L'Ancien Regime

The sacrum progressed along to the point where I couldn't resist making a save and then a quick experimental autopo, just to see how Andrew's algorithm handled such a topologically complex toroidial object; all those holes! I didn't do anything, no painted weights, no splines, I just let the algorithm do its thing...and it passed with flying colors. Very impressive. And an aside; when you undertake to do the human or any other animal form there's a natural human tendency to become an Aristotelian and seek some ideal human form with ideal proportions, but of course that's absurd. In my simple researches for this I can't believe how much the same parts diverge from one another in their genetic variations. The sacrum particularly seems to be very individualized...there's nothing even close to being a typical sacrum. It's all very strange and a little bit unnerving. Who and what are we anyway? The more I study it, the less I seem to know about what it actually should look like..

http://youtu.be/o0piBgR1HT4

This is what I love most about 3d coat and voxels...you need to make a hole? Just poke your finger through it like wet clay...no fuddling around trying to understand the mysteries of topology mathematics..

The sacrum represents more than just the problem of sculpting it as an independent bone here.. It forces me to organize my workspace in preparation for the entire spine development. And the sacrum-hip bone connection is a very tight one that will require boolean subtraction between the sacrum and hip. I had to monkey around quite a bit last night figuring out how to bring in my meshes from Maya for voxelization and still obtain symmetry. I solved that before I went to bed, so now the stage is set for the full development of all the vertebrae in rapid sequence with separate layers for each bone. And with those little technical problems solved I can just spend my morning enjoying sculpting the structural elegance of the sweep of the bones and learning the secrets of the body's engineering... Later near the end I'll carve the rough contact of the sacrum to the hip bone then subtract it from the butted hip bone...

I wrestled with it for hours and I'm still not satisfied but at least now I'm ready to go from voxels to surface mode and Live Clay detailing... Before I went to that step though I thought I'd test it out for it's overall form buy doing another autopo of its latest state, exporting it to Maya and duplicating it on a negative one on the x dimension to assemble a 2/3 complete pelvis. Autopo was to 10,000 polygons..

I needed a break from texturing in light of new stuff I've been learning about using displacement maps and sculpting to a much higher level than voxels allowed with the surface tools, particularly the live clay tools..probably going to redo everything I've done so far to encapsulate everything Digman's been showing me. The pelvis is a damned complex piece of bioengineering. The entire thing manages to act as a platform to support the spine, a cradle to hold the intestines with two little sockets for the hips all thrown in together in one little strangely sculpted pair of hip bones. It's an amazing piece of minimalistic functionalism.. I like flowing back and forth from Maya to 3d Coat and back.

This drove me crazy too last week...

Interesting point. This is my fear. I'm worried about ATI not supporting the interface for eon Vue too... One question though; what generation of ATI GPU was this? My 4870X2 had terrible drivers and I don't think you could update them without reinstalling windows. Maybe that's changed with the 7000 and soon to be released 8000 series. OTOH... Well there's still time for deciding before my upgrade in late 2012 early 2013...

Extrude, Gum, Absolute and Freeze didn't work at all on my CUDA 64 bit version, but now with 16A they're working perfectly. One small fix for something that is not quite a bug, more of a bit of clumsy ergonomics. The Paint Weight tool for AUTOPO is directly affected by the Opacity of the Freeze Tool in the Paint Room. It took quite a bit of puzzling to figure out why my Polygon Weight painter was turned off in Autopo, let me tell you..maybe a more direct manner of changing the opacity of the Paint Polygon Weight Tool in Autopo could be arranged in place of this situation. Thanks for fixing those bugs. The hard work is paying off Other than that great stuff. Loving 3d coat. Looking foward to buying my upgrade to Version 4.

Dear Andrew...Vray has both CUDA and OpenCL support and ATI is coming out with a top of the line GPU with 12 gigs of ddr5 RAM. ATI is going to blow away CUDA and NVidia in both power and price.I'm just waiting to blow $5000 on a multiple GPU OpenCL multi teraflop monsters. Please please please add OpenCL compliance.

Full renders are just bizarre, totally different that the heavily painted models in the 3d viewport window. Bring on the holograms!

YOu know I'm going to entirely redo everything I've done so far. Digman showed me that power of displacement mapping in 3d coat and the amazing real time displacement rendering in the work viewfinder. . And it also opens the door to really getting in and hand painting displacement in a powerful way.. This looks very rough but it's just the beginning. Damn I'm loving 3d coat.

OK I'm going to work on developing this. I love this workflow for hand painting textures on a greyscale in the paint room on a 3d object then just exporting as a Targa then reimporting as a real time displacement map...this will be excellent, far better than Normal Maps though they'll still be useful as another layer of finer detail..

http://youtu.be/tcZ4bHj3Awc

.l

And thank you Digman for showing me the Cavity Painting tools tonight

Two hours on the talus... Doing a deep study on it like this really makes me appreciate the inherent engineering that nature/god has place in the bone. Some parts of a bone are dense for structural strength, some parts are dense and smooth as joints that take a lot of friction, and other parts are porous, for lightness...it's amazing really. I wish my clumsy efforts could express this better..

Digman should build an entire cathedral in 3d Coat and decorate it with sculptures like this. It could be The Church Of The Brutal Covenant.

http://www.futuresho...r/10195789.aspx yep...when I bought my 14 megapixel camera for $189 I thought that was cool but now this; 16 megapixels for $89!! And they're great for hyper detail close up shots.. I carry mine with me in my pocket everywhere I go, always ready to "harvest textures" at a moment's notice without having to hassle with big bulky equipment. I hear Nokia is coming out any day with a 41 megapixel phone camera with Carl Zeiss lenses in it. I'm hearing it'll be $699 unlocked.. http://www.pcworld.c..._in_the_us.html You'll be able to extract 39 megapixels to Photoshop from it...

Calcaneous painting almost finished.

A whole lot of headaches but it's back on track again.

When I use it all it does is erases the displacement while leaving the painted diffuse color. It will not transpose the texture over to where I want to paint it. I need to paint displacement (normal map displacement) and diffuse map simultaneously.. this is true of release 15, 12E and 14A.

http://exocortex.com/alembic The Exocortex Crate product suite is a set of professional grade, consistent and commercially supported Alembic plug-ins and tools that enable VFX studios and independent VFX professionals to standardize their tool chains around the Alembic file format as the core data interchange and automation format. https://groups.googl...ion/4Tg2f0eElOc http://www.scriptspo...cripts/j3d-moya A Consistent and Expansive Feature Set. Our Alembic suite is not a proof of concept, rather it is designed to be one of the foundations of your content creation pipeline. As such, our plugins load and save all the major scene elements that you would expect. We support meshes across all platforms, including those with static, deformable, and changing topology. We support particle systems across all platforms, including both simple systems and those with instancing. We also support curves across all platforms. With Exocortex Crate you won’t find your data stuck in a particular DCC because of a partial Alembic implementation. http://youtu.be/I__MeR8jsFk

that's pretty damn cool..

A problem drives me mad ( it turns out that somehow my voxel sculpture is hollow and it's autotopologizing the surface of the inner hidden hollow, an artifact from creating the original voxel from a Maya .obj mess), and Digman rescues me by telling me to hit the fill command in the voxel sculpt's layers tab... It seems like a trifle until you waste huge amounts of time trying to figure out what is going wrong...