popwfx

I'm not sure of every possible variation of subtitle formats? but WMC does do subtitiles for DVDs - but I use Media Browser plugin to manage my video file library and it launches VLC (which works fine with remote control) and plays mkvs or anything and all subtitles seem to work on that. WMC and windows doesn't play Blu-ray - VLC kind of plays them without menus, but there is no open source Bluray player as far as I know, so any HTPC Bluray solution means you have to buy Bluray player software and the Cyberlink stuff is crappy but Arcsoft is ok, but is expensive at $99 for just playing back BLuray discs... Btw I didn't know that Bomberman was called DynaBlaster (where btw?).... Oh and Saturn Bomberman gameplay is by far the BEST version and best multiplayer game of all time - This is it (yes it is mental when you play 8 players on the small field, but later in the video there is 10 player wide-screen): And yeah, that case is a bit of a whopper but it fits a 660Ti which plays my PS2 games!

oh well thanks anyway.. (hiding every other layer - which you can do with Alt+visibility eye icon - won't help if there is a subtle soft transparent data that isn't easily perceptible in an area of the model that is hard to notice (like behind the ears or between the legs or something)

Is there an existing Mantis for linking Layers? I know there is one for Layer groups which I strongly need, but I've just found a need for linking layers as well. What I'd like to do is link layers so brush strokes affect all of the selected or linked layers. I like to keep layers independent of channels sometimes (at least until we get better control over the color, depth or spec channels within a layer) - For example, I might have a face and have a separate layer for color, one for depth and one for spec. This lets me swap & change options quickly, by say using the same depth with a different color layer etc by setting their visibilities. So if I want to do a brush stroke like a smudge - I'd like the *exact same brush stroke* on all 3 layers I select or link (momentarily). So if I change a wrinkle by the mouth, it changes for the depth layer, the spec layer and the color layer even though they are independent layers. I guess I could achieve this by duplicating layers then collapsing the dupes to one layer and then smudging that, but dynamic linking and unlinking of layers seems like it could be useful.... any thoughts anyone?

What gfx card/drivers do you have? I am painting > 30 4K maps (layers) and find it quite usable on a GTX 570 (could be faster, but it works well enough to get work done).

Are there any current problems with the Smudge Tool in the Paint Room with the latest Beta? I'm getting no effect (but then again I don't use that tool very much so maybe I'm doing something wrong?)... EDIT: Restarting 3DCoat made Smudge tool work again.... ?? Can't get it to fail now, so maybe ignore this post - I will post if it happens again.

I guess what I'm asking is baking ambient occlusion? But say I've been painting depth on a layer and I want to convert a particular layer's depth channel to shaded color (maybe using ambient shading or maybe using whatever the current viewport lighting is) and I want to make that a flat colored texture which can "look like depth shading" but is in actuality just color. The reason I want to do this is we are having different settings in the game engine where some people with less powerful cards can turn off normal & spec textures and have better performance. Having the ability to bake this depth into a color, lets me create an alternate color texture that looks closer to the full look than just the color channel by itself. What is the easiest way to do this? At present I'm exporting the depth layer to Photoshop, masking out the bumps I want, inverting the channel and then reimporting as a separate layer to "darken" the color texture. Is there an easier way to do this from within 3DCoat? thanks

Sorry, I don't see how this helps me figure out whether a layer has blank/no data on it in any of the channels. I agree with the feature request to add emmisive to the channels and be able to paint to that. But I want to know if a particular layer is empty or not in some or all channels.

Is there any way to tell if a Painted layer is completely blank on all channels (color, depth, spec) or on a specific channel (like say Layer2 having no depth info on it)?? Normally I plan my layers and paint to separate layers so I can control things (like visibility) better, but I came across the need for knowing this when I started having a few buggy undo issues - like I wasn't 100% sure if the Undo removed the spec strokes entirely (and sometimes you can't tell just by toggling visibility). So how would one tell? thanks

Unrelated to my last posts, but is anyone getting weird Undo problems in the Paint Room?? I thought I was going crazy, as this has happened on and off for several versions (I can't recall how long I've noticed this). But weird stuff happens particularly around the creation of new paint Layers. If you create a layer paint or rename the layer and then do something and Undo a couple of times, sometimes a single Undo undoes more than one step and sometimes Redoing causes the paint stroke to appear on a different layer (maybe because the creation of the layer is not correct in the Undo history??) Anyone else experience any Undo issues (in Beta 14 or earlier)?

I posted this here because I suspect this is easy and a newbie question, but how to do it in 3DCoat escapes me at present. How would one apply a seamles fabric depth texture evenly over a surface based on the normal of the pixel on the surface while painting in the Paint Room? At the moment I am using the Materials projection painting, but since that is tied to the camera viewport, I end up getting Moire patterns when applying the depth. Any hints on how to apply a seamless depth fabric texture (with fine details) over a curved surface? Something which wraps the depth around based on the shape of it? Ideally something that works with seamless textures too and won't leave seams if I scale up or down the texure before I paint.

Please check this thread again: http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=11666&st=20&gopid=89857entry89857 I made slightly newer mockups as the last set had a slight field-enabling error. I had forgotten to keep the name fields enabled so you can change the names regardless of the size of textures you choose. This set of mockups fixes that situation. Also I suggest this same method should be in the Edit > Mesh and Texture Resolution screen as well.

Sorry my mockups had a slight visibility/enabling error. I need to leave the text fields enabled so that you can change their names if necessary. Check these mockups instead of the last set. They are pretty much identical, except for how the enabling of some fields works:

johnnycore, seems the universe is demanding this feature I just mentioned this workaround to someone else having this problem, but it seems you figured it out on your own. I was importing as 128 size textures and changing resolution to 4096 after loaded: http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=11666&pid=89849&st=20entry89849 Take a look at that thread, it also shows mockups to the import dialog of my suggestion to Andrew about making it so you don't have to set them individually. He is working on it and says the loading problem is fixed and hopefully he adds this minor feature as well. I've also asked him to not "flatten" imported textures to one layer so different channels of different surfaces will each have their own layer on import if they exist when you import. That should make tweaking much more flexible and easy.

I was having a hard time understanding how or why the applink is useful, as I thought I could just manually import stuff and UV map it or whatever, but after seeing your GUI here, it has become clearer how handy this could be! I have an idea to help you with the Nodes. While I haven't developed any nodes based plugins before and didn't come across that limitation yet, I have pushed LScript beyond its limits by thinking outside the box, There have been things I couldn't access from LScript that I got access to by reading and writing files. Getting info from the LW config text files or reading binary information from Wav files is easy enough if you know the file format. You might be able to get/set the info you want from/into the nodes if you read the binary LWO file. I believe that format is available, and Andrew even is reading that info for his import, So you might be able to do it "the hard way" if you write out a new LWO with new node info - though that would take a bit of testing to be sure you don't corrupt the object. But if you really want to do it, that may be the only way until they improve the sdk and Lscript/python...

I don't think so. Btw, it doesn't combine them, it trashes all your old UV sets and makes a new one when you automap on import. Anyway, I was just working with Andrew on a particular import bug I was having with lightwave objects with many UV maps and textures, and he said today he just fixed a problem so this should work in the next build. I've also asked him to make each uv map/texture/channel a separate layer so we can fine tune things easier. Before this fix he's about to release, it collapsed them into one layer if it was successful at importing and didn't crash. Here is a workaround until the next build (it is a bit more time consuming but works): Import your object with the Multiple UV map and Keep UVs On import set all UV map sizes to the smallest like 128 x 128 - and click OK - it shouldnt crash (depending on if you have a halfway decent card) now once it is loaded, hide the flattened texture color Layer since you wont need it go into Edit > Mesh and Texture Resolution and change the UV sets to larger sizes as you need them Now for each texture you will need to manually import them, so for each, create a new layer, select it, and then go to Textures > Import > Diffuse/ displacement/bump/spec as needed to load that larger texture into the new blank layer step 5 takes a while, but later you can save this .3b file and it will open quickly next time I had a model with like 50 UVs that wouldn't load when set to 1024, but if I loaded them with 128 and changed it after the load to 4096 it worked. However, as of today, it sounds like Andrew has fixed this and we will see great improvements soon! - He's an amazing developer! So try this, it may help you in the meantime. It is a pain to manually load large textures but it works. Hopefully this will be automatic very soon. Apparently what you and I do, loading non-sculpted/externally created, objects with many UV maps already created, is not as common as I thought. But 3DCoat's painting is so good that even if you have existing assets, you can edit or changed them beautifully and we want to load them into the Paint room! hope this helps.

Are you guys saying that the problem Phil has is the same as the one Javis and I are having with depth painting getting those tiny dot artifacts? I'm fairly certain mine is not a hardware issue... The dots in the pic I posted are related to curve-created-brushes with high falloff painting into the depth channel... and this is new since 14 I think..

Hi, It's not model related. It happens in any model when I am using the (awesome new) spline painting tool. Creating the spline is no problem, but occasionally (and this is intermittent) hitting enter to paint the stroke paints the stroke as if it were projected through the viewport camera, not onto the actual spline. Hitting undo undoes that, but when this happens, hitting Enter a second time repeats the error on projection even if you've rotated your view after undoing and before redoing the Enter to paint. Once it is in this error mode, it gets stuck like this not being able to paint on the spline and only painting on the projection of the spline unless you hit Esc and clear the spline and redraw it from scratch and then hit Enter a second time. I cannot reproduce this perfectly every time, but it happens enough to notice this. There is a chance that this is related to cylindrical objects like arms or legs or necks? or due to Loading or Saving splines or to switching back and from from Closed to open splines, or it could be related to the Camera Viewport being in Orthographic mode. I am not sure entirely. Maybe you could try these things and see if it happens for you. Thanks!

I don't want to confuse this thread or distract from it. But something since I've been having issues that are slightly related and have asked Andrew to look into them, I thought I would chime in. When importing objects with MANY UV maps it is slow and painful setting up their sizes so a slight improvement to the PPP import dialog a little to handle multiple UV maps better might help. (This is unrelated to the import bugs themselves and "flattening" of multiple images into one layer on import - that is another matter). My suggestion for improving that dialog is not exactly about your issues, but it may help nonetheless. I wanted independent and grouped settings in the import dialog to make loading an object with dozens of UV sets/maps easier, by just adding a couple of checkboxes to that import dialog. See what you think.

No I didn't report it yet, I wanted to make sure those depth errors of those tiny diamond dots (like in my screenshot) were really a bug. In my case they happen only on depth channel, only for Curve-created brushes, and only when the falloff is high (say above 70%). Thanks for adding it to Mantis. I will check it out and see if there's anything I can add to it to help.

I emailed them. thanks

thanks! I will send you a PM shortly when I package up the model and textures.

hi, sorry, you may have misunderstood my query about this one. I'm not talking about the spacing in the stroke or the spaced dots in the stroke - I'm talking about if you look at this spline, it fully wraps around the thigh, however in this case it doesn't draw the stroke around the thigh (even though the spline is on the surface of the "cylinder" of the thigh) - instead OCCASSIONALLY, this happens here. Where the "angle you see the projects of the spline when you pressed enter is where the stroke gets drawn on the front/camera facing surface. I think the confusion is I mentioned that I did it 3 times and showed 3 images. What I meant was that these 3 images are differnt angles of the 1 time (of out 3) where 3DCoat did it wrong - but I included different angles so you could see the stroke does indeed go around the thigh, but the drawn (pressed Enter) stroke only gets projected on the camera facing portion. Which in this case was the first image was where the viewport camera was positioned before I pressed enter. When it does work (which it does most of the time) is in this case it will draw the storke on the spline - the whole way around -- whereever the spline is regardless of camera position in the viewport. Hopefully that is clearer...

Spline painting may be partially broken/buggy too now. I never noticed this before Beta 14, but occasionally now, painting with splines doesn't actually paint on the spline but on the camera projection of the spline. Take this picture for example, I did this particular attempt like 3 times and once it did this when pressing Enter. What it should have done, (and what it used to do all the time, but now occasionally is buggy like this) is paint the stroke on the spline (which as you can see is on the leg/thigh surface) all the way around the spline. So this problem appears to be intermittent. I'm assuming this too is a bug. Has anyone seen this?

Also, what are these depth artifacts in Beta 14? I get little dot-diamonds appearing in the depth channel when I paint?? See the pic here please. I assume this is user-error, or possibly it is some kind of setting that got reset weirdly when I uninstalled Beta13B and installed Beta14? My Brush options look ok - though I probably missed something... Is this a new problem with 14 or have I made a mistake here? (my last post about the importing is not a mistake though - that I've triple-checked). thanks for any help or comments if you are experiencing this on Beta 14 too. EDIT: It appears these artifacts in Beta 14 depth painting are only with brushes created from Curves. The image brushes don't appear to have this problem. EDIT2: It appears these artifacts in Beta 14 depth painting are also only related to brushed created from Curves which have Falloff on.

I should say that I love Beta 13 & 14 and am happy with many of the features and improvements! However, I still have problems importing. In Beta 14, PPP import appears to be broken again. Something is going wrong on import (when in fact, I am successful in not crashing 3DC and it actually imports that is). Since no one responded to my SOS thread, I will post here since this is related to the latest beta. If you import a LWO with many textures and UV maps, this is what results (if it actually can indeed load it - as I said in the other thread, LW will load the object in under 15 seconds on the same machine all with 4K maps, 3DC will choke for 15+ minutes and may or may not come back from "Not Responding"): see the attachment ppp_broken_01.png Then, in order to get it to work. You have to manually import each of the color, spec, & displacement map textures for EACH of the UVs which takes forever. And, although it is sort of possible to get things to load when you manually load each layer (as opposed to the "collapsed/flattened" single layer that the import does on its own, the manual layers displacement maps are different now than they used to be. In earlier versions the same displacement maps worked fine at default texture import settings. Now I have to change the Blending modulator to ~0.15 for them to look roughly the same as they used to. See the 2nd image to see what it looks like when I manually start to import each of the layer types one by one ofr each of the UVs. I think more work and fixes on the import need to happen before 4 is released. thanks!