marsmotion

so i made this object that needs to use transparency as its baked on to a flat plane. i thought i had to create or assign a layer as an opacity mask to get layer zero to not show up. that caused the preview materials to not display or display as fully transparent. so i removed any opacity "clip mask layer" info from that field and my materials previews worked again. so i was still wondering how do i get this layer zero to not ruin my opacity for this object. well i set its layer opacity in layer blending from 100 to 0. i then used the tracer lines 2 layer from the original bake as transparency for all other layers and i believe im good now with it. see image no. 4 for anyone in future do not assign a clip mask to a layer zero but instead just set the layer zero to zero percent opacity. i think....lol

ive narrowed it down to a layer in the paint room doing it but im not sure which one.

tried past file on current stable build and problem is not happening.... so im more confused. the past file works fine the current reconstructed model file breaks the icon gen. so something specific about this file or model is the problem even though reconstructed from exports. im baffled ill try sharing my file

so i did some trouble shooting this am. alot of it. rolled back to earlier stable. tried with same file and tried with no file. whenever i DID NOT have a file for painting loaded in the paint room it worked fine. when i HAD a file loaded in the paint room i got this totally transparent icon or error. so i reconstructed the file from its exports, an obj and its exported textures. with the reconstructed file open i got the error in icon gen. so with any file or paint objects and textures loaded in the paint room this error is visible when remaking the icons. in either version of 3d coat today when i had nothing loaded in paint room the icon gen was correct. in simpler terms with clean reconstructed objects and textures loaded in paint room icon gen failed with no objects in paint room icon gen was successful. this is strange i do not know what this means. thanks again for help here. troubleshooting these issues are difficult especially when we dont know what variable are at work here. next i will test on another prev made file and see if that one works or fails for consistency. 3dcoatMatPackedWithIconError.3dcpack

hi carlosan. thanks for your reply. folder not moved. all textures in smart materials dir under user prefs see shot. so i copied a mat and changed it and it went checker board. i went and right clicked on the material icon and selected "refresh preview" got checker then tried for all materials refresh preview and got all my metals inc basic ones checkered as well. so it also overwrote good ones that i didnt change with the checker pattern. any insight welcome. thanks.

right clicking update preview doesn't work

im having same issue. i re-installed from scratch and same problem present. kind of a bummer not seeing the preview icon images or sm window either. can still work but makes selecting right materials kind a diff.

i wonder if that should be under windows or view menu instead or hide? i read the blurb on where it gets saved to but forgot it then tried combing the menus and couldnt find it. i was not expecting to find that in preferences. this post saved my sanity

this is really something i wish to have addressed as well. id expect to be able to set the scan settings for each model separately then, go through the bake menus once. and definitely not end up with multiple uv sets that have to be cleaned up. way easier to bake in marmoset or even substance painter then do what coat is asking a user to go through. baking is a major serious function i consider coat to get right as im using it to make game models. that last video is the only decent video on this subject as well. their are others but they go all over the place in a non linear fashion and confuse users. not everyone is good at taking users through a process making it understandable.

re digman: tried to message on this forum, interface says you cant receive messages so im stumped in trying to share model. more info needed. thanks

thanks andrew. much appreciated. i had turned on zip even tho i dont really need it so i would have a feedback in the interface letting me know when save was over. i humbly suggest that the interface provide some readout on saving that lets the user know when the operation is 100% complete. its a major peace of mind thing. if there are any things to know about saving in coat other than this id like to know. my checklist is this: big files take time...check windows folder where saving to see by memory used if the file looks save complete. autosave is on always 20 files for me when saving save new file not over old files to be safer create a file system back up folder for important saves, a redundancy am i missing anything? re digman: yes you are quite correct. some of this is to be expected. i work for a video game company on their proprietary editor and know well the difficulties. this issue may have been happening in the stable build as well. i will try to go and check soon but im fairly certain. andrew is now aware of the issue so by next stable it will be fixed anyway. ill send you my zip file the one i sent andrew. andrew sent me back a corrected unzipped file so im back in business. thanks for your interest digman. nice to know their are helpful users out there. cheers!

i am losing work alot. i am saving and zipping files and waiting until that operation finishes but when i re-open the file again even after closing the program my file is missing all my meshes. i then go and look at the file in windows explorer and it says its the correct size. 3docat opens it and displays nothing in the sculpt tree. im frankly baffled and quite sad. im losing days i cant get back which are very precious to me as i dont have tons of time to work personally. another aspect of this is that my autosaves are also being lost as well upt to 6 hrs of them and they open as empty in sculpt tree as well but again in windows show large sizes in mem. if i cant solve this i may have to give up on coat for anything serious or do crazy things to back up my work like saving out sculpt layers as fbx files to really make sure i have my work. my system is very robust way more spec than i need. 128 gig ram, good ryzen chipset mult cores, win 10 64, mult solid state drives main even on motherboard. 3080 super graphics card so i have the file to send for debug but no idea where to send for support. i need help please someone ill be very happy to solve this. attached the images of what i lost a whole day of work basically...but also other days as this is a running problem im being beset by. no other program on my computer does this only 3dcoat. i have many other 3d programs. Log.txt DxDiag.txt

if your working in 3dcoat 2023 or sim version, its here for windows 10x64 make a folder and drop the objs and png previews in there together antenna_001.obj and antenna_001_preview.png etc C:\Program Files\3DCoat-2021\UserPrefs\Models\SculptModels

vid in real time with narration making panels in 3dcoat by creating a retopo mesh of strips that gets turned into a voxel lattice work which then gets subtracted from a main mesh. then some minor smoothing is done. then converted to mesh mesh cleaned and decimated. the idea here is to make something that doesn't have the usual artifacts from drawing panels with a brush or forces you to cut your mesh up when with alot of panels that wouldn't work. i also wanted a more consistent result. the good part of doing this was i could re do it when i wanted since it was made from two meshes that got boolean-ed. coats retopo room was essential with its tool set which is very robust. the mesh import tool in sculpt was also important. if someone has a better way im all ears.