Tieguaili3D

no, in zbrush you always have your topology and UVs preserved on import until you destroy them with dynamesh, which should be how it works in coat as well, but as you seem to keep missing the point.....when you're working in subdivisions on a pre-made basemesh you do not use dynamesh/sculptris, there is no benefit to it in any way at that point in your workflow so saying "well dynamesh breaks your topology and UVs anyway so why would you ever bother having them?" is pointless.

as i've explained countless times....the point at which you're dynameshing and the point at which you want your clean topology are very different parts of the workflow, dynameshing is for the sketching phase when you don't know the overall form of the model, and what 3d coat currently has is fantastic for that loose sketchy clay feel, personally i agree that coat's voxels are better than dynamesh in zbrush. Subdivision on your pre-UVed basemesh is for blendshapes and making a character that fits your basemesh but isn't just a minor detail alteration, the whole point is to be working within the framework of the basemesh's capabilities, you're not suoopsed to suddenly go "oh what if i add another arm and put some holes in the chest and make the head into a dragon instead of a human" that isn't what it's for. Conform does not allow smooth working for either of the jobs you need from your basemesh and working with a clean quad basemesh lets you do everything conform allows without any of the ballache of the conform tool constantly ****** up forcing you to go over to the retopo room to fix it.

saying "you're using it wrong" is extremely lazy when someone is showing you the weaknesses of the current tools and using that to show why a proper multires with proper topology is needed. I have no idea why so many people in this community are so hell-bent on this "what we have is absolutely perfect and nothing else could ever be of use so don't even try asking" mentality, there would only be benefits from giving surface mode proper topology preservation, no drawbacks, it wouldn't prevent anyone from using any one of the existing methods but it *would* allow people to use basemeshes effectively without having to go through a bunch of hacky extra steps to make an inferior tool semi-functional (yes semi-functional, it still doesn't give you the flexibility of proper multires work).

for me anything that doesn't need a basemesh is better in coat, nicer brush engine for both sculpting and painting, wway better splines, pose tool is close enough to mask modelling that it works well enough, losing bend curve is a problem but not a dealbreaker, but losing the ability to properly work with basemeshes makes it unusable for a lot of things

they have a decent rememsher, and while most of your work can be done in voxels if you're not using a basemesh, the second you have to work on blendshapes or work on a different character for the same project voxels aren't suitable and neither are the current alternatives in coat.

is there an eta on preserving quads in surface mode for proper multires work? lots of great stuff been coming along but that's still a basic feature we're missing and maybe a little update on how it's going would be nice

i've not had issues nearly that bad with it but you're right, we need proper multires before we can actually work in 3d coat with basemeshes, all of this i did point out in the original feature request thread but hopefully we get there eventually

the main use of multires sculpting is to be able to use your game-ready basemeshes to make variations on that asset without breaking your UVs, and to be able to create blendshapes for your character and creatures, and to be able to bring in that low poly game-res mesh to work on because it gives you the flexibility to make large proportional changes at the base resolution while also sculpting in details to bake later at higher resolutions, the fact that you can't do any of that effectively is why the new multires offers no benefit over the old decimation levels system it won't help with the fact that conform retopo mesh just doesn't work well when you're doing anything more than a few very minor edits, unless they're also gonna be preserving UVs as well

low poly was imported to the retopo room and the sculpt object picked from there so there were no issues with the low poly at all, it was already exactly the same as the sculpt mesh which has conform on. try this with an actual low poly rather than an already high poly voxel object, the issue is when working on game-res basemeshes the triangulation causes all kinds of pinching as shown in my screenshots

the current multires + conform retopo mesh workflow doesn't work as stated before in the multires feature request, the fact that conform is basically just a shrinkwrap projecting one mesh on top of another causes all these distortions, overlaps, and merged verts while you're in the process of sculpting normally, something that wouldn't be an issue with a proper multires that preserves the original topology without triangulation and without having to rely on reprojection after every single operation (something that is also gonna start causing a lot of lag the second you want to work on details and need more than a few million polygons) the fact that it's a triangulated mesh also means your high poly is covered in these pinches when you subdivide that no amount or sculpting can clean up, which is unacceptable for baking cause you're gonna have them showing up in the normal map. hopefully this is finally enough proof of why this feature is incomplete and needs to be finished with proper topoology preservation, it's a good start, the performance is great, rebuilding lower seems to work fine (hopefully it won't break the second you try it on quads), but as it is this multires meethod offers absolutely no benefits over the old decimation multires we had before, and has every single one of the same problems.

personally i think they should all be merged with the option of keeping the sculpt/low poly/paint rooms as separate workspaces for the people that prefer to have their tools split

new multires sculpting is a great start, performance is awesome, had well over 100mil polys active at 6 subdivs and it was running smooth. There are some major issues with the feature that need to be fixed before it's a usable tool though: 1) UVs need to be preserved (in progress i know but it's absolutely essential to working with basemeshes in the first place) 2) quad topology. absolutely essential. when you subdivide a triangulated mesh you have nothing but a mess to deal with, baking looks like ***** because it doesn't shade properly, smoothing doesn't work cause subdivided triangles make a mess, ruin your edgeflow, and don't relax properly, so you end up in the same situation as with voxels where you need a much higher resolution to keep lines crisp even when you're working in an area that was specifically designed to have those lines crisp from the start.

that was my thinking, it's simplify things without forcing people that like the current system into learning a new workflow, they could still use rooms the same way they do now, everyone else could work in whatever workflow they choose

since this is a wishlist thread i'll toss down all the things that would put 3d coat pretty much top of the pile for sculpting and painting: 1) true multires sculpting, being able to import a quad mesh at it's base resolution, maintain the UVs, sculpt in multiple subdivision levels, and bake normals/cavity/displacement from your highest to lowest subdivision levels. currently that's impossible, you have the broken and incredibly obstructive "conform retopo mesh" combined with decimation levels that don't work as well as using your original mesh. 2) multi-alpha brushes and paint blending in brushes, using one alpha to affect the other the way you can in most 2d paint programs so you can create much more interesting and expressive brushes and create more dirt/damage patterns to use for PBR texturing, being able to set a threshold for how much of the brush colour is mixed with the object colour for faster gradients and a faster way to achieve a painterly style, or just for smearing materials like grease into other materials like girt and dust when doing PBR texturing. 3) face sets/polygroups/selection groups/ whatever you want to call them, polygroups from zbrush basically, they make isolating parts of your model easier that you don't want to actually split, selecting and masking areas, creasing borders, guiding autopo, and even UVing your model considerably easier and more convenient, and are a lot more reliable than guide curves or saved masks or any of the tools we currently have available. 4) removing the arbitrary separation between sculpt, paint, uv, and polygon objects, and removing the locked in linear workflow demanded by the current "rooms" system. This would just make the entire creation process much more freeform and fluid, and there's no good reason for separating the objects since they're literally the exact same thing, it would also allow people the option to continue using rooms as premade workspaces for related tools, or to create their own tailored room to their workflow, similar to zbrush you'd be able to roughly sculpt in your basic shapes, autopo them to get a cleaner surface and better edge flow, crease the edges as needed and subdivide so you can continue sculpting, all without having to do the sculpt in the sculpt room, autopo that and end up in the retopo room, change over to the modelling room, manually fence sharp edges, go back to the sculpt room, grab the mesh from the retopo room etc. which some might argue isn't a big deal, but when you're working on more complex models with more parts and you either have to add 30 operations to each action, export to another program for rebuilding then import back (probably the fastest option right now), or spend the extra time polishing it up in the sculpt room. 5) overhauling the way texturing is done, smart materials are ineffective for detailed painting since you have no way to really combine or alter the automask on each layer, and there are no blending modes in smart materials, this leaves you with making groups of layers that you clip mask against each other to create the mask you actually want, then you can use that final layer to clip the layer you actually wanted to mask, a better system would just be to add masking layers that you can attach to a paint layer and build up your mask inside that using the procedural masking options form smart materials combined with actual blending modes to let you combine "always on top" with "less on concave" to make a dust layer that sits on the top of an object but hasn't got into the crevices that aren't exposed. these might be huge projects but definitely worth doing to make the overall user experience massively more enjoyable and less frustrating to learn, and bring an already great set of tools together to make the workflow less frustrating for more experienced artists.

so you enjoy not being able to see what you're doing when you have "conform retopo mesh" active? all you can see is the stupid overlay, try doing any kind of detailed work with that thing active. as for "you never need to use a low poly mesh to make large changes" yes you do, try making a nice smooth proportional edit to a character mesh with any tool, try making those kinds of edits without killing any details you have at higher levels, don't lean on videos with a mesh barely out of the blockout stage that does nothing other than twiddle the thumbs, you also haven't addressed the fact that smoothing, moving, and otherwise making large edits to your model royally fucks up the topology of your retopo mesh with conform active, making conforming your model pointless in the first place. You also completely miss the point of multires sculpting, no one is gonna boolean a new arm onto their character while they're detailing it, that's what you do in the blockout not when you're refining and detailing, the whole point of using a basemesh and multires is to skip the blockout, you already know you're making a human so you bring in your human basemesh to work on it so "oh i can boolean my basemesh and not lose my layers" is a pointless argument, ifyou're into the multires stage you're past the point of needing to boolean and your retopo model isn't gonna conform to that boolean anyway, so again completely pointless.