trubetsk

Hello, I'm trying to figure out how to carve or reduce mechanically-straight channel lines (relative to the camera) along a curved surface. I've tried: Holding shift while dragging the brush (as in photoshop) to constrain it to a perfectly straight, or 45 deg line. Using the curved stroke tool with hard edges. Neither of these seemed to work, with the results shown in the screenshot below. Does anyone here know of another workflow to achieve what i'm trying. Thanks!

Thanks for the help everyone. These are all very useful tips and workarounds.

Thanks Carlos. I now understand how adding ghosted volume on a separate layer may make the brush take that volume into account while you are still painting on your active layer. What does "Pick and Act" do? It didn't seem to have an effect on drawing over the ghosted volume. Also I understand more how the brush chooses the default angle: it's the average of all the normals underneath the circular brush radius. Simply increasing or decreasing the radius of the brush under a particular point will cause the angle to change if the average geometry under the cursor does. Still, it's a bit unfortunate that you can't freeze or lock the brush rotation in any other way, or simply have it use the normal direction under the "dot", not under the entire radius.

Hello guys, I'm just getting used to voxel modelling and working with brush alphas. One of the things I'm currently running into is the 3D 'angle' of the brush head doesn't always point in the direction I want. It seems to roughly follow to the average of the model's normals underneath it, but there are some cases where I'd like to freeze it along one or more axis for specific rsults. Is there a way to fully freeze and manipulate the angle of the 3D brush head? Or any protips for workarounds for the 2 cases I'm attaching below? Thanks a bunch

It was just a parameter I was fiddling with trying to understand what might affect the alpha stamping. Falloff 0-100 doesn't change anything in this case. Only adding more opaque shapes to the center of the alpha seems to help.

Update: I found a workaround. It has to do with filling the center hole of an alpha with a very faint transparent object. It's somehow related to alphas failing to print all or some of their parts when their center area is fully black (transparent).

Thanks I tried downloading the beta 4.7.37 client. Same problem though It gets more interesting, I started doing more testing with different brush alphas and getting different results depending on the alpha used (See Attached) I was basing this on the hunch that the brush was not working because the 'middle area' contained transparent pixels. It's sort of the case... Sometimes it will extrude the complete alpha (A & D), other times it will extrude only certain pieces of the alpha (example C) and and other times you simply get a blank result (B)!

Hi, I'm attempting to voxel sculpt with custom alpha as a texture I've created at 1024x1024. I'm having several issues: 1. At small radius various pieces of the alpha are missing, or have holes. It seems different with each stamp of the bruch. 2. If I increase the radius to a large size, the alpha won't paint at all. There is simply no response from the mouse click. (See attached) What am I doing wrong? I googled around before posting and found this bug: http://3dcoat.com/mantis/view.php?id=2084 which was marked fixed in version 4.5.29. I'm even using "constant pressure" mode for my brush. How do I get my alphas to look as crisp and high resolution as in that picture (on the left). Please help! Thanks a bunch!

Figured it out! Thanks Digman, your response prompted more investigation on my part. In this case it turned out to be an order of operations thing: Starting dragging the handle and then pressing Ctrl will cause snapping from the location of the mouse cursor. Starting by depressing Ctrl first, THEN moving the mouse cursor will snap to precise 45 degree increments. It was a missed expectations thing on my part. Abode Illustrator for example clears any existing transformations as soon as you press Shift to snap to 45 degree increments, so you don't have to worry about moving your cursor slightly before snapping. So maybe there maybe a case for changing this behavior to be slightly more user friendly But I understand how it works now in 3DCoat.

Hello, I'm having some trouble rotating my primitives in 45/90 degree increments. The primitives placement doesn't contain a rotation input box, so I'm attempting to use the gizmo rotation handles with ctrl+drag snapping to tilt the shape. However my rotations end up snapping a couple degrees off the mark often. Playing around with it, I discovered that the rotation will snap in a 45 degree arc from the location of the mouse cursor, rather than the object axis. It is obvious when you drag from the "edge" of the rotation handle, as opposed to right in the middle of the handle. I wanted to bring up the behavior, which is probably not intended with the ctrl+drag rotation. But also wanted to ask if anyone has other workarounds or suggestions for precise rotating starting primitives in 45 and 90 degree increments. Thanks!

Thanks, I didn't think about the 2D grid + snap to grid. That's a useful workaround

I really love how the cut tool can be used to slice off geometry, and I often find myself using the vertex lasso to create more complex hard-edged cutouts. Using shift+click with the the vertex lasso stroke mode I can make easy 45 and 90 degree shapes, however there's a problem that always plagues my workflow: I can't shift+ click to a blank spot on the canvas (that's doesn't have geometry underneath it). I can make a regular (non-shift) mouse-click to any blank spot for a vertex, but this doesn't give me the precision and clean 90/45 degree cut that a quick shift+click snap can. Has anybody else noticed/encountered this? Or have a workflow suggestion for clean 45/90 cuts they can suggest?

Thanks, so it's a known issue and unsupported currently. I sent a line to support@3dcoat.com, hope that increases its visibility.

Hey guys, I'm curious why when I select two or more points on a lattice cage, it displays the transform gizmo in the spot between the points. However with just a single point selected, no gizmo is visible (although the point can be freeform dragged relative to the camera plane). I'm trying to move a single lattice point with with axis constraints. Is there a way to accomplish this? Thanks in advance!