Oliver Thornton

This is a fantastic character, the detail is great! He looks very clean though, did you do any AO passes for the texture? It may help pop out some of the details that are the same color as the material around them (gloves, belt, etc). Love the toes!

Hiya folks, just posting some of my works with VS after a few hours of tinkering. The head only took about 30 minutes of trial and error to sculpt out of the default ball. Love this stuff, it's like digital goo!

No argument, sorry if you took offense. I got a different result on two PCs using different brands of NVidia cards. The PC I am on now has no error; just like your video. But the PC next to it flips concave polys once the interior angle starts to reach 270 degrees for some reason (even though it is a much more powerful card). I did not realize a video card would make a difference in seeing an error. I was trying to explain why some concave polys can be problematic at times, that's all. If the UV is concave as well it would explain smoothing errors in 3DC.

Phil, Try making that concave poly by itself, starting with a simple square poly and using the Drag tool. You'll see the problem most when the poly is not part of a larger mesh and you view the poly normal direction. I suspect that either the box attached at the corner in your image is hiding the error or the normal is manually flipped. At render time all 3d apps tesselate their geometry into triangles, so you would only have a 50% chance of seeing an improper tesselation on the poly (assuming the poly was by itself and not hidden in a larger mesh). Here's an example of tesselation gone wrong: Notice the normal flipping back to the opposite direction when tripled in both tesselations. This is because LW sees the concave poly as having a flipped normal. I would imagine the normal in your example is flipped as well. I don't know how 3DC handles flipped normals, but using convex polys all the time will completely avoid the issue. Cheers, -Oliver

This video may be helpful to anyone growing trees for LW: ftp://ftp.newtek.com/multimedia/movies/LW_9/Fiber_Leaves.mov -Oliver

If the faces are all different surfaces this can be done with the fill tool as well. -Oliver

Ok, I see the poly problem. To be brutally honest I would go back to the base mesh and fix (delete) the polys if it was my model. He's a cute little guy, but there's not much detail added that you couldn't re-make in less than an hour. It's the best way to limit problems. As for the eyes and other differences, it looks like you're exporting the wrong mesh. Are the eyes large on the original mesh or is that a sculpting change made in 3DC? If you did them with sculpting you should export the mesh with "use original positions" unselected, this should give you a better matching mesh. Most of the painting tools work by displacing the base mesh, but the sculpting tools actually change the base vertex positions and create changes that are best reflected by exporting the sculpted mesh instead of applying the maps to the original mesh. When you do this however you may find that the hat gets thinner, so you may need to plump it up a bit after the export. Adjust any other areas that suffer from slight shrinkage if needed. Once you have this mesh you can use File>Texture Baking to bake the details out. You may have to hide the different body pieces when doing the bake or you'll end up with the head baked to the hat or vice versa. One last suggestion in case you decide to start over: making the mouth a different material would make it easier to get a straighter line between the skin and mouth interior. If you're looking for a smoother blend instead of a sharper line I would suggest painting one color over the other with a low opacity or using the smooth tool set to only affect color. The eyes look really great, but the rest of the skin is a bit bland, is that intentional? (plastic toy perhaps?) -Oliver

Where? I've managed to get several good displacements from 3DC to LW using the 'standard' node setup with great results, what values are you using and how big is your model? If you could re-attach the images missing from your post maybe we can help you figure it out. Some other answers: -Displacement maps must be 16 or 32 bit for good detail. Other than that the format doesn't really matter as long as it supports 16/32 bit. -I've never been 100% sure on this either, I don't think it is used outside of 3DC. However, inside of 3DC it is the depth value for the exported displacement map. If you were to say paint several layers of depth and output them as one image, you can then delete all the layers and reload the exported displacement into one layer. I've found this necessary in the old days when there was a memory bug involving merging layers. When 3DC asks for the depth value for the re-imported displacement, you would input that value to get accurate displacement. -Depends on how much sculpting was done withing 3DC and how much this has disturbed the base topology you need for animation. If your edge loops are all over the place now you may want to bake the mesh onto the original low res mesh or make a new one using the retopology tools. -Not sure what 'wrong polygons' means, could you be a bit more specific? Cheers, -Oliver

Do you just have Poser and 3DC? If you have Lightwave you can fix this fairly easily and output the model as a lwo to preserve the 3 UV sets. If not, auto uv-mapping might work but you'll have to re-export and re-rig the model in Poser because the UVs won't match. -Oliver

I'm quite pleased with this general price increase. Andrew and his team work harder and are more responsive than any other developers I've bought a product from. Hopefully this increase will mean that Andrew can actually start making a profit that reflects the effort he makes on his app. If the functionality:price ratio continues at this rate, imagine what we will get for our money before we come close to another increase. -Oliver

Making a cavity map in 3D-Coat is easy. Follow these easy steps: -Fill layer with white (spec and depth turned off) -Change color to black, set masking to More on Cavity. -Use preview window to adjust cavity settings to your liking. -Fill or paint black into layer using the cavity settings you chose. If you want to adjust it further you can sharpen or smooth your new cavity map or even add another pass at a different opacity/different cavity settings. You can also apply a different layer blending mode to see how the map affects your existing texture. Without depth on your model it's hard to say how the cavity tool will work on your model. I would suggest painting some actual depth even if you only output it as a normal map. A few wrinkles around the eyes and mouth will make a huge difference in bringing life to a model. -Oliver

Thanks Andrew! I love the speed of 3DC development, it's always cool to have something new to learn! -Oliver

You guys are so paranoid! I mean, Autodesk owns Mudbox already, and they'd never waste money developing two apps that do the same thing. I mean, that would just be insane!!! .... That being said, I'm personally hoping that 3DC grows into such a monster app that no one can control it! RAAAHHHH!!!! 3DC SMASH!!!!!! -Oliver

I really like the textures, but given the power of 3DC, you should really add another layer of accents like dirt, water streaks, dust, wear on the floor, etc. Some translucency on the paneled doors wouldn't be bad either to allow some illumination to pass through the paper walls. Also, the rocks look like they are floating on the grass, some depth painted onto the grass around them could fix that. As neat as your render looks, this could be made in any app with planar or cube-mapping. In terms of lighting though the shadows are way too soft for a cloudless blue sky. Bright sunlight = sharp exterior shadows, which makes it much easier to read a sundial. Cloudy sky - diffuse shadows. It's a dead giveaway of a cg scene to have soft shadows with a bright sky. -Oliver

Hey guys, Here's a shot of a model I've had for a while and finally took the time to map for painting. This is a test shot of the textures I am using, more tweaking and general weathering will follow. Looking forward to rending this one especially because he'll require no sub-surface scattering. I want to add a cigar for final pose, which means I have to run out and buy one so I can peel it and scan the texture. In hindsight after taking the time to model the belt buckle I could have just used a disk and displaced the "4" and the inset circle. Oh well, maybe I'll fix it later. -Oliver

Very cool! I like that the sculpting stands out through the cel shading, nice touch! Any shots of his hand? -Oliver

Taking a break from my tank to catch up on some character models I've been working on. This one is mostly done, but I could honestly spend the rest of my life detailing veins and wrinkles. Modeled in Lightwave. Cheers, -Oliver

GeForce 7950. But speaking from personal experience I can say with all honesty that RAM makes a bigger difference in performance, especially with a 64 bit system. With 2GB on Windows XP I maxed out 3DC's performance (under those specs) at 16m polys and 2 layers of texture at 4096x4096. Working with a model at this resolution would choke my system, even with the /3gb switch enabled it would eventually groan to a stop. With Vista64 and 8GB of RAM my machine my machine runs the same model in 3DC like a dream. It's a truly beautiful thing after struggling with the XP RAM cap for so many months. One thing I learned about video cards during my upgrades: More VRAM on your card actually means the system loses resources to manage it. So a 1.5G video card sounds cool until you put it in a 2GB system and find only .5GB of system resources left to manage the OS and other apps. Weird, huh? So on a system running 3DC with only 1-2gb of ram, a smaller graphic drain/less powerful card on your system resources is a good thing. Sorry, went on a bit of a tangent there. -Oliver

You are welcome! I've been meaning to do it for a while, I just hate the process of updating the Flash files. Honestly, rigging whole characters is less confusing to me. Future updates will include new 3DC pens, custom painting masks, and more textures. Cheers, -Oliver

Hi folks, I have just uploaded 19 new materials to the new Download section on my website: www.OT3D.com. The site is Flash based. Please let me know if you have any problems or use the mats for anything interesting. Happy painting! -Oliver

Quick update, started over from scratch. There are some smoothing issues still, but I think Andrew plans to address these sometime soon. The texture painting is perfect though, and I can get occlusion or grit procedurally if I have to, so I'm still pretty happy with the results so far. -Oliver

Congratulations on your third child, I wish you and your family all the best! Cheers, -Oliver

Thanks for the comments guys, I'll post some updated pics after I have a crack at the new Beta. For smoothing, as Andrew says I am importing without smoothing, this mesh is stripped down poly mesh frozen from the original sub-D monster that rendered with more polys than the film model for Optimus Prime (no joke). This version of the model allows me to keep the mesh detail I need when rendered with a low smoothing angle. However, this does present some challenges in 3DC when painting due to the lack of smoothing of rounded geometry that is smoothed with surface normal smoothing in LW. So far I have not noticed chunking in the normals that would alarm me, but I will be keeping a close eye out for anomalies. If I cannot address them with the smooth tool the model is dense enough that I may be able to get away with a smooth import adjusted to a low enough angle to just round out the curves. If that doesn't work maybe Andrew can address the issue, but I would rather figure out a workflow with 3DC's current version that preserves the details. -Oliver

I'm off the 'best tool for the job' school of thought. I've seen some really great work produced with procedural modeling, and humans are just the tip of the 'berg. At last year's Siggraph there was a lecture on generating cities using procedural geometry (I hope Andrew reads this... ) for game environments. $.02 on the OT chat: The same goes for all the different animation and modeling packages. I love Maya for animation, but LW's my modeling app and it's making huge leaps in many directions and XSI.... well the buzz speaks for itself. No one's mentioned Houdini yet, but the Venom goo animated with it looked fantastic right alongside all the Maya driven animation. LW is probably the most uknowingly seen app in this game, so just like the big ticket apps I really wouldn't bash it unless you're super 100% positive that you haven't been "WOW!"ed by something done with it. Besides, a lot of the really big animation studios use a pipeline that's hugely driven by software developed in-house to get the desired results. -Oliver

Hi guys, Just thought I'd post some pics of my tank as I repaint it with 3DC. Roughing this monster up has really been a lot more fun than I expected. Pic linked below. Cheers, -Oliver