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As a novice in 3DC who put very concise questions and asked for help and guidance in workflows (because there aren't) I find the time invested here by experienced people very frustrating. You are more concerned of fighting back and forth instead of investing time for your community and your new members who need guidance. And it is not about my threads but I read other's too ... it is a shame for what this community and this software could be ... If you do not get anything from my few lines here then come back and reflect on them in 1 month when you will cool off.

Rygaard, where you were as a beginner in 3DC it is a TRUE MIRROR where I am at this moment. Atm I am unsure if I should quit 3DC or continue invest time to understand 1-2 workflows I barely got an ideeea that might be. I asked people around, I watched almost all the videos (still have few but mostly are on specific tools) and improoved a lot in 4 weeks of working like 6h/day medium every day including weekends. I do not care if other's spent years to achieve skills or did x classes: I am very fast learner and tought myself and others many things. I made a very decent looking character in vox room and a bit in Surface but I do not need to do a lot though in S for my toon. Still I am very frustrated because I dont find videos DETAILING THE WORKFLOWs for an organic complex character modeled in 3DC. All I have found is in the last minutes of this video which is very brief and fast forward and also this topic. I am also amazed that I ask questions on this forum with clear points to be answered (and that will help the community as well if answered properly) and all I get are very brief answers. Like I should understand everything from a sentence. I understand people do not have time but if there are so many videos on TOOLS and TIPS and so on, why there are no videos ON WORKFLOWs so novices would know what TO DO. Few words scattered in some videos here and there are FAR FROM ENOUGH. I am very sure that many new users will not have the patience I did and invest so much time in order TO FIND A WORKFLOW to have I am 40y old and I have used many softwares and also some programming but the lack of DETAILED WORKFLOWs in 3DC is just something I cannot comprehend. It is like everybody expects the users to come from zbrush with enough knowhow in order to understand quickly what is what ... While the video about tools and brushes are good in 3DC Official channels, I got a guidline only from other users --- still those are obsolete and 3DC team should do detailed WORKFLOWs to insert in the beginner's playlists. Maybe some updated techniques on sculpting in 3DC too. I get that it was hard for some old users from this forum but do you think in 2019 people should still follow the same roads ? I do not and I can tell form experience that learning is much much faster that it was when I learned X stuff. Everything is faster now and so should be the process of learning 3DC. Bottom line: my appologies for any 3DC staff member if they feel bad about my lines but my intention is not to offend anyone but to tell you loud and clear that you have to change the approach to new users and make their life easier. Else your community will not grow but shrink more and more and also who knows how many users did quit in the past and gave 0 feedback. I am sure that you can see some analytics in the forum, on the official website and on facebook that will tell you if the popularity of 3DC grew or shrinked and also details on geographic or returns of visitors. I appreciate 3DC software for what it is offering in terms of tools (at least what I can understand for now) and I do wish it to have more success (though it is very hard without strong marketing and good absorbtion of incoming users).

Topic is about baking an intermediate sculpted mesh to a low retopo mesh and use image based sculpting in paint room VS sculpt all the details in Surface Mode and use less the Paint Room The topics of comparison (PROS and CONS) for the 2 methods I have in mind are: 1. procedural manipulation (in paint it would be easier but I do not grasp the drawbacks) 2. performance in working 3. exporting for unity/unreal 4. exporting for animation in other apps: like Houdini, C4D, others 5. using the mesh with Mixamo animations 6. cloth / fur adding in 3DC or other programs after the Paint is done I know it is a lot to cover with PROS and CONS for each point but I think this post can help future users to better understand the paths they can take. Most questions I have are because of many videos just touch the surface of topics like the above.

I do not get your question yet I found the problem. I did same test on a new file and there is no problem. Selection loads correctly. I tried it again in my file and it fails. I even did a new layer with a simple primitive sphere and it still fails to load the selection with the same error popup. After more tests I discovered why it wasn't loading: I deleted the NON-UNIFORM layers and now the selection loads as it should be. I think a nice feature should be to have a popup to uniform the layers or at least to check it. How could one think that a non-uniform layer can affect another layer in using any tools ? Anyway if anyone has a solution for point no.2 or consider that is a good feature to add, feel free to answer it. later edit: I uniformed all the layers and the loading still not works. How can I discover which layer is causing the Pose selection not to load ?

1. loading a saved selection witH PAINT SELECT (tried with sphere too) then clear selection and then load selection does not work I am not moving anything but just do the above simple steps 2. I didnt find if there is a posibility to have the posed selction SAVED as A NEW LAYER ---> if there is a workaround with the booleans operators please advise though it would be much easier to just have the pose selction + RMB and have CREATE NEW LAYER from posed selection

Thank you for the answers. I understood almost all and it cleared the clouds 1. "To that layer we do the retopo, and then we hide it and we bake the rest of the well-detailed layers." >> can you please detail this a bit or link to a video ? 2. "It is tempting to paint using surface paint and then bake, I never do it because the weight of the project increases." >> from this I understand that most people does not use vertices paint but bake maps and UV paint. Correct ?

I will also try a pose in Mixamo to see if there are any good results in some exported animations. If not I will try tweak the animations in Houdini. Hopefully with a good mesh I won't need to tweak a lot the animations I can get from Mixamo.

I want to animate the character in Houdini and try make a short animation with what I build in 3D Coat plus some effects in H in the future I will go to Unity or Unreal for a small game I have in mind the short animation I want to do is just to connect what I allready learned to do in Houdini yet it might be easier to just take what I create in 3DC and Houdini and build a small game. my plans are big yet hard to achieve in 1 man but I worked and still work a lot to improve.

I have a few uncertainties and maybe I get a little clear insight with this post I Sculpted an organic character with multiple layers (upper body, legs. feet, tail, arms, hands, eyes, iris, ears) + some layers with ornaments applied on some parts (so I will have my main parts "procedural" in case I want to modify the ornaments). I have understanding of UV and topology and watched videos on it. But I wouldn't like to go on wrong path so I am asking a bit of guidance because I am just at the begining with those steps. Questions are: 1. I used Fill Voids after selecting all layers - is it doing it for all ? ( I am asking because for example if I try apply shader on some selected layers it doesn't work - it just applies to one of it). 2. I didn't yet go to Surface Mode and I do not know know if I will need it to for this character. Anyway, going to UV and Retopo it would be a pain to retopo every part. Should I merge all the layers in 1 layer before going to the other rooms ? 3. What else should I do in Sculpt Room before going to Autopo, in order to have a good mesh and not a messy one that would require a lot of tweaking ? 4. If I want to have my character animated in an external animation program and after that in a game platform like unity or unreal are there different approaches I should have regarding the mesh ? a. shoud I paint on vertices and skip UV workflow? or it is out of discussion if I want my character to go into those programs ? b. what bitmaps should I have to build and export from 3DC in order to have similar result in those programs ? displacement, normal, metalness and roughness ? If I use smart materials and also paint room should I export with the option with color and glosiness ? 5. After I have topology + baked maps generated, is it a way to connect what I will do in the Sculpt Room to the retopo and paint rooms so I don't have to do modifications manually ? I mean, in baking microvetex I think it wont be very hard as I just have to repaint a bit the areas but how about the retopology ? Should I just go to the retopo room and delete some polygons and recreate others in the parts where I modified the mesh ? Please excuse my nubish way of questions but still I have more dots to connect in real work, despite the fact that I watched a bunch of videos :).

tokikake got it ty

Can this be done ? "Save Latice Shape in Primitives" ? I searched over the forum and googled it but maybe I used the wrong words for the help. Reason is that I would like to re-use some shapes I make and make minor adjustments to the cage.

I allready use it but it is not the same thing. Scrolling betweeen those folders helps a lot the usability. You just have to try it so that you will udnerstand. If you do not trust me check C4D. You just hover over a drop box and you can scroll it. Another thing I didn't found yet: while working with references when i zoom closer to my object the controls of the reference remain outside. It should be great to have the controls on the screen still or a small Gizmo so that I can move the reference to align perfectly to my object.

I searched on the forum if this feature was requested and I didn't find it. Maybe becasue it is not very common. I found it and used it in a different program and I can tell you it is optimising a lot the navigation through the panels. So here it is and I am sure it can be done very fast if people will understand how good it is: Make the drop area scrollable This way in so many tabs/pallets one can easily scroll and minimize the clicking. Who used this simple feature ever can confirm the usability Cheers!

Thank you for your answer and yes it is curved surface. I made some modifications later on and I cannot replicate. Yet what I discovered later is that using the same shape on the same surface worked after all. And I think it is because my brush radius was bigger. Similar to this you answered though so this can be closed if needed

Thank you for your answer but I am still not enlightened I will try summarise a workflow as I understand it now and please correct me: first thing I should make a rough model as you said in voxels (even some ornaments but not with very High desnity as I will tesselate in Surface ?) then get the V layers to Surface layers and tesselate where I want high-details ----- what I do not get from what you wrote is this: - isnt the overall general shape done in voxels allready ? what to do more in Surface mode than to tesselate some areas of the existing shape and add details and ornaments ? or do you reffer as after doing this we can call it overall finalised shape and in voxel is just a general shape ? - and what is the difference in adding detalis and ornaments with Surface Tools vs adding same ones in LiveClay tools (using of course Freeze, Subdivide if needed) ? Are there major differences for example between extrude and flatten or expand and inflate ? When should I rely on one or the other ? ----- One more thing: I noticed that one can paint on vertices and now on depth map as well. This is procedural which is good. Question: is it possible to make rough sculpting in voxel layers and paint details and ornaments on vertices ? Eg: I want to have a base model for a character and have layers with different depths that will give me organic variations without the need to have different sculpts for each model. What are the caveats to this if possible ? In game assets and animation assets from a logical stand-point it would be a problem since those platforms use ray-casting on geometry, but I do not understand how the export works for such assets: when I export an obj/fbx will those assets include the depth info provided from the painted vertices ? Will it be possbile to change the shaders in an external program ? thank you again! ps. If anyone cand do / link videos to show 2018-2019 techniques in building organic characters, like the series "from scratch" that was dne years ago, it would be an awesome addition to the allready existing videos you guys provide.

Hi, I am new to sculpting and I am a bit confused of which path to take for sculpting characters (which is my main goal). I watched many tutorials on 3D Coat and read documentation. For old users who already know voxels and surface it is easy to choose and just watch updated videos but for a new user there are many infos missing in the new videos. I watched a lot from the past too but I cannot get a grasp which way to go because many are obsolete (although there is some good information scattered here and there). As far as I understand for now, before thinking to go into smaller details on surface mode, I should focus on voxel or LiveClay. I understand the differences in performance but I do not understand which one to use it for most of the time and also what would be a good workflow in switching between voxels and surface. IF working in LiveClay is similar to voxel why use voxel and then surface and back to voxel for more sculpting if needed and so on? Wouldn't it be better just work in LiveClay ? (scenario: Maybe I will miss creating detailed layers in voxels, then do some details on a base head mesh in surface and then on switching back to voxels if I want to go and sculpt more big details, I will have to 32x a full voxel layer not to loose my res ... ) I understand voxels help a lot in boolean operations but in sculpting a character I do not see anyone using booleans but only brushes. So, particularly for character creation (organic ones I am interested and not realistic) is it a boolean approach to it or not needed since sculpting with brushes is more reliable ? Then again should I just focus on LiveClay for creating characters and skip voxels ? Sorry if I my words are messy but this thoughts are influenced by the confusion I am in right now.

Hi, Is this a bug or I am to noob to figure it out ? I tried picked from bounding box too and I tried different alphas. I used VoxHide to make a circle intrude then same to unhide and then i tried make soemthing like a mouth and it doesnt work. Ty