Gary Dave

I would advise just trying it. If you hover over the tool it will tell you all you need to know really. Aside from that if you just use it you'll see.

It's been a while since I've needed to sculpt some tiling geometry and I was pretty disappointed to find that 3dc is still using the box-instances method. This makes it impossible to produce tiled meshes unless all you're doing is putting down geometry on top. Is there anything in the works for a proper tiled system?

I think modding tools are great, anything to get people making stuff in an easy to use fashion is always good, but... and I mean no disrespect, but these videos you put out on the official channel are just awful for marketing purposes. The two-part navigation video should speak for itself, you shouldn't need to split basic navigation into two videos. The development here does not lend itself well to growth. If it takes two videos to explain orbiting, panning and zooming, how are you ever going to show something that will actually get peoples attention? The text on-screen instead of talking is really hurting these videos. For a trailer, fair enough, but for anything even remotely educational you've got to get out of the past. Your target audience isn't likely to sit through 5+ minutes of "how to press the left and right mouse buttons to change the viewport" while deeply atmospheric music plays in the background and text pops up in different places. This is of course just my opinion.

Ahoy, I was wondering if there was some pipeline (intentional or not) for making easy LOD's? In the past I would do this: Sculpt > Retopo > UV's/Unwrap > Duplicate Retopo > Optimise this retopo (being mindful of current UV seams). This leaves me with two retopo layers with the same UV's, but one is of a higher poly count. It's not ideal, and often requires a lot of tidy up afterwards. I could just throw the "high" retopo mesh into a different program and optimise it while keeping UV's the same, but the results are often undesirable, I need pretty good LOD's, but unfortunately I have a lot to make, and have to think of a fast way to do it. Can anyone think of any neat little 3dc tricks that I could use?

Different icons for me: https://www.dropbox.com/s/c3ca0v1nh9g3p0j/transform.jpg?dl=0 Left = sculpt, Right = retopo. And yeah, general fixes for sure, but there's a lot of them. Too many little things for me to do a video on, I don't have the time for that unfortunately.

I think I might be missing the big deal here, sculpt layers? Perhaps I don't know ZB enough to compare. What is it exactly that you want to be able to do that we currently cannot (or requires a big workaround?) For me, 3dc is pretty awesome but it's the little nit-picky issues that drag it down for me. Like how there's a different icon for "Transform" in the retopo room, and also that it doesn't work if you put it in one of the 1-9 quick-access slots. Or how some numerical fields I can click-drag to change them, but others require me to input a number manually and hit return. The UI and overall user experience of some tools like Warp or axial symmetry honestly just put me off using them. These are the sorts of things that I would consider huge, when using the software and its current tools feels as easy as can be, then I'm all for more features. But for now, it's not a lack of any major feature that stops me from doing my job, it's poor UI/interaction design or little bugs.

Slight update: If I bake the chest with the planks sculpt hidden, it's fine. If I bake the planks on their own, they're fine. But, if I bake them both, I get those oddities appearing on the planks. I've managed to reduce the baking issues a lot by merging my planks layer into the chest layer (sculpt room), I still get some odd results but those are minimal so I can paint them out myself. Still not ideal, as I'd of liked to have kept the planks layer completely separate. but oh well. Not sure where it's going wrong, I did a model similar to this last week and had zero issues. Perhaps it's a scale issue, I'll have to double check that tomorrow.

Long time no post, been using 3dc a lot lately without too many issues but now I'm coming up against something that I can't seem to solve: https://www.dropbox.com/s/r9iw2ai245rdzca/BakeIssues.png?dl=0 (ignore the lighter patch on the top, I know what's causing that) As you can see, I keep getting these weird dark areas, I've tried baking with name correspondence on/off, using different symmetry's, disabling symmetry entirely, using 100% unique unwraps, using mirrored X unwraps, mirrored Z unwraps. I always seem to get this exact same result. The only thing I can confirm, is that's it not an AO issue, if I disable the baking of AO when going from retopo to sculpt, I still get this issue. The only thing I'm doing out of the ordinary, is I haven't retopo'd everything. There's more to this chest, but I have everything else hidden, and I've only retopo'd the bits you see above. Saying that, even if 3dc was somehow unhiding the rest of my sculpt assets during the bake, it still would not explain these odd areas. I have been back to the sculpt room to see if there might be something obvious going on, but for the life of me I cannot work it out. I've tried so may different things but the result is always the same. Any help would be appreciated. P.S. The method of expanding/contracting the bake shells is AMAZING! Thank you so much for working on such a beautiful feature.

Much appreciated. I shall try it later today and report back.

Thanks very muchly, I must have hit the "Yes" instead of "No" when importing a piece of geometry and it asks something about scale, I normally hit no. That's solved it, I set it all the units back to 0,0,0,1. But I did have to hide and un-hide my paint objects in order for it to update, bit weird. But oh well, all fixed, thanks again.

I have a few clothing items that are already retopo'd and baked into the paint room. I did as I always do and went back back to the sculpt room to create a new piece, except this time when I went into the paint room again, all of my baked objects had shrunk. See image for example, what you're looking at is the retopo room with the trousers sculpt and retopo over it, and then the baked version underneath it. This has put an immediate stop on what I was doing, as now any new pieces I bake into the paint room will not match the scale of the previous pieces. Does anyone know why this is happened? As an side, I know the baked objects have gotten smaller, as opposed to the sculpts and retopo's getting larger, because my reference planes still match the sculpt/retopo scale.

Hey, thanks for the response. I only use whatever the Steam version is running (currently 4.7.06). If you're on a later version and can't replicate the issue then that's good enough for me.

On or off, it's always the same, low values, high values, no difference. Tried it on a different mesh piece too. I also created my own shader/material in the sculpt room and made sure it had to extra settings, just colour, but the bake is always the same, it always seems to include cavity on the objects layer in the paint room. AO is completely separate. For now I'm just deleting that paint layer and re-baking AO, and then boosting it a bit in photoshop. It gives me what I want, though a bit of a hassle. I'll be able to test it again in a week or two on my proper computer, I'm on a laptop at the moment with integrated graphics so I wonder if that has something to do with it.

If you're importing this object, try enabling or disabling the "Swap Y & Z Scene Axis", which will be available when the importer pop-up window is displayed. Otherwise, (if you've brought it into the sculpt room) you can just use the transform tool to rotate it.

Whenever I bake using the default material, the result always has a cavity map, much like the result of the "Clay2" material. I am not using clay2. I am only using default. Anyone have any ideas? Just to clear some things up, this is not an AO issue, the far right image you see above is just displaying what's on the base object layer. No other layers are visible. (and on that note, I thought occlussion baking in the paint room was supposed to recognise normal maps? I can't get it to work at all, only does basic geo AO for me.)

Sorry to raise this thread, but upon searching this was the closest I could find. How do I force OpenGL? I'll be spending the next few weeks on a laptop with some poor integrated graphics. I can already use 3dc, but I worry that the machine will take off or melt from the heat if I sculpt for too long. *Edit* Oh, my bad, OpenGL is still a selectable option for me. No worries!

Hey hey, Just a heads up, I stumbled across this: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa7A1S8Iw-vFOtH4_m3vT-MZzXqD5i31- it's a playlist, but they're not referencing videos from the main 3dc channel or other channels, they've re-uploaded all the videos to their own channel. Most of the content seems to be from the official 3dc channel, but there's also some videos from regular users too, like the old stuff from Psionic Games. Just thought I'd let you know.

I think what ScrotieFlapWack (love the name) is saying, is that every game/program/video that you launch on Steam will change your status to a sort of "actively doing this thing". ie, if you run Portal 2, it will show you as playing Portal 2. This also tracks the hours that you've been using things. In the case of 3dc, it does not recognise that you are using it, nor does it track the time you've spent in it. (I've been on 311 hours for a few months now, so it was working at some point, but I don't remember when it stopped working) It doesn't actually stop you from using the software, so I can understand this being a low priority issue. It's just an annoying little thing, plus it used to work just fine, so something's gone wrong.

Are you performing any sort of scaling before applying? One of the issues you might encounter when dumping primitives into a voxel layer is not having enough resolution for a crisp shape, but... that's definitely not what's happening to you.

Sorry to drag this one up from the depths, but I would like to permanently remove my reference image and the above steps don't work anymore, is there a way we can do it properly now?

First port of call is to make sure that you've enabled painting to depth. Up in your top-bar area you should have three spheres, a blue, green and black one. These are Normals/Depth, Colour, and Gloss/Roughness. If the blue one has a white X over it, it means you're not painting any depth, regardless of what you choose to do.

I've been doing a bunch of tests with 3dc's 7 options for normal maps in the preferences panel, 5 of which are drop-downs that lead to even more options. But, so far I've only been able to get two results, which I'm assuming is just the flipping of the green channel, which is pretty common. My question is, why are there so many options here? If I change the preset to Unity, and the Tangent Space standard to Unity Space, that doesn't necessarily mean it will work in unity. It only works in unity if you also change the Export to "Maya, Blender". because if you set it to "3ds-Max, LW" it inverts the green channel. Which also raises the question "why isn't "unity" an option in the export?" Or better yet, stop making it software specific and just go the route of +Y/green or -Y/green, etc. Swap TB seems to flip the sculpted details, but not the baked ones. This confuses me greatly. Denormalized TB only seems to affect the auto-padding that exists outside of the UV islands, which has no use. A lot of these options seem to have absolutely no effect on the normal map itself. I understand that some of them are referring to how the normal map is calculated inside 3dc, which will obviously have no effect on an exported map, but I'm just wondering why all of this is setup in this way? It makes trying to explain it to others near-impossible. It also makes problem solving a bit of a pain if your normal map hasn't come out right, because it seems as though you'd have to trawl through 30 odd options to find the right combo, when in actuality all you probably need to change is the export drop-down.

When you start a new project, select Surface Sculpting, and then use the Tiled box 3x3. It's essentially a pre-built scene that uses instanced boxes. But, it's severely limited at the moment. It's fine if you want to put down objects, like laying bricks or creating some rocky cliff face. But the "ground" level is essentially un-workable, and here's why: You can't paint across the volumes, so your strokes will end as soon as it reaches the boundary of one of the "floor" pieces you're working on. I used "bricks" as a good example earlier, but to dive a little deeper into this issue, bricks are only good if your bricks are really close together. If you wanted to have a "floor" of cement that held the bricks together, you're going to run into major seam issues. Like this: I'm a little disappointed to see ghib's original request for a decent tiling engine date back to 2009. I know that it must be a lot of work, and even if you can get past the issues of seams on this "lower" layer, there are still other things that make tiling 3d textures in 3dc a bit of a pain in the bumbum, like if you've got multiple objects (concrete blocks, tins, bits of steel) on the same layer, good luck finding a way of grouping and texturing them all without wanting to smash your head through your desk. I only hope Andrew still has plans for a proper system and hasn't just given us an instanced scene of boxes and then called it a day. A proper 3d tiling system would probably cause a lot of people to flock to 3dc, as although ZBrush has their own, it's a pretty destructive workflow. I'm not sure how Mudbox handles it. Edit Oh, I see Mudbox just has a "tiling plane" system, which makes sense. Better than 9 instanced boxes in my opinion.

12 videos in about a week, AbnRanger is on fire.

Sounds good, hope to see the concept soon.