L'Ancien Regime

No it doesn't Something has changed though; now instead of "FALSE" it stays at "FIND" and after entering my serial number and hitting "FIND" nothing happens. Page refresh just returns me to the sales page. Still cannot make my purchase of an upgrade.

It's pretty cool that photonic computers are back on the agenda again; there's lots of stuff up on You Tube about it now.

Yeah I'll second that. Thanks for all your hard work.

I'm trying to upgrade; I hit on "Find my V4 license button and I'm entering my license key and it's saying that it's false. I'm also entering my email address and that's being listed as false too. It's not accepting my email address either even though I can sign into my 3d Coat online account with my email address and it does a reply to my email.

I agree...

The first photonic computer will be going on sale by the end of the year. I've been fascinated by the idea that computers could be run with photons instead of electrons since the 80's when I read an article in Scientific American about them. But the promise of those efforts failed, mainly because they tried to create transistor style logic gates that used light. But light and electricity are physically very different so that analogy didn't work out. However a reassessment of the potential of photon computing has produced a new product from a young company; Lightmatter. https://medium.com/lightmatter/the-story-behind-lightmatters-tech-e9fa0facca30 https://lightmatter.co/story/ While the optical transistor was dying, a new kind of optical computing approach was being invented. In the mid-1990s, the field of quantum computing was growing rapidly owing to new proofs that showed that quantum systems could solve problems that were intractable on classical computers. There were many known approaches to implementing quantum systems, including using photons (single particles of light). In 1994, in hopes of building an optical quantum processor, Michael Reck and co-authors described a system that used arrays of a fundamental optical component — the Mach-Zehnder Interferometer (MZI) — to perform an important mathematical operation called matrix multiplication. It's not good at logic operations, but what it does excel at is Linear Algebra, machine learning, chemistry, RAY TRACING. (go to the 15 min mark in the You Tube video) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/light-based-quantum-computer-exceeds-fastest-classical-supercomputers/ https://www.infoq.com/presentations/quantum-simulate-chemistry/ This is that 1983 article in Scientific American I read; https://www.jstor.org/stable/24968831?refreqid=excelsior%3A7c104d6a66ea167442c8e5d82d76c246 https://ur.booksc.me/book/10696832/e271e8 (downloadable PDF of the original 1983 article)

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/fake-chips-flood-china-market-fill-overseas-supply-chains China Economic Observer reported a chip agent revealed that to meet the growing demand, suppliers were no longer keeping their counterfeiting practices secret. Instead, they are openly creating separate production lines to expedite the sales of counterfeit or refurbished chips. Furthermore, businesses are no longer offering the shoddy products at half price. Many are being sold at full market value. The agent identified two types of counterfeit chips. The first involves recycling used chips from e-waste by removing the logo and cleaning them for resale with new packaging. The second involves packaging the substandard chips from the regular production line and selling them as good products. Not surprisingly, customers were often dissatisfied with the product’s performance, reliability, and durability. However, the deficiencies were not immediately evident until after the chips were used over time or under extreme conditions. At which point, it would be the customers or manufacturer of the final products who suffer a loss, while the fake chip providers often avoid troubles, according to the chip agent.

I take it this is where we're going to have to look. https://3dcoat.com/2021announcement/ All new website on July 9th.

One thing that should be remembered that 3D Coat is no longer just a one man operation. Andrew has taken on other talented workers and has a payroll to meet. If long term license holders are charged an extra $100 for V5 or 2021 whatever it's called that's reasonable.

How close in functionality is this to Zbrush IMM (Insert Multi Mesh)?

yeah IOW sculpting with straight up displacement maps generated in a compositing laboratory. 3D Coat is already half way there with the 3d sculpting in the paint room as you directly paint with normal maps. Real time sculpting with textures and displacement maps generated in a node texture workspace would be pretty cool...

Well that may be good news then; if you don't know what the ultimate form of 3D Coat 5 will be then perhaps we will be getting a new heretofore unseen interface too. The literature says we're getting a Substance Designer style parametric texture generator and a new interface. Here's hoping... And a Substance Designer style of parametric texture generator will be well worth whatever extra money we have to pay to extend our licenses ...

I may be wrong here but that link you posted was to a shader generator for the sculpt room , like red wax, or car paint or a lambert, a blinn. The new Node system is apparently a competitor to Allegorethmic Substance Designer that generates complex textures parametrically...that's what I'm taking from all the talk about nodes. But it somewhat confusing at this point. Maybe Carlosan or AbnRanger can set me straight on this.

Is the material node system in the B55 yet? I can't find it. Is it only going to appear in the full V5 (2021)? As for changing the interface radically, this is a dilemma for any program; you have the long term users that have learned the ins and outs of the program over the years, your faithful base, and they don't want the trouble of relearning a new interface which can consume a lot of time and then you have new users baffled by the arcane logic of the program. You 're going to go with the long term faithful userbase if you know what's good for you.

Yeah I've got B55 installed. It's alright. But it doesn't have the node stuff in and there's a lot more stuff coming. I do believe there is a new interface coming...at least that's what it sounded like in their announcement. Or have I missed the node editor in B55?

Let's not assume they're "crippling" anything. I think the old GUI is a tangled mess and I'm looking forward to a new redesigned interface. Let's just wait and see.

OTOH, there is the prospect of a "new interface". I'm looking forward to this as it's much more customizable.

Apparently we find out on July 5.

That doesn't trouble me too much because the different rooms are such different beasts that require their own approaches. I've been playing with Zbrush Zmodeler and I haven't really looked at the new polygonal modeling tools yet for 3D Coat. So in that room I'm just as much of a novice as you; I don't know what I'll find there, if it's going to be useful to me or not but I'm going to give a good effort to learn it just to see what's there. Who knows? Personally I struggled with texturing, trying many solutions and for UV mapping (back when I tried to do UV mapping in Maya it was so bad it turned me off totally) and then when I discovered UV mapping and texture painting in 3D Coat it was an amazing liberation for me. I prefer it to Mari; it's more visceral and sensuous to handle less abstract and detached. And it's less of a click fest than Zbrush so it's more direct and simple to use though for someone learning it that may seem hard to believe. Stick with it, and keep working with it. When you master it you'll find a lot of enjoyment in it. Is it perfect? Do I wish it was better, easier? yeah I do but maybe that's my own failings. It's a miracle to me that I even have this supercomputer on my desk and I can sculpt and paint with it at all...

The problem with Zbrush is that it started out in an odd manner. Instead of directly trying to be a simple 3D digital sculpting program it started out as this weird hybrid; a 3D/2.5D program that at the time boasted of being the next evolution into a kind of 2.5D Photoshop. This was based around the idea of PIXOLS. The idea was that you sculpted stuff in 3D then went into 2.5D mode and composited your now fixed objects into a 2D plane that still allowed for changes in lighting and illumination. This had the potential at the time of being very powerful as you could assemble scenes that were huge with great complexity even though the angle of view was now fixed. I may be wrong but my impression was that the development team was deeply influenced by their resident artist, Meats Meier. What ended up transpiring was that everyone piled in for the 3D sculpting tools and ignored the 2.5D stuff. It simply never caught on and over the years, well now decades the 3D sculpting tools rapidly grew in power but the 2.5D Pixol stuff just faded into the background. The problem was that the 2.5D pixol stuff made the interface needlessly complex and annoying for those that didn't understand all the extra stuff you had to do because of it. I knew all about this and even I would get enraged at say inadvertantly turning my sculpt into a 2.5D Pixol object that was fixed in space and not being able to immediately Ctrl Z my way back out of it. Of course you could just CTRL N to ditch the Pixol transformed sculpt then drop a fresh version of your sculpt sitting in the stack, BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD WHY? It also meant that there were 3 distinct ways to save your work in Zbrush; ZTL, ZDOC and ZPR (Z tool, Z Document, and Z Project) Here, learn all about it. Try not to puke on your keyboard. That's hard to clean up. The whole 2.5D thing seemed to encourage the pictorial horror vacui of Meat's Meier's style, or psychological mindset. So the end result was a needlessly complex interface with a lot of extra clicking and a requisite awareness of whys and wherefores of it all. Like Utopius said you can get used to it, and I have, but still it's vexatious when you're learning the interface and trying to learn say human and animal anatomy at the same time. It's one of the main reasons I prefer 3D Coat to Zbrush; 3D Coat is simply easier to learn to operate and more straightforward in getting you to where you want to go, if sculpting is where you want to go and not some elaborate and esoteric compositing with billions of Pixols (and even with 2003 computers Zbrush could deliver billions of Pixols, I'll give it that). Having said that there's some things in Zbrush I wish Andrew would incorporate soon into 3D coat, like a proper sculpt room lighting system instead of unwieldly and ineffective lighting system he has now. A powerful lighting studio in the Sculpt Room is simply indispensable to serious sculpting. In fact it would be nice if it were more akin to Maya's lighting system than even Zbrush's system which really is a bit annoying by comparison to Maya with that tiny little ball and those tiny little lightbulb icons with all the obscure little sliders. Everything in Zbrush's interface is so fidgety and tiny...eecch.

This isn't computer programming any more. this is some black art...