Gary Dave

I would hope so, I got a little caught up on "what defines a vehicle?" but so long as it fits within the "anything that can transport people or goods" then I would imagine it's all fine and dandy.

I'm pretty sure I understood that bit!

I'd say to just dive in. Some people take to this stuff a lot faster than others. And even if it all goes horribly wrong and you feel like you can't do anything, you'll still know more in a months time than you know right now. Youtube videos are always a good source of information, there's the official 3d coat channel of course, but I think the best ever "series" I've seen is from a regular user who goes through a little project from start to finish: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL17Z03Lf1lyLBPyV4ytIct4xdetKToJmB This should get you going with the basics.

You're talking about things like the e-panel, symmetry window and the tools pop-up? Yeah, I often have to open them multiple times due to a stray cursor movement. I think the e-panel is the worst offender for this.

I'm sure the above video probably covers this, but when you bake your retopo you have both an inner and an outer cage. Be sure to check both of these. The inner cage shouldn't be seen at any point really, as it needs to be inside, if it pokes through, then you'll get artefacts.

Yup, same for me.

Yeah the grip is looking much more believable. As Tony says though, you'll eventually learn about convex/concave painting on your journey's with 3dc's PBR "smart materials". Worth looking into for sure.

Very impressive for a 100% 3d coat workflow. For PBR stuff, there's the official youtube channel which covers some of it, I've not watched any of the PBR stuff on there though so I'm not sure if they teach you how to create your own, I would imagine that information is sort of included though. Once you understand what 3dc PBR shaders are doing I think you'll be okay. https://www.youtube.com/user/PILGWAY3DCoat/search?query=pbr There is also this non-official video that goes over creating your own, to my knowledge though, it's very basic and he skips a lot of the finer points of this workflow: For presets and the like that you can get elsewhere, check out this area of the forum: http://3dcoat.com/forum/index.php?showforum=31 There was a user on here who had his own website dedicated to sharing 3d coat PBR materials, but I can't for the life of me remember it.

It looks like maybe that's your sculpt mesh poking through the low poly mesh in the paint room? Or are you certain that those artefacts are appearing on the texture itself? If they are not appearing on the texture, then I think you just need to hide your vox layers. You can do this either by going to the sculpt room and hiding them there, or in the "VoxTree" window from the paint room itself. (If you don't have the window, you'll find it in Windows > Popups > VoxTree

Is it worth doing a quick youtube video to advertise the competition? There might be subscribers to the channel who don't check the forums. (as an aside, I don't get emails from 3dc, so even I wouldn't have known about it if not for the forums)

Pretty damn good, especially as you say you're a beginner. Did you do the entire thing in 3dc or import a base mesh from another application? I actually really like the simplistic rendering you've ended up with here, but if you wanted to push it a bit further I would say the grip could definitely do with some tweaks, like adding an engraved logo, and some repeating normal map pattern that covers the whole thing. Like this: http://media.midwayusa.com/productimages/880x660/Primary/155/155591.jpg The decision to add a bit of wear and tear is of course optional, but it never hurts to add in a little bit of these details, like some little scratches in the paint work on certain hard edges, the trick is to not go crazy with it, I've seen people who cover every hard edge with scratches and it just breaks the believability of it. Lastly, I'm not much of a gun guy, but I don't think I've ever seen a desert eagle that didn't have text on the sides of the barrel. I'm guessing your mirrored UV's are a problem for that though.

Hey TimmyZ, could you share the model you're using? I'll give it a whirl. Could start a new thread somewhere and we'll see what's what.

Hmm, good to know.

When you close the reference edit menu you can still see your reference pictures. Skip to 5:34 in the video posted above.

I can usually do a few (3 - 4) million with voxels, but any more than that and it's time to start converting over to surface mode. Which is handy since my usual pipeline is voxels for base sculpting and then surface for details.

@Axel6430 I think the issue might be related to the material you're using on the sculpt/hi-poly version. In that it will bake the light direction information along with it. The reason you're not seeing this effect on the upper parts is because (I believe) they are also using symmertrical/overlayed UV's? Try using the default shader (applied in the sculpt room) and do a re-bake. Then see what the results look like. If you're using any of the later beta versions, I think the shaders have all changed... I have no idea what results you get when baking from these as I'm not on any betas. Lastly, if you're still having issues I recommend starting a whole new thread.

I've read elsewhere on the forums that this is a major bug, and that the alphas for the brushes are using the preview res rather than the full res of the image.

Also, not sure how well known this is, but as you're orbiting around you can press the shift key and will auto-snap to a front/left/top/down/back/front view. I use this 100% of the time.

Oddly enough, I actually wouldn't use the extrude tool for this. The first thing I'd probably do is clone that corner section of the model and then just scale it up and move it. Use the cut off tool where necessary. Another way I might go about it (surface mode only) is to freeze off the area I plan on extruding, invert that selection and then use the Absolute brush, which in my opinion does a much better job of extruding than the actual extrusion tool.

Actually 3dc will only try to paint on a single object at a time, it all depends on what your cursor is hovering over. Here's a gif of what I mean. The knob, drawer and back piece are all separate objects. I can only paint across them all if I do it on purpose, otherwise if I keep the centre of my cursor over one object, it will only paint on that object. Notice how my fall-off range is much larger, but the brush is not painting on multiple objects, until the end where I purposefully paint across all of them. I only hide objects in the paint room if they're a bit too fiddly to be painted in this manner.

As far as I can tell, the H key in the paint room does try to auto-select the correct layer, but if you have an AO map or curvature, or normals or any other sort of global layer then it will just keep auto-selecting that. Photoshop does this too (with the "Select by layer/group" options), but you can lock or hide layers and they are prevented from being selectable. To my knowledge, even if you hide the "AmbientOcclusion" layer in 3dc, pressing the H key over your painted mesh will still select it. One way would be to follow the naming convention, ie... press H while hovering over geometry, it detects that you're selecting "Left Arm" paint object, and you have a "Left Arm" paint layer too, which it would select. It's not ideal, and very prone to human error, but it's a suggestion. Edit Actually... This confuses me a bit. The paint objects are just the geometry, you shouldn't be using them to find correct paint layers. Here's what my paint room UI looks like: The only reason I have paint objects visible is to hide/unhide them. They can't actually be selected. All painting is done on the paint layers, rather than the objects. Perhaps you're getting confused between objects and layers?

hah, yeah the two date ranges is a little odd. Good stuff though, I hope this gets more people on the trial versions, and ultimately more people using 3dc.

What problems are you having? Why is it a pain for you? You mention needing to switch between voxels/surface but that's not a necessity. On the topic of resolution, yes that's a voxel thing, resolution of the mesh does not apply if it's a surface object. What are you trying to do, and what problems are you running into?

So what was the answer!?

The issue here is that he's asking about changes to the retopo after painting, which would mean he's baked or just sent the retopo mesh into the paint room. To my knowledge, as soon as the retopo mesh enters the paint room it has no connection to the original retopo mesh. Whenever I've needed to change the retopo mesh after already bringing it into the paint room, I have always had to remove it from the paint room (+all layers) and then go back to retopo, make tweaks and do a re-bake. The video posted above describes the process before the mesh is in the paint room.