Polygoon

As the title says, what are the recommended minimum system specs. I can't find anywhere this info. Is my computer and graphics card any good? Many of the bugs / problems I have posted about seem to go by the way side & nothing happens about them, or even a comment or anything. Except ABN and he's gone now. diggman always tries to help out when he can too but. Is it because my specs are no good and not what the mainstream uses have & not professional industry. If so where does this leave the average Jo user? Why do I have problems no one else seems to have all the time? I buy tutorials (thanks Geo) and follow what is done & don't think I'm doing anything that different! I just want to know whats going on!

Yes, I find it a good idea to write down various brush settings on a note pad. Makes it a lot easier if you are switching back and forth a lot from tool to tool, room to room etc. Also a good idea if you are shifting components around (can be handy for getting symmetry exact) to write down the original co-ordinates down before I move them. Then I can just put back in the original co-ordinate to get it back to exactly the right position.

Noooooooo! Please don't go, you have been so helpful to me and I am sure to many others. I can understand the way you feel to a certain degree and don't blame you for wanting to put more of your time into your work, but you don't have to cut off completely. You could still check things out occasionally, yes? Hmm Why are people so emotional? Can't there just be difference's of opinion?

Yes I have experienced this also. Likewise, I use the airbrush all the time with no problem.

Using the lines tool options in the E panel has this happening at the end of the stroke all the time, especially when intersecting. I would be very interested if anyone knows how to prevent this easily.

Well, may be, we'll see.

Interested yes.Time available no.

Have been away for a while for work & haven't had any time to spare . Just been using the latest build & REALLY noticing a fantastic improvement in performance when merging voxel layers. Awesome work everybody.

You need to bake from the Retopo rm. Retopo tab. With you finished Voxel sculpt go to the retopo rm. Create or import you retopo low poly mesh onto it, then in the retopo tab go to "Merge with NM to Per- Pixel". The baking tool in the texture tab is for when you have done some painting in the paint rm. with depth, or you can just export with a normal map.

Yeh! for some reason its not working for the closed spline tools. I am thinking that it did, or is intending to be working though, other wise the option wouldn't be there. there are a few things that arn't finished in these newer builds. Andrew did mention that was the case with a few things when he released polypainting, I guess we will just have to be patient. You can still adjust depth by setting it in the other none closed spline tools on the E panel, or at least I have been able to. When switching back to the closed spline tools it remembers the settings you put in to the Extrude % and as with other tools it has a relationship with the size of your brush.

If I understand what you are wanting correctly, you can adjust the depth with the "Extrude %" up inthe top tool bar where depth normally is & Falloff etc. For getting them at the same hieght you can make you second draw in a new layer then use the transform tool. Select the first layer with your first draw in it and take note of its Y axis co-ordinates (middle set). Select the second layer and type in the same co-ordinates as the first layers in its Y-axis co-ordinates. Then merge your layers. Hopefully that will help you out for now. I don't know why the second draw is offset along the Y-axis by default or even how to make it not offset like that. Perhaps someone else knows a setting to adjust.

I noticed this also in the 3.7.04A build, havn't noticed it yet in the latest build. Hidding all un-used Vox/LC layers stops it for me.

Understood! Please excuse, Sometimes it is good to colaberate with others to see if they are having the same things happening. I find this usefull in finding out whether it is actually a bug, or whether its just something I am doing wrong. People also from time to time come up with good little work arounds that can help you still get things done. It would be good if we could have somewhere where we could post such things for colaberation, either a thread here or on Mantis or both. I see many times people post in an issue they are having as bug when, in fact it is not a bug. I am guilty of this myself and am now reluctant to post it as bug until I 100% sure that it is a bug.. I think it would be a good idea for both reducing the amount of false reports so Andrew and team can focus on the real issues, and aslo for the users to learn things. Or is there somewhere already you would like us to do such things? Also, is it necessary to post a report for a crash when an automated report is generated and sent off?

Well I have no problems saving my work to another drive and opening them back up, but I don't ever use my desktop to actually save my work to. Only I unzip a file I have down loaded to desk top and shift it after and have no problems, but they're not massive either. It could be that 3DC has lost the path to the textures, but I don't know. I thought everything was contained within the 3b file. Though any of your saved retopos, UV's will still be in you Documents/ 3D CoatV3/ UserData/ folders. Perhaps your USB connection is too slow. One thing you could try is to load the file in 3DC from desktop and them save it to your external drive and see if that fixes it. If so then just delete the desktop file after.

Thanks for that tip Phil, I will try inceasing the res. To add another thing I found problematic is using the "CutOff" tool on layers created by "VoxLayer" tool, especially in areas that are concave. It is creating more mesh instead of removing at times, which makes it hard to get rid of those unwanted back faces, and 3DC has crashed once using this tool, but I am not having the undo crash you are experiencing. Merging layers is Ok if you are merging to the voxel layer used to create the Voxlayer, but this changes the VoxLayer to a wavey jaggered appearance as I discribed earlier, but perhaps increasing the res. will fix this, I will try it out. I also have a crash merging to surface mode as you do.

"VoxLayer" tool observations; I am very excited about this new tool, and I think it is a tool which I will be using a great deal. There are a few things at the moment though which really make it hard to use and which exclude it from my work flow, such as;- - Using "Auto Voxelize" yields wavey sufaces with jaggered edges - Using "Create as surface" yields nice smooth surface with nice sharp corners, but when going to voxel mode the surface becomes wavey with jaggered edges the same as using "Auto Voxelize" & upon returning to surface mode does not return to nice smooth surface with sharp edges. - The freeze like painting to define the region to create VoxLayer works inconsistantly & I can only get it to work with "closed Shape Spline tools" and some times with the "curve and line" tools. Also it paints on backfaces even though I have the "Ignore back faces" box ticked & sometimes it is impossible to get the full darkness of the paint which leaves segments out upon applying. I am curious as to whether anyone else is having these things happen, or is it something specific to my computer, charactoristics of my model or something. Or am I just doing things wrong? Hope theres some answers to these problems, this new tool really does give an awesome effect.

@ Simmsimaging, I don't know if this might help your situation currently as it is a little confusing to me as to what is happening for you, but when you import your mesh, (I presume thats what you are doing) before you hit "Enter" you can subdivide your mesh in the "Merge" object pop up. I have found this gives quite a nice local subdivison result. Perhaps you know this already, but just in case, I thought I'd mention it. Looking at what is happening to you when you increase res., it seems to be loosing the localised subdivision for some reason. @ mercy, I too would be very interested in how you are achieving that very nice result. What sort of res./ polycount are you using? What brush & settings do you use to paint the freeze? And whilst on the layer tool. I think it would be handy if you were able to use a negative value, if that would at all be possible. Currently I paint where I would like indents then "Shift-Ctrl-I" and invert freeze selection, but in many cases this results in pretty much all of the model being painted with freeze and consiquently a large load on the processing and I run out of Physical Memory.

Well if I understand what you are wanting correctly:- You could use the "cut off" tool, Save your sculpt as Full body, cut off the head, save as body. Re open Full body 3b file, cut off the body, save as head. Then Autopo the body in the body file, delete the part on top of the neck where the head joins on and "Save retopology state" , do the same with the head. Then open full body 3b sculpt, go to retopo room and "Restore retopology state" for both the head and the body. Then "select all the faces of 1 layer "(Retopo Group) in the Groups panel, with the "Select all faces in this layer" button at the bottom of that panel. Then select the other retopoGroup and press the "Move all selected Faces to Current layer" button just to the left of the "Select all Faces in this layer" button. Then you can join up your 2 meshs with the retopo tools. Note; when you "restore retopology state" don't snap (in the pop up) them to your model, they should be in the right location anyway provided you haven't moved your sculpt. Oh diggman you beat me to it, must have taken me 18 mins to type that up

The new layer tool is fantastic! I had been trying recently to get the effect it gives for some time using the freeze tool in surface mode and scaling a cloned layer slightly reduced in size to get the effect it can give. The new tool does a much better job a lot faster. I can't believe my luck having this new tool just pop up like that, have you been spying on me Andrew? He he! I think this tool will be very useful thank you, I am very happy.

Every program is different and takes a while to get used to. Personally, even though I have used them for some time, I find myself having to find my bearings so to speak, when having a good session with 1 program then staring up another. Wouldn't it be nice if every program could be used with the same keys, but well, life wasn't meant be easy I guess. Though some AutoDesk programs you can do it to a certain degree. My wife is a Pom, I am well familiar with potty. You get like that after eating too many mad cows.

Ensure you have "ShowVoxelsInPaintRoom" activated in the "View" tab menu. 3rd from bottom.

Edit; Can 't seem to edit original post there is no edit button? For the ubove statment ;- Regarding the symmetry not carrying over to the other side of the symmetry plane correctly, it is painting correctly but oddly when erasing it dosn't. Note; also I am painting with numerous voxel layers, could the unselected ones be interfearing? I will try merging all layers and see if that helps.

Yes, this has been asked before some time ago and would curtainlly be a very nice feature. Just a FYI. You can achieve similar results using "XNormal" by baking out a couple of cavity maps and overlaying them on top an AO map. Here is a link to a tutorial on it by Donald Phan

Been giving Poly painting a whirl and can see that very nice results will be achievable. I am not sure if this is the right place to post this because it is a new feature. I know polypainting is still very much beta so a few bugs are to be expected. Anyway I have experienced some areas where the edge of where you are painting becomes all jaggerdy whilst others remain a nice smooth defined edge. Now this, I thought could be because of the mesh as seems very much like the original (before voxelizing) mesh, but further painting suggest this is much more of a random effect as areas where it was becoming preasent before where no longer doing this and other areas where it wasn't preasant it was then becoming preasant. Has anyone else experienced this? Also some areas where I painted, symmetry was not carried over to the other symmetrical side. This also seems to be a random thing.

Hi haikalle, hope you have some success with it. Not sure that fbx. would be an option as Blender is only able to export fbx., but maybe you have a way around that.