popwfx
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Not sure if this forum section is only for bugs or also for general support, so sorry I posted it in the wrong spot.
Can I specify UV seams that make painting wrap around seams to be seamless?
Let's say I have a square flat block as an object and I want to make the textures seem like they are seamless when multiple versions of them are layed out in the render or game. What I would like is a way to specify which uv seams connect to which ones so that say in this case if I start painting off the left side the stroke would wrap around to the right side. Is this possible in 3D Coat? I know how to do it in Photoshop, but i kind of need to do it based on geometry and uv maps so that I can have the color, spec and depth maps appear seamless like a terrain.
Can this be done in 3DC and if so how so I get strokes to wrap around non-contiguous UVs? thanks!
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Sorry, I was thinking of rigged bones specifically. The posing tools in in 3DCoat are awesome - didn't mean to give the wrong impression...
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What size of maps? It is important, maybe they are too big? Also, I am often loosing qustion in this thread, it grows very quickly, so if I will loose your requers, just drop me mail to support or post in mantis. Also you may send me model to support to see what appens.
Thank you.
I will email you the object tomorrow when I'm back at my desk. Maps are 4096x4096 6 total layers. Photoshop can handle many more layers than that at that size on this machine with no problem and visibility toggling there is instantaneous. My laptop also has a hybrid SSD drive which is very fast if there is swapping, but 3DCoat freezes for several minutes just to toggle a layer on or off. -
Andrew, quick question about v4 Beta9C:
When testing it on my old, but still useful laptop I'm getting some new performance problems I don't recall seeing before - why is this happening? I will try this on my grunty desktop and see if it happens there.
laptop is:
Win 7 64bit
Core Duo T9500 2.6GHz
8 Gb RAM
NVidia Geforce 8800M GTX - latest drivers from NVidia as of today
Object loaded in paint room for per pixel painting has only:
759 points ~ 660 polys (all quads)
2 uv maps
6 painted layers
What happens is if I click the "eye" icon in the layers popup to hide or show layers in this very lightweight file, the CPU goes to 100% and 3DCoat is non-responsive for like 3 minutes! then eventually 3DCoat wakes up and makes the layer either visible or invisible. Rotating and painting on the object is fine at normal speed, but something new makes the toggling of visibility of the layers very very slow (unusably slow - even for lightweight game objects) on my laptop - which admittedly is a few years old (and I normally work on my powerful desktop) but usually this laptop is fast enough for playing games like TF2 at 75fps at 1920x1080 and Lightwave and photoshop are very speedy on it. I used to recall 3DCoat being speedy on it too, and some parts of v4 still are, but Layers painting visibility toggling is almost broken it is so slow now.
I am running the CUDA version and according to NVidia my card is CUDA compatible... any ideas? Can't wait to upgrade to v4! Thanks!
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that's cool. Your english seems fine
I'm trying to figure out what you meant - without an interactive video diagram it would be hard to understand this sort of interaction in just a few sentences. So you want the list popups to still be available in the application, but most people won't show them, and then just have a new dockable popup with the current selectable tools and then the normal spacebar keystroke which brings up the tools and color palette picker will bring up this new list popup when you press the spacebar with the cursor over the new "current tool" popup? Is that what you mean?
That could work, I'd have to play with it like that to be sure.... those popups do need something to clean them up though. I personally, want additional tooltips with extra info on each item to appear when you hover over a brush or material etc - in the thumbnails, you can't tell much difference between 2 similar items - additional text we could save per brush, tags or a description could give those brushes more info. This idea you have here is good, but only part of the solution for the content popups... Some more thought needs to go into any new interface for them.
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Sorry are you saying you are just interested in making still photos that contain 3D objects or compositing real objects into a virtual set as a still image?
If so, yes 3D Coat with or without Blender can help with that - I don't use Blender much since I'm a Lightwave user but recent upgrades in it have made it more feature packed, but not 100% production ready for my tastes. I also dislike Blender's interface. Photoshop and After Effects CS6 would work fine for what you say - now there are even fairly decent (but basic) rendering in Photoshop Extended - so you could export OBJ files from 3DCoat and load them into a 3D layer in photoshop and rotate and tweak lights and shading in photoshop. But you need a grunty 3D card as Photoshop isn't optimized really awesome for 3D OpenGL stuff. Also, you may get a touch frustrated in Photoshop exactly placing or photo-matching your 3D object into your environment.
But all that being said, the main problem you will experience depending on how realistic you are intending these images to be, is:
1) 3DCoat and Adobe CS6 have no real deformation engine - meaning if you have a character and want to pose it or whatever before comping into your still, you'd need to bone and rig it in order to animate it into position for the silhouette you need. Obviously this is less important if your subjects are all inanimate objects or architecture type things that don't require to be deformed or animated for your stills. If they are not organic or basic objects, then don't underestimate the power of motion that even a still needs to portray intent or convey energy in your images. If that is the case then you'd need to rely on Blender or some other 3D package in that workflow as well as 3DCoat and CS6.
also most importantly:
2) none of these packages have significant tools for Motion Tracking and solving - yes Adobe After Effects has some limited 2D trackers, but for the most convincing and realistic way to embed 3D objects into photographic scenes is to use a motion tracker and have it solve for camera position etc. Something like SynthEyes. If you only have one picture and don't have a moving camera, then that would be what is considered a "tripod solve" which is limiting in exactly how well you can embed 3D imagery into it realistically. My understanding is blender has some newer tracking features as well but I have no idea how good they are - I don't think Blender's motion tracking stuff is up for production ready projects though, I think it is still in its infancy. What I mean by all this here is that you need a solve and ways to get the 3D location and camera angles and lens distortion compensation etc etc in order to accurately match the scene to recreate it. There's also shadow catching and projection (where the light in your photo is should reflect how your object is lit and how it casts shadows onto your photo). All this is especially critical for moving images as slippage can occur if you are off by even 0.5 a pixel in the rendered composite. It really depends on what you are doing. If you just want to have a play and model and paint something in 3D Coat and then slap it into a picture in Photoshop mixed with a photo and have it look "close enough" for an average user, or if you are doing abstract non-realistic stuff, then sure, you can do that easy with 3DC & Photoshop and might not even need Blender or another 3D package.
hope this helps, but to answer your overall question - Nudge! Nudge! Nudge! 3DCoat is a totally awesomely feature packed app that is more than worth double its price. There's nothing out there that is as easy to get into and use for these sorts of things (though it may have way more features than you need). Plus if you know photoshop well, using the 3DC Paint room will be mostly second nature.
Good Luck
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Can you elaborate further? This is unclear to me. Are you saying Pack to 1:1 ratio? or are you suggesting something similar to the way mipmap textures are created in the way they are divided?
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Your post here is unclear to me. Do you mean that there is an additional popup window which contains the currently selected tool of each type?
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Thanks Javis. That's great! There's alot of good stuff in there - I assume the User Construction Plane works like the one in LWCAD?
Wow, I could see how a post like that could get overlooked since it is so overwhelming and hard to separate out the tasks for development. It looks more like a v5 feature set promo material than a single feature request ;-)
Maybe if you broke out the individual features into separate requests and prioritized them we'd be luckier in getting them added to 3DCoat? Anything that makes it easier for Andrew & team to develop... I do like your suggestions though - and Guides as I mention here are only one of them in that post.
But reading your post had me thinking of another Guides related feature. So in addition to the Guides as we've described them in my first post here (and in your post), it would also be awesome if the guides could be created right off selected geometry. So you could select 2 points and say Make Guide. As long as we had Snapping to Guides, then the other Snapping stuff you mention is just bonus and can be added later maybe?
Do we ask too much here? I honestly think if the workflow was easier and faster that Pligway would sell way more copies, making such changes more than worthwhile to develop.
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Thank you carlosa. I figured out the problem.
It seems 3.718F has a bug where this doesn't work (maybe it's just with LWO objects) - because I tried the EXACT same thing in v4 BETA9C and it works! Not sure what the problem with 3.718F is, i thought it used to work. The more I play with 3.718F the more buggy I am finding it when comparing it to older 3.6 version or the new v4 beta. I assumed 3.718F was the latest stable build, but it seems that several things got broken in it and it is now abandoned?
thanks for your help though... this was driving me mad, and I finally decided to try the v4 beta for my day-to-day work...
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Does anyone at all know if it is possible to paint through objects from another material or just through other polygons? Surely this is something people have wanted, to use portions of a model as reference of where to paint..
Thanks for any ideas, if I don't hear anything, maybe I'll email support, but I didn't want to distract from the work on v4! :-)
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Do you mean like Unity's Asset Store? Something integrated into the 3D Coat app?
That would be great. But before that happens, I really think we need some slightly better management of content and assets within the app first, before we worry about bringing new assets into our local box. Not that what you say isn't vital. But I'm finding Brush & Material management cumbersome, and would like a proper interface to manage:
- what content is default in 3D Coat,
- what have content have I added for all projects
- and what temporary content have I added for this one off project that I don't want persisted, except in this file.
Also, better thumbnails, and/or description popups for materials and brushes etc. So that if I have a texture in there I can have comments or tags that make it obvious which is what. at 32x32 pixels or whatever, I sure can't tell what the difference between 2 different concrete textures will be in my panel on the right. So popup comments (which are editable if I need to) which I can add when I add the content or later on, might help me remember what brush is for what.
All that being said, it would be nice not to have to spend hours scouring for things, and such a consolidated app store (even for free stuff) would be welcome as the definitive way to find addon content for 3D Coat.
- what content is default in 3D Coat,
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anyone have any ideas on how to do this? thanks!
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Couldn't find your request in Mantis? Is it in there?
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just added my support for this in Mantis
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Thanks, I've now joined mantis and added my comment.
However, I would not like to clutter your bug tracking tool without some discussion here first sometimes - since I am not intimately familiar with every aspect of 3DCoat and the history of some of my requests or bugs if indeed they are. Hence my posting here first.
For example, my idea above is about Folder Groups and Layer Comps (like in Photoshop) - with that example, should I be creating my own Mantis request for the Layer Comps idea? And what determines when I should post in this forum section versus when I should add something to Mantis? If this forum is deprecated it should perhaps be closed? or is it for discussion prior to posting to Mantis? Thanks...
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Hi, please post in the v4 beta thread. v3 is no longer in development.
Here is the URL:
Thanks for your reply, but I am confused by it. I am using 3DCoat in production. 3.718F is the latest stable version. 4 is still in beta and we can't buy it yet, and since I tend not to use beta software in production I am using 3,718F. If this is a known bug that carries over from 3.718F to 4, then hopefully beta testers will tell me that it is fixed in version 4 or that this still exists in v4. With my schedule I don't have time to fully beta test 4 myself, so I am using the latest stable software for production - I only use v4 when playing and not for production work. This seems like a pretty basic bug (or something is not working as expected)?
Am I to understand v3 is completely abandoned even though 4 isn't out yet and I should not be using it? The bug I mention exists in 3.718F....
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I think I've found a bug in 3.718F. Suppose I have 4 Layers (the 2 bottom standard layers that get created and 2 new ones I've created, #3 & #2). Assume blending is standard. Assume I have the Opacities set as follows:
Layer #3 50%
Layer #2 60%
Layer #1 100%
Layer #0 100%
Now, if I try to merge Layer #3 down into Layer #2, I expect it to basically (just like in Photoshop) collapse layers 2 & 3 together keeping the opacities in account when merging. So the new layer created from merging 2 & 3 would have transparency that looks exactly like when 2 & 3 are stacked, but after merging would have an Opacity of 100% on the newly created layer. For some reason, 3DCoat merges them, but the resultant layer looks much lighter than the 50% & 60% stacked when not-merged. Why is that? It doesn't seem to merge like Photoshop and is confusing. Is this a bug? You can reproduce this by duplicating your Layers 2 & 3 as 2 copy & 3 copy and making them invisible, and then merging down the original 3 down to 2 and by comparing the resulting layer to the copys of 2 & 3 stacked, you will see that they look different in Opacity...?
thanks!
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While I'm at it for feature requests while painting, It would be great if the Paint Room Layers list had the ability to have Folder Groups like in Photoshop.
and that would include the ability to Duplicate Groups (like in Photoshop) as well as apply blending & opacity levels or depth levels (and spec levels whenever that gets added) on a master level to the whole group while keeping the individual layers settings within the group proportionately. Again this mimics how Photoshop works So if I had:
Group #1
Layer #1Layer #2Layer #3So by reducing the opacity of the group, you nondestructively dim all contained layers proportionately to their individually set levels. If Group = 100% then whatever is exactly in the individual group will work as it is set. Also, group folders will help with organization.
Ideally if we want to allow for better flexibility as well, the addition of a Photoshop-like feature called Layer Comps would be great. This would enable you to save Visibility, Opacity, and depth settings for all layers as a named entity. Therefore if you were say making textures for a character. You could have in the same project file, a Layer Comp for Regular, another for Burnt by explosions, and another for Injured in battle - etc. and Selecting Layer Comps in the new window would automatically set the remembered visibility, depth and opacity settings for all layers - enabling you to save states.
Please don't add the Layer Comps feature before the Layer Folders - that is more important and is needed for the Layer Comps feature.
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I personally would appreciate if text in the Layers, Sub-Objects & Materials/surfaces lists could in fact NOT be centered. If you left-justify them they are much easier to read (at least with a left-to-right language - I don't know if 3DC is availble in right-to-left languages but if so then it should probably be right justified for those users)
Centering them makes scanning a long list hard to find things. Often times I will use naming conventions for my layers or sub-objects and something might be called:
building.front.spec
building.front.depth
building.entrance.depth
See how this list below lines things up better and is easier to visually scan?
building.front.specbuilding.front.depthbuilding.entrance.depthI don't want to sound like I'm splitting hairs or nitpicking an otherwise excellent application. It's just minor stuff like this that is easy to do adds up and helps workflow. Also, hopefully doing this might lead to the Layers list eventually having thumbnails like in Photoshop or linked masks in-line like in Photoshop etc. Or dare I say a filter/search box at the top of the Layers lists for long lists - though this may not be as needed if folder groups (as in my other thread) is added...
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... I even did a mock up of how it would work, with a lenghty write-up on it's functions.
Please repost a link to your mockup - I'd love to see it. thx!
I can imagine painting with splines and having spline nodes having them snap to guides or guides intersections; or sculpt and have tentacles or whatever grow to snap to a particular guide - so you can get precise lengths or whatever...
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While those tutorials are very helpful and show me about the copy channels which I wasn't aware of, they don't exactly address what I was asking. I'm sorry if I wasn't clear.
Here is a picture describing my issue:
I want to paint "through" the spheres so the stroke goes onto the ground layer - but I still want to be able to see the spheres (ideally with some sort of wireframe outline or level of transparency as I paint). Notice how the stroke is broken in the texture? An additional question is why is the stroke not broken sharply at where the spheres intersect with the plane? It's like paint leaks around the object a little but still gets broken - I could see later on wanting a true shape mask where it is sharp - but in this case I just want to see my brush strokes underneath as I paint and also allow the paint to just land on the flat plane. Hopefully I'm a little more clear.
thanks btw for those other tutorials!
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Sorry if this is a duplicate question - the thread about the Xmas sale doesn't specify and sounds like it is only for new purchasers.
Is there any discount for current v3.x pro users to buy or preorder v4 upgrade? and from the post above I assume there is no way to currently preorder v4 upgrade if you are a v3 pro user?
P.S. the sale should apply to us too ;-) I'd preorder at a discount otherwise if there wont be one, I'll just wait until release....
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If you add magic wand, it would be great to have multiple selections available and to have a 'make new layer from selection' option as well as invert selection and feather, all as in PS.
Yes this, but I would like it so you could "Save Selection set." and "Load Selection" like in Photoshop - also I believe these selection sets should be saved into the .3b file. This would be alot more intuitive to me than the freeze tool. Perhaps it is just the display of the frozen areas that is throwing me off and it would make more sense as a dotted line like photoshop...?
maybe the frozen areas (i.e. masked off areas you can't paint) should be dimmed or dimmable so you still can see what is there as opposed to the (to me) undulating trasparency checkerboard..
Seamless texture painting possible?
in SOS! If you need urgent help for 3DCoat
Posted
Thanks, I'm using Lightwave and the ultimate output is for a game engine - I actually haven't used Ptex before, and was under the impression it is for high-end rendering movies and stuff. Plus I want the ability to edit my textures if I have to tweak them slightly in Photoshop, with PTex my understanding is there won't be discernable islands to paint on?
This is what I need, something like this that lets me specify which UV map seams conneect to which for "wrapped painting" with strokes. Something like this which works for color, spec & depth would let me create a seamless texture for UVmaps on blocks of 3D objects that would eventually get placed in my scene and that means that the texture would appear to be seamless. Surely I'm not the only one who needs this sort of thing? It can be done by hand in Photoshop, but I thought 3DCoat would have something like this built in?