popwfx

Dumb question. Is 3D coat 2021 free for long time existing owners of the latest 4.9.x version too?

Great article on subtleties of exporting objects to Unity . The author states: Anyone with the knowledge want to update him? It's great seeing 3DCoat in articles with other tools.... https://medium.com/@bgolus/generating-perfect-normal-maps-for-unity-f929e673fc57#ab02

I tried fbx and LWO - I will try obj

I'm trying to Autotopo a mesh roughly 34K polys and when I import via the wizard - it reports successful but no mesh appears in the viewport. What am I doing wrong? I checked the model for stray points and even thickened the object in my modeler so it was closed - but nothing works for autopop? If I import the object for UV mapping the object appears. I even tried saving out a version that was created from UV mapping in 3DC and then trying to reimport for Autopo and that also doesnt work as after the wizard the model is not visible - I've hit Shift-A to fit to viewport and that zooms but also the model doesn't show up. This is the model I'm trying to autopo:

I'll see if I can send link to a private scene file for you to test or strip it down and post a basic scene. This object has a lot of layers and blendshapes etc

Workaround doesn't work for multiple monitors that are different sized and vertically stacked

I haven't' read all the suggestions here. But I have a suggestion for the Panel docking and HIDING. Sometimes when I'm on my laptop 3DCoat panels are a bit of a pain to fit everything on a 2560x1440 13" screen. Tear Away panels from 3DC are nice - but only help if you have a lot of monitor space or a second monitor. The tabbed interface for the panels is fine but they are hard to manage. Affinity Photo has similar panels to photoshop and 3DC - but it handles the ton of panels and docking of them slightly better. You can DOUBLE CLICK on the tab name to hide it and click it once to show it. It makes it very awesome for quickly focusing on what tools you need. For example in 3DC I sometimes want to just see my huge layer list but because of 3DC font size and default layout with brushes and Smart Materials etc taking over the height, I can only see a few rows of my layers. THIS IS QUICK WIN to add this. See this video of Affinity Photo panels being hidden and shown via double click and click:

I agree with this. Too many people offering interface suggestions for the rooms are only thinking of their own sculpting preference. Workflow for game content that doesn't START in 3DC or doesn't START from a sculpt suffers in these situations.

BUG/Error? in 4.9.56 that I haven't seen before: I am in Paint Room - Multilayered object with many layers Select Eraser tool Select only to erase normals Select normals layer and unlock it Turn on Symmetry X Enabled Choose the 3rd default fine gradient circle brush Erase some normal displacement on half the face Watch the cursor on the other side of the face move in symmetry BUT NO ERASING on the other half of the face - despite fully symmetric face Why doesn't normal erasing work for symmetry?

Please be careful with changing the fundamental rooms - especially the Paint Room - a lot of us don't sculpt at all, and just paint, UV, & Retopo. (and by a lot of us I mean me).

This happens with a regular low poly mesh in the Paint Room too. I've had to quit 3DC and lose my last iteration a number of times for this. When this happens, I can't tell if it is a poly-hiding bug and the geometry is actually still there, or if it's a serious model destroying bug - either way I lose enough confidence in 3DC at that moment that a restart seems like a good idea, and I do that and the holes are gone when I reopen my last saved file (obviously). But I haven't been able to recreate this regularly enough to file a bug report but it's happened in the last several versions for me. And I NEVER use voxels or scupt hardly - always low poly game models and it still happens.

Why would depth painting stop working on the Spline Paint Tool? I've obviously got the Depth painting on and a % for the value - but for some reason it stopped writing to the normal map channel but only with the Spline Paint Tool - the normal paint brush works fine I rebooted and installed .54 and that too doesn't work anymore on spline paint tool??

Thanks @Carlosan I've eventually got the seams to go away somewhat by playing with the Smoothing UV settings - but then I couldn't get it completely right in all areas of the model - as when I got the knuckles correct the wrist went wonky. So I ended up exporting both textures and combining them in Photoshop to smooth the normal map errors generated by 3DC. I'd love to see a comprehensive baking tutorial for people who never use sculpting and just want to make lowpoly game assets. Thanks for your help.

No overlapping polys - you can see the simple UV map for the low and high poly models above in my posts earlier.

Ok I just did these steps. But when I switch back to the Paint Room, if I hide the Paint Object for the high poly hand there is nothing there. I'm confused. Most of everything in the tutorials and docs seems to assume everyone is Sculpting. I'm not sculpting, just dealing with low poly objects that I UV and Paint and sometimes Retopo in 3DC. All my baking is getting seams no matter what settings I do. So since I couldnt get the bake working - I tried to load the baked lowpoly version into a new 3DC Paint Room and tried to paint over the seams and touch it up - but nothing I do, whether reduction on normal map or smudging or erasing fixes it?? I really appreciate your help!

Is anyone having any problems with the Texture Baking Tool baking to external low poly meshes in this beta version? I'm getting grey maps out of it. Is this a bug?

Hi @carlosan Within 3DCoat I don't think it is possible - because you can only "Move UV islands" from one UV set to another. But in other apps it is very possible to have polygons which are in 2 different UV maps. Lightwave can do this - I'm sure Blender too. I just created a cube in Lightwave and created 2 different UV maps - they are in different layouts and have different names - I just exported as FBX and imported into 3DC for painting and it seems 3DC kept both texture map names but stripped the polys from the 2nd map. I guess 3DC does not allow the same polys across multiple maps but other programs do???

I've searched the forums and went through the video tutorials. I see there was another couple of posts similar some years ago but nothing in those posts applied to me. I would REALLY appreciate if someone can help me with this. I have a 32K poly object of a hand in the paint room with about 4 layers of paint, normal and gloss work. I have a lowpoly 2K object in a folder on disk that matches it exactly (the retopo was done in 3DC) in external 3D tools (i.e. if I load both the high-res hand object and my low poly object in Lightwave in different layers they align perfectly and both have different UVs). Neither of these objects are at the origin and when I import into 3DC I select "No Center Snap". I launch Texture Baking Tool from the Paint Room with the high-res model and multiple paint layers. I give the dialog the lowpoly object (I've tried both LWO and FBX) set the names of textures and resolution to 4096 and then hit bake I get a progress bar completing then on disk the Color, Normal are grey and the Roughness is full Black. Please help - how do I transfer the textures from this high res model to my low poly one with different UVs (but the same pose and placement).?? Attached are pics of the HighRes hand & UVs and the low one. The UVs are drastically different - but the geometry is very close. Thanks so much for any help - I really appreciate any help or hints!

Hi @Carlosan, I'm not sure what you're asking here? How to make multiple UV maps? in 3DCoat? or externally and bring them in? Surely you know about the dropdown in the UV room:

Sorry to be pedantic, but 3DC can produce multiple maps - but only 1 is the "default" or main map. This map is "flagged" in the object as the first or default main map which is used by other software that doesn't actually manage multiple UV maps. But it does let you create, edit or use multiple UV maps whether imported or created in 3DC. it's a little clunky as most of this is done in the UV room in the drop down at the top toolbar.

I "get" UV Sets because they are just a collection of vertices with UV mapping data associated with them. They are called UV maps in other apps and "maps" in general are just collections of vertex indices with associated data. UV maps are lists of vertices with UV data. Morph maps (or Blendshapes) have vertex translation/normal data associated with them. Color maps have vertex colors associated with them. Weight maps have weighting values for use by bones etc. Other apps can have multiple UV sets. This is useful in areas other than game engine content, where you tend to only have 1 UV set per mesh for performance reasons. But you can get around this with different shaders and separating UV sets to different mesh/layers. 3DCoat lets you manipulate multiple UV sets which is necessary for editing imported objects which might have multiple UV sets associated with them.

I kind of disagree. For some imports this distinction is necessary. Like an 3d object can have Surface names (collections of polys) separate from layers (i.e. Layers in Lightwave or Paint Objects in 3DC) plus layers in 3DC (i.e. paint or sculpt layers - like photoshop). You may apply a material to a surface (i.e. the collection of polys to be mapped in a UV set) but you don't have to. a Surface material can just be used to separate where materials are applied. I completely agree with you though that naming issues maybe needed - it's tricky to navigate the terminology of multiple apps and common denominator usage should apply - but only if the thing being named fully matches the term.

It crashed before the save, and the autosave didn't work for it that time, however, I tried again with the import and then painting with the Smart Material purple glossy plastic and this time it crashed in a different way - but I'll send the scene before applying the smart material. This is what it did this time: email with scene has been sent. thanks Carlosan!

Is there any help on how Smart Materials are applied? I got a dialog saying that curvature is needed and I ended up getting 46,000% done and kept going until memory crash. What am I doing wrong or is this a bug with the latest v4.49 beta? thanks for your help!

nice quick shareable trailer! - but I think you mean "easy to pick up" not "easy to pick" in that last title card in the video