L'Ancien Regime

That's amazing destruction work

Thanks for explaining this.

I find the documentation is deplorable in 3D Coat and that's very frustrating because it's my favorite go to tool. The manual is totally superficial to the point of being useless. Videos are scattered and often insufficient (or just completely antiquated) for serious work, leaving vast aspects of a tool's functionality unmentioned. Everything should be thoroughly documented and put up for us the way it is in say, Houdini. I'm trying to learn the new Polyhedron tool and unless Digman comes back to politely and patiently explain it to me then I'm at a loss. And digman doesn't work for 3d Coat and so it's unfair that he should be the only teacher around here to tell us how to use this program in depth. And man, does digman ever know this program in depth. Ditto for Vertex Painting. There's one or two very superficial videos on this workflow. When you design these tools why not write down what you're thinking and how they're supposed to be used in a workflow in great detail? Then just put it up as part of your documentation for us to study.

nice

So I reworked the bottle stopper and in doing so I discovered that a Normal Map is essential to rendering glass. By reworking it's displacement entirely with the normal map in ppp, it just popped, crystalline clear, the way it was supposed to be, not murky or sandblasted as it initially appeared. To do that with the rest of the bottle I'll have to redo the gold pattern on it using a normal map instead of just a painted displacement identical to the painted gold alpha basically. Even with just a mouse it should be much better second time round. I didn't have time for that tonight but I did have time to apply a simple normal map to the .obj slab of amber liquid in the crystal flask. That and removing some base color blue that was tucked away in the liquid shader's base color made it look a lot more like some kind of perfume and not yesterday's coffee in your secretary's styrofoam cup.

Is this 3D Coat or is this Zbrush?

Nice.

This is more of a proof of concept rather than a finished work at this point. The raised, gilt pattern on the glass was painted using a mouse so that made it pretty damn clumsy to execute; I don't even have so much as a Bamboo tablet right now. I'm waiting to buy a Cintique Pro soon so this will have to do. The glass stopper needs badly to be reworked. Lots of tweaks and experiments to come on photon maps and caustics. But the main thing for this weekend was to simply pull this off to this extent so I'm happy with that. And again, the Autopo produces impeccable meshes now, particularly in tandem with the Symmetry. I'd hate to have to hand retopo the Boolean hollowed interior of this vessel with a hand retopo.

Very very nice. Could you please tell us something about your workflow for that? is is pure Photoshop painting or did you build up a lot of it in 3D?

The best compliment I can give Cleitus' work is that I love studying it so I can learn how to get proficient in 3D Coat. He has mastery over tools most people never even touch. Please do tutorials Please do videos of you working with all the tool clicks involved.

I can see its potential virtues but I'm having a bit of trouble grasping it even with tutorials. For instance, this tutorial; It says that you're painting on Voxels, apparently mainly in the Sculpt Room with shaders as opposed to PPP or MV painting. Fine. But then he starts to work but he's not painting on voxels. He's painting on the surface mesh in the Paint Room. I'm already confused right at the start. Someone please rectify this for me. Maybe I should just proceed as though surface mode was the equivalent of voxel mode? Also what is the difference between Micro Vertex and Vertex painting practically? Mainly I want this because I want to work with painting out displacement maps, not normal maps. Seek and ye shall find; I solved my own problem

I'll clone the original solid wing several times. then I'll cut out the intricate web of gold holding it all together. Then I'll take another clone with the cut out web still visible but ghosted and cut the crystal cells out by hand with the cutting tool or just extrude a clone of that gold web and use it as a boolean tool to cut out the solid wing. Something like that.

OK. But I used to use that technique and this workflow is much better. That autoretopo with the long spindly loop is quite the technological accomplishment I can assure you, since you do seem to be new to this subject. In fact I'm amazed by it to no end. It's a huge liberation for artists in 3D computer graphics. It wasn't possible 3 years ago. The 3D Coat/Zbrush/Mudbox workflow is to sculpt with 10, 20, 30 million polygons or voxels, then retopo, by hand or automatically, a much simpler poligonal mesh then bake out the fine details of the original sculpt onto the UV mapped retopology, then render the UV mapped poligonal retopo with it's Displacement, Normal Maps, color maps and ambient occlusion and curve maps, gloss maps and perhaps even emitter map.

It's not mocking the program whatsoever. That wing autoretopo is just a test for a much more complex retopo job that would be a pain in the ass to do otherwise. It passed the test with flying colors. This is going to be a job that requires a good autoretopology program, not otherwise. I'm looking forward to some extremely satisfying renders with all that gold, enamel, pearls and cut crystals in it. I'm doing it in 3D Coat. It's got all the tools I'll need outide of the render engine which will probably be Renderman or maybe AMD's ProRender.

I just did this test for a much more complex retopo job for a 3 year old project I'm reviving. It took several tries but just straight up Autopo with no painted weight maps or contour splines added gave me this adequate result with a final setting of 10,000 polygons. 15000 was too much and 7500 not enough; the retopo just crumbled at the outermost fine extremities of the topography. Two or three years ago there's no way Autopo could have given a result like this. This is such a relief. I hate doing big complex retopo jobs by hand. The retopo took far more time than the initial voxel model to sculpt. I spent an entire month going crazy on one retopo job. It was crazy. I went as mad as a march hare trying to do this by hand. It was like solving some insane calculus problem that wouldn't work out no matter how you tried to solve it.

Post em. Let us see. I'm particularly impressed with the way it automatically detects and works out flow lines. Andrew or whoever worked on this should come in here and tell us as much as he (they) (zhe?) can without giving out trade secrets.

It royally kicks ass. I remember the bad old days. This is amazing and complex as hell with that nasal sinus area above the palate and those eye sockets are not simple at all; they're thin semi spherical membranes and not a single tangled mesh or uneven mess in sight. And FAST. As good if not better than Zremesher. 15000 polys with no splines or painted weight maps.

I don't have any philosophical explanations for it. Creationism, Darwinism...it's almost irrelevant when you start looking closely at how in one spot you find incredible gossamer thin bone tissues and in other places a network of thick buttresses or in the case of the skull, a thick helmet with an almost spongy porous interior to protect that precious computer from shocks. Its hard not to be seduced into thinking there's some meta intelligence dictating the formation of these complex structures to its purpose. It's a sublime miracle. It's an absurd contraption.

Well the time has come with my new Threadripper and Radeon VII finally up and running to fire this thread up again. Seriously anatomy is so much fun and as someone said to me here once, perhaps in this thread, that it's wrong to do a hybrid approach with Maya or some other subd polygon program to start out a body part. They were right and frankly working in 3D Coat, purely with voxels and then going over to surface mode solves so many problems in working with complex body parts. With that I think I'm finally going to go over to Vertex Painting too; it's a challenge with a lot to learn there but I think that's the price to pay to take advantage of some seriously powerful tools. When I was looking at some source photos of the skull lately I was thinking about how strange a thing it is. There's this big cranium, a shell housing this huge brain and then the face architecture is sort of stuck onto the lower front of it, almost like a carpenter's scaffolding. It got my thinking that rather than trying to sculpt the entire head all as one mass, rather you should create this brain container then use the Curve Tool to construct the rather delicate structures of the face; Inferior nasal concha , the mandible, the maxilla, the palatine bones, the vomer, the zybomatic bones. Then duplicate and shrink down that Cranium and use it to subtract it from the original to hollow it out so you can study the interior of the skull too.

So I created a new curve for the Curve Tool. If I just make one span it's set up perfect, face on, just the way I want it to be. But if I go for a third or a fourth it flips over on edge. Is there any way to keep it face on no matter how many segments I make with it? Also when I was making my new curve object, I came across this cool page in the manual on creating new curve shapes but when I go to the curves section in the sculpt chapter of the manual I can't find it. I only could get it through the little menu drop down when I was creating the new curve tool shape. The manual is very mysterious and uh..opaque. I wish it had all Andrews notes when he was creating each tool item or something like that.

Just to let you know, DM2 is out. $100 on Gumroad https://gumroad.com/alexeyvanzhula#xKBKM

So on further reflection I did a lot more work on Autopo, adding painting the voxel area where you want more detail and also adding indicators for mesh flow. After many tests my verdict is less is more but having said that, it works well. I felt it was particularly important to have more geometry flowing around the nostrils and it worked not too badly. I went from 4900 to 10,000 polygons and didn't have to even touch up a single ngon or tangled mess anywhere. Using symmetry was essential to good results. My only critique would be around the rim of the eyes but when you start drawing in too many splines and insisting on two many conflicting flows that's when things start to get tangled up in the overload. I can live with this. Well actually I went back and tried an added loop around the eyes with three lines coming out of the eye sockets; one across the bridge of the nose, one straight back to the top of the ears and one up into the forehead. Really, there is no need for ZRemesher at all now. 3D coat can handle it all. Oh and I just discovered "close holes" and "remove n-gons". Very nice for those unreachable problems in the eye sockets and other enclosed areas.

It's been two years and frankly I'm astounded at just how good AUTOPO is. I know it's not going to give animators the kind of precise mesh they want but still. I'm just amazed at the results it's giving me compared to the junk it was putting out before. What happened. Can one of you historians of 3D Coat and Andrew tell me just what has been going on in this department? This is 4900 polygons with internal space for the mouth and nasal passages and eye sockets as you can sort of see. That alone should have confused it and made an atrocious mess. Bravo Andrew.

That's what I'm finding with my 2950x with a Dark Rock Pro TR4.

So much to learn after a long layoff This tutorial serves just as well for 3D coat which is better set up for making layers for sss skin renders. I really think 3D coat is superior to Zbrush in this capacity.