Jax_Cavalera

Hi Aethyr, Yes I was doing those things as you recommended. The biggest issues were that the number of zones required to accurately deal with all the in and out depths was very high and also did not mirror so I had to do this for both sides. I was not able to get the feet fixed so instead my character has flippers for feet. I've seen other baked models with proper toes.. so I'm not really sure how they were able to do this and I could not but oh-well flipper boy is the best I can get right now. I figure that it's simply a matter of adding extra V shaped quads between each toe. I have got successful bakes now but it took a lot of experimenting to get there. is there a chance that the spheres being added pre bake are able to be mirrored so you only have to set up one side optionally?

hmm so pretty much everything that I did.. don't do haha thank you. Ahh man this can be so tricky when you're doing it all for the first time. With these tips it makes it a lot more simple to understand. I'll have to try these things out and see if this also fixes the visible seams and odd baking of splits from the ref mesh.

I'm working with a 10 point multi-touch capacitive display on Windows 8 and it would be really handy if I could navigate the scenes using the ALT key modifier in conjunction with multitouch .. 1 finger is rotate (this already works) 2 fingers is zoom in or out 3 fingers is pan just those 3 touch inputs for a start would make it really easy to navigate with. in Blender they use different key modifiers instead so it's : Alt plus 1 finger touch = Rotate Alt & Control plus 1 finger touch = Zoom Alt & Shift plus 1 finger touch = Pan This isn't ideal as I prefer to not keep changing key modifiers just for navigating the 3D Scene and now that there are a lot of multitouch touchpads coming out on laptop devices, this would likely help people in those situations to navigate as well. Currently I need to plug a mouse in to navigate within 3D Coat because when I left click.. I can rotate fine. When I try to left click and right click at the same time.. it does not register the 2nd click so it does either zoom or rotate. If I want to pan I need to use my pinky to hold down the Alt Key whilst using my thumb to press the Right click button on the touch pad whilst using my other hand to touch the display for the left click whilst using my index finger on the same hand that's holding down the Right button on the touch pad to actually pan. Currently touching the display for Rotate does rotate .. so long as you are holding down Alt (otherwise it can accidentally start messing with your mesh) the problem arises as follows : I hold Alt and touch my display and slide my finger along and the view rotates as expected. I didn't quite get a full 360 degree rotation and need to rotate a little further so i release my finger (which has reached the edge of my display) and place it back near the middle and continue to slide it in the same direction to continue rotation as expected. What happens though is the view snaps back as if my mouse flew from the edge of the display to the middle in an instant and I'm not able to rotate any further around than I had previously achieved without using my touch pad to move the cursor to the middle and THEN re touching with ALT to start the slide motion for rotation again. I think that 3D Coat is using relative mouse mode instead of absolute which could be why this is happening. As my device does not have a Pressure Sensitive Pen or Wacom pen I do not have the ability to follow other tutorials that address using a pressure pen in here and I do remember one of those topics discussing the problem of Relative vs Absolute Mouse Coordinates needing to be changed. In the mean time I will look into where this is actually.. didn't think of that till right now but yeah if the compatibility for multi touch were added that would be super awesome and save my brain breaking from the finger gymnastics required to perform a pan without a mouse being plugged in

I'm using the latest version of blender 2.68 and when I draw the "F" symbols in the uv edit window they all display non-mirrored.. some of them require me to rotate the screen as they are up side down or on their side but they aren't mirrored which I am guessing means that they aren't inverted. The problem is that inside of 3D Coat I do not see any seams / baked joints where I sliced the ref mesh up for retopology. In Blender these Seams/slice zones on the bake show up like a sore thumb. I'm not sure what's causing this to happen though. any tips?

Ok I figured out part of this now.. the manual import that doesn't show the object as smooth relates to the Shading.. on the left hand side in Blender you will see Shading.. Smooth or Flat.. pick Smooth and there you go. then when you assign the model it's normal map all will be as good as it should be. As for why it's so dark.. this remains a mystery :s seems to do that regardless manual or non.. so I am going to guess that in 3D Coat htere is an area light which makes the objects look far brighter than they are in Blender. So to fix this you simply turn down the ambient lighting and direct light so it looks a little dark in 3D Coat and start painting away.

Just checking what happened with this? I've been having a real tough time getting my low poly meshes into blender so I can rig them with bones.. to then use in Unity. Unity and open Blend files so they are perfect for this.. I just can't figure out how I am meant to achieve the goal. I can export out the obj from 3D Coat and it goes with the Baked Normals and Texture maps. I then import this into Blender.. and sometimes the normals and texture map load into the mesh by default sometimes not (I only know how to apply a texture map to my mesh right now in blender). If I use the 3D Coat Applink addon in blender.. it can bring in the file and it looks similar to how it looked in 3D Coat.. But the texture is ALWAYS darker. Also, I've no idea what layer I'm meant to be painting the texture onto inside of 3D Coat.. so .. i'm just doing it onto the Occlusion layer at the moment since it's on the top of normals and others and looks the most "bright" inside of 3d coat. I see you mention Smooth Groups.. I will have to look into this for Blender as this is likely how the Applink Addon for blender imports the low poly mesh but keeps it looking "smooth" whilst when I import it as an OBJ manually.. it always looks like a rough low poly mesh no smoothing applied. EDIT : Already figured out the answer to my problems actually .. always the way you spend hours researching for an answer and nothing.. then you click back and BAM it's right in front of you.. how could you have missed it all along lol well oh well these things happen : Ok I figured out part of this now.. the manual import that doesn't show the object as smooth relates to the Shading.. on the left hand side in Blender you will see Shading.. Smooth or Flat.. pick Smooth and there you go. then when you assign the model it's normal map all will be as good as it should be. As for why it's so dark.. this remains a mystery :s seems to do that regardless manual or non.. so I am going to guess that in 3D Coat htere is an area light which makes the objects look far brighter than they are in Blender. So to fix this you simply turn down the ambient lighting and direct light so it looks a little dark in 3D Coat and start painting away.

Perhaps someone will know why this is happening : When I do a standard Export of my Retopo Mesh from the Paint Room.. I only select the Normal and Texture maps.. and no other boxes are checked. I then import the OBJ file into Blender and it looks like the retopo mesh .. with all the "boxy" edges to it. I apply the tex and normals yet it still looks "boxy" or raw without any smoothing. When I use the applink .. it comes in looking really nice.. (the actual texture is way darker than it looks in 3D Coat so I'm not sure why that happens.. this seems to be an export thing though and not exclusive to applink) The problem seems to be that when I am using the Applink.. I can't seem to be able to link or append other blender files or parts of blender files into the applink blender project .. such as a bone rig I previously created. These may all be stupid questions or have obvious answers that my inexperience with 3D Coat, Blender and Applink are rising from. Any tips on how to resolve the issues of : Importing the obj without the applink so it still looks smooth as it does when I import using applink Keeping the brightness/colour of textures light as they look in 3D Coat and not Dark like they appear when using the applink or importing the exported Texture Map. Why I am not able to append / link from other .blend files into the new file that contains the imported 3D Coat character when using applink.

Thank you, glad you enjoyed it ^ ^

Thanks for that, the Flash files that they produced in the last of the links you provide are really awesome and make it a better - compact set of reference documents.

Just letting you all know that I've put together a review for 3D Coat to get the good word out there more http://cxstudios.net/blog_zone_blog/?p=13 I plan on adding more review and general blog content as things progress but felt that this software deserved the first place as it really is a great suite of tools... when it want's to play nice haha.

Ahh that is also true and I know my modelling skills are still quite young and will get better as I go along. I forgot about poles in the case of a Cube.. yeah not always diamond shaped indeed.. I guess the poles that I was recommending to avoid though were the ones where they are a diamond shape. So in the left example I found that the Red pole was causing spiraling edge loops which were destroying the bake so by manually placing in triangles instead... the option on the Right was more similar to the way I resolved the problem. The triangles seem to affect edge flow unpredictably which is why I was recommending using the Split Rings tool to visually see edge flow and test how it's currently working to determine if it needs tweaking. I guess once you get good enough at this stuff you no longer need split rings to understand how your topology is flowing but for a beginner in 3D Coat like me, it has been quite helpful. Thanks again and I am super excited to see how the new Autopy toolset works as it could even be a bigger time saver !

Well I got a bit of luck with the fingers.. the trick is to make a V shaped wedge so that just before the webbing in fingers where they join as shown in the Game Character Tutorial Series. By placing an extra row of loops around each finger here, you can get in nice and close whilst still keeping with the V shape instead of a flat surface between each finger as I was attempting to do in the above videos. So.. that's go them sorted now and I also realised that the use of Triangles was important. it's also worth mentioning that you should use triangles instead of N-Gons.. and ensure that you have good topology flow using the split rings tool.. by placing the triangle the right direction it will allow for clean circles around your mesh which using the method shown in that video.. it did NOT do. Once I fixed this up and got rid of the spiraling topology flow it played nice on the hand area as well. Other than this.. if you want to have smooth "round" fingers then I would recommend that you subdivide them so instead of having 4 segments you want 8. I tried with 4 and it's good.. but the fingers do look a little too blocky and if they are going to be in view say... holding a weapon or something then you definitely don't want them to look like old school counter-strike fingers or Quake 1 fingers or worse! Just remember that the subdivision is fine to stop after the finger area before you get into the palm using clean quads and triangles. I would personally recommend avoiding Poles which are the diamond shaped quad polygons.. in favour of using triangles.. .as with the triangles you have more control over edge flow and can stop the evil spirals.. where as using Poles.. the software figures out what ever it wants and usually causes more of a mess when you try to bake. So I guess I will be able to get some good baking done now.. it will just take me a while to get more use to it all and I think I'll have to tweak the size of my fingers so they are a bit thicker. Thanks to those that helped along the way and I'm sure I will still have more questions as I explore things further but I do appreciate the help. (no I'm not being sarcastic.. I got a lot of help in other threads from a lot of people and Digman spent a good number of hours showing me things via Skype so I do mean the thanks) Hopefully these tips will help others that want to rip their hair out of their head when trying to work with this software and save them the torrent of profanities that flew from my mouth at times haha.

I forgot that I had previously watched the Game Character series on youtube and was asking these kind of questions back then :s I honestly can't believe I still haven't been able to get one good retop => bake with 3D Coat. Maybe I need more sleep or something lol

I've just been watching the Ghost Game Character series again and notice that for his fingers he only uses 4 sides and does not have flat quads between each finger for the webbing.. I think I will try this out on mine and see if it improves things more. Unfortunately in the videos because they are for version 3.3 The baking process doesn't show up the same as it does for version 4.0.6 which makes it a little bit hard to follow how he got such a great bake when .. aside from those aspects my mesh doesn't look that different. Also the character he is doing isn't a main so I'm guessing that's why he did not subdivide the fingers into 8 segments but only 4.. I think if the hands are for a main then you would want the 8 segments so they look rounded but the overall concept shouldn't really change I would think so long as I get rid of those flat webbed bits between each finger. I think I will give that a try and see how it all goes. Haven't been able to find any good tips for the toes yet and so I'm starting to think that I will have to use a ring of triangles before them and then just join like I do on the fingers unless someone has a better idea? I had a question as well about this kind of thing... Am I meant to be paying for tutorials so I can obtain a successful retopology and bake? As in, do other people seem ok with paying money to learn how to get successful results with what I would consider basic workflow and generic usage of the 3D Coat software? This is a genuine question so please take it at face value.. there is no hidden agenda to it or intended hostility. I'm just curious to know if this is why help seems to be a little bit hard to obtain at this point or if there is something else I can do to get better assistance. I'm not saying that I would personally be happy to pay money for tutorials to learn how to operate software that I haven't purchased yet just so I can evaluate it's validity and usefulness in my workflow, I'm more trying to understand if this is what is socially expected though from this community.

I have been snooping around the forums trying to find some tutorials that cover Low Poly Game Character Retopology and Baking that I may learn from. I've read carefully the happy baking guide and it seems to only help if you have a medium to high poly retopo mesh, which for game models (500 to 5000) are not working out right. I read also that back in 2011, 3D Coat was not able to perform well at Hard Surface modelling and that there were a few people looking for tutorials on this. I would also be interested in locating a tutorial for this so I may determine if 3D Coat is now capable of being used for low poly retopo and baking of hard surface as well as organic models. I've been trying to get any information I can regarding the specific test mesh I've been using and I think either the community are not sure how I can fix the problem or are tired of all my questions (I know I am lol). I'm happy to wait the hours I would have to wait to download the right vid tutorials or to spend the time needed to read the text+image tutorials, though with limited internet speed and bandwidth, going on a treasure hunt for them is not currently an option. Please if you are able to assist I would appreciate the help greatly as I am really keen to use 3D Coat and am certain that there is a way to get successful low poly work done using it. I like the way it's tools work in theory, I'm just not getting the results from using them yet. ((Current progress is linked to 2 videos I created below)) More detailed updates to these videos is also found in the following topic : http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14515&p=98869

I tested on the latest build with identical results as shown in my previous post just as a quick update here

Would you by chance be able to explain briefly what you did here to use this feature please. I'm trying to use 3D Coat for Low Poly modelling as well and baking plus small tid bits like that feature would really be great to understand. Also.. do you experience artifact problems when you do low poly baking and how do you approach things like the toes and fingers of your models when building a retopo mesh?

Ok so I have tested out the latest advice and also used it on the latest available release of 3D coat to ensure that I would be only experiencing problems that were not yet addressed. I'm still trying to determine the exact cause of the glitching in the hands area and am hoping someone has a few tips that will help me to avoid the intersection of inner and outer depths between fingers at the join zones. I'm still not having any luck with the feet in between the toe areas so this is another location that some further assistance would be appreciated. Thanks again for all of your help so far guys, I am getting a lot closer now to producing a usable retopologised mesh with baked normals and once I have this sorted out I can confidently purchase the software knowing that it performs as required. My internet connection is still running quite slowly and so the upload of the most recent addition is currently stated on Youtube to still be 92 minutes away from finishing it's upload process. Hopefully someone is able to recognize any remaining problems with my workflow and provide suggestions on how I may improve. EDITS : I was able to remove the problem seen on the back by adding an extra sphere for the inner depth at that position and also the problems on the heels of the feet. Is there a way to mirror the effects you do with the region spheres? I notice that the Right hand of my mesh (the one I did NOT add any spheres to) has identical glitchings in the fingers and looks to me to be the same with respect to overall baking. same thickness fingers.. same problem areas.. no black bits.. which makes me wonder how much use the spheres are actually doing on the Left Mesh hand.. Or if they mirror which is why the Right side looks to be identical to the left. On the feet however, I notice that the left and right feet do show differences with the the Black stuff showing up on one more than on the other. so that tells me that the effects of the region spheres are not mirrored. Late Edit : I just realised that a new release has come out since I downloaded the 4.005H. So am now downloading this newer release in the hopes that it provides a clean bake. That being said I'm pretty frustrated as to how other experienced users are getting clean bakes on the stable release yet I'm doing so badly at this. If only the software would work :s oh well all I can do is keep updating progress and trying my best.

Hmm I will try to do this with the Islands to see if it helps. I wasn't really aware that the UV map would take it's toll on the baking process though it does make sense that it would have an impact on it and may be part of the problem. I'll give what you recommend a go and report back with the results. Thank you.

Hi Timmy, thank you for this update, I had heard word that this was in the works and am really excited to see how it works. Do you know if we are able to do Autopy on selected regions only without slicing our reference mesh into pieces?

Yes it breaks as in down the bottom, you can see it starts off as Perfect Symmetry. Then as I manipulate on the Right side (Character's Left Side) it changes at some point to Partial Symmetry xx.xx% usually around 98.99% I then have to re-apply symmetry to all layers even though it should be live as I have virtual symmetry turned off.. and then it goes back to Perfect Symmetry again for a while.. I also see that baking issues were fixed in a recent beta release of 3D Coat so that may be what is causing the issues with my baking.

I'm actually a bit confused now. So the problem where working with Symmetry turned on breaks when all you are using are the Brush, Move Vertices, Del Polygon, Del Vertices, and other basic retopo tools does not happen to other users? It really seems like this may be why my Baking isn't working either then.. since I am sure that I've done all the right things. Clean topography, no inner depth inside the outer depth etc.. I may need to try downloading the newest version of 3D Coat while I'm away this weekend it might be done by the time I get home.

Well I thought it may have been the messy retopo job I did on the hands so I carefully recalculated so that the subdivides would work in well and only need one ring for downsizing between the 2 variations. The overall topology looks clean now yet it's producing more artifacts than the messy retopology. On a plus side.. the fingers are no longer "mashed" or stick thin like they were in previous attempts.. Well, I've been at it for close to 2 days now on 3 hours sleep so I think I will call it a night at this point and hopefully someone may be able to point me in the right direction.

Hey there, let me try that again. When you are working with True Symmetry turned on under the Retopo Menu (Whilst in the Retopo Room) you will see down the bottom either Red writing saying Partial Symmetry and then a percentage, or you will see Green writing saying Perfect Symmetry. - Down the Bottom = the Status bar at the very bottom of the 3D Coat Program Window. - True Symmetry is turned on when you UNCHECK the Virtual Symmetry checkbox under the Retopo Menu sometimes all this needs is for you to select the option Apply Symmetry to all layers and it will be resolved and go back to saying Perfect Symmetry at the bottom. Hope this makes more sense.

Just a quick update to say that the video in my previous post is now uploaded (4 and a half hours of waiting later :s) I really need better internet. Also, Below is a recent screen shot at the baked results of my latest attempts. in this attempt, I tried to set the extrusion to 2 and I ensured that all the reference mesh bits were covered on before entering the baking process. Not really sure why I ended up with stick fingers though :s I'm really struggling to get past the retopology and baking phase successfully. Does it normally take this long to get the hang of it? I'm trying to remain as positive as I can and just press on trying things till I get success. I just don't quite understand where I'm going wrong. In the attachment, you can see how I think the feet area has slightly improved.. I think my next step will be to watch the pirate tutorial again and see if there is something that I missed in there that will fix the issues I'm experiencing. EDIT : The pirate tutorial was not applicable so I am looking into the Rat Tutorial and will see where this takes me. EDIT 2 : I have noticed that in a lot of the tutorials, the retopology is way higher than what's allowed for a game model which is likely where I'm having the difficulties here. It seems that when I subdivide my retopo mesh to the point of it being 6000+ triangles.. the baking goes a lot better .. when it's under or just near 4000 triangles *higher end of what's allowed for a game character mesh in Unity) the baking has these issues again. This leaves me to wonder if 3D Coat is the right tool for creating retopologised game character models and baking their normals or if it's just useful for 3D Animation models where the polycount isn't as critical.