philnolan3d

Does anyone have a suggestion for the best way to layout the UV map for a head? If I was painting by hand I would make a seam up the back of the head and unwrap it from there, but I found when I do that to use with 3DC the mouth, nose, ears, and maybe eyes are just too small. and even with the biggest image size I just get little blobs of color instead of the nice detail I need.

You may want to just look into IrFanView. It's a free image viewer that has a lot of other features too, like simple editing. I often use it and set it to "always on top" so that I can see it while I work. http://irfanview.com/

This probably would not be difficult to do. When you load the program we get this strip with 6 sample models to choose from. Or we can go all the way up to the file menu. I think it would be helpful if the 3 File options (load, import, import image plane) were shown as buttons right there under the 6 images. It would make jumping into your project just that much faster and there's already a strip of blank space there under them next to the "show on stratup" text (should be startup BTW).

You know you can get Serial > USB adapters? I got one and it worked great until I built my current computer, which is running Vista x64. Wacom doesn't make drivers for the my old Intuos 1 any more so it's no longer supported. I bought an Intuos 3 recently and I love it, but I hate that my Intuos 1, that works perfectly fine, is now gathering dust. Great head BTW, I'm working on one myself, I'll post it soon.

Perhaps this option already exists and I'm missing it. I was thinking it would be nice if there was a way to toggle the tiling on and off for the material stencils.

Oh well that would be much nicer than a dongle or hardware locking!

I'm not sure which way to go on this. I really hate my LightWave key. I can't count the number of times I've brought my laptop 20 minutes to a Starbucks only to realize when I got there that I forgot my dongle so I couldn't work. Right now I'm perfectly happy, but I already have keys for both of the computers I use. I can imagine situations where it isn't possibly or practical for someone to have a key on every computer they use.

Very nice, and as Juan said, heavenly sword. I think the blade could use a little more spec, otherwise excellent work.

That's very nice, the lion heads in particular are good looking.

Oh wow, I never even noticed that, thanks!

Suppose I've painted all over a layer, but then decide that I've gone too far all around and I'd like to tone it all down a little. It would be nice to be able to just lower the opacity of the layer a little (or a lot) .

Careful, I understand there's a good number of us LW users in this forum. :P

Oh OK, great news, thanks.

You know if you own LW 9.x you can sign up for the 9.5 open beta right?

I know this is probably very difficult if not impossible with the way 3D Coat works, but it would be nice to have local subdivision in the future. Like for example if I get my subdivision level looking good for most of the model, but the lips are not high enough. Local subdiv would allow be to improve that one area without using up a lot of memory to increase it on the rest of the model.

I haven't tried playing with the Collada in 9.5 yet, I too hope that it will help things like this. I the mean time there's the free plugin, Merge Trigons X.

No prob, I'm still figuring out some aspects myself, but feel free to post any questions here I'm sure lots of folks would be happy to answer them.

I just thought I'd share this. If anyone is looking for human models for base meshes check out MakeHuman. it's a really simple and very fast free program for making realistic human character models. Models can be exported at OBJ. http://www.makehuman.org/

Also check out this tutorial for 3DC / Cararra. (it may be a little different since that's an older version, hence the 3D Brush name.) </a>Along with Andrew's new video tutorial on the ineterface and basics: http://www.3d-coat.com/files/Tut1/Interface.htm

I don't know anything about Cararra and I haven't used Poser in like 6 years, but the answer to all of your questions is yes, it can do that. In fact some of the included materials are a couple of tartan (plaid) textured fabrics. You may need to make your own denim material in Photoshop though.

Got it, thanks. By the way, you may want to think up a different word to use instead of "carcass" It sounds kind of gross since it usually refers to a dead animal body. A bug: The navigational controls don't always work correctly with a tablet. Barely touching them makes the screen zoom in really fast or spin around really fast, etc.

I loaded the model I had trouble with before and it's definitely a huge improvement. I feel like the algorithm or whatever used to smooth the mesh needs some work though. If you look at the attachment I have the same shot in LightWave and 3DC. The 3DC one almost looks like there are ripples in the geometry. I'm also noticing that even if I bring the mesh up to 20 mil polys I still can't get that default skin texture with any normal size. I have to make it really big before I can even start to see the details. Should I be subdividing my object before I bring it into 3DC?

Question: Can 3DC handle multiple UV maps on one object? Normally my complex characters have seperate UVs for the head, arms, torso, legs, etc.. Or do I have to make one map for the entire character?

I would have done icons in my example, but 1. I'm no icon designer and B. I personally don't like icons. (LightWave fan)

Thank you, I put it right into that Samples folder.