add to technical debt and confusion in the app (and wasted $ developing) and lead to a a really, truly awesome application. I realize Pilgway is a small company. But what they have here is so cool, that the investment in a dedicated interaction designer (and this is not a graphic designer who thinks they know UIs) is a good idea. Check out this book for best practices for interaction design if you are interested: http://www.amazon.co...ds=about+face+4
Ok that's my rant over. Hope I did not offend anyone. But using interaction designers is how the big [read: smart] boys play. Ok rant not entirely over, here's one more thing - Pilgway should totally check out the Lean Startup methodologies to keep costs down and deliver excellent stuff the customers want. http://www.amazon.co...n/dp/0307887898
(and no I don't get commissions
- this is just great stuff and overlaps with what alot of you are talking about with the product and its comparison to Zbrush in the market)!!Big Issue Right now!! I am seeing HUGE delays when switching tools in not just the retopo room but thoughout 3D-Coat.
Yes also this. I have noticed that since v 3.523 (I haven't used every version so I don't know the exact point it changed) that much more delays in switching tools, changing selected layers and visibility of layers has had a big (or at least noticeable) performance hit (at least in the CUDA 64bit GL versions). Hopefully there is something here that can be optimized back to the good old days when the app was snappier on the same hardware.
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That tutorial problem happens all the time with software. I've Been trying to learn Nuke and Digital Tutors has a number of old tutorials up where tools have been moved or renamed since then. It was a little confusing but I figured it out.
I used to teach LW in NY some years ago, and this is partly why I stopped instructing. Keeping up with current & changing curriculae/documentation and videos was a nightmare with screenshots and screen captures because the UI had changed. I loved instruction, but hated making the docs stay relevant over time. Unfortunately for a moving target like software, this is the name of the game. Better tutorial organization by the creators would help (i.e. naming the video with the 3DC version # in the title) but that's a bit like putting a milk carton "Best Before" label on it and many older tutes have very useful information - even if they are a touch out of date. The only way around this is to check for later versioned tutorials first and also if the tute creator puts a Youtube comment overlay onto the video mentioning if the video contains techniques which no longer apply to the current version. That way end users could still get good stuff out of the video without the confusion you mention. It is a bit more work for the tutorial creators though and yet another reason why we should thank them and buy their wares to support them...
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Just a confirmation that some nice bugs were indeed fixed in beta 10. The mantis bug digman added which was about materials painting not respecting alpha seems to indeed be fixed.
Now if you load a transparent decal with color, spec, & depth maps, and paint the material, the depth and specs follow the image correctly and whereever is transparent is ignored in each channel - just as expected. before, depth and spec would get painted by stroke into the depth and spec channels despite the material having no data in the transparent part.
One caveat, that you should know (and now that I play with it like this it makes sense this way) is that if you load a material decal (i.e. an image surrounded by transparency) into a material slot with say color and depth, but you don't select a spec map, then the alpha is respected for depth and color, but not for spec - the spec gets painted by your brush stroke as normal. However if you either turn the spec channel off, or load a solid black image in - then no spec is painted. At first I thought "not loading a spec map" would ignore it when painting with a material, but on second thought it works better here how Andrew has made it, so you have more flexibility this way and can always either load in a black image for an unwanted channel or turn off that channel when painting with that chosen material.
Nice work Andrew - thanks for fixing it! And thanks digman for posting the bug.
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lol
But this was only one layer but I'll see if messing with that helps...
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Also, I'm sure this is also an oft asked question, but the answer escaped me in searching for it.
Why is the symmetry plane so small?
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everything worked right and got it to blender got everything fixed
if the model have a UVset
save the model like .obj
go to paint room - new project
and import model for per pixel painting -this mode is good to make normal maps-
-> dont use Layer0 for painting, leave it as it. Layer0 is use by 3DC to perform some software tasks.
So in any .3b file Layer 0 should never be touched or deleted? Can it be locked? Does that cause problems when tweaking the layers in Photoshop and bringing them back in? Thx
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One thing I'm noticing in my workflow now, is, especially when I am bringing LightWave objects into 3DCoat by Importing for per pixel painting or Replace Geometry in an existing .3b file I have saved - is that I can't tell what version/iteration of my model is inside the .3b file at all. I have to examine the object inside 3DCoat, and/or look at the file system date of the .3b file and hope there is a correlation with my saved .LWO object files.
Now before anyone tells me - yes I use subversion on projects to save histories, and I also name files and have a proper folder structure. But when being creative you don't want to care to stick to a rigid path of when to load the content into what application. If I want to model in LW and then paint in 3D Coat and then tweak in LW and then repaint or reUV in 3DCoat I should be able to go back and forth to whatever programs as often as I like without trouble. The only thing about embedding the LWO inside the .3b file as opposed to linking it to an external object file, is that you may have an iteration inside your .3b file which is older than a previous pass and it's hard to tell what is what easily.
To that end, I propose at minimum, there is a "Notes" section whenever you import ANY kind of mesh/object/or file into 3DCoat that ends up getting embedded into the .3b file. Then there should be a mechanism - whether an additional popup menu called "NOTES" which shows you the time & date stamp of when the file was imported into 3DC and your text notes in a popup of the object. That would be immensly helpful.
Perhaps later on, a better way of dealing with this could be to potentially allow the option of external linking of meshes and not having them embedded into the .3b file - which would then mean that particular .3b file has a dependency of that external .LWO file. This is common in programs like Lightwave and After Effects which commonly link to dependent files in the system - much like a project. Maybe that means there should be a new 3DCoat file format for 3DCoat projects?
What do you all think - any one else have workflow issues related to this?
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Does this happen with the symmetry plane because 3DCoat places it in the center of the bounding box of the object and not on the origin? I assume that is what the "No center snap" does when importing-- maybe we could ask for a feature request to make it ON by default? I mean if we are importing existing models to work on, I think we know well enough to place our objects on the origin. I really don't get the idea of using a bounding box for symmetry - maybe that is more useful when sculpting something out of nowhere? But if that were the case I think I might still start with a primitive on the origin and then turn symmetry on at the origin....
Also, I find the symmetry plane's size to be arbitrary, sometimes it is much smaller than the object - why is that?
is my assumption here correct?
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Does this happen with the symmetry plane because 3DCoat places it in the center of the bounding box of the object and not on the origin? I assume that is what the "No center snap" does when importing-- maybe we could ask for a feature request to make it ON by default? I mean if we are importing existing models to work on, I think we know well enough to place our objects on the origin. I really don't get the idea of using a bounding box for symmetry - maybe that is more useful when sculpting something out of nowhere? But if that were the case I think I might still start with a primitive on the origin and then turn symmetry on at the origin....
Also, I find the symmetry plane's size to be arbitrary, sometimes it is much smaller than the object - why is that?
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yes - a few friends and colleagues downloaded and installed it. Apparently Adobe didn't mean to give it for everyone for free initially, but then are backpedalling and having to agree with it as far as I know. I never went to the links because I already own CS6. pretty sure it's for real.
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yes, thank you! I was wondering exactly how to do such a thing. I was hoping it was as simple as photoshop's layer mask button - but thanks for taking the time to show us how!
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hmmm...? how did the clusters appear?
Originally I had a block made and had 3DC uv map it, but I didn't need the sides and bottoms mapped in the game engine so in LW I deleted that geometry and then brought it back into 3DC - thinking that the deleted geometry would also have deleted the relevant portions of the UV map. So did that corrupt the clusters somehow? not sure how it happened, because yes, that does look wacky in the uv room now? The islands look ok in the UV if you look at it, but not in that view. Does that mean there are now overlapping polys in the UVs? (if so they werent like that in the UV before I deleted the geometry and did "Replace Geometry" in 3DC.
I'm just trying to figure out what I did wrong to avoid that workflow in the future.
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Would you be kind enough to load this object and tell me what is wrong with it and if the lines appear for you when you paint on it? The UV maps look ok to me.
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I just tested with an extruded version of this plane in both LWO and OBJ and it still happens.. auggh... I'm going to try and update my NVida drivers and see if that helps.
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It's a simple scene with a plane loaded using 4096 pixel maps - and I'm just painting with a basic brush - it fails (in color, depth & spec) with materials as well. Maybe it is because it is a plane??
I loaded the plane for per pixel painting as a LWO object and the model is clean - no duplicate points etc...
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I'm using v4 beta9c. Anyone know what these weird lines are at the polygon edges that show up when painting with a basic brush or material are?
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Hi, I really like the fact I can hold the shift key down when rotating an object with Alt and then it snaps to the nearest axis when Shift is down. But is there a keystroke that does that? I know that's weird how I'm saying it - but I'm moving from keyboard mouse use to mouse & tablet for painting and left hand using 3D Connexion SpacePilot Pro - I'm trying to figure out how to set up my buttons on the SpacePilot Pro to do that - I didn't realize how often as I rotate I snap to an axis with that shift key.
Anyone know how to do this or care to share their 3D Mouse button settings (and if so what driver are you using the standard one in AbnRanger's video or the 3DXLabs beta driver which has more features?)
thx!
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Thanks I added my +1 to this too!
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+1
Someday is now. Hopefully. I love this idea too, as long as it also works in the paint room. Ideally it doesn't even have to be an exact square tile, just defined edges that match up. Rectangles and trapezoid shapes should also work. Please get to this for a 4.x update! :-)
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I hope something can be done about this, but again, comparing a 2D app (with little to no overhead) to 3D Coat's behavior on a 3D Model is not a reasonable one. in 2D space, Photoshop doesn't have to apply those layers onto a model. That is why I suggested testing it's ability to turn on/off layers when those are assigned to a 3D Model in Photoshop. So, paint 18 4K layers on the same model, in Photoshop, and you'll have a better comparison. In fact, if you can record this process and turn those 18 layers off/on instantaneously, then that might compel Andrew to investigate it further.
Sorry, can you clarify? I did try 18 4K layers in Photoshop and it is instantaneous switching visibility on and off. Did you mean use a 3D object in a 3D layer in Photoshop? 3DC with 4-6 layers hangs for up to 3 minutes to turn visibility on and off - something is not exactly optimized at the least. There is something funky going on that doesn't need to be happening to hide a layer in 3DC. I can test something else if you could clarify, I'm not sure what you meant here. Btw the 3D model I was talking about had like 800 polys - pretty lightweight.
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Most of it is hardware. I don't have any problem with 4k maps on my 6 core AMD CPU, 16GB and GTX 470 Desktop. Not to say there isn't a little pause when toggling visibility, but no freezing up. You also have to keep in mind that graphic card naming conventions on laptops are very deceptive and inaccurate. They are extremely crippled in comparison to their desktop counterparts. They aren't even close (usually equivalent to desktop models 2-3 generations older). Plus, every layer has 3 image maps....so 6 x 3 = 18 4k maps. The bottleneck will be the lack of video RAM.
http://www.geforce.c.../specifications
Do you have Photoshop painting on the same obj. model with 18 4K maps? If not, try it. Painting models in PS, always seemed laggy and slow compared to 3D Coat, so I don't think that is an accurate comparison to make. Try using 1k-2k maps, and you'll probably see a big difference. You can change it by going to EDIT > Texture and Mesh Resolution.
Hi AbnRanger, I just tested painting 18 Layers in Photoshop CS6 64bit on the same laptop and switching visibility on and off between layers is instantaneous. I am not experiencing the ~3min hang up that I am doing the same thing in 3D Coat. So although you are right that 18 layers in Photoshop is equivalent to 6 layers in 3DC, it doesn't seem to be the problem. I'll go ahead and email Andrew directly since this appears to be a 3DC problem and it may be hard to follow in this busy thread...
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Yes you are quite right, except creating procedural scenery pieces in game development is also the wave of the future, and having programmatically generated land or buildings or pipes or roads or whatever that have seamless connections requires textures to be seamless when being placed on the game grid by code. So artists making assets for that sort of thing (not just the characters that run around in that scenery) need seamless stuff. Also, odd shaped "puzzle pieces" or shapes that are not perfectly square and don't have a square UV map that fills the map space won't work like that. Let's say I was building a track with curved corners or wedges, then in those cases this wouldn't work unless I had severe stretching. I know there are workarounds, but having some kind of edge wrap painting would be really nice.
To do it the way you indicate, I would have to paint the textures in 3DC with a UV map that happens to be square and fills the UV space and then in Photoshop load the separate textures, color, depth & spec and one by one use Filter > Offset (50% of the pixel size), then select the non-seamless area and Content Aware Fill or something to feather the wrapped portion - and do this for the spec and depth maps too -- this is especially tricky and time consuming if I have a non square area or have the sides of the blocks as well that I need to make seamless.
I appreciate your hints, and perhaps my requirement here is edge-case, but I would think many people who create re-usable components for games would need some kind of method for creating seamless textures that include depth and spec - I don't think Luxology still sells ImageSynth anymore and I'm not sure what is the definitive app for seamless creation -- it would just be nice to do it in 3DCoat (and I hoped there was something in there) - so that all the cool tools that I've come to depend on in 3DC when I paint would be available to make wrapping surfaces. Does this make sense? thanks
Ensuring welded vertices on X-axis symmetry
in General 3DCoat
Posted
Just a quick question about the 3DC interface while manually retopo'ing. How does one ensure that vertices along the X-axis (when modeling with symmetry on the X-axis) are welded and not overlapping. Is there any way to prevent overlapping (across the X-axis when using symmetry) vertices and just make the vertices snap and stop at the X-axis? So what I mean is I want to make sure polys created with the Quad tool etc are flush with the X-axis and not just mirroring across it when I accidentally pass the X-axis a few mm. I mean I know how to do this in other modelers like LW. But in 3DCoat when modeling with symmetry how do you do that? Or if you have accidentally created some overlapping polys across the X-axis, how can I easily (within 3DC) weld those 2 vertices together at the X =0 point? (What I've been doing in the past is just exporting and cleaning this up in LW. I'd rather make it clean within 3DC.
thanks