L'Ancien Regime

Metaballs would be very cool. Houdini has them as does Blender and I'm just doing a Chipp Walters tutorial on them and they are a very powerful tool for broad base modeling. Not sure about the programming end of things but from a mathematics POV they seem to be pretty simple. A typical function chosen for metaballs is the inverse-square law, that is the contribution to the thresholding function falls off in a bell as the distance from the centre of the metaball increases. Incidentally; The technique for rendering metaballs was invented by Jim Blinn in the early 1980s to model atom interactions for Carl Sagan's 1980 TV series Cosmos. You know Blinn as in Blinn shaders.

I'm just coming back to 3D Coat after a half year hiatus and I started rummaging through my 3D coat files and found these saved samples from your previous generous advice. I'm very interested in anything you do but what I'd love to see more than anything is a comprehensive 3D Coat manual (as I've said before). I don't want to be a nag but you did say "any other suggestions". I would pay for a really comprehensive manual of this quality in PDF form. Frankly the current manual simply doesn't come close to cutting it.

And now Intel is working on employing photonics in their devices,

https://www.tweaktown.com/news/84949/russia-to-disconnect-from-global-internet-on-march-11/index.html

As an aside...

No more free upgrades to perpetual licences of ZBrush Pixologic‘s policy of providing indefinite free upgrades to users with perpetual licences of ZBrush has ended. Anyone who bought a licence of the digital sculpting software before 29 December 2021 will get free upgrades for one year following the purchase; anyone who bought after that date will get no free upgrades. The change follows Maxon‘s acquisition of the firm, which was also completed on 29 December 2021. Free upgrades to ZBrush ended on 29 December 2021 The change in ZBrush upgrade policy was widely expected, following the announcement last month that Maxon was to acquire the assets of Pixologic pending regulatory approval. http://www.cgchannel.com/2022/01/free-upgrades-to-perpetual-licences-of-zbrush-have-ended/

https://i.imgur.com/N8Zdah3.jpg https://wccftech.com/amds-monstrous-epyc-genoa-cpu-for-sp5-lga-6096-socket-pictured-up-to-96-zen-4-cores-400w-tdp/ The Turin will have 1024 threads! https://i.imgur.com/4yvFu06.png

https://www.benq.com/en-us/monitor/designer/pd3200u.html and son of a gun, it swivels from landscape to portrait mode too...in 2020!

First of all AMD is coming out with a 256 core CPU! So that's 512 THREADS!!! https://wccftech.com/amd-epyc-turin-zen-5-cpus-rumored-to-feature-up-to-256-cores-192-core-configurations-max-600w-configurable-tdps/ So how can you possibly cool that beast? ICEGIANT ProSiphon Elite from Austin Tex. https://www.icegiantcooling.com/ It says here it's $119 USD https://www.icegiantcooling.com/copy-of-home12884

What I'm saying is that I have what would have been considered the most powerful computer beyond anyone's imagination in 1970, a computer that a trillion dollars probably couldn't buy, is sitting on my desk, I'm typing this message to you on it right now. Right now there's no Unreal 5 games out there at all. In two or three years almost all the games and a lot of movies using Unreal 5 will be out there. Now is the time to jump on board Unreal 5. Small teams of ordinary joes like us will be making stupendous high quality movies in Unreal 5 on a shoestring budget and 30fps will be just fine for that. It's already beginning. Grousing about nanite because you can't get a GPU card or they're a bit pricey for your budget really isn't much of an argument. Not having to UV map or do reduced geometry retopo is an argument. It's a huge one. Don't bother trying to disparage Nanite; it's a massive game changer for everyone obsessed with CGI. The only reason I'm not buying an Nvidia RTX Quadro A6000 right now is because I'm not in a position to utilize it with the studies I'm buried in. The Radeon VII will have to do and it does just fine for now. By the time I'm ready I'm pretty confident I'll get what I need and want. A RTX Quadro A6000 isn't in short supply at all. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1607840-REG/pny_technologies_vcnrtxa6000_pb_nvidia_rtx_a6000_graphic.html Everything is available. It just depends on how much you want/need it.

I refuse to be cynical. I can remember in 1970 that 10kb of hand woven ring magnet copper wire RAM for the Apollo moon mission onboard computers cost $10 million USD which is like $30-$50 million in today's money. It's all good. Unreal 5 is a game changer and will liberate a whole new generation of artists, not just for games (which I find frankly to be boring and repetitious) but for movie makers and other artistic disciplines.

Computer artists should never study and work for the technology of the current year. They should be looking 3-5 years in advance. What is a $2000 card requisite today will be a $350 card in 3 or 4 years. Nanites is going to be awesome.

Yeah, surface mode...with a very high polycount then put that high polycount object, painted in high res right into Unreal Engine 5 with Nanite Virtualized Geometry. Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry frees artists to create as much geometric detail as the eye can see. Nanite virtualized geometry means that film-quality source art comprising hundreds of millions or billions of polygons can be imported directly into Unreal Engine—anything from ZBrush sculpts to photogrammetry scans to CAD data—and it just works. Nanite geometry is streamed and scaled in real time so there are no more polygon count budgets, polygon memory budgets, or draw count budgets; there is no need to bake details to normal maps or manually author LODs; and there is no loss in quality. No more retopo, no more UV mapping, no more displacement maps, no more normal maps, just glorious detail to the max straight out of 3D Coat Surface Mode. AND....no need for Ambient Occlusion maps. UE5 doesn't use AO maps...its environmental lighting calculates ambient occlusion real time which I find to be astounding, amazing. We are living in glorious times... It's free and frankly it produces what to my eyes are the equivalent of high end render engines in real time. And it's free. It's making me reassess my entire workflow, with a radical simplification of the workflow. I have to hand it to digman, he saw this coming before I did and jumped right in there. I'm busy learning VEX code in Houdini right now but once I (hopefully) nail that down I'm going to UE5.

https://wccftech.com/deepcool-launches-premium-ak620-high-performance-dual-tower-cpu-cooler-featuring-sleek-aesthetics-lga-1700-compatibility/ $70.82 USD AK620 - MSRP: 59,99 euros https://www.guru3d.com/news-story/deepcool-announces-the-ak620-high-performance-cpu-cooler.html

ECC VRAM and pro drivers. Here's the main details from NVIDIA: "... If you are a gamer who prioritizes day of launch support for the latest games, patches, and DLCs, choose Game Ready Drivers. If you are a content creator who prioritizes reliability for creative workflows including video editing, animation, photography, graphic design, and livestreaming, choose Studio Drivers. Do a little bit of both? No worries, either can support running the best games and creative apps." And with the gpu shortages a lot of those pro cards compare favorably with the actual prices of gamer cards.

https://wccftech.com/nvidia-intros-rtx-a2000-an-entry-level-small-form-factor-professional-graphics-card/ https://www.thebharatexpressnews.com/nvidia-rtx-a2000-workstation-gpu-launched-with-6-gb-gddr6-ecc-vram/ NVIDIA has officially introduced its entry-level workstation graphics card, the RTX A2000, making RTX technology more accessible to professionals. The NVIDIA RTX A2000 features the Ampere GPU architecture & all the RTX goodness that you'd expect in a compact and power-efficient design. Nvidia RTX A2000 is reportedly priced at around $ 450 (around Rs. 33,500) and will be available from Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, global channel partners of Nvidia and other manufacturers from October. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1644218-REG/pny_technologies_vcnrtxa4000_pb_nvidia_rtx_a4000_graphics.html The A4000 is actually a really good deal.. And frankly so is the A5000. Imagine running Redshift on this beast. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1644219-REG/pny_technologies_vcnrtxa5000_pb_nvidia_rtx_a5000_graphics.html

"played by white" The campaign was based on many duplicities. The first of them was that Iron Eyes Cody was actually born Espera de Corti — an Italian-American who played Indians in both his life and on screen. The commercial's impact hinged on the emotional authenticity of the Crying Indian's tear. Just accept it as a quaint artifact of the times. Obviously the movie is *****, as are 99% of movies frankly. In Limehouse Blues another Anna Mae Wong movie George Raft plays a Chinese man. Anna Mae Wong was herself sort of a historical character as she was the first Chinese woman to be a movie star in America. But it's worth going through them for all sorts of period details that would otherwise be lost today.

Good stuff, lots of character.. Maybe you should add this character to your story;

Isn't that deactivation of the older version only applicable if the Beta Tools are activated? I just fired up 4.9.74 and it gave me the warning that it would be deactivated in 8 days because I had Beta Tools activated. I went into Preferences, and turned off all the Beta Tools and then restarted 4.9.74 and I got no warning that it would be deactivated. Got to say there's a lot to love in the old version though I'm happy to have purchased the new 2021 upgrade...

... problem solved, sort of.

It should be a mix of both. The UI hasn't changed that much and really how difficult is it to produced an infographic anyway, particularly for a program that is all about graphics. Rygaard produced those two inforgraphics on the brush engine in under 2 minutes. I'm not asking for something that's immensely difficult here. The people that created this software know it inside out. What is to stop them from just whipping out an awesome PDF that is vivid , easy to read and comprehensive of all the tools functionality? Snip tool + Photoshop...it's easy to do whether in the initial creation or the updates.

Let's look at the Manual for the new Modelling Room for example. Let's look at the Extrude functionality. That's it? That's all we're going to get? Like the developers that created the four different extrusion tools didn't have the time to bang out two or three paragraphs on how it actually works, or take a few screen shots like Rygaard's above to demonstrate it? How to get it to extrude along a normal? Really? There was no time for that?

That's true but there's several things wrong with it. 1. The user base for 3D Coat is small , relatively amateurish, and reticent to post tutorials and advanced works or share workflows, compared to Zbrush which has an overabundance of super accomplished professional artists churning out superb tutorials all the time. 2. The "common knowledge base" is important but it's also unwieldly for those who simply need to get up and running and desperately need a proper manual that really goes deep into the functionality of the program in an easy to digest manner. We can't all be hovering over this forum looking here and there desperately for information that for the most part doesn't exist. Making proper documentation isn't something that can be easily dispensed with. As I've said before; go look at Houdini's documentation. This is how a software is supposed to present itself to its users. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ This is a manual to learn from. What we have now here in 3D coat isn't adequate. I'm sorry. I just paid for my update and frankly it's not up to snuff. A one and a half minute demo on the new Modelling Room is what you get when you go to the manual and want specific info on the Modelling Room. That's not right. We shouldn't have to go to digman and bother him to tell us how this software works. Pay Rygaard to produce a proper manual.

yeah the password recovery letter I got sent me to a non functioning page on the Pilgway website. But I was able to purchase my update successfully.