Roger_K

The iPad is too under powered to be usefull and its input system is too coarse to allow good control. the iPad is a nice device but its far too limited to allow it to be a highend graphics platform.

Thats good to hear. hopefully we'll have a good bit of time devoted to this in 3DC. there are a few utility maps that could really improve 3DC.

Certainly can.

I was simply working on what you said chris. From that statement it seems to me you were saying if you kept at it you would become great without reference. I think perhaps this is a language thing though. Good luck with your terminator. its looks nice so far

Thanks so much guys Ill keep this thread updated as i go. Im looking at how to do the embossed detail on the inset metal panels. http://www.rockislandauction.com/photos/49/p_standard/PRJ29-K-CU9-H.jpg Its an odd balance, making things look hand made but not badly sculpted.

chris, I agree with spazmortis totally. You cant imagine stuff you dont allready know. Go get some facial reference. your piece could have been much stronger if you had studied human facial structure. learn how fat bulges, skin sags and stretches over bone. How hornes look on animals, what the interface between skin and horn looks like. Learn your subject then use your imagination to warp it into new things. Also Rafael's work is excellent becuase he has studied anatomy, perhaps he can work without reference now. but thats because he has taken the time to learn his subject matter intimately.

This is my current personal project. As the title says its a Deringer Pistol. Im modelling it in sub D and using Voxels to distress the surfaces. so far I've been working on the wooden body.

I think some of the shaders in 3DC work like that yes. It depends totally on the situation, Colour values of the diffuse have very little to do with the level of reflectivity of an object. look at printed page for instance. the colour value is very variable and contrasty but the specular would be a single flat tone. Its best to think beyond the colour of the texture and think about what its actually made of. What i tend to do when painting my diffuse is split each material into a new layer (or layer group) in photoshop and then use layer masks to control their coverage. Since each material is being controlled by a mask its very simple to create specular, glossiness, and glow maps once you have defined these material areas. for alot of surfaces a tonal block is all that is needed. so far as cavity maps go, yeah then can be very usefull, again though i wouldnt just apply them as a general rule.

PSmith: SSS for metal???? Dreamcube017: To do nice metal you need to be able to control the specular level independently from the glossiness. which 3DC wont do. So far as painting specular maps and making them look convincing you need to consider how light works. put really basically Tint your specular to the colour of your metal. Keep your diffuse balanced with your specular. 50% Grey spec on a 60% grey diffuse = 110%. basically means your object is reflecting more light than is hitting it. which in reality cant happen unless the object itself is a light source... which generally metal isn't'. Since you shaders are often dont take energy conservation into account you can sort of fudge it by regulation the diffuse map. Now specular as most shaders use it is pretty rubbish for making things look real. they just take account of the position of the lights in your scene and draw little fuzzy blobs. this is a mathematical approximation of the reflection of a glowing sphere in a void. no account is made for the environment around your object. so basically your going to need to use an environment map to fill in the void around the object. this will also need to be tinted and weighted using the same map as the specular. Hope some of that helps

I'm scratching an itch really. Messiahs always interested me. I think the autorig could be a nice fast way to get characters posed without having to deal with weight painting. also the interactive renderer peaked my fancy. For the price of a round of drinks i think its worth the risk

I wouldnt be supprised if they are eeking out the last little bit. I dont see why this is seen as a dishonest thing though, they're letting stragglers get in on a sweet deal. If anything stretching the offer extends the time they cant charge full price.

I would like to ask how 3DC assigns resolution when a object is merged into the scene. Is the bounding box of the object divided into a normalised grid or is the object dropped into a world grid and voxelised from there. Does having empty space in a layer waste memory? A working example of this is an open doorway, am i better off splitting the door frame into 3 seperate volumes (left, right, top) so each objects bounding volume contains a minimum of open space. or is 3DC super clever about this

A Cavity Map An Environment Occlusion map (a quick match to how Final Gather solves it)

0000492: REAL Ambient Occlusion At the moment 3D Coat has a feature its calling Occlusion. Its Ok for a really basic lighting preview, if your willing to wait for it. There isnt really much point though because the render room will give you a far better lighting preview and it will do it much faster. As a baked texture its very limited in its usage. In general you don't want any direct lighting information in your textures unless its a light map, In which case there are far better solutions that this. You want colour bounce for a start and correct area shadows. Direct light is going to be handled much better by the renderer. AO in texturing and shading is generally used as what you might consider a Utility map, you dont used it directly, but more of a way of controlling certain effects. for example: Contact Shadowing Dirt Distribution -With suitable settings you can create masks which are a great base for dirt maps Cavity Mapping - These can be great for accentuation small details, wear maps for specular/reflection, dirt collection in tight crevices Ambient Occlusion -Masking a environment probe to give the impression of Global Illumination Bulge Maps - AO can be used as a displacement map to create surface indentations/ bulges around objects where they interface. great for mud None of these things can be achieved easily with the current solution. To be able to achieve these effects you need the map to be a true occlusion map and you need to be able to control how it is created. In a program like Mental Ray you have 3 main parameters that let you control the effects of the occlusion map. Max Distance: How far a ray will probe for hits before its ignored. Spread: how wide a cone of rays to shoot out from the point being sampled. in MR you get a 0-1 slider (the cosine of the cones spread angle) falloff: the fallof value of the occlusion ray. I really think this is an important feature to have in 3DC. especially for extracting detail from sculpts. To be honest I think 3DC could benefit from some additional baking feautres. In addition to AO, Curvature, and thickness maps (for faking translucency) would be great. that said at this stage I'd be happy with AO here is how Modo does it skip to 4:45 for the occlusion shading. (cheers Ben)

That's a bit extreme, she said she avoids the software because of the religious link. Her loss. we have Bay Raitt, that's more than enough awesome for any software

the nice thing about this is its only ever going to be 1 place. and i think the content must be approved before submission. id imagine that will prevent a lot of the problems you describe. what amazes me is the prices. 10 quid for a low poly hat!! Did you guys know that the artists who made the polycount pack got between 30 - 50k in royalties in the first 2 weeks.

Sorry for not getting back to you guys. TBH when i realised how limited the old system was I lost interest in developing the link, I'm glad to see the functionality has been expanded and someone else took up the gauntlet.

Now im not being clear . What I mean and I presume the OP means is Goraud shading. I usually have to export to silo or max just so i can see the model Goraud shaded with a low gloss material (great for showing smoothing errors.)

Its flat shaded. Which is useless for quickly previewing a sub d mesh.

Good luck mate, ive been asking for this for quite a long time now.

+1 to what beatKitano said, Your basic shapes could do with being more resolved before you get to the finer details. At the moment the sihlouette reads as male. the torso especially has a male proportions. Do you have a concept or are you winging it?

its about 150-200 bucks an hour for a nude live model. You'd be better off with photos though, if you leave the curtains open your neighbours might think you have some kooky fetish about women doing aeroplane impressions. if you go to photoset 39 at http://www.characterdesigns.com/index.php?sitepage=photosets there is a 360 female t pose Seriously though if you can get to a life drawing class its a very beneficial experience, theres no substitute for 1st hand observation. you rarely get such a good sense of the tension of a pose from a illustration.

PTEX is about escaping UV Tiles and only storing what data you need on a per face basis. Starting with each faces at some arbitary max resolution just wastes RAM and removes all the workflow benifits of PTEX, the idea of PTEX is that if you need more detail then you add it to a focused area and spend your system recources on the important stuff. Id personally just do a good uvlayout and paint it in per pixel, as it stands auto unwraps from PTEX are useless for anything that needs to be edited in another application.

Totally, its best to work from photos of real people or live models, also CG like poser models are crap for anatomy sketching, they look lovely and all but as soon as you deform them they loose all credibility. You could use them to pose i guess but you could use a box man for that and you'd be less likely to pollute your drawing with aspects of the model heres some good links:(Nudity Warning) there are some really nicely lit/posed male/female nudes in the following links. http://mjranum-stock.deviantart.com/ http://www.characterdesigns.com/index.php?sitepage=photosets

This shader was released to highlight the fact that if the normal map baker and the renderer use the exact same tangent basis calculation then the normal map display will be near perfect. The only special thing the shader is doing is taking Tangent basis data from a max modifier and not from max itself. basically max's viewport and baker use differnt methods to calculate the TB so normal maps wont display 100% correctly. What this feature request should be is to allow custom tangent basis calculators.