popwfx

This is a very simple question which should be a no brainer but wasn't intuitive to me - nor could I find the answer in the manual - I am using 3.718F (let me know if this is different for beta4). I have a multi-layer object and want to paint "through" one of the layers onto the other layer. They both have different surface names (i.e. 3D Coat materials) and they both are on different layers (i.e. subobjects) - but I want to use the geometry of one of the layers to help me decide where to paint on the other later. Ideally, in the paint room, I could just go to the materials or sub-objects tab and lock it and adjust its opacity or click view as wireframe for just that layer and then paint away. Locking the material or sub-object prevents me from painting on that object (which is what I want) but it als prevents me from painting on the other sub-object where they intersect - it kind of acts like a mask (but not a perfect one as color still leaks out under - but not fully. So lets say I have a flat square plane as layer 1, and several small half spheres randomly places on the plane's surface in layer 2. I want to use these spheres to see where to paint on layer 1 and paint through them. Invisibility and locking doesn't work it just "masks" them so I can't paint "underneath" where the spheres would be on the plane and still see them in the interface to know where to paint at the same time. I'm sure this is easy, but with the hours I'm working at present it is escaping me. Any help is greatly appreciated. thanks!

Carlosa FTW! thanks Carlosa - that works exactly as I'd hoped and keeps the uvs & layers intact and everything. Was that so hard everyone-else-who-doesn't-read-the-New-Users-forum?? ;-)

Thank you carlosa! That was exactly what I was looking for. I appreciate you taking the time to let me know about it. I've been using 3DCoat for a few years now and never noticed that. But I'm still wondering about the "replace mesh" thing though....

bump any ideas?

Don't know if this was asked for elsewhere, but it would be really nice if 3D Coat gave progress bars on any operation which hangs the UI at all - this includes saving, exporting textures and some long fill operations etc etc. Because you don't even get an hourglass cursor, you have no idea if 3DC is actually performing the action at all, is crashed or if you can use the UI. Also, during these times when it takes a long time to do something, if it can't be done in the background, then definitely please do NOT buffer keystrokes or mouse clicks at this time. Often I'll accidentally click and start working assuming it is complete (and I don't have any indication other than maybe looking at a CPU or HD monitor on another screen) and then 3DC wakes up again and only partially buffered the clicks and they wreak havoc on what I'm working on. Generally this only happens when I'm using 3DC on my less powerful machine (my laptop), but otherwise it is speedy enough to do 3DC work on. A lot of times I can't be away from 3D Coat long enough to wait to fix something at my grunty desktop - so even though my laptop is sufficient to work with, the lack of progress bars hampers intensive operations and causes problems. More feedback is a good idea. thanks!

Thanks for the reply Javis. Good to know it's by design and not randomly killing them. That being said, I do contest this choice. If floating vertices and 2point polys cause problems for 3DC, surely there's a better way to ignore them while painting or whatever, but keep them intact enough to export out. As far as I'm concerned, whatever I feed into 3DC it should spit out along with any edits or additions I use 3DC to make into the file. Regardless of rigging choices, it is nicer to have the flexibility to pull anything into 3DC at anytime during my workflow to tweak, update, or change things. Why let a limitation affect my pipeline? So if it is at all possible, I would like to see this addressed - if not as a bug, then as a feature request. It should be simple enough to save 2pt polys in memory, have them not interfere with 3DC if they aren't supported in there, and then export them out when needed. Like what about characters being textured with 2pt poly-chains for hair/fur? If they were supported, it would be useful to see them as references to paint their surface (as some things like Sasquatch use uv maps for color growth of fur) also to be able to color map vertices in 2pt poly chains as well as surface polys would be helpful. Don't you agree? Thanks for considering this...

I did notice that a surface called "Bone" was imported into 3DC - which was probably from the 2 point polys which are the skelegons. LW skelegons have a special tag according to this thread here: http://forums.newtek...rding-Skelegons At first I thought just the tag wasn't getting set on export, but I notice that 2 point poly geometry (which is the skelegons) seems to get entirely stripped as well - despite the surface name of the geometry being detected - they aren't in the exported file at all anymore. This sort of geometry (1pt & 2pt polys) shouldn't get filtered out just because I UV map or paint a LWO object - at the very least it should slide right through untouched by 3D Coat. Please let me know if this is a known issue or bug and when you expect it can be addressed if indeed it is one. Thanks! BUILD: v3.7.18F 64bit CUDA OS: Windows Vista 64bit SP1 BUG DESCRIPTION: LWO Object with skelegons gets skelegons stripped on export. STEPS TO REPRODUCE: Import LWO object containing skelegons for per pixel painting. Switch to UV room create and edit some UV maps. Apply the UV sets. Paint in Paint room. File > Export model. Load exported LWO in Lightwave - and skelegons are gone.

If you load an LWO object for per pixel painting and UV map it in the UV room, and then export the model, the exported model no longer contains any of the imported skelegons that the model had inside it. Lightwave Skelegons are 2point polys with a special tag on them in the file format somehow. It seems 3D Coat is stripping the skelegons when exporting the model. I am using 3.7.18F Hopefully this has been fixed in v4 and if not please add this to the list of things to fix, it is fine if 3DC doesn't utilize skelegon bones but it should affect them and should just leave them alone if you can't do anything with them in 3DC. It is important to me that 3DC doesn't destroy the skelegons when exported and brought back into LW. This just adds yet more workarounds in my pipeline and makes it ripe for a mistake in my workflow if I'm not very careful to save separate versions with the skelegons and paste them back in. Please fix this - thanks!

Hope everyone is having good holidays. I unfortunately (or fortunately if you count using 3DCoat is fun) am still working. Quick question. Lightwave Layout scenes have a "Replace Object" function which lets you replace the geometry of a selected item in the scene with another model and it replaces the object in place with all the keyframes and adjustments intact. Does 3DCoat have a similar function? I have a .3b file which contains an imported LWO object which in 3DC: I marked seams created a new UV map went to the paint room and painted many layers I saved the .3b file I then exported this new model and its textures out of 3DCoat back into Lightwave. Eventually I had to tweak the geometry in the model in Lightwave Modeler. I added several points and polys by slicing up some existing geometry - but the vast majority of the model is exactly as before. LW Modeler interpolated the UV and Weight maps to the new points I've added and all looks fine in Lightwave. However, I would like to go back to the .3b file above and replace the model that is in there with this newer model with the slightly added geometry but I want to keep everything else in the .3b file the same -- the UV map, all marked seams, texture layers etc. How can I do this? I'd greatly appreciate any help if you have a moment to describe how to do this. Also, for bonus points: ;-) Assuming I have a .3b file with several textures, some 1024x and some 4096 - is there anyway I can scale up the 1024 sized textures to 4096 within 3DCoat? I accidentally made them smaller than 4096 and need to repaint them larger. By upscaling the image, I realize the quality will be crap, but I can use those old separated layers as reference to paint 4096 sized ones and keep everything looking the same. Obviously I can replace the image with a larger photoshopped one outside of 3DC in LW or my game engine, but how do I tell 3DCoat in this particular .3b file to allocate larger space for these textures/UV maps? thanks for your help!

As the beta continues and I am mostly using 3.7, I find I'm needing to move materials, brushes etc to the new version. Does there exist anywhere a site-map or folder explanation of where all the content for 3D-Coat is installed (for Windows I mean)? Some of it appears in the AppData and other stuff in subfolders in the Program Files\3DCoat folder. What I'd really like to know, is for every type of add-on content there is in 3DC, is what folder is where and how best to organize it when I add new materials etc. Ideally, I would like a situation where I have folders for: 3DCoat default installed content 3rd party or addon content downloaded from forums My Content that I want there all the time in 3DC for use between multipl projects My Content that is temporarily loaded (or in a folder so I can easily delete from My Content) for use for a particular model or *.3b file But I get confused where everything is and also in maintaining all the myriad of brushes, objects, materials, depth/spec etc maps and I don't want to mix my stuff with with installed stuff so it's easy for me to extract my content if I move computers or change versions of 3D-Coat. Is it even possible to separate my content out into different folders and yet have it integrated with the default content inside the application? Can anyone spell it out for me how to do this or what best practices you use for 3D-Coat to manage this sort of thing cleanly? (I'm not sure if any of this requires any feature requests to make it easier to do). thanks

thanks wave of light - I'll try that trick with the wireframes right now - that should help! (Ideally I'd like vector shapes or *.AI file for the wireframe - but I ask for too much ) But I still think the checkerboard shouldn't be that much work since it's already mapped to the UVs in the UV room, it should just be a one-click thing for users as I imagine it essentially is a "dump from memory" behind the scenes. Seems like a quick win dev-wise... Sometimes I wanna fix UVs and test everything back and forth a few times with animations before I finally sit down and paint textures on the character....

Unless I missed how to do this, It would be great if 3DCoat could export the checkerboard texture used in the UV room after you've marked seams as a PSD file. Ideally it would also have the seams as lines and the polygon wireframe on separate layers too. This would be very useful for double-checking UV distortion in bone animation without having to paint your own yet. Also, it's nice to work with this colored checkerboard (I'm happy if you export even the default colors that 3DC picks - but if you could change the colors in the UV room of a cluster easily enough that would be good too).

I'm considering the Quadro K5000 - it's not cheap - but given that Mac Pro's don't have many options (this is the first in years) and that I need the 4K video that card does too, I'm hoping it will also scream for 3D and improve performance with 3D Coat. I've generally been using my Nvidia 8800 GT - but was thinking about trying 3DC out on my other Windows box which has an NVidia 660 Ti - too bad I can't put one of those in my Mac Pro (I don't know how to hack the bios into EFI if that's even possible - hence waiting for the K5000).. Don't mean to hijack, but does anyone here have the K5000 or know how it will work with 3DC?

thanks, that works mostly - not as pixel perfect as I'd like but it works!

Followup question that comes to mind: * Is it possible to Align (or Align and Distribute if you have multiple layers loaded) one of these decal stamps on a surface? i.e. can I have a decal loaded and then have a selection somehow (either a surface, the whole object, or some polygons selected) and then say have align positioning buttons like in photoshop where I could automatically align the decal to the vertical center of the poly-selection or the horizontal center of the selection or both? This alignment would be based on the alpha color (or depth selectable) image width/height. So like imagine I had a logo I want to stamp down smack dab in the center of a car's hood - I could select the car's hood surface material (or manually select some polys) and then pixel perfectly center it onto the projection. Can this be done like I describe? thanks again for the help!

This is awesome. Thanks guys. Not exactly how I envisioned it working - but useful for the purpose nonetheless! I especially like that Copy Visible Layers remembers the layering when stamped down again. Good idea whoever thought of that. And Nice video explaining thoroughly all the ins and outs of the tool. Most videos just have someone putzing around with the tools, this one was fantastic in that all the odd questions that pop into mind ("but what about what happens when you don't have enough layers?" etc) he answers. Though one question wasn't answered but I can play with it to figure out. If you save a project with layers 2 & 3 and then you later load it into another .3b file where you want those to paste to layers 7 & 8, it would be nice to make those saved layer numbers relative or editable - but I'm already asking too much for that feature. This is pretty powerful as is. So thanks for the tip! I'll play with it right now.

Hey again... another question as I paint more, I've been using materials for painting alot and occasionally need a logo or decal as a transparent PNG that I load as a material and use it to paint onto a surface. This is great and all, but doing it that way is permanently painted to that current layer. What would be really nice (and I don't know if this is possible with 3DC or just not intuitive for me) is for me to load an alpha'ed PNG with color, spec & depth images and have it projected (like a movie projector) to surface of the object I'm painting and therefore warped based on the surface normals, but have that image translatable and rotatable dynamically - i.e without actually painting to the layer - or rather, it's like in photoshop being able to have the layer there but nudge it around as opposed to actually stamping it down on the surface. So that later if I want to tweak it, I can easily rotate, scale or transform that decal and dynamically slide it all over the surface of the object (like a sheet of rubber) without having to load the material and place it with the material painter and stamp it down. Does this make sense? And is this currently already possible? Sorry but it's just not obvious to me despite the manual and the videos I've seen. Thanks again for pointing me in the right direction.

Thanks, I will attempt what you've mentioned and see if I understand that workflow.

After all this time owning 3DCoat I just noticed that there is a special support section. Lol.. Maybe I should pay more attention. I guess I should be asking there? I just assumed these were basic "New User" questions...

Thank you for replying. Perhaps I should post in the General or another subforum as it appears the New Users one aren't as frequented as other sub forums. Many of my questions remain unanswered from my posts - maybe it's my cologne ;-) I found your instructions a bit hard to follow as in this case I absolutely do not want to sculpt, voxel model, or retopo in 3DC, I just want to use it for its painting and UV map creation tools. But I did notice you called the object materials popup = surfaces. I didn't get that from their terminology so I missed that popup. I'll check there and see if that helps. However the 3DC import still only offers to create 1 single UV and I want several - either per mesh or per surface. The import dialog only shows the 1? I do appreciate your help though! (and anyone else who is kind enough to chime in ;-) )

Nope- I just go to Import per pixel in the File menu. I just watched the video and read the thread (I'm using LW 11.03 btw) and didn't really understand the benefit of the app link - it looks like it saves you a couple of clicks importing, but otherwise it's the same process. Am I missing something? It doesn't really seem to help with multiple layer/mesh objects with multiple UV maps? Does 3DC support multiple uv maps on an imported object?

This is probably a dumb question, and even though I've been using 3DCoat for sometime - I clearly haven't been using it to it's fullest. And now that I am using it for other types of projects (lowpoly stuff for games etc), I need some more help filling in the holes in my 3DC knowledge. So thanks for your patience as I figure this out how to use it in a way I'm not as familiar with (and as usual - it's being learned during a project with a deadline ) Anyway, I've got a lowpoly object consisting of several sub-meshes (i.e. non-connected geometry) and found that 3DC coat doesn't care about that and can't tell based on whether it is connected or not - ideally I'd like to be able to paint across non-connected geometry seamlessly. So I figured out that using LW layers in the object loads what 3DC calls sub-objects (so even though my game-engine requires them as 1 object - I guess I'll collapse the layers before exporting after UV & painting), but 3DC doesn't seem to care about LW surfaces or parts (either that or I have no idea where any panel is that lets me select them in 3DC)? So I want to either: A ) pull this multi-mesh/multi-layer object into 3DC for UV map creation - typically I'd like a UV map per mesh/sub-object, or by surface - then to save LWO object with the new UV maps and the textures. or B ) pull in a previously UV mapped multi-mesh/multi-layer object into 3DC and keep all UVs intact, and paint and create new/ modified textures to export. My questions are: How do I get 3DC to generate an automap UV for me for either each sub-object or LWO named surface (or collection of surfaces - ideally I would be able to group LW surfaces in the object to be used in one UV map). When I import for pixel painting, I only get 1 UV map auto made for me regardless of number of surfaces or sub-objects in the loaded model. If this is not possible, how do I get 3DC to create a new UV map? So assuming I'm not happy with the automap, and I mark up some seams, and then want to make a single UV for each sub object (so that I have enough res in 2048 to show detail) - where in the UI do I tell it to use the islands in each sub-object to create the separate UV maps? Workflow-wise - obviously I tend to model in quads, but the game-engine format requires triangles. I normally would UV map and texture in quads and then in LW triple the quads to tris and then export to FBX/OBJ/Ogre3D etc. But I've noticed distortions doing it that way. Is it better to triple before pulling into 3DC for the UV and painting steps? thanks for your help!

Thanks that would make sense, but even with the same UV map the performance is slower on the open objects.

sorry for not being clear. I mean very slow. As in, despite my normally speedy enough graphics card, painting on a plane (unclosed object) is much slower than on a closed object. I am using v 3.718f (though I did download and try v4Beta5 and experienced the same thing).

Please help me understand 3DC a bit better. I'm trying to paint on a lowpoly object and if I just load the plane I want, 3DC performs very badly painting on just the surface when painting with materials. If however I load the same surface but have it a closed contiguous object like a block (so it has under and side and back and front bits - not just the block's top) then it performs better. See this attached pic to see what I mean. This is the model - I was just trying to load the top of it - but would prefer to keep the geometry how I need it. I don't want 3DC to create UV maps (or at least not much space on the map) for the non-top areas since they wont be seen from my camera anyway.. If I load just the selected polys here into a separate object and load that into 3DC it chugs badly when trying to paint. And it's not the video card or driver. Why is this so? thanks