benk

Thank you for your response carlosan. I was not aware of the Layer 0 specifications, hopefully I will avoid messing it up with my improper use. I added another layer and still did not get a proper result. I investigated the shader selections and discovered that metalness is only properly displayed in my copy of 4.5 beta when the object is set up with a default, pbr or pbr width depth shader. All other shaders did not display metalness. My copy of 4.5 beta does not automatically assign a shader to objects and out of habit from using 4.17 I assign a clay shader to objects. Is metalness supposed to display on all shaders? Am I doing something else improperly? Thanks, bk

I know I must be missing something obvious but I just downloaded 4.5 beta with pbr materials and cannot get metalness to show up. Whether I paint with a metal material selected or paint with a color with metalness set to 100% I get black with a fringe of color. Must be something simple but I haven't a clue. Tried other pbr materials and they seem to work ok. Thanks, bk

Just to see if I can push this concept in another more literal direction I put together a rigged canine manikin in Blender that when posed exhibits muscle stretch and bulging. I don't yet know if this can be manipulated to resemble other species. It certainly cuts down on rough sculpting time in 3DC which might hopefully translate into some efficiency increase as well as imparting a bit more anatomic accuracy. bk

Thanks for the input Michaelgdrs and digman. I have refined the big cat posed primitive a bit to see how the work flow pans out. It does seem faster than loading up a number of primitive objects in 3DC. Especially so if one wishes to sculpt a number of different animals in a variety of poses. I guess some would argue that a finish sculpt of a subject should be done in a neutral pose and then posed afterwards. I have had problems with this in regards to animal forms as I have never had much luck getting the limb to trunk relations to work well when posed...especially in compact poses. I guess one could always separate the limbs from the trunk and pose them separately to overcome this problem. I would like to use a technique of posing a skeleton model and laying soft tissue forms on top of it. I think that is done in Zbrush but I haven't had much luck doing that in 3DC. Since I am a veterinarian that is more akin to how I think about anatomy....from the inside out. To test this technique a bit further I have manipulated the general form into more of an elephant form. Digman I can highly recommend Goldfinger's book as a good reference to multiple animal species anatomy. In fact I even like Goldfinger over some of my veterinary textbooks. Regards, bk

I have been playing a bit with trying to set up a sculpting work flow for making a variety of animal forms. Referring to Goldfinger's Animal Anatomy for Artists I have modelled and rigged in Blender a generalized animal form that can be posed and altered to reflect various kind of animals. This in my mind is somewhat akin to a figurative sculptors approach to blocking out a subject on armatures. I am just beginning to see how functional this approach might be by importing into 3dc a big cat test derived from the general animal form in Blender. Do others see any value in this approach? Too tedious or systematic? Always happy to see any input the community might have. Regards, BK

This is my first 3DC project. Trying to make a primitive for use in illustration and animation. I intend to add some muscle elements next. Since this model is intended to be relatively low resolution I am sticking with voxel sculpting at this time. For final work I will try surface sculpting. Fantastic program, looking forward to getting more out of it. Cheers to all, B

Thanks for the solution Tony. I more or less stumbled on this solution by fumbling around. Wish there was an easier way to do this. I guess my Blender biases have crept in holding me back from the 3DC way of doing things.

Sorry to bring up a chronic problem topic yet again but I have been digging through the forum for some time and cannot seem to resolve this problem. I am using 4.1.17D Educational version and cannot find a way to lock a symmetry plane in place. Basically what I want to do is take an existing object that is mirrored in global space and adjust its position relative to a static mirror location. Whenever I apply the transform tool to accomplish this task the tool shows up on the mirror plane and when moved moves the object, its mirror and the mirror plane together. If I reset the mirror behavior to local space the same thing happens. If I right click the layer and reset to global or uniform space I still do not accomplish anything. The closest I can get to my goal is to transform the scale of the object in the desired plane. Unfortunately this distorts its shape as well as position. It seems previous versions had an ability to lock sym plane position. I cannot find such a feature in my version. Any help greatly appreciated. Ben

Nice work Arumiat. I am working on a similar project having just started using 3DCoat. In my case I will be making a number of canine anatomy primitives to be assembled for custom illustrations. I was previously working in Blender and am hoping to work more efficiently with 3DC. Attached is an example from Blender. Good luck with your project. Ben

I have resolved the problem by rescanning reference image and re-assigning to reference plane. I have no idea what was going on with the original image but am moving forward in ignorance. Thanks to all that have viewed my post. Ben

Hi all: My name is Ben and I am a brand new 3d Coat user. Prior to purchasing a license I used a demo of V.4.1 for a short while. After using the licensed version a bit I have hit a snag with reference plane images. In the demo version I had no problems getting images in and manipulating them. Using the same procedure when opening a greyscale PNG image in the licensed version I get an image with an intense green color in all the white areas with a darker green in what should be dark grey to black. I haven't a clue as to what is going on. Tried rebooting to no avail. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Many thanks, Ben