Gary Dave

I've been playing with it more and more, and I can certainly understand the difficulty in coding up something like this... I mean, what if you wanted to snap to the inner surface? How do you really expect 3d coat to know what you have planned. I was thinking about some sort of "Fill inner" tool, that would just, well, fill the inside of a tee shirt, for example, but even if that was a relatively "simple" job to do, there are always going to be cases where you want the best of both worlds, like "Yeah I want a tee shirt, and yeah I need the mesh filled.. but umm, not the sleeves or the bottom!" I managed to get a good work flow with just using the points/faces retopo tool, there was still the odd issue here and there, like literally 2 verts would end up on the inside, but on the whole it was a pretty pleasant experience. It only starts to get messy as hell when using the strokes tool... which is a shame, as I often lay out the major forms with strokes, but oh well.

Not entirely sure what you mean? The retopo groups were named "clothes" and "skin", the UV sets were also named in this manner, this automatically gives me a different name for the bake, doesn't it? I can bake the separate UV sets and groups just fine, The only issue is I can only seem to store one bake setting per 3d coat file. I'm not really sure where else I would need to specify a name?

Slight update, the issues around the ears were being caused by my inner surface poking through, as for the other bits... still not really sure, I re-did the influence spheres until it worked, basically. One thing that does have me stumped though, and maybe this warrants a separate thread but I have two separate UV sets for this character, skin and clothes. Those are also separated by different retopo layers. I just noticed that when I changed to the clothes UV set and tried to perform a bake, it was still retaining all of the bake settings from my skin bake, which is fine of course, I'm glad it keeps it... BUT I'm guessing that if I clear the bake settings for my skin, and do a new bake for the clothes... if I then decide I want to change something on the skin and do a re-bake... there's no way to get my "skin bake" settings back? Edit Just tried it out, not possible by the looks of it (or at-least not that I could see). This is pretty frustrating as it means you need to be 100% sure that you'll never need to re-bake a uv-set if you decide to bake another after it.

Me again! And I was having such a flawless day with 3d coat too! This isn't the first time this has happened to me, but it is the first time it's happened where I can't just close down 3d coat and forget about it. Image should be pretty self explanatory, I'm just doing the "Merge with NM (per-pixel)" from the retopo room.

No, crazy as in all the polys get screwed into oblivion. I'll take a screen shot the next time it happens,

Hey stusutcliffe, thanks for the reply. Yeah I had thought about increasing the thickness after I made the post, I'm avoiding 3d coat at the moment though to allow myself to "cool down", hah. I'm honestly more tempted to just ditch cloth all together and sculpt the clothes the "old fashioned" way, this will certainly be easier to deal with at the retopo stage.

Having a very frustrating time with 3d coat today! First off, I created a retopo of a shirt, used the cloth tool in voxel room on that mesh, created it as a voxel object when I was finished, then sent it back to the retopo room, only for my original retopo to go absolutely crazy when trying to snap to the voxelized shirt. Annoying, but whatever, I decided to just ditch the retopo mesh, keep the voxelized version and manually make a new retopo over it. And now I keep getting verts snapping to the inside of the cloth instead of the outer surface which is just driving me absolutely insane. I then spent a good 10 minutes trying to find the freeze tool in the voxel room, in the hopes of painting an area for the retopo room to ignore, but apparently no such thing exists? I know that retopo > cloth > retopo is a common workflow (even built into the cloth tool), so I'm really hoping that I'm missing something stupid here, because I can't keep working like this. I don't mind starting from scratch on the shirt, so long as I know the pipeline will definitely work, at the moment it feels like every new corner I turn with 3d coat, I'm met with something unexpected.

Ah cheers, I can only seem to do it twice before it goes crazy, but it will do nicely.

I have searched high and low for an answer to this, but whenever I think I've found a solution, it doesn't seem to work for me. I'm trying to import an .obj (which has smoothing groups) into 3d coat so I can continue to work on it, but it always imports the model faceted. My search results always end at the same point, someone advising to change the smoothing groups option when importing. But there is no such option! Is it hiding?

Hey Carlosan, I'm 99.9999% sure I had applied my UV set in the UV room, (it broke my normals in the paint room, as expected) but the retopo room did not update to the new UV's. I ended up exporting my mesh in the paint room out to an obj, deleting my mesh in the retopo and then importing the export, worked fine but I'll try to re-create my issue in the future and see if I solve it without exporting.

Hey guys, hopefully this is an easy fix, otherwise I've just wasted some time! I have a retopo'd model, I created UV's for it and sent it off to the painting room after baking the detail from the voxel sculpt. All good so far. Then I go into the UV room and basically re-UV map it, I know this breaks my previous bake but I'm okay with that. The problem? I can only seem to send the mesh from the retopo room into the painting room, and those UV's are the old ones. I tried saving the UV set from the UV room and loading them into the Retopo room, but saving out UV's in the UV room come out as a .uv, whereas loading them into the retopo room only accepts .mesh format. Any advice? Or do I have to re-UV in the retopo room? If so, why is there a UV room?

Long weekend is here! Hoping to finish this off tomorrow and get started on something new. Here's where it's at, at the moment:

Paint started, still not 100% sure which way I want to take it.

Cheers for the tips TimmyZDesign, I've not actually touched any tools in surface mode yet, I should probably look more into it on the next asset. Nope! It's actually been a crazy slow weekend (and I don't have time/energy to work on it during the weekdays). I'm really REALLY struggling to unwrap this in the retopo room without messing up my mesh. When using the UV Tools like "Mark seams", I would not expect to be able to move my edges around with the right click also. So just by using general navigation in the viewport to orbit my object or zoom in/out I constantly keep moving things out of place and it's seriously driving me insane. Even using Alt + Right click moves highlighted edges ever so slightly and THEN it zooms the camera. I'm assuming this odd functionality does not exist in the UV room, but how do I get my retopo into the UV room, and then back into the retopo room in order to bake the normals and occlusion? I suppose if I map the zoom and orbit to the middle click I might not ever get this again? It does seem a bit stupid that the same functions to just move around are also the ones to adjust the mesh, it's an accident waiting to happen. I'll end with a picture though, low poly 99% done, I'm having to fix up little issues here and there as I UV, but it's coming along. She sits at just under 3.5k tri's

Tiny bit more work, my weekend has ended! I doubt I'll get to work on it too much during the week but hopefully I can sit down next weekend and finish it. Lots of poor areas, will refine when the shape is done.

Cheers Tony, that fill tool looks handy for a few situations, I'll have to remember that. Carlosa, that Colt pistol is amazing! I'll have to read through the .pdf, thanks muchly. Little bit of retopo work tonight, Most of it will just be one single mesh by the end but I'll build it up in stages and merge/weld and give the final optimisations when it's complete. Not thinking too much about textures/art style yet but I've left out a few niggly details in the model which I'll get around to finishing off with NDo.

Getting a bit more comfortable with 3d coat these days, so here's another WIP. Voxel sculpt (currently 100% 3d coat workflow) is as good as done until I find problems. Starting the retopo today, I imagine it might take me a little while. I'm crazy impressed with how quick it is to knock stuff out, I think that gun has probably taken a full "work day", and I'm still getting used to it all so things can only speed up! I still feel like I'm wrestling with some things though, mostly object positions and symmetry. I must be nudging things slightly out of place during my workflow but I can't pin-point any specific sort of "here's where it goes wrong" moment. I was making a very conscious effort to keep things symmetrical in this latest file but I've still ended up with some minor issues. A big problem for me at the moment is in the little touch ups and tweaks, some of them have proven to be so difficult to fix that I've had to start the object from scratch. Here's a very small example: I know it's difficult to see there, but the end result is usually something smudgy. How would you guys go about removing that little blemish while keeping everything consistent?

Damn, now I feel stupid. Not sure how I accidentally froze everything in the first place though, I was literally just moving layers around. Oh well, doesn't matter too much, thanks!

Trying to quickly wrap up this "complete" model/uv/texture tonight and I seem to have ran into another problem. Can't progress from this either: I was in the paint room, messing around with layer orders and then my object suddenly looked like the above, and nothing I can do can get it back. The voxel model appears correctly, this is the retopo'd mesh that looks like the above in every room except UV and Voxels. It's worth noting that the checker texture appears to be in some sort of screen space, ie... it doesn't move with my model, it's like my model is acting as a mask to a checker pattern behind the screen. It's also animated, as in it keeps on scrolling. I shut down 3d coat, re-launched and re-loaded the scene but I still get the same issue. Have I accidentally hit some "show animated checker pattern" button, or is this a bit broken?

I've found that the Auto-topo does not handle hard surface meshes too well when dealing with low poly assets, not that I would really expect it to either to be honest. You're much better off doing the retopo manually, once you get used to the tools and work out the little tricks to them you're going to be better off. Edit D'oh, beaten to it!

Ah that's beautiful! And I see there's also an "Apply Axial Symmetry" in there too, which is dandy! Thanks muchos.

Cheers for the reply Garagarape. I'll have to look into the Axial tool, it might be what I need. You can use multiple symmetry on the free-form primitives (before you apply them to the scene), which is super awesome and very handy. As for my off-axis problem, here's what I mean: (just loaded the scene up, I had previously set the Z plane back to the centre) I'm not sure what I've done to cause it to keep going off the centre like that, but I can't seem to get it to stay put, I have to keep manually TAB'ing it back in place which I think is causing me some other minor issues with not sculpting 100% symmetrically. It would just be handy if there was some sort of "reset symmetry to root of world or root of object" you know? Thanks for the answers though! Good to know I can remove the baked mesh, and yes... I apologise if my questions are n00bish, I am reading the manual every now and again when I get stuck and also watching numerous videos when I get the chance.

I'm just working away on small things to get a better grip with 3d coat, It's certainly pretty intuitive but there's bits and pieces I keep running into that seem like I might be taking a poorly efficient route. So I figured I'd throw down a WIP and tag a few questions (possible requests) onto it as I go. I've already got a few so I'll just bullet point those. When creating a "Free-form" primitive in the Voxel room you can use multiple symmetry axis' when moving points around, is there a way to get this functionality into general sculpting and even the Retopo room? Or is that a big no no? I get the feeling that the physical scale of my models are important, should I be making things huge in the voxel room so I don't later have resolution issues or over-keen snapping/welding in the retopo room? By "resolution issues" I mean sometimes I'd create a free form primitive to cut out a small area, and so I'd make a really small object (in comparison to my model) but when I hit return to generate it, it's.... super low poly.* Selecting faces/verts/edges in the retopo room. Sometimes I can't actually deselect, I have to switch to a different tool and then back again. I know about Ctrl to deselect but I mean more like "clearing the selection"... sometimes simply clicking in a blank area does it, but sometimes it does not. Either I'm missing something obvious or I'm experiencing some odd behaviour. Once you send a retopo'd mesh to be UV'd and painted, is there any way to reverse that? So, for example... removing the mesh that's now in the Paint and UV rooms. Let me know if I'm not being clear enough on this one but basically, I retopo a mesh, send it to be UV'd, notice something (or lots) I want to change, go back to the retopo room.... annd now I've got my voxel model AND my "baked" mesh in there, as well as my retopo geometry. I know I can hide the voxels... but my question I suppose, is can I delete the "baked" mesh? Sometimes my symmetry plane appears in the wrong position, I've no doubt this is something I'm doing wrong but I'm wondering if there's a more accurate way to get it back to the root than just holding TAB and pretty much lining it up by eye? Also... slight note, but even after I move my symmetry plane back with TAB, it often finds a way to revert itself back to the old/wrong position. Am I doing something incredibly stupid here? Just an addendum to point 2 there, I know about res+, but sometimes I find myself res+'ing "more than I think I should be" in order to get the required detail. Lastly, sorry for the words! I'm still learning, and still watching and reading whatever I can find.