Scary M

I'd like to see more of the old faces, I'm confident the slew of improvements coming with bring lots of folks out of the woodwork.

Hey Chap Not seen you in a while.

New Pinky Demon, Hard surface done in 3DC

No that's not it you have to have voxels visible in paint room active when you initially load up 3d coat, if you start the app and this wasn't checked when you import your mesh into the paint room no dialogue appears and the mesh pops in without UV data. If you have this issue set show voxels in paint room on close 3d coat and start it again then you can import mesh , dialogue shows and you can lock your normals set your smoothing etc

AHH the voxels have to be visible in the paint room for it to merge object correctly

Yes

i had to re export my model then import into blender again and remove smoothing, then import again into paint room. For some reason it did not work correctly the first time (imported model with no dialouge or UV), I wonder if it was because i had model in retopo room with same UV set name. who knows!.. the main thing is it works its an extra step but it works. So that work-around works Not only does it work it produces the best maps, However it is still a work around and we need to use another application to remove smoothing in order to do it. The normal map generated with 3DC with the import to paint room and locking normals work-around - NICE

Ok for what ever reason it does not show me dialogue on import of mesh so no UV was imported just mesh data. Model has UV so I will investigate further.

Please walk me through the process? I have a sculpt in sculpt room and I have a mesh to import, what do I do? In paint room when I 'import object' from the file menu it has no UV so when I try and bake from sculpt to paint room the result does nothing. If I import object for per pixel paint with UV it creates a new scene removing what's in the sculpt room. What am I doing wrong?

I don't understand why the mesh from the retopo room need to have this strange additional smoothing added to it, as the mesh was initially made in 3d coat (I only exported it out fo fix the smoothing problem. importing the mesh is not really the issue here. I would want to bake my retopo mesh without the smoothing can we not have the ability to remove smoothing right there in the bake menu from retopo room? The break in workflow comes more in the fact that I would have to export my retopology out of 3d coat and bring it back into the software with smoothing removed. Surely there should be a way to do this without the extra step of exporting out of software? I stress I'm pretty sure it's not a bake settings problem, because if I bake any mesh made in retopo room export the mesh and and bake normals map in other software I get the same result as the unusable map I baked in 3d coat, however because the idtech 4 has to have no smoothing at all the mesh from 3d coat cannot be used without removing smoothing first. So to break it down again if I make something in the retopo room and bake it with auto smoothing not checked I still get smoothing on the mesh and it bakes weird normal maps regardless of the software. However If I export the baked result out of the paint room and bring it in to another software (say blender) and remove smoothing. I can then take the mesh into other baking software and bake perfectly good maps that do work.

Hi Andrew the problem when importing to the paint room is that the sculpt room geometry disappears, I can re load the sculpt from a 3b file but the scaling no longer correlates, unless I'm doing something wrong?

And just before somebody says 3d coat map has a flipped green channel her is flipped green same map from 3d coat -

knald map - Not as good as topogun but clearly more consistent than 3dc

our version of RBdoom Requires no smoothing on mesh so its an ideal test to illustrate 3d coat adding its own unspecified smoothing to the mesh before the map is baked. Both maps were calculated using same mesh one imported into retopo the other imported directly into topogun both calculated from same highres in 3d coat case the sculpt room then in topogun an exported sculpt room scene from 3d coat, can we see the difference?

just to illustrate this is 3d coat normal in game - below is topogun normal there is weird specular only caused by wrong spec map not normals

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1KZTg8EvAXDq5_djF8iBlbVfxdjcb2uE0?usp=sharing

Im sorry my Mic is broken as you will hear but this video should illustrate https://drive.google.com/file/d/14b9SUCdt_2rCETMwprdX1ZYU5rIPk_Ts/view?usp=sharing

I will record video

Its difficult because it's not apparent initially until we test the mesh in game the viewport display and rendering in 3dc is perfect. The bias created by smoothing angles isn't visible in 3dc. I will drop here link to my 3d coat file where I found initial issue on this project. And a link to the obj I exported and removed smoothing angles from so you can analyse. This OBJ without smoothing was successfully loaded into 3 other tested applications and produced a working Mikktspace tangent space map without bias. Another test would be bake something from retopo with per pixel and set auto smoothing groups to off, then export mesh remove smoothing bake from this mesh in another application then import the mesh for ppp, import baked normal from other application and look at the effect smoothing has on the normal map. I think one of the areas of difficulty is 3dc has soo many conflicting normal map settings. And how a about an Industry standard Mikktspace default that you can just return too. For the artist who doesn't know the exact requirements of the software preset and tangent space. It says a lot that I can pick up 3 different software and bake out 3 perfectly good and consistent normal maps with default settings in these softwares using the corrected unsmoothed mesh. Yet the struggle I have had in 3d coat 1 to find a workable set of parameters, and 2 to diagnose the smoothing angle issue. If I wasn't so invested in 3d coat It would be game over.

Hold breath another long one Hi Don I will ping him l, my time was spent on it purely because I did not expect it to be the problem it's one of those bang your head against the wall kind of things where you start to question your own sanity I am working heavily modified Doom 3 code but I know that a one Mikktspace normal should at least be the same or very similar to another and I had been extremely careful (or so I thought) to remove all smoothing from all meshes at each stage so the models can render properly in game. The way I diagnosed and confirmed the issue (because it not really ab apparent problem until it is if you get my meaning) is to create a complex model in retopo room and bake pp with normal map with auto smoothing turned off. So the normal map produced looked swollen and biased on the model in game. I was pretty sure of my process by now, so I tried another baker on my shelf nowadays and the first I tried was Topogun loading the mesh over an exported scene from the voxel room, and the normal map looked perfect. So this then became my pipe for these model but I still didn't really understand why Topogun would work so well against 3dc? So last week I got to playing around with 3dcoat painting weight in a area of influence before a bake is commited the model was particularly complex and rather than build a cage mesh for Topogun I thought I'd give baking in 3d coat another as in prior project the weighting of ray casting prior to bake has been a life save and sure enough it worked and I was able to illiminate baking pinch in awkward areas in the result in 3d coat. But on load into engine map still looked bias and swollen back to Topogun and cage for baking. But I decided to try other software see if I can find a better less labour intensive solution so I tried substance p, and knald and to my surprise each one of these produced the same swollen bias'd map. So I then figured that it must be something wrong with the mesh from 3d coat and the topogun upon import removes smoothing angles. Over to blender for an import and export after removing smoothing then import into sub p, knald to bake and test and normal map produced is as expected and looks good in game. Import into 3dc and bake - funky bias. By this time I had searched for removing mesh smoothing angles in 3d coat and a possible solution was Import object into paint room and bake sculpt to paint room. There are several issues with this walk around 1st being that I have to use a walk around, 2nd if I import a mesh for ppp I lose the sculpt in the sculpt room and have to re import from 3b file and scaling is all fecked, 3rd is that if I import just the object into the paint room no UV are loaded. And nothing bakes across this might be that I have a retopo mesh with UV setup. Anyway at this point I gave up trying and had a rant. Conclusion is you simply cannot retopo and bake to non smoothed mesh. You cannot produce a mesh in 3dc at all that does not require a silly little step of export remove smoothing and no simple way to import and without mesh being re smoothed. The worrying thing to me (and I am passionate about 3d coat) is that how many people have tried this common workflow and either just dropped the software because of its (and this is a quote from the tinternet) 'weird normal maps' I know in my case here it's Game engine specific (because I have worked in a few engines now and smoothing is not a problem for some not others) but it does illustrate a fundamental unexpected issue. Furthermore after diagnosing the problem I see there are in fact multiple posts re this from far FAR back in the forum archive.

Rant coming sorry guys - Bit frustrated with 3D coat at the moment it seems I have run into a Massive issue with Smoothing Groups Why if I retopologise a high Res sculpt does 3D Coat automatically apply smoothing to a mesh on baking regardless of options selected. I have to export my retopo out of 3dcoat and remove smoothing to bake it in another App successfully. Of course I'd love to bake my maps in 3D Coat but it produces a normal map that will not render properly in game due to the fecking auto smoothing that I have no control over. I have wasted over a week in total on this project trying to find a solution, and it turned out to be so simple. I love 3D coat I really do but when a BIG problem like this which has been reported since before 2018 it still present I have to wonder! So we have the option to have auto smoothing groups option like any other software but this option is a CHECK BOX if I uncheck a check box as I don't want smoothing. I don't expect smoothing if I can't have no smoothing then WHY bother with a check box in the first place. It's frustrating see because I've run into this issue before and had to switch software. I've hung on in there this time but I've been baking my maps elsewhere which is a real shame because honestly I could do pretty much the whole process to in 3d coat. There is supposed to be a workaround of exporting my retopo (Get this into another app to add/remove my smoothing) and then re import it into the paintroom where I can then somehow bake from the paint room the sculpt that I had in the sculpt room, which is lost when I import into the paint room, or something like that.... but honestly I can't be bothered. I'll just bake my normals in another software. Rant done. Still loving coat for sculpting.

More hard surface voxels