Silas Merlin

I know people don't like the suggestion of workarounds, but I believe there is a nice way to do this : instead of using freeze to paint your mask initially, paint your mask with regular paint on a new layer. you can edit this layer in external editor. when you are done, you can right click the paint layer > freeze painted pixels.

I finally just got around to testing the activity bar. when It came out I was perplexed, but now I thought I'd give it a try, to free up work space. I haven't seen much feedback, so, here is mine : -I'd like to decide what's in the activity bar. (for example I don't use presets, so I'd want to turn that off) -I think it's great that the active stencil or strip show up there, highlighted... So, why is it not the same with the brush alpha ? it remains greyed, that is a shame imho. Also what if you have more than one alpha shift-selected : only one shows up in the activity bar, that's a shame. -When you shift-select alphas, the panel remains open as long as your cursor is inside the panel, which is great. However, when you simply select one alpha, the panel vanishes right away : which is bad, what if I change my mind ? I have to click on the alphas icon again, really ? -Why is the activity bar snapped to the right of the screen instead of directly to the right of the menus ? (that would place it almost at the middle of the screen, yes ?) -one time I clicked on one icon, and there were folders there, I thought that was great, but ever since, I only get a dropdown menu, which is cumberrsome. Since these panels are temporary, why not make the most of it and display folders instead of a dropdown menu ?

There is a problem, something that I believe should have its own check and warning like for when you have two surface materials with the same name : If you do vertex painting before baking, and it so happens that you have a paint layer that has the same name as one of the sculpt objects... then 3dc will become confused at baking. because when you bake, the shader of the sculpt gets baked to a paint layer that is named after the object. If you already have a paint layer with that name, 3dc does not create a new one, but tries to bake on that one and fails. When you try to fix this after the fact, you may lose the painting on that layer if you are not careful.

Stencil not working with cut off tool after raising the vox layer resolution Untitled.mp4

When you press "clone" in the Vox Slice tool, is it supposed to create a copy of the visible voxels ? Because... it doesn't. it clones the whole vox layer.

The smart materials are in your user folders and don't get uninstalled. However, to make extra sure, you can make your own backup of your user folder containing all your custom settings and things. Personally, I use Glasswire to uninstall 3dCoat. I don't use the OS uninstall because it is not enough : the registry needs cleaning too. I don't know if it is the same for everyone, but if I simply uninstall, the .3b files remain associated with the old version, and thus will not open automatically with the new. So, I need to uninstall, then clean registry several times until all is wiped clean. Then I can install the new version and associate .3b files with it.

no I only use GL, I don't know if DX would crash under the same conditions. those crashes do not occur with a fresh file, you have to work long hours in one session before it happens.

Things that cause a crash for me but for which I can't seem to be able to produce a file to recreate the crash on another system : -Calculate curvature (separate objects ticked) -calculate occlusion (separate objects ticked) -painting right after baking -fill layer with projection (when the current view is not alligned with the original camera position for the projection (from stencil) knowing these things may cause a crash, I always save incrementally before calling the task, and after. when reopening my file after such a crash, it is possible to perform the task without crashing.

(Sorry for posting this question on the forum rather than in a private message, but it is because I feel it would be a waste to answer just to me when the answer could benefit others) @Andrew Shpagin Could you please spare a few minutes to explain the nature of voxels in the context of 3d-Coat ? In a few words ? My understanding is that in the following picture, One voxel is the whole space inside this white cube. Is that correct ? I have always believed that we are sculpting into each voxel. that is, if we set a tool's depth to say 0.01, then we are affecting 100th of a voxel ?

I wonder, Is the behaviour of the Symmetrical copy tool for translation symmetry the desired behaviour ? What it does currently is duplicate all the voxels on the layer on each axis that is set to more than zero clones. which means that each time you press the symmetrical copy button, your layer grows in those directions. There is probably a use for this behaviour. however, I wonder, are any of you using it, and if yes, what for ? In other symmetry types, when you use symmetrical copy, you intentionally choose one section of the layer which you want to duplicate and replace the other side of the symmetry with. you thus discard part of the layer. I believe this is what is desired. it is how you expect symmetrical copy to work, I believe. Am I mistaken ? If this is true, I think it would be expected that when you use it on translation symmetry, only the portion at the center would be duplicated, and everything else would be discarded : In this scenario, you could use symmetrical copy an infinite number of times, and the layer would not grow. --- Here is an example to try to explain why I am asking these questions : I was experimenting with making a tileable terrain of sorts, and when I exported I discovered that it did not quite tile. I thought of using symmetrical copy to ensure that it would indeed tile correctly, but the way the tool currently behaves does not achieve that.

I only know 3d-Coat, nothing else... (Blender for rigging and things that 3dc doesn't do, but that's it) So, I would like one clarification : am I correct in saying that in truth, even when you export several objects and several sets of textures, they are all on one single "UV-set" as far as other software are concerned ?

One object -> multiple materials : IMHO 3dc lets you do many combinations, but what it doesn't let you do is : -work with UDIM -Export several materials to a single texture (Workaround : you need to unify uv for that) -Export only one object from the scene. (Workaround : you need to either delete paint objects, or export selected from retopo room but the drawback to that second method is that textures won't be assigned to the object (they won't load automatically in the next software))

it is only the terminology that is confusing, but there is no way around that, each software is bound to have their own. I think 3d-Coat can hold only one "uv-set" (in the general sense, outside of 3d-Coat), is that correct ? Where it gets confusing is that in the retopo room you are led to believe that you are able to create multiple "uv-set"s. But wait, it becomes clear when you bake to the paint room and those UV-sets become "surface materials" : It seems that what 3d-Coat means by "Uv-set" is in fact "material". In order to get multiple materials (surface materials) on one single objects, you need to create and assign different parts of the geometry to different "uv-sets" in the retopo room before baking. As far as I know, if you import one object made elsewhere with multiple materials, it will import as one object with several "surface materials". If it does not do this and it creates several paint objects instead, I have never seen that (I'd like to see an example), if it does that, I think it must be a matter of how that object was created and exported. different settings should result in one paint object/retopo object and several surface materials/"uv-sets" Also, a surface material can be distributed accross several paint objects/retopo objects. Here is an example : (remember, uv-sets will become surface materials in the paint room, and retopo objects will become paint objects)

Tooltips don't work anymore in 4.9.61 or is it just on my side ? it is bad because when you don't see tooltips, you don't see smart material names....

no, I do have that enabled, but it doesn't work well for grow tool :(

How/when does 3d-Coat decides to remember alpha/depth/stroke mode for the Grow tool ? Is there a way to make it remember ? Most other tools do most of the time...

ah sorry replied without testing, because I thought I remembered something about inverting the values to make it work, but it was just for inverting. it does not change whether the normal map shows up or not. anyway I am getting normal map to show up on "new shader" in 4.9.59GL, except that it has lines at the borders : Newly created (right click > construct new shader then add textures) "old" shader with same textures : EDIT : duplicating a shader and editing its settings works. It is when you try to change the textures that you get this.

Have you tried setting a negative value for the bump ? you need to do that sometimes for it to work, but you have to type it in manually because otherwise 3dc won't let you. As for the border lines showing up I have had that for a long time but I thought it was something I was doing wrong : I have been unable to create new shaders for quite a while.

I've never really figured out what the reproject tool is meant for, I mean, originally. I use it in many ways, often, usually as a way to fix something. Well, someone told me it was meant to "reproject a different topology to your sculpt" In that sense, I have an idea of how I would like it to work. I don't know if it is possible, I'll try to explain : I was doing vertex painting on a face, so, in surface mode, very dense mesh, but I realized I had to work on the sculpt of the ears. sculpting in surface mode is very unnecessarily tricky and complicated in my opinion. So, I created a new voxel copy, sculpted it, turned it to surface, and then use the reproject tool on my original to copy the changes. After that, I go to the retopo room and adapt the retopo mesh to the new shape. Well, that gets me thinking about the reproject tool and that idea that it is meant to reproject a different topology. Yes, as in my example, it is ultimately my retopo that I want to reproject. At present I do it manually, in the retopo room. But, what if you could have in the sculpt room a subdivided "instance" of your retopo. I mean something different from a sculpt object : you could not voxelize it, you could not use live clay tools on it, but, you could use regular sculpt tools on it, and... reproject. (and you'd also need the ability to turn it into a regular sculpt object to paint and bake from) whatever you would do to this subdivided instance would carry over to the retopo mesh. Does this make sense ?

You can successfully export a .ply with vertex color from the sculpt room. When you reimport that .ply in the sculpt room, if you go to flat shading, the vertex color disappears. Also, you can't "bake color from visible volumes" from that .ply to another mesh in the scene.

Maybe merge the UV room and Retopo room and call it something else ? People go to the uv room to do uv work and they don't have all the tools they need there.... This merged room should have somewhere big and visible a toggle for working either on retopo mesh or paint mesh. When you toggle, the irrelevant tools are greyed out. (greyed out, not vanished, because that contributes to confusion imho).

I'm having fun with the new "pivot around camera position". Very difficult to fine tune the settings and get used to it after five years of not having it in 3d-Coat. Anyway, this is pure joy, thanks again !

Awesome ! Thank you so much ! New pivot option, Ghost/saving, and sphere tool all working perfectly here !

I was recording this video to demonstrate how the projector can be used to reconsctruct a whole scene from a single image... It ends abruptiy in a crash. 3dc became unstable when using the split tool. It prompted me to save my work, which I did, but... The save didn't work. Autosave was disabled. It doesn't matter, really. However, this is what I want to say : I have autosave disabled as a workaround for a bug. The bug is that whenever the scene is saved (or autosaved), all the ghosted volumes become visible. The reason I need to ghost volumes is a workaround for a missing feature. The missing feature is "rotate around camera position" : If I leave all the elements visible, it become very difficult to navigate the scene with a 3d mouse, because it will rotate around any point in the scene my cursor happens to touch... Edit : Ironically, the reason I was using the split tool (which lead to the crash) was so as to be able to ghost more areas.