L'Ancien Regime

Atomontage is pretty old. Never seen this magicavoxel before though it's been around since 2015. That Path Tracer render engine is actually pretty good.

https://ephtracy.github.io https://www.artstation.com/madmaraca Comes with a path tracer. At first I didn't know what I was looking at; some variant on Minecraft?

Not a bad idea.

I just tried signing into Trello and Mantis and it's no go for posting anything. I can't figure that stuff out. This entire board is called Feature Requests. Why isn't enough to just mention it here without jumping through all those other hoops?

That's a problem when every second move you make disturbs the absolute angle of front or top or whatever, even in orthographic.

So how do you lock the view?

Thx

Among other improvements to the reference images. Scaling is unweildly, counterintuitive, not precise. It's too easy to be using a move tool for example and slip off the sculpt you're working on and inadvertantly move the reference image you're using. Very vexatious. Perhaps there's some control at present to lock it in place but if there is I can't find it. At present, I dread using the ref image in 3D Coat, I avoid it. Hint; Maya does it right. Simple, straightforward, easy to scale and position, totally stable in the viewport once put in place.

I agree with you about the render engine development. Instead of developing their own they should have simply created a deeper link embedding Renderman and Radeon Pro Render with full functionality rather than making their own. But then perhaps Andrew just fancies exploring render engine development for his own satisfaction. I don't care for Blender as admirable as it may be. Perhaps I just don't want to have to develop the muscle memory to run a workflow that demands elaborate hotkey combinations that change their sequence with every plug in you load into it. Personally I like the different work rooms in 3D Coat. The layers bar is annoying though with accidental shifts from Voxel to Surface mode always a hazard.

CAD is about BREP. I said that already. Not NURBS. NURBS is more for elegant surface designs like car bodies and expensive yachts. And your argument merely serves to reinforce my idea; all these people trying to do hard surface modeling with voxels, or polygonal ngon mesh or dynamesh or even SubD's are making peepee in the wind (yes, Blender 2.90+ too). BREP is the ultimate in hard surface modeling, especially when it comes to splitting or shatter booleans or any other kind of boolean workflow not to mention elaborate chamfers and bevels. A solid BREP modeling system in 3D Coat would solve your problems and I bet Andrew could implement it quickly if he wanted to. If he did it all with a non destructive node workflow like Houdini that gave you a bulletproof dependency graph/history then so much the better. And as a by product that would also open the door eventually to parametric modeling like Autodesk Dynamo or Rhino Grasshopper down the road. This is a model using NURBS tools, polygonal tools, subD and voxels with Houdini's OpenVDB tools, translating back and forth effortlessly between modes, entirely within Houdini, no plug ins, no Vanzhula Modeller. I often wish that SideFX would just purchase 3D Coat and bring in Andrew as a senior developer at Houdini. Rather than seeing a move like this as ignoring old glitches and bugs, I see it as leapfrogging those problems in an audacious manoeuvre that simply makes your vexatious old bugs disappear into irrelevancy with an entirely new innovative approach. This is what Andrew excels at; rapid innovative development that no one else has done.

Actually a lot of CAD tools have added SubD toolsets, even Alias, and with Grasshopper and Dynamo there's a lot of momentum towards procedural tools in there too. Rhino has some sculpt capability now. The point is that when you want to model the world there's all sorts of things that have to be modelled and no one toolset can comprise all the necessary workflows to attain them. Model an engine block without proper bevels and chamfers like Siemens NX or Creo or Catia is an impossibility. Both Modo and Houdini with the Modeler plug in have a workaround with Mesh Fusion, derived from Groboto's initial work. 3D Coat is my favorite program because Andrew is what I call an advanced thinker. He can take a white paper proposal and implement it as a vital toolset that nobody ever thought was necessary or possible, as he showed by being the first person to implement automated retopology, or the first person to implement sculpting with voxels. He beat Houdini to the punch with voxel implementation. I think that he could blow everybody away, MOI3D, even Rhino, Modo, even Maya if he just focused on making 3D Coat the ultimate artist's modeling toolset. Obviously he's not going to be able to take on Catia ICEM Surf or Autodesk Alias but Maya has a NURBs toolset (not a very good one either it's basically Alias 1999 or something like that). NURBS does make sense but more importantly BREP makes sense. Look at the incredible variety of work now being produced by 3D Coat users. It's not just organic modeling anymore. You're missing the point if you think Geomagic is just NURBS. They bought Freeform which was the first computer sculpting program, preceding Zbrush by several years. It was a project by a team at MIT using an expensive haptic device so it never caught on. Thus in Geomagic you can create seamlessly in NURBS, BREP, SubD, polygons, or if you choose, a kind of dynamesh that allows you to sculpt and then go back and forth at need or at a whim. This is the ideal for creative people. You shouldn't have to be limited by a specific app to where your creative desires lead you. I mean look at this; is this organic sculpting? This is the work of one of the foremost users of 3d Coat.

The ideal workflow would be if 3d Coat emulated GeoMagic, with polygonal/ subD/ NURBS/ BREP/ and then OpenVDB tools all in one modeling package so you could just seamlessly go back and forth between modeling modes at need. No need for amateur hour hard surface modeling tools. The real deal for machine design with BREP and NURBS. If nothing else your bevels and chamfers would be perfect regardless of the underlying shape of the surface. Then voxelize it for sculpting like Geomagic's free form sculpting.

uh...WOW.

Mantra render of the per pixel paint on the left and the microvertex paint on the right. Aside from their sloppiness as just test paint jobs (it's going to take a while to tie down the finer points of the technique) I think I'm prefering the results from per pixel painting. It's more subtle in its effects.