L'Ancien Regime

Hey guess what? It's March! That means the new 3d Coat will soon be out. Oh boy.

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.

How does Unreal compare to Unity?

hahaha oh man....this would hurt. Nvidia has launched the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti, a new entry-level card in its GeForce RTX 30 Series of Ampere-based gaming GPUs, joining the existing GeForce RTX 3090, 3080 and 3070. The new $399 card outperforms the much more expensive previous-generation Quadro RTX 2080 Super. http://www.cgchannel.com/2020/12/nvidia-launches-the-geforce-rtx-3060-ti/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+cgchannel%2FnHpU+(CG+Channel+-+Entertainment+Production+Art) Last time I found a new Radeon VII for sale new a month ago it was more than twice the price I paid for it. Hey Carlosan how would it work if I ran a 3060 simultaneously with my Radeon VII..

The micro vertex techique requires a lot more delicacy to lay down, and attention to layering but in many ways it gives superior results. The lowest layers should be hand painted for broad color effects then the displacement no more than 13% at the very most while the simultaneous color layers should be around 56% or so depending on the base photographic stencils you're using. With the Per Pixel approach you' almost need to go double that, particularly in the displacement. This is just a crude test but sort of a valid example

I was reading the wiki on these two systems and I was wondering if there was any way to take advantage of both; say to go in and paint in Micro Vertex and then after to load the entire project as Per Pixel and go in and add details with the the latter system, thereby getting the benefit of both their advantages. The wiki indicated that it wasn't possible but maybe somebody out there knows to the contrary.

So I've been using Per Pixel and it's really difficult to work with. The colors and textures between the different angled photos are very hard to match. I took a break from it to think this through and I just tried the micro vertex painting system instead and it just goes on a lot faster and easier. The Per Pixel seems to create a dryer more porous looking bone while the first one seems to have more of a living bone look and when I get into painting muscles attached to bones I think they'll work much better with the micro vertex approach

Thanks for this. I particularly liked your vase; it's seamless alright and that's what I'm struggling with always in these kinds of projects because if the original photos aren't all lit identically with at least a 2 point softbox setup and maybe a third point reflective card to even the light out so there's no shadows or color bleeds from the surroundings, creating that seamless continuous texture. You definitely don't want a key light for this kind of project. The need for authentic scientific validity in this far outweighs any artistic fun so it's a bit stressful to try to get it right. In 3D Coat there's masks but essentially the layer system in the paint room works as freeze layers or masks so that as you said you can produce one continuous texture. But you're right about one thing; 3D coat is the best program for this kind of work.

I've tended in the past to not take advantage of all the tools in 3D Coat, just jumping in and going for results. Too many tools to learn can sort of lead to an overload when you stack it on top of a project. But this time I've gone about trying to master the paint room. I've learned a lot in the last week or two but I'm only scratching the surface of the available tools. I'm going to have to figure out the freeze tools for example. Any of you have any favorite tools in your workflow you'd care to recommend? When you're doing complex textures 360 on an object it's important to have each angle shot assigned a matching layer to keep track of your work so you can go back and make adjustments and corrections without going crazy. I inserted separate tool bars on the interface for depth gloss and color; dealing with them on the top bar menu was driving me crazy. In particular the depth seems to want to set itself to 100 with each new texture or alteration. Keeping layers locked down was an important part of my new organized work regimen. About half the work is in photoshop, just making the photographic texture materials useable in the paint room. You have to get rid of shadows, and color bleeds from various sources, paint out the specular reflections to turn your source photo into an even texture. And I used to be critical of the amount of time Andrew invested in his own render engine but now I'm finding it indespensible. It's incredibly fast and gives very forgiving results. I'm just flicking back and forth constantly. Stuff that looks grotesque in the paint room can turn out surprisingly nice in the render room.

It's not working for me in 4.9.65 and frankly it's sort of dissatisfying even with shadows off in that I can only move the light from side to side and not position it any angle I want. Hopefully in the 5.0+ versions we'll have a better lighting system for the sculpt room.

Learning this again for the third time and once again, digman to the rescue.