Tser

No disrespect intended, but have you ever actually tried to create a complex sculpt from the beginning to the end, meaning, starting from the curves tool, to sculpting the various components of your model with high details and definition, then retopo-ing the model components on to creating good UV's for them, merging the components to the paint room to texture and then exporting the lot to be picked up bu Maya or Softimage etc. I can tell you its like taking a journey to hell and back. You should try it, and then let us know how stable the tools are. The trouble is that you guys code too much and don't thoroughly test your creations in the same manner as an artist would who is working in a production pipe, playing with one tool all day is one thing, but using one tool after another as you refine your sculpt, your topology or UV sets is quite another. Also, I wouldn't recommend leaving the honey out, you have more than enough bugs to play with. T.

3DCoat reminds me of a kid who wants to grow up too fast and be like the big boys without going through the pain of growing up, you need to be patient, grow with solid foundations, mature and gain respect, throwing as many tools loaded with bugs together is not the way to go, perfect the tools you have and then add new ones only after all the problems with your existing tools have been worked out to EVERY ONES satisfaction. Reputation is everything in business. If you want to make tools attractive to artists then stability, reliability and usability are all what matters, an artist is like a driver of a car, he/she doesn't care how the car is built or how shiny the tappit covers are on the engine, or how many pistons are in the engine, he/she just wants it to start, drive reliably to and from their destination and park the car for use the next day with the knowledge that tomorrow the car will perform as it did today. T.

By the looks of it, its going to be quite some time before v4 is up for general production use.

This is exactly the problem I had and why I changed to ZB, the file grows so large that when you save often sooner or later 3DCoat will crash and destroy your file.

David, yes, sometimes and no. T.

I would love to be a full time beta tester for 3DCoat, but financially I need to put food on the table, so I have to work, therefore time is very precious for me, wasting hours of creating time because of bugs in an application is not an option. Maya, Softimage, ZBrush and others do have bugs, but they are minor and don't cause you to loose significant amounts of time when they occur, so they are acceptable.

Is it a fact that WE are the testers of the program? Are there any people at Pilgway who thoroughly test each new added feature? if not, I would suggest setting up a group of testers whose job it is to find bugs, this will be the only way to once and for all, produce a stable and reliable application.

BeatKitano, I appreciate that and I don't mean to be a whinger, I am just thinking of 3DCoat and want it to be great, not just potentially great. T.

AbnRanger, with all due respect, 3DCoat is always in beta, the so called "Stable Builds" are just builds with some of the bugs fixed, there are still way too many, I have used all the builds for many years now and I can tell you that there was never a Stable build, I always ran into issues which I had to find work arounds for, maybe its a Linux thing, I don't know, but I do know that its killing my enthusiasm.

This is such an important concept "Stability and Reliability", how would you feel if you were writing a novel on a word processor and have been saving regularly and only making a "save as" every chapter or so, then towards the end of a chapter the program crashed and destroyed your novel and you could only go back to the previously saved novel which was minus your last chapter, you would have to try to rewrite the lost chapter, but this time you would have lost a lot of your enthusiasm and creative juices and your mind would be filled with anger and frustration which will be reflected in the chapter rewrite. You just want to work and be creative without the thought that at any moment the application may do something unexpected and ruin your valuable work. T.

I have had to move to ZBrush to get my jobs done because I cannot rely on 3DCoat any more, I think the turning point was when I pressed the save button and my scene file was destroyed as the program crashed and I lost many hours of work, what is amazing is that I am running ZBrush in Linux under wine and its very stable and Reliable, this is what Andrew has to do, drop all the development and make 3DCoat rock solid, stable and reliable because nobody wants to loose their work or waist their time. 3DCoat has such a great potential but nobody will ever take it seriously while it is in a constant state of perpetual Alpha/Beta. Once 3DCoat is made stable and reliable on all platforms then people will take notice and place trust in the program to get the job done, the last thing an artist wants is distractions whilst in the creative frame of mind, distractions kill creativity. New features should only be added then released to the general public after they have been thoroughly tested under every possible scenario that the user may use the feature in. As I go through all my various versions of 3DCoat I find the same pattern of some old bugs being fixed, but far from all, and also a swag of new features which are full of bugs which you hope will be fixed in the next version, which then repeats the cycle over again, or even worse, a feature which has been stable for quite a while suddenly becomes unstable in the latest version. I think this just has to stop if you want 3DCoat to be respected as a serious player. T.

Done.

I am not familiar with Sculptris and I don't think Andrew has to start from scratch, just add the ability to weld and cut vertices and edges in the UV preview rather than creating and removing seams in the scene. T.

Yep, I have discovered that you can create a seam then Upd. Islands to cut an Island and Manipulate the Island into the right location, tweak the vertices, remove the seam and Upd. Islands to weld the Islands back together, but it seems such a round about way of doing things. T.

Yes, but the trouble is that when you unwrap again the whole UV map changes, what I want is the ability to create islands and weld them together the way I want, not the automated way by unwrapping, I want to have full control over the UV map, to create a UV map which has the seams hidden so you cannot see them due to displacement mapping. This is all possible in Softimage and Maya and all other UV editing software. Surely, it is not a big ask? T.

Is there a way to weld/sew verts/edges/islands together when editing the UV map in the Retopo room, this is the reason I do my UV's in Softimage/Maya, if not, I think it would be a needed feature and save me the hassle of exporting my retopo mesh for UV editing then importing back to 3DC for painting etc. T.

I always unpack the tar archive into a new folder in my Home folder, I always have, the 3D-CoatV3 folder I copied to 3D-CoatV4 to keep my settings, I cannot understand why there would be corruption. Any way, what do you mean by a "clean install", do you mean to delete the 3D-CoatV4 folder and loose all my settings? because the only other 3DCoat related folder is the unpacked tar folder. Also, I did have a lot of similar problems with the 3.7x versions too. T.

The retopo mesh I created in 3DCoat I exported to Softimage to create the UV's, then exported it back to 3DCoat, the imported mesh in the Retopo room was riddled with holes (missing quads), so I tried to add the missing quads only to find the UV's were lost and automatically replaced by some self generated UV mapping, has anyone else found this? Edit: After trying the import again with a freshly restarted 3DCoat, the import came in complete, how strange!!! This, sort of, reminds me of Windows 3.11/95, back in the day... T.

Hey there Taros, do you use the Linux version? and do you use the Retopo room? T.

This is what I have had to do, I love 3DCoat, but I cannot afford to spend so much time on trivial matters, I agree that Andrew has to spend more time in the Retopo room, I need a program which is reliable and predictable, even if it has less features, I need to predict how much time I will be spending on a particular job, not have a 10 min job turn into hours. T.

I have reached the point that I cannot rely on the retopo room any more, things just are not stable enough for anything but the most simple sculpts, for example: 1 When merging into the scene (mv), the file you are working on is forgotten by 3DCoat, so you have to do a save as and name the file again. 2 Often, the contents of the pop ups (voxel list, palette, group list etc) display are empty, even though the contents are still there, a restart of 3DC is needed. 3 If you go to the Tweak room and move some verts around, when you return to the paint room your modifications (tweaks) are lost, but if you save the file, close 3DC, then reopen the file, the tweaks are saved. 4 When moving verts around in the retopo room, sometimes you will find, that some or the verts are stretched or moved to other locations on the mesh, this happens more so with the Brush, but also happens with the move vertices tool. 5 After defining UV islands on your mesh and unwrapping, then merging to the scene (mv), you get areas which don't appear to have UV space, even though looking at the UV map the areas seem to have UV space and are not overlapped, the only way to get around this is to cut your UV map up into many small islands which is no good for animating in other 3D packages such as Softimage. 6 As reported earlier, you have to keep saving incrementally because at any time you do a save, the program may freeze and destroy your file at the same time, this results in many scene files which are huge (now at 2GB each), what program destroys the file when saving? the file should be saved before deleting the original!!!. This is just a few things encountered using the Retopo/Tweak rooms. T.

Has anyone else had a problem with a lot of crashes in the Retopo room? It will even crash when you are saving with the result of the destruction of your file, I had this happen after 6hrs of work and lost the lot, I had to drop back to an earlier incremental save and do all the work again. That really pissed me off!! The trouble with incremental saves is that they are now 2GB each and my folder has reached 84GB. T.

Another strange thing with Linux version 4Beta4 is that it is using 5% CPU (one core @ 100%) even while its just sitting there idling (doing nothing), this never happened with 3.7. T.

Another thing, I was working away in the Retopo room moving verts around for around 1hr, then a small dialog message popped up "saving" and then 3DCoat crashed, this is strange because I have auto save turned off. T.

Hey there Sergyi, Installed the Linux V4 Beta4, opened the sculpt I have been working on with V3.7-18F, it took a while to open, but it looked o.k, then I went to save it with another name and 3DCoat crashed. Update: Second time I tried it all saved without any problems. T.