L'Ancien Regime

wow, exporting from Zbrush to 3D Coat for its Autoretopo. Now that's something I never thought I'd see. Andrew must have been really doing something right.

Now that is interesting ... AdoredTV says Path Tracing is the way of the future.

Meh...it's a repackage of an older version of Catia 5, probably v21 or something. It runs like *****. I suspect Sketchup is now a better modeling program but in general if I'm going to spend the time to learn a new modeling program it might as well be Blender, frankly.

Yeah I'm going to have to have a discussion on that closed spline , stuff like maximum depth on it. I never had this problem 2 years ago with it but now it is. OTOH...I did get a productive night, though not without shouting some very bad words into the void. Those seats look like ass; I could have done a lot better if I had some of my old 3D Coat skills with me..but they'll do as a placeholder for now.

I'm finding the Cut Off tool to be rather troublesome, particularly the Closed Spline. It simply doesn't work now. I worked great two years ago. And what happened to all the fancy curves tools that were added to it? I'm using 4.9.33 and 4.9.34. Sorry to be out of the loop here...But the info on this stuff is hidden all over and it's sort of a formidable task to go rooting all over the place for it. the brown area I'm cutting is 45000 triangles and I made it uniform. I'm hitting "ENTER" and the little drop down "Apply" and no luck.

yep, 3D coat's retopo rivals Zbrush now.

I think that it's legitimate to distinguish between BREP and NURBS. Yes they share a lot in common technically but in practice they're two different animals, two entirely different toolsets. That's why Autodesk has both Inventor and Alias programs. Engineers will use BREP for their mechanical and electrical designs and Industrial Designers will use Alias to create an attractive form around the functional guts of the device. I think we can agree that car body designers definitely distinguish between the two uses of this technology, and I'd like to see the mechanical engineer that designs a car engine to manufacturing specs in Alias. I doubt if that has ever happened. BREP is for solid modeling, it has a boundary on all sides. NURBS can be just a 2D surface that doesn't imply any solidity to it. It's not a mass, it's a skin. One is for engineering, the other for design. And yeah Daniel Simon is using Blender to design stuff..but not in NURBS...he's using it for SubD modelling. He posted this example on Twitter just a few months ago; Both are great books but The Timeless Racer is full of amazing NURBS modeling. It's so beautiful, so perfect.

I've played around with MOI3D and it's useful to an artist alright. There's certain things you can do in that program that you can't do in 3D Coat. Like what you say? Like bevels and chamfers on irregularly shaped edges between two boolean union objects for example. You find a lot of such bevels and chamfers on an engine block. You simply cannot do that in 3D Coat, or even if in certain limited cases you can it's an immense time consuming chore involving all sorts of involved strategems while with MOI 3D it's simply a matter of selecting an edge with your cursor then hitting a button and then if you want you can fiddle with it by punching in some various parameters. And then there's long curvilinear swept shapes with varying profiles too; yeah you can sort of do that in 3D Coat but hmm...not really. I'm a great believer in multiple tool approaches to problems we encounter in attempting to creat the things we desire. I think it's great that Kenmo is using MOI 3D in his workflow, and it's great to use 3D Coat too. I love 3D Coat. You should probably throw Teya Conceptor in there too just because Arseniy Korablev is an awesome guy. There's a ton of stuff in Houdini too, where the boundaries between modeling and texturing melt and fuse into something amazing, more mind bending than any drug. But then on the other hand, there's certain things you can do in 3D Coat that you can't do in any of those programs. It's a superb pleasure to move your object, your file or data or whatever you want to call it from one format to another, one program to another to work on it, like an alchemist distilling, heating, cooling, alloying, fermenting, some substance in the hopes of producing the Philosophers' Stone. And strictly speaking MOI3D isn't a CAD program. CAD programs produce BREP models. MOI3D is more of a NURBS modeler, for a designer. It's for producing a certain kind of aesthetic, not for producing technical models for stress, shear strengths, heat diffusion or weight estimations. Of course it doesn't have the very expensive high end algorithms that Alias Auto Studio or ICEM Surf have for producing Class A surfaces. Even Rhino doesn't have those; that's why Rhino is close to $1000 and Alias Auto Studio is something like $64,000.00 and ICEM Surf as part of CATIA is at least $20,000 plus over $3000 in annual maintenance and remote server fees. Having said all that, I've tried to see how far I can push 3D Coat down that Alias road, in this case by copying the work of the unparalleled master of NURBS modeling Daniel Simon. https://danielsimon.com Here's my 100% 3D Coat cable imitating Daniel's As you can see there's some serious deficiencies in my voxel model's irregular chamfers between various geometric objects; the problem is in striking the correct tangency where the chamfers segue into the objects, from one to another. Only NURBS and to a cruder degree BREP are going to truly do that for you. I need to do further experiments with Mesh Fusion in Modo or Groboto to see just how far it permits that kind of perfect tangency in the irregular segue between two boolean shapes in union. But then Modo costs $599 annually and MOI 3D is something like $300 for a permanent license. Both do the same trick though perhaps MOI 3D is more precise?

I concur entirely with this sentiment. Great stuff. Thanks again.

Thanks a lot.

It would be nice to have a squared profile in that list beyond the hemisphere and arrow etc. so you could do a long four sided curve or filament with it or for that matter any shape you wanted. It seems you used to be able to do that but the manner escapes me after several years of absence.

Aha right click on Objects banner at the top of the list of tools and click on show all objects or restore all objects when the drop down appears. I wonder how that got hidden? hmm.. That Custom UI trick is a good one though. I'm going to hide away a lot of the tools I rarely use. Thanks Carlosan.

I would click on the object (in this case the dome) and then select extract shell. You can select at that time the thickness of the shell you want in voxels then when the vessel is hollow slice off the side you want open. That's what I did with this teacup.

I've looked on 4.9.22 and 4.9.26 and I don't have Primitives. This is what happens when you're out of the loop for a long time.

That really opens up a lot of powerful opportunities to use bevels over undulating edges the way you can with BREP modeling. I like that.