Marc Wakefield

Cool, I honestly meant no harm. You are right about the surface tools though, they are great. If you have a really high resolution sculpt, the surface tools are the only way to effectively smooth out any imperfections and work at a good speed. The downside is that you have to switch back to voxel mode pretty often. If you get carried away, forget yourself and do a lot of work in surface mode, you can have a bit of a looong wait for it to convert back.... If this could be sorted out, it would be awesome! The ability to subdivide/increase res in certain areas of a voxel sculpt and not the whole thing (ptex style) is also on my wish list. By the way, has anyone ever told you that you look a bit like Peter Facinelli, the actor who plays Carlisle Cullen in Twilight?

Well first of all.... no need to get angry about it buddy. The stop whining was actually in reference to good old Arnie Schwarzenegger and was meant to be taken tongue in cheek. I guess you couldn't hear my bad attempt at an Austrian accent. I am sorry I offended you or anyone else for that matter. Please accept my apologies everyone, I am not trying to tell anyone what to think or do. It just seemed to be coming across like people where being overly negative about the workflow of one of my favorite programs when it is actually still rather good. Maybe I misunderstood where others were coming from. I completely back up what you are saying about the sculpt room and I mentioned it in my post. I also don't need permission to say whats on my mind no matter how random I may put it across and I don't expect to be scolded like a naughty school boy for expressing my opinion. Now lets all calm down...

I honestly do not think the Voxel learning curve is in any way steep at all. Far from it... As far as I am concerned, you can just jump in and start sculpting without any worries, constraints or considerations. It is as easy and natural for me as using a ball of clay. You can also create a bunch of parts (body parts, props, etc) which you can add to any sculpture as a primitive / merge object which greatly speeds up model creation. In terms of speed and artistic freedom, it is awesome! Retopo is easy and way quicker than creating a mid-poly model from scratch. UV's are also pretty easy in 3D Coat (with ptex considerably so). You can bake the high poly texture to the low poly model with local ao and spend a bit of time detailing and painting colour and spec before exporting the whole kit and kaboodle. shimples The voxel and sculpt rooms could do with being merged / mirrored and the surface tools could do with a bit of optimization. The ability to bake lightmaps would be good and a bit more speed wouldn't go amiss but I am using xp 32 non cuda so upgrading my laptop would fix that. (although I do get 100 fps + quite regularly on my old Dell xps m1710) IMHO 3D Coat is a fantastic, extremely useful and relevant tool and voxel's are the future so stop whining! If you love mb & zb so much, buy em and go away. I don't mean to come across as a fanboy but It almost seems like some people on here are making 3D Coat out to be a second rate lame useless donkey and it is so, so far from that. A lot of work has gone into 3D Coat and it is updated more frequently than some people update their under crackers. It may not be perfect but I am confident it will be soon. Peace to all!

Hi Andrew, I tried the object again and used quadrangulate for ptex and it worked fine. I guess I must have messed up on the retopo somewhere. Thank you anyway. There is one thing though... When you quadrangulate for per pixel you get the option to bake a local occlusion map and this produces a really nice result as a base for painting. Can this be done in ptex? I didn't see the option. Cheers,

Hi Andrew. I posted this in another thread but I guess this one is probably more appropriate now. I am trying to get a voxel sculpt which I have retopo'd (with perfect quad's by the way) to work in ptex but I am having issues. I have tried all of the options in the retopo room "merge model into scene with ptex", "merge hull with ptex", "merge patch with ptex" but they all hate me. The model appears in the paint room as it should with its normal map but when I paint it, it's ugly and shows artifacts. I opened up the UV room and I noticed a massive cluster of squares didn't exist. The same process works great with the per pixel painting method by the way but ptex will massively speed up my work flow if it will work in this way as it will cut out any messing around with UV's. Ptext works amazingly if i import a mesh on its own. Hmmmmm, I just tested it again with a sphere and quadrangulate and it worked with no issues...... Maybe its my mesh or something I have done in the retopo process. Thank you for this.

Hey People. I am trying to get a voxel sculpt which I have retopo'd (with perfect quad's by the way) to work in ptex but I am having issues. I have tried all of the options in the retopo room "merge model into scene with ptex", "merge hull with ptex", "merge patch with ptex" but they all hate me. The model appears in the paint room as it should with its normal map but when I paint it, it's ugly. I opened up the UV room and I noticed a massive chunk of squares diddn't exist. The same process works great with the per pixel painting method. Ptext works amazingly if i import a mesh on its own. Any ideas comrades?

Hi Guys, Just finished this sculpt for a competition over at Game Artisans and thought I'd upload it here so you lot can see it. Aye, Aye!

Hi Andrew, Your ambient occlusion tool is fantastic and really useful character models. I tested it today on a room and it didn't work so well as there were too many shadows but something occurred to me. I could use this to create GREAT lightmaps! I changed the lights to 4 and the results were a bit closer to what I was looking for but if I was able to get just one light in the scene or had the ability to place lights in set positions, I am certain it would be perfect. There is also a massive demand for this from users of game engines which would result in more users for 3D Coat! The voxel sculpting abilities for landscapes and auto UV are two major selling points but realistic lightmap's would be the cherry on the cake. Can this be implemented, Pleeeeeeaaaaaase?

Hey Ged, looking good! Have you seen my entry? There is a pic of it on this forum. It is the one with an eye where his mouth should be and mouth's where his eyes should be. Good Luck.

Yaaaaaay! Downloading now

Ha Ha, thanks Tony. I will.

A quick montage of FREAKS

Hi People, Thought I would start one of these. Here are a few things I have knocked up in 3D Coat since I have owned it. They are mainly just doodles that I come back to every once in a while. Some I am working on now. Some may get finished. Some never will..... I will add others over time.

That's nice Phil, really smooth. I cant wait for multi-res either. I need it soooo much.

It would be good exercise. I would never need to go to the gym again!

Voxel Clay sounds good. By the way, over at the Unity 3d forum's people have been requesting "a voxel based terrain system like Crysis" as Crysis uses voxels for its terrain system. People really like the idea of being able to create caves, overhangs on cliff's, etc in editor without having to use a modeling program or a height map then importing the asset. Voxels are "so hot right now" (Zoolander - one of my all time faves) so keeping them in the name would be a good choice. 3D Coat is awesome at creating unrestricted free form terrains and the game making bods need to know that. My 2 pennies

It looks good Andrew! I really like the cooliris image wall. I am so going to use that on one of my sites. I am going to have to create a few more sculpts so I can get in the gallery. I have just been really busy lately but I will post a finished project on the forums later on. The only thing I can see missing is the "they say" testimonials section which was pretty good I thought. All the best,

You are probably right, chris. I see 3D Coats voxel feature as the future of 3d modeling though and find the new developments with every update amazing. Before 3D Coat I would create almost all of my models using sub-division modeling in programs like Wings 3d and Hexagon, then I started using these programs to create the base model, bring it into 3D Coat for detailing normal maps and textures then export. Now you can create a base in 3d Coat, detail, retopo and export, it is fantastic, but having the extra control of a cage (which could potentially be used as a lo-poly mesh for baking the normal map and textures to as well without the need to retopo) to be able to quickly create precise models with no need to tweak anything externally is astounding. I would only ever have to use another program for animation.

"Primitives cage can be tweaked using not only points but edges and faces too." Cool! It would be fantastic to also be able to extrude faces to assist in easy shape creation like sub-div surface mode in blender. Could this be a possible addition to the primitive tool? If so, that would be amazing!

I think you are right with regards to the mock up. I guess it would be a lot easier for new users to understand as it would be a bit more straight forward.

It may need explanation, but I actually think it works well when done in the right order. 1) Primitive Symmetry activated = useful for making a head or a body part symmetrical before duplication. 2) Main symmetry activated = duplicated primitive which useful for making two arms, two legs, two ears, etc

Wow! These new primitives have just massively increased productivity. Creating everything is now sooooo much quicker. Faces, bodies, arms, legs, car bonnets, spaceships ...... Surely this must be making 3D Coat even more popular in the overall 3D community. This is by far the best bit of software I have ever bought. I am just glad I got on the ship early to see how well it has progressed. Fantastic Update Andrew. How many users do we have now, by the way? Thank you

Hi everyone, Just thought I would give you a heads up on a fantastic new development in the world of 3D Game Creation. Unity 3D, a really great, easy to use Game Engine for PC, Mac, Web, Wii and iphone games is now free: http://unity3d.com/ You can import obj files created in 3d coat into your games. The indie license can be used for commercial and non-commercial purposes. Check it out! It almost rocks as much as 3d coat! Marc Wakefield http://www.mrmdesign.com http://www.marcwakefield.co.uk

Hi Andrew, Loving the new tools. Sorry to be the bearer of more bad news... I am afraid I am getting a pretty serious out of memory error though. After about 100 uses of the move tool and 10 minutes work, this alpha just crashes. I have tested it a few times while watching the little memory counter in the bottom left corner. This happens with the DX and GL versions. With the last alpha I was able to doodle away for hours.

Wow Andrew, I can't wait for this. It feels like christmas is ariving early!