manticor

I came to the same conclusion about the painting density ,shame it doesn't work properly at the moment .Hopefully in the next update Andrew will get it working correctly

Here's my result from playing around with the autopo . Overall it gives a good result but too many polys in extremities and messes up in the face area even with guides placed and density painted on the face area aswell. Uploaded with ImageShack.us

I find this latest version of autopo almost perfect .I've been testing with a female figure and it captured everything very well with only a few strokes .the only let down is on the face area ,it makes a mess of the face ,even with guides to direct flow and even with density painting that it seems to ignore .The good thing about this tho is that it creates edge loops and because of that reason ,I'm using autopo over zremesher as it is a lot easier to optimise and modify ,and also the uv tools are great for marking out seams .Something that would take the best part of a day has turned into a 30 minute job ( retopo,modify ,uv and then bake in xnormal) .if 3dc had Unity's tangent basis normal map output ,real AO and curvature map output ,I would stay in 3dc for the whole lot. I would say that it 90 % complete ,just needs a little further refinement.

Doh !My Bad! I mistakenly put 5 polys instead of 5000 polys in the dialogue box.....must be from using zremesher so often that I automatically did the same thing in Autopo.

Mine just goes through the motions and doesn't spit anything out at all.... sorry ... after about 20 minutes of trying different settings I managed to get about 10 tris on one attempt....even with the default head and body busts....not sure whats going on

To be totally honest after using zremesher for while now the same can be said for that too,while it does an impressive job overall it does take good while to get something that you want if you are making game res models .its still a test , undo ,add curves ,test ,undo paint colours ,test kind of workflow and although it is fast at generating ,you end up sitting there for ages till you've got something perfect. So now my workflow is to go with 25 - 50 % extra polys and optimise down ....which is a problem with zremesher as it generates spirals almost every time . Andrews algorithm seems pretty good at getting a clean mesh with a good flow which you can take out edge loops easily.the only thing that seems to let it down other than the points that have been mentioned is it hugging crevices and lateral twists of loop flow on areas like fingers . What I think would be nice would be a dot loop range select option like what abn suggested and a kind of shrink wrap magnet that pulls points towards creviced areas ....kind of like baking a curvature map in xnormal and using this as a weight map to drag points towards the creviced areas. So you could use the autopo to go higher than you need to get good detail capture , quickly hand optimise pullin g loops out and then tighten up the final mesh.

Im hoping he is still working on it .He's past the point of no return so to speak ,we all can see that it can produce really really good results ,it's just the consistency ,speed and stability need to be improved .

My first test came out best on female body sculpt at 10k res .minor strokes for face . After that test all others had a problem with shoulder area where it seemed to pull the armpit mesh down to make wings . Gonna run some more tests tomorrow but on the whole in most areas it not far off zremesher quality.

I think a good idea would be to have a projection system .that way we can autopo a new base mesh , subdivide and project detail onto thr new clean mesh .would solve a few problems with faulty meshes /holes etc .the base mesh could slso be used as a cage to drform the high detail mesh

Looks awesome results from the pics Andrew .cant wait to try it out in bit.

Same here .cant get facial features to show up on a full body .seems it puts too much polys in the arms .ignores any masking I do to increase polys on face .but overall compared to old version .much improved

The cloth sim is pretty good . Although for doing clothing it needs more control . Being able to pause and then freeze specific parts and then continue the sim would make creating cloth folds in specific areas much easier .

Welcome back Andrew . Great to hear about the new autopo code . Can't wait to try this out , especially on hard surface models.

I think what is missing is a projection system so you can voxelise a messy mesh and then convert back to surface and project the detail back on .but it would have to tesselate again in the high detail areas .if Andrew gets the autopo working well enough to generate a new clean surface that would be excellent.

I learned blender to see what it was like and it's very good but much prefer xsi and modo for modelling.I only use it for the fire and smoke when I'm doing fx work ,blenders fire system is phenomenal

I think the space bar menu could do with organising a bit better .to me it seems a bit unstructured .It would be nice if it was layed out in a radial way like the paint room ,but more like a pie menu ,or maybe have 3 pie menus ,one for create and import ( primitives ,merge ,booleans ) one for tweak and adjust ( pose ,move ) and one for brushes and maybe one for view switching ( front ,right ,perspective etc)... That way you don't have to lift your hand off the mouse to switch views.

that could work.Or ctrl +alt .Either way would be good .It just speeds up moving and placing objects

Good point .Well spotted But my models dont end their journey in 3DCoat.Softimage ,Max ,Modo or Blender all have a quadrangulate function. A triangulated mesh wont affect baking either. I was just illustrating a point My original point was this. Yes I totally agree that a shell option ,shift extrude and other things for the retopo room would be nice additions and keeps us from having to flick back and forth between applications.Im not disputing that point . My point is that Andrew should concern himself with more important things ,the autopo improvements being one of these.If he manages to match or better pixologics solution ,which I definately think he will then we as users wont need to even bother too much with a lot of tedious mindnummingly boring retopo work and spend more time on creating art fast. The only thing that really stands in the way of this is the autopo handling hard corners which neither pixologics system or 3DCoats handle that well . An example test of this is to create a vox box and scale it out and duplicate it several times to make a fence structure.Now run autopo and do the same in zbrush with zremesher.Neither system handles the right angles properly.If andrew can solve this problem and match what zremesher does with organics then Andrews system will be by far the best.The closest way I get to getting a better mesh at the moment is to decimate to 95% and then optimise the rest in Softimage ( as it is the most versatile optimiser ,it has a lot of options to tweak).I clean up the stray vertices after its done.But this doesn't work well for some meshes but as these are non deforming models and they will have a normal map to iron out the kinks in the geometry shading its good enough for me as a games artist.

export mesh to be shelled from retopo room Import into voxel room - merge without voxelisation -merge as skin (set skin settings as required based on scale of model) mesh is now shell Export layer -> import into topo room replacing original mesh. I agree that it would be a nice option to have in the topo room but I personally dont use make shell that often. This could probably be done with Angel script .Would be nice if Andrew or someone could make some beginner tutorials on this.

Ok just tried it.firstly the camera navigation doesn't work at all.not even holding down s to navigate works. I use maya style anyway. And nope the middle mouse drag doesn't work either. Worth a try tho .thanks anyway

Would like an option while using transform tool to use middle mouse drag in a direction in empty space which matches closest axis for move ,rotate or non linear scale .this is a default option in softimage and it makes transforming objects really fast .a simple workflow option but increases speed of manipulating objects .also holding Ctrl and tapping a point on another object snap the object to that point would be great too.

Is this not already possible ? Import model into topo room as surface with make shell option on ? Not tried it myself but worth a shot . Thing is people seem to forget that everyone has blender available to them which have these tools at their disposal and with the app link it's a single click operation .i know it's nice to stay in one application but Andrew is just one guy ,I think it would make his life easier so he can focus more of his time on features and improvements that are not available in most other packages. And you have max which has the most robust modeling tool box of any package .... Don't mean to cause offence btw

Yeah I did know that. Zbrush just expanded upon the idea,seems to me that most of the cool stuff in zbrush were originally Andrews idea's

I think what would be even better would be some "live" autopo .Whereby it first builds a mesh based on basic guides and then as you place extra guides down it recalculates the flow in that local area . you could also paint in extra colour information for more or less density ,same as zbrush does it but updates on mouse up.

I'm hoping that Andrew manages to improve the autopo routine so it handles sharp edges too for hard surface models ,as at the moment neither zbrush or 3dc handles that very well ,they work better for organic surfaces