philnolan3d

Wow I wouldn't call it fast, but it only took me about 15 minutes.

Very nice update. I think it might be better though if the 2D area was a window, not docked as it is right now it covers up all of my other windows, so I would have remember to move them all away from that area before opening the 2D view, then move them back when I'm done.

Very nice, that does look like fun. How did you keep the sharp edges, does the original model have bevels? I noticed you have cracks modeled in-between the hull plates. I do this myself, but after playing with 3DC for a while it occurred to me that it could be done very easily here with a normal map, or even by exporting a new mesh.

I know what you mean I've been sitting here refreshing the 3DC beta page. :P

Your LW shouldn't take too long I started a job at a studio one day and they didn't have an extra copy for me so they ordered one that day and I started on my laptop. 2 days later I come in in the morning and the IT guy hands me a box and says "this is for you". Of course it was the LW and I had to install it. I agree on your other points. No saving is just stupid. Interestingly I read an interview with someone at Adobe a while back where he said that they don't really care about the individuals pirating Photoshop, it's the big studios that bothers them. Of course that is very different from Andrew and Pilgway.

Thanks I'll be sure to post more as I work on it. I agree about Andrew's plan. It sounds fantastic!

double post

No problem, I'll just have to look to see what that feature does. lol I do that all the time and I was born in the late 70's. :P

Thanks, this is just the epidermis , I will make a subdermis from this color texture that will be much darker, that should darken up the final render and add a little more contrast.

Here's some work I've been doing on a head. There's a much longer thread on it here: http://www.spinquad.com/forums/showthread.php?t=21710

I was thinking it would be nice if the layers palette had some indicator on each layer showing what was on that layer as far as color, spec, and depth. Even if it was just a colored dot after the layer name. Or like 3 dots if you were using all 3. I currently don't like to use more than one per layer, but I have to add into the name for each what is on it as well as a name. For example, I might have layers named "base skin depth", "base skin spec", and "base skin col".

Great news! Even less reason to switch over to Photoshop.

Well I didn't really do much in Vue, basically clicked the tree button and then moved the camera to 4 places around the tree and did a render of each, the rest I did in Lightwave, simply applying those renders to 4 polygons. I could have just as easily exported the tree to LW or Max and done it in there. With this technique there no need for facing anything at the camera.

Thanks, that probably explains why I couldn't find it under the export options in the manual. :P

This is actually the first time I've attempted to play with the color and there's something I'd like to do in Photoshop. As I understand it you can save to a PSD file, do whatever work in photoshop, then save the file and it gets updated in 3dC. Is that correct? How does one go about it? The manual is kind of vague in this area.

To clarify, I was actually talking about the entire tree, not just the leaves. I made up a really quick example using a tree from Vue.

You think Max is pricey for a student? When I was in school we learned Boujou, then I checked out the price. $10,000 for camera tracking software! It's a shame, I don't think GMax is available anymore.

I read it the same way. Andrew already has a material I made, as long as he got permission from the Flickr user I got the original photo from.

Found a bug. When using the Fill tool, when you choose a color for pores or spots (maybe others) you get a new color picker window if that's set to IMG none of the buttons work. The sliders work and the "crosshair" icon works, but nothing else. Not even the Ok or Cancel, so I'm going to have to force quit the program unless someone has an idea of how to close that window. Edit: I just tried it a couple more times with different objects, it seems the buttons work fine until you try to use the new move/zoom icons, then everything stops working.

This reminds me of something I was going to request. If 3DC would remember more settings when you close it (or it crashes) For example, I was painting with a specific color, I closed the program and restarted it, now it's back the the default green. The options Dinoraul could also be remembered. Perhaps if it wrote some of these changes to a config file as soon as you make them.

From what I understand if you include code from a GNU licensed program you have to sharre the source code for the entire program it's included with. Meaning Andrew would have to share the 3DC source code with everyone.

It looks like you might have a problem with the name Trees Generator. There's another program I just came across called "3D Tree Generator". I just came across the (very tiny) web site by accident. http://www.tree-generator.com/

That's not billboards it's clip mapped objects for each leaf. a billboard tree would be a single polygon with the entire tree clipmapped onto it. The old way of doing this, which can be seen in many Playstation 1 era games, is to have 4 - 8 of these crossing each other like an X or an X and a + together each showing a different angle of the tree. Another method is to have an animation of the tree that gets stuck to one polygon which is targeted to the camera. As the camera moves the polygon always faces it and the "animation" plays in time giving the appearance that you are looking at a 3D tree while only taking the render time of one polygon. I hope I explained that well enough. Edit: it just occurred to me a fine example of the second option is the bullet-time effect made popular in The Matrix. Where they used many cameras to shoot an object they were surrounding, in this case Keanu Reeves, in our case, a tree. all of those pictures get applied to the flat polygon and the software scrubs through them as the camera moves and the polygon turns.

I did my usual line up the back of the head, but then I took the nose, mouth, ears, and eye socket areas and made them separate islands, then unwrapped. Of course I would never do this if I was painting the maps by hand, but that's a nice thing about 3DC, I don't have to worry about it. So far it's worked out quite nicely.

One thing I noticed as soon as I started loading a LW model in There needs to be a way to say "don't use this UV map" The only options are different sizes of texture, but a few of my UVs are attached to the same polygons so it would screw things up if I tried to use them all. I was trying to decide which one works best, but can't really do that if they're all active at the same time.