Silas Merlin

"My" method : New "bake shader" feature :

Yes, I know what it's for, and I need it. I wanted it for a long time, so, I'm really excited about this. originally I did this in Substance Painter, but for some time now I have been using a workaround in 3d-Coat alone : -Make a render at screen size -import render as stencil (it synchronizes perfectly with the view) -projector from stencil -fill layer with projection -create a clip mask with rectangle and "ignore back faces" -Turn view to other side of model -make new render, project, fill layer, etc.. -paint over to blend the two layers filled with renders. so you can see this new feature is really a time saver Thanks, Pilgway.

Thank you very much for the video, Sprayer. So, does it not strike you as odd that it is called "bake shader", when it works only with smart materials, not shaders ? This is great, I got it partly working So, since it is called "bake shader", I want to bake reflections from a shader, not necessarily a smart material like in your video, right ? Ok, not sure of the order in which I tried things to get where I am in the screenshot above. I did this: -open default ball -select default rusted metal shader -autopo -bake -"bake shader" >this resulted in a white coat on most of the ball, with an unpainted circle at a pole, and random dots at the "terminator" to speak in astronomy terms. Next (I think), I sculpted the sphere a bit and turned it to surface, then tried to "bake shader" in vertex colour. This resulted in the screenshot in my previous post. After seeing your video, I baked the sculpted sphere to the original retopo of the unsculpted sphere. when I did "bake shader" on this, I got what you see in the new screenshot above : Only the areas that were sculpted (where the normal map is not blank), does the "bake shader" do anything. Where the normal map is blank, I get the white coating. I believe this is not expected behaviour. Now I am going to try with a smart material and I expect it to work, as seen in your video. So... "bake shader" to bake.... smart materials ?

could someone explain how to make this work ? "Bake shader with reflections in Light Bake Tool " I suppose this is what is usually called "bake light with environement" elsewhere, which is something I really wanted, but all I am getting is something like this whichever shader is used

that looks like a mesh that was voxelized then turned to surface (maybe you used resample ?) do you still have the mesh that was not thickened ? try importing it this way : File > import > import mesh for voxelization then, before apply tick "import W/o voxelization" (by the way, when you do that you get the splash screen, I think that is a bug)

I hope this is changed to allow subsequent import from file menu too. In the meantime here is a workaround that should do (not tested in 2021) : import your new model in the retopo room, then do Bake menu > "Retopo>Per pixel (no baking)

Try pressing F

I spoke of this before but I will explain again with a video this time. In the video I first use a surface tool in voxel mode, and then switch directly to cut off tool. The geometry is still in temporary surface mode, therefore when I do a cut, Coat gets confused between the voxels and the surface representation and mingles the two in the resulting cut. Next, I undo, and this time, before switching to cut off tool and making the cut, I switch to a pure voxel tool. In the viewport you see the geometry changing to voxels at that moment. In this case the cut works as expected. What I have not shown in the video is that if you select another vox layer while a surface tool is active, the first layer will remain in temporary surface mode, which is likely to cause similar issues when you switch back to it later, depending on what tool you have active. I think it is imperative that when using a surface tool in voxel mode, Coat turns back to voxels whenever you : 1. Switch to a tool that is not a surface tool (so, not with move tool if "voxelize immediately" is unticked). 2. Switch layers Untitled.mp4

This worked for Flatten tool, thank you. As for Build tool, the right click menu does not have "Restore default", so it still does not work on my end.

here is a novel (I think?) idea to deal with the clutter (rather than removing "duplicate" tools). What if Coat recorded your use of tools over time ? after a while (let's say 50 hours of active use), a new button would appear in the UI (prominent, but in a corner, it could appear with a flash, some lighting effect, to make sure people notice it). When you press that button, the tools you never used vanish, and the ones you seldom use are a bit greyed out. In the menus, items do not vanish, but the ones you have not used are a bit dimmed. When you need an "archived" tool, press the button again to make everything visible.

Rotation around camera origin works fine now, thanks ! So does drawing in empty space with import tool ! -Build tool has no effect whatsoever, what am I doing wrong ? -same with flatten invert, no effect. (See video below) Untitled.mp4 Now, when watching the video, notice how the little camera icon vanished each time during a stroke ? I find that very, very distracting. am I the only one who is annoyed by this ? I just can't get used to it. Also, I would like to have a light colour in the background on top of the screen, but the toolbar makes it not practical : the icons are difficult to differenciate against light background : Also, I notice that now when you set a projector from stencil, the display updates instantly in the 3d viewport, whereas before you had to move the camera a bit to see the changes. Is that what was fixed ? Because, if that is the case, there are still other cases when you don't see a change occur in the 3d viewport until you move your camera. Sadly, the only one I can think of at the moment is when you change the colour of the background. but there are other cases, I'm sure. another type of situation when the display does not update in real time is when you navigate in the render room with a 3d mouse. you have to click with the mouse at the same time as you navigate, otherwise the display just does not follow until you stop and click with mouse. Here in the first half of the following video, I navigate with LMB down, then I let go of it and continue navigating : Untitled2.mp4

That is good to hear, thank you. In my opinion it is very good to have "duplicate things", because : 1. "duplicates" are never quite the same, and the small change in behaviour between two similar tools may very well make all the difference for someone out there. 2. the abundance of tools and the many ways to achieve the same thing that Coat provide are precisely what make it possible to find workaround when there is a bug. Workarounds are needed until the bug is fixed, which sometimes takes years to happen. This one might be difficult to explain. I know that voxels are meant only for blocking out, and then you are meant to finish in surface mode, however, sometimes it just makes sense to remain in voxel mode until the end. Even more so now that there are so many surface tools that work in voxel mode. Now, the peculiarity of the build tool in 4.9 is that it is very precise. It allows to work on the single voxel level. For example let's try to make a crease with a voxel tool in 4.9 and 2021 : Build tool.mp4 Yes, it works, but it makes the display glitch. geometry becomes half transparent and when there is more than one object, they fight on screen : rotate around camera glitch.mp4 The ability to "draw in the air" is now missing. That said, having removed this ability may very well have effectively solved an issue there is/was with it : when you use on brush extensively, something happens to the vox layer that makes it very, very slow to save the file (think long minutes or even half an hour). the model sometimes gets imported into the scene at a great distance from where you are working, maybe hundreds of meters. This might be part of the problem with saving, but I am not sure. I have found that moving the geometry to a new layer sovles that, so I think the problem is more that the layer itself becomes corrupted, rather than the size of the scene due to bits of geometry in the far distance, but it could be both. Anyway, here is a video showing the change in behaviour : On brush behaviour change.mp4 There are other things for sure, but I can't think of them at the moment. Well, like I said above, the ability to place pivot by clicking has vanished long ago in V4, it was very useful to save time, rather than holding shift and moving the gizmo. By the way, moving an object or moving the pivot with the gizmo is problematic, because you can only go so far : when your pointer leaves the 3d viewport, releasing LMB is no longer enough to apply the change. (you have to do a left click). some stroke modes have vanished for some tools too. modes that were actually useful, but I can't remember which ones now. I think this all happened at the time when the whole code was rewritten in V4.

that, maybe, but functionalities vanish and don't come back. some, like click to set pivot with gizmo was really nice but not critical. However, the functionalities that are vanishing now are essential to me. (inverse flatten tool, rotate around camera, build tool... When the ability to continue a stroke in the air with carve tool vanished, it was alright because it was still possible with import>on brush. Now this has vanished too....)

Thank you for clarification. I'm afraid that's not acceptable. I don't want to rely on personal request to keep 4.9 I wait until I can buy a new, separate license. We can have two licences, yes ? This is really a sad time. I'm am trying to get used to work without the "beta tools" before they vanish. I open 2021 to test things and try to solve problems others have with it, but there is no way I can switch to it for my own use at present.

Why deactivate 4.9 ?

Excuse me, but it would be better if 3d-Coat remembered the setting in the geometry menu (like it does in 4.9) rather than having it in preferences. The reason is that it is a setting that needs to be toggled on and off : -Scrape tool is basically useless with Cuda on, in my opinion, so you need to toggle it off when using Scrape tool. -Grow tool is super nice with Cuda on, but on occasion you may want to switch it off so as to be able to create geometry with it by pressing hard on geometry that is on another layer, which is quite convenient in some cases. there are probably other similar cases when you need to toggle it, but scrape tool is the one that comes to mind.

Autopo without any strokes or freeze seems to work really much better than in 4.9. However, I guess there is always going to be an area that could be better. Let's say the edges cut accross an ear. so you think, ok, let's draw this one stroke and try again. And then the problems start. Now the edges follow the ear alright, but the topology is wrong where it was good before. it is a vicious circle, you have to add more and more strokes and run autopo each time. In the end your model is covered with strokes and frozen areas. I wonder if it would be possible to change that. maybe partial autopo to complete a mesh (in the example above you would remove the geometry of the ear, add a stroke and run partial autopo afterwards?) or a tool to tell 3d-Coat, "ok, you did well in all those areas, try to recreate the same mesh but do take this new stroke into account". ot something like that ?

Could he possibly look into collada export ? ever since I started using 3d-Coat in 2015, collada export has only worked if there is only one material present. When there are more than one material the object becomes unuseable: materials are messed up. on reimport it is possible to see that something is wrong when inspacting carefully, but in order to see the full extent of the damage, you need to import the collada in an engine that works with collada (Second Life / Opensim) : the mesh will likely be split up into multiple parts and the faces will not hold texture. While testing this I found a new problem : It seems to no longer be possible to add an object into the paint room via file>import : when you do this, existing object(s) are deleted. Also, in retopo room it is still not possible to "invert selection" with the Select tool. why ?

rotate around camera position makes sculpt object half transparent and glitchy Flatten tool (surface tool for voxels) no longer works inverted (This tool with and without CTRL is very powerful sculpting tool in 4.9) "Build" voxel tool vanished. It was the only tool to allow for very precise work in pure voxels, with "depth and opacity" pressure, and the third default alpha. When working with a surface tool in voxel mode, you need to switch to a pure voxel tool for 3d-Coat to voxelize the object. Should you fail to do so, object will be damaged when using other tools. -for example : use cut off tool directly, object will be damaged. (this is true in 4.9 too) (What makes things worse is that when working with multiple objects it is easy to get carried away, working on several at once, and forgetting that you were using a surface tool.) With import > on brush, you can no longer start a stroke on mesh and then continue it "in the air". The tool just stop building when you reach the edge of existing mesh. (this new behaviour is very crippling) With primitves transform, when ticking "transform/lattice toggle", the gizmo appears, but the lattice remains visible. Each time you select a new primitive, the tool reverts to lattice. (impossible to remain in gizmo mode). It is very difficult to grab the "move in screen space" tool on the gizmo on all primitives except the ring shape. This is because when hidden inside an object, the "move in screen space" circle does not highlight on mouse over. After maybe half an hour of testing the various things above, 3d-Coat asks me to save my work because it has become unstable. This has happened every single time I have spent a while testing tools.

This made me think of an OPTION that would be nice : when you start painting with a new smart material, automatically create a new layer and attach the smart material to it. (the new layer should be created just above the active layer. this should be an option. anything automatic should be an option)

maybe not exactly same subject, but seeing what Anton Tenitsky was doing with splat maps, I was thinking that it would be awfully interesting to have the ability to set a clip mask to use a single channel of a layer. That is, you could have a single layer painted with a blend of red, green and blue and use the individual channels as clip masks for other layers filled with smart materials. This would mean you would get a preview of the result of a splatmap while painting it, not having to wait until you get your model into your target engine. in the end you would hide all layers but the mask for export. Of course, this is already possible to achieve in 3d-Coat (with the colours on separate layers) but it is a bit painful to set up.

By crippling I mean the beta tools being stripped off 4.9 As for the new 2021, I take it you have not tested it yet at all ? It has been available in beta for a long time now, you can get a copy on this thread :

In the case of hardware, I can understand that you lose some/gain some when upgrading to a new device. There just comes a point when the old hardware has to be replaced. This is not the case here. This is software, the old version works just fine. crippling it by choice is something that is beyond my comprehension.

The prospect of losing beta tools in 4.9 is traumatic.

hmm... Import tool lost trace mode primitives tool lost "move only gizmo" (both tickbox and holding Shift)