popwfx

If I import a big model for PPP into the Paint Room, and it has several existing UV maps, I have to manually change the width & heights for each of the UV maps. There should be a: Select ALL - and change as well as a tie/constrain Width & Height to be the same checkbox. 99% of the time, I do not want a 4096 x 128 texture. I want a 4096 x 4096 or a 256 x 256 - I rarely ever want a rectangular texture - so the default should be to set them the same - it's a lot of work to manually change them all one by one. thanks

Btw, I tried XMBC like 4 years ago and didn't like it that much - I imagine it is better now? Back then I liked MediaPortal better than XMBC, but all of them at the time were a little unstable, and I ended up switching to Windows Media Center once Win 7 came out because it was better than all of those especially for Live TV and has been rock solid - especially with the GameEx & MediaBrowser addons. I probably shouldn't for my electric bill, but I run WMC + GameEx 24/7 attached to my living room TV and never had a problem in a couple of years...

My case an Antec Fusion Remote max came with a remote (click that link to see it) plus I also use a Lenovo handheld backlit keyboard remote with mouse for some things like Hulu which don't have good keystroke shortcuts. The Xbox controller does work to control GameEx too so once I set down whatever other remote I am using (the Lenovo works good for couch browsing the internet and typing), the gamepad does work to control GameEx too so if I'm mid game I don't have to switch remotes. I actually don't really use the jukebox/media/integrator/karaoke stuff in GameEx (though other guys in the forums say that works great), I just use it soley for its Game and emulator launching and collation. GameEx can be run standalone or integrated into Windows Media Center (which also is my main set up for media - though I use that for Live TV & recording dvr stuff & dvds & blurays - but I use the Windows Media Center plugin called MediaBrowser to play other video files like .mkv s or whatever WMC can't play. It also seems to work great and automatically downloads IMDB actor info & screenshots and episode stills etc with even crappy named files - so you get this great headsup display which looks really sexy). I believe Tom the developer of GameEx has made a mac version recently - and may?? be working on a Linux version too? But I don't know much about other launchers like Gelide - but I can tell you that GameEx launches so many different emulators flawlessly for me (once I set it up right) that it is not funny. I mean I'm still blown away I can play PS2 and Gamecube and Sega Saturn and MAME arcade games instantly with a click I highly recommend GameEx if you can sort your Win 7 license out - It's probably worth it. I guess with any old PC you could make it a file server or something, but with a decent one like this, it seems a shame not to make it a casual living room gaming set up.

I vote for turning it into a living room HTPC & Gaming station, I have an old AMD Phenom II X4 3.4Ghz, 8GB RAM with a NVidia 660 ti that has become my home theater pc and game station for my living room. I run Windows Media Center for Digital terrestrial TV, Netflix, Hulu Plus, & Vudu. But the main and best use is using it as an old school MAME & emulator gaming machine. I run GameEx as a launcher that works beautifully by remote control from the couch giving me access to many many arcade games and ripped versions of my old school console game discs. I have a one-stop shop to watch tv, internet movies, and game one old school arcade games and console emulators that run flawlessly like Atari 2600, Sega Genesis, Sega Saturn, Nintendo NES, Super Nintendo, N64, Nintendo GameCube, Sony Playstation and Playstation 2 games + MAME. And the cool thing is that Xbox 360 wireless controllers work great for it and I can play games a 2x to 4x the original composite resolution of the PS2 on a living room LCD! Yes, the emulators are smart enough to turn on antialiasing and upscale the 3D to 4x or more the res of the original games (textures are still as big as the maximum on the discs but the increase in res makes playing older games like Katamari Damacy or GTA San Andreas amazing looking - and better than on the original consoles.) Plus I figured out how to get 6 (I might be able to get more running if I buy some more) of the Wireless Xbox controllers working via PC USB so friends can play multiplayer games on the couch when they come over - like the best multiplayer game in the world: can you say 10 player Saturn Bomberman!?! Seriously GameEx is an excellent launcher - ALL the games (that you have) at your fingertips launching multiple open source emulators from one simple interface! It took me half a weekend to set up the 15+ console emulators I have and set it up so that it can also launch virtual CDs and DVD isos, but it's been working well for like a year+ now with no problems. Everyone of my friends is blown away at how well the emulators run and it's kind of like how the iPod reveolutionized music... When I had hundreds of CDs - I'd never go to the trouble of finding one track on on CD from the back of the shelf and listen to it, but having it at a swipe at it's there makes you listen to music more! Same goes with this emulator launcherand games. Oh, I feel like playing Nintendo Gamecube Super Mario Sunshine." Click. Boom. There, playing it. and now better looking than it did on the original console. Let me know if you decide to do this and need help setting it up and I can help, plus the GameEx forum users are generally very helpful! Best use of an old machine ever. (plus it's an extra render machine on my home office network if I need it - you should switch to Lightwave render nodes are free up to like 999 or some crazy number)....

I am downloading Beta 14 - but my question is about Beta 13B in case that matters. I am loading for per pixel painting a character model with 64,596 points / 63,660 quad polygons, 27 UV maps, that share 17 4000x4000 pixel texture images (8 diffuse maps, 4 spec maps, & 5 b&w displacement/bump maps) I turn on "No Center Snap" and "Keep UVs" and "no subdivisions" and 3DCoat has been going for 15 minutes and still hasn't loaded this Lightwave object. I get a not responding, and my CPU looks like this attached pic. Only 2 cores are at 100% and only half the memory is being used. Lightwave opens up the same file in 15 seconds. What is the deal with 3DC being so slow? (I think it may eventually open after 30-45 minutes but I usually get so frustrated I kill the 3DC process. What is going on? Why can Lightwave open the same file relatively quickly and 3DC have so much trouble with it. It is an 8 core Xeon 2.8Ghz with 24Gb RAM. My video card in this machine is a NVidia 570 GTX with 2.5Gb. (I know this is not a new Titan card or anything but this is a Mac Pro and this is the best video card available for the machine - and yes I know I am running Win 7 x64 on it) But It seems fast enough for Lightwave with this same content? Is this a bug in 3DCoat? Can it be sped up to work? Help please! thanks!

+1 yes good idea (and while you are at it respecting the object's pivot - make "No Center Snap" default - 99% of the time I want the center to be whatever exact center I set up when modeling, I generally don't care as much about the bounding box center )

just a quick status update, I have not abandoned development on this - however, I have been having some reliability & performance issues with my developer Leap hardware device despite firmware updates, and they are sending me a new one soon. The final hardware is not released until May 16 or something. So hopefully I get the new hardware well before then in order to finish development.

Good, maybe people can explain to me what merging is anyway. I've been using 3DC for a couple years now (admittedly just for UV, Retopo, Painting, & texture baking - but not sculpting) and this whole "Do you want to merge" when switching rooms or various tasks like importing meshes has been confusing to me. I know a couple of people tried to explain it to me here before, and I'm in no way new to 3D, but I could not understand what 3DCoat was trying to do when it says it wants to merge. And if you guys say baking, what do you mean exactly? Do you mean texture baking? Because that is totally clear --> take a high res model & transfer or bake its textures to a low res (or different) mesh. If there is more than one kind of baking you should specify that too. This whole merging thing of 3DCoat has been the only area of the program I don't fully grok. (that being said, 3DC is still one of my favorite media apps!)

The culprit may also be that the slashes in the path are not right for an LScript string when passed to the command to make a directory. LScript needs them escaped. If you have a string like "Myfolder\MyPath" try making it "Myfolder\\MyPath" and see if that helps.

Fair enough, that makes sense, but the way I normally do retopo is to import a reference mesh - or to load a hi res model for per pixel painting and then retopo that...

thanks for your reply!I will try this. It does seem a bit long and complicated, especially since I don't want voxels or sculpt room stuff at all, but I will attempt this and see how it goes. It should be just straight-forward to bring in a model and have it be IDENTICAL in size and placement to the original. On a tangent, I also hate that "No Center Snap" is off by default. Why would I want 3DCoat to center my object? I built it around the origin for a reason. Sometimes I forget about it and then when I export, wonder why my symmetry in other apps is broken...

So let's say I've retopo'ed an externally made and imported hi res model and exported the retopo mesh. I have tweaked the exported retopo geometry externally in Lightwave. Assuming I don't have the hi res model or .3B file, but want to re-import the retopo mesh into the Retopo room so that I can continue to tweak it there, how do I import it into 3DC and have it keep its size? When I Impprt Retopo mesh it wants to merge to voxel (and there is no voxel) and then when I go into the Rertopo room to see it, it seems to have loaded this external Retopo mesh really tiny and you have to zoom so far in that it screws up the camera's near clipping field. How can I import the Retopo mesh into 3DC without it screwing with the size. I want it identical to the original model. thx!

Ahh so that's the G500? This is the MX Revolution and its wheel and buttons seem well-engineered:

Yup that wrist support moves with the mouse and feels surprisingly natural. That switch on the bottom is a terrible idea - weird.... But I love that my MX Revolution I can just engage the gear by clicking on the mousewheel...

Andrew, Did 13A reverse the fix you did a while ago where you made the Paint room materials respect the alpha channel when painting? I thought this was fixed in a previous update, now only color respects the alpha, depth and spec do not respect the alpha channel when using a projection material to paint anymore. I can't remember which version this was fixed in, but in 13A this fix is gone. Can you please put this fix back? It was very useful to stamp image spec'ed or depth punched logos while painting. thanks!

Minor request, just like it is in photoshop -- this would be nice so I don't have to edit in external editor:

Andrew, Nice little touch there in beta 13A where you now change the cursor icon to a "NO" symbol when hovering over the object while holding down alt and rotating - this makes it clear that you are not able to paint or operate while the rotate is in motion. It's little touches like this that make a nice UI! EDIT: Ok, I don't know what I'm talking about, because that little No/cancel cursor symbol stopped showing up now as I rotate. Now I'm not sure why it appeared....

Kinect Fusion is finally implemented into a public release of the Kinect SDK and lets you scan 3D objects by waving your Kinect around the object. Better resolution is achieved by video frame interpolation over time as you wave the thing. This will be great to bring stuff into 3D Coat with. Might need a bit of work first though. Amazing that it is so cheap to get into 3D scanning now. http://blogs.msdn.co...dk-is-here.aspx

This is solved thanks to Beta 13A. thanks! There might be a few slight issues with spec maps not baking perfectly, but I will investigate and open a new thread or mantis if I can reproduce it.

thanks Andrew! One more thing Andrew, the fixes you made to loading LW 11.x objects with textures doesn't seem to load normal maps (set up as nodes in the LWO) - specs and color seem to load as does color, Also I'm not sure bump maps seem to load either. And is it possible to load the textures into separate layers on load instead of collapsing them into Layer 1 as it seems to do now? thanks!!

Thank you for your response, but can you clarify the steps to do it with Merge with NMap? Assume I have a high res model with many paint layers & UVs, I also have a low res LWO model to be the target to bake to. So, I should 1) Import high res model as per pixel into Paint room 2) Import low poly model as Retopo mesh into Retopo Room 3) Merge with NMap in Retopo room 4) Export Model or does Merge with Nmap save out like the Texture Baking Tool.. Is this correct? Sorry for the questions, but I haven't done it this way before and I'm not sure how it works. And should I take it from your response that I should stop using the Texture baking tool and do it this way instead? thanks!

Thank you, that clears a lot up. However, I still have a question. Why would I use Merge with NMap from Retopo room instead of Texture Baking Tool window with PreferOuterDetails? If I want to bake high res color,normal, & spec to separate low poly mesh (which is external) which do I use? Or should I load external mesh as Retopo mesh and use the former method? (Also, if so, I need to confirm that loading as Retopo Mesh does not strip weight maps or anything - baking to external does not, so I've been using that method)... I guess I am a little confused why there are 2 methods to do the same thing and when to use which...?

I couldn't find this sphere of influence control that everyone has mentioned here. But I did notice a "PreferOuterDetails" checkbox in the Texture Baking Tool and that worked GREAT! That was EXACTLY what I was after! Thank you for fixing my example scene and making this work! This will make 3DCoat much more useful for game asset creation! I'll keep running it through its paces - but it looks amazing so far with this checkbox on. EDIT: There may me a few slight issues with how the spec bakes - making seams and such. Also need to see if the normal is baking inverted - I will try and see if I can reproduce this. The color/difuse baking seems to working perfectly though!

Yes, thank you very much! I hope my baking scenes have been helpful in diagnosing it. I will try this new version now and see if it solves my issues.

Btw, I was doing extra hours and a lot of precision retopo work for a few weeks and started to get hand cramps but they went away as soon as I got one of these: It's just the palm support and thin flat mousepad (the mouse pictured above is not included - you use your own mouse). The palm rest has slidey feet on it so it slides smooth; and it connects to your mouse and your hand rests on it making those micro-movements much easier to make without cramping your hand gripping the mouse. I normally have no problems or RSI with mice, but most mice are too small for people with big hands and it's usually only when I am doing a lot of precision work without rest when I have trouble, This has solved it though. In the past I tried that Evoluent Vertical Mouse, but it was crappy and I couldn't design well with it. So I sold it on eBay for more than I ended up buying it for - people like those, but I gather they aren't media people who buy them...