Ghastly

I'm having problems retopoing a mesh. When I curve around the shoulders everything looks like it's snapping to the mesh properly when then when I change my view angle for some reason the quads end up leaping off the surface I'm retopoing and no matter what I do I can't get them to stick.

That's awesome!!!

Is it possible to manually retopo your critical geometry , like loops around muscle groups, joints, eyes, mouth, nose, ears, etc and then have 3DCoat automatically retopo the non-critical parts of the mesh filling in the details between all your manual retopo groups?

Well I learned something new today about low poly modeling. Turns out the problem was with my geometry. Some of the quads were too non-planar. I modified the geometry and that fixed the problem.

Hmmm. it actually seems to distort worse when I paint on the Daz Triangulated mesh in 3D Coat. The problem is definitely an issue with the triangulation.

Crap. Daz doesn't do triangulation. Oh okay I found the triangulate function. Yeah, Daz isn't maintaining symmetry when it triangulates the mesh for rendering. It seems to randomly decide which direction to triangulate the polygons. So I paint the triangulated mesh with symmetry and the texture map will work even though only half the figure is unwrapped and mirrored to the other side?

So I retopo my mesh. UV unwrap it. Export the unwrapped retopo. Triangulate the retopo mesh. Paint. Export textures and now the exported texture will work properly with the untriangulated retopo mesh? That'll do the trick?

So I made a low poly model in the retopo room. I've been trying my hand at manual retopo. I made and unwrapped the model with symmetry so I'd only have to texture on half of the model but I've noticed a distortion with the way the model displays a texture in Daz Studio. In the paint room in 3D Coat everything looks fine but when I load the texture in Daz Studio the right side of the model has a distortion on the right leg and arm. Any idea what's going on?

Before I installed the software on my new machine I copied all the files from my /user/documents/ folder to the new computer. When I installed 3D coat it defaulted to the way I had everything set up on my old machine. AWESOME!!! No worries about things not being exactly the way I like them! And boy does it ever run a lot better too.

Thanks a tonne! I can't wait to see what this program can do when I'm running it on a machine with 16gb of ram (my old laptop was only 4gb). I am giddy with anticipation.

Oh, that's good to know. That shouldn't be a problem. Unless my new computer ends up in the shop or something I can't really imagine a situation where I'd want to run it on this old clunker anyway. So GL or DX? Is one better than the other?

Hey guys! Long time no see. Hope everyone has been doing well. I've been a little too busy all summer long to indulge in my 3D passions but I just got a new laptop which is far more powerful than my old one and I've got a project in mind so I'll be getting back into 3D shortly. I just have a few questions about the switch over process. I assume I download and install 3D Coat on my new computer. Then uninstall the license on my old laptop. Then run 3D Coat on my new computer and install the license there, and if for any reason I need to switch back to my old computer I just uninstall the license on the new one and install it on the old one again. Is this correct? With the license uninstalled does 3D Coat still work and just not save your files (sort of like a demo mode) or does it not function at all. I wonder because if I need to go back and look at how my preferences are set up on my old computer so I can duplicate them on my new one, can I just boot it and have it run just to take a peek at the preferences etc. or will I have to swap licenses each time? Also which version of 3D Coat should I be using on a laptop of an Nvida 940m Geforce video card? DX or GL?

There we go! Thanks!

On a 4.5 related note, it's been awhile since I last installed an update. How to transfer my 4.1 setup and preferences to 4.5? Is there a menu option to do it or do I just have to do it manually?

If I remember correctly Sketchup uses booleans and ngons to make it's models which can have unexpected results when importing them into other programs. I've only used Sketchup a few times. It's handy for creating quick greebles. I used to import the mesh first into Hexagon which can handle booleans and ngons and then triangulate the ngons to get a geometry that would work with other programs.

Well that was embarrassingly obvious. Is there a way to antialias the text too?

I'm trying to paint some text on figure in the paint room. Using the text tool I have the text set up the way I want it but I don't see how I actually execute the text tool to paint the text on the model. If I click on another tool the text disappears.

MakeHuman provides a pretty good start. I still have a copy of the Alpha 7 release and an Alpha 7 Daz Studio rigged mesh so I can pose the figure in Daz, tweak it a bit in Hexagon and then send it 3D Coat for the detailing. I'm hoping Make Human will come up with a proper Unimesh design in new versions comparable to the A7 mesh. Then I'll rig that mesh for Daz and use it as the base for 3D Coat sculpting.

Woohoo!!! Thanks!!! That did the trick.

I don't see the Merge to Separate Instances. I have Merge to Separate Volumes though, but even with that checked I still get the error that it cannot merge the volume because there are self insertions. The irony is I don't even want to do any boolean operations on this mesh. I just want to merge it as a surface in the voxel room. I can load the mesh fine into the retopo room but I don't know how to move it from there to the voxel room.

I'm trying to merge a model but keep getting the self intersection error, but the only way to remove the self intersections is in the voxel menu after the object has been merged. I seem to be at a catch 22. Is there a way to merge an object with self intersections? I'm not going to be doing any boolean functions on it.

It was in the voxel room. I ended up getting it done but it was really tricky and I had to keep angling the model just right so that it wasn't aligned with the nodes on the rear. It made it very difficult to get an even circlet encompassing the circumference of the leg. And yeah, the strokes tool can be really tricky.

Woot! Thanks!

I'm trying to encircle the limbs of a figure with a curve which is just fine when I'm doing the front of the figure but as soon as I rotate and start laying down the curve on the back of the figure it keeps selecting the nodes of the curve I laid down on the front. I've tried setting Ignore Back Faces and the depth but it keeps selecting the front nodes. Is there a way to lay down a curve where it will ignore adjustments until you've finished? It's quite frustrating.

Because that's what 3D coat seems to be thinking. Whenever I try to relax a mesh or part of a mesh it seems to like to randomly throw the verticies all over the model making it look like an angry little spiky ball. Why does this keep happening?