PhilW

Sorry I couldn't post anything yesterday - as a newbie I am limited to 5 posts a day so I couldn't post a reply. Anyway, I just wanted to say a huge "Thank You" for the help I have received. I'm feeling much more positive about using 3D-Coat and being able to export and use the models. I have done a "final" render of the spaceship that I did in 3DC and then exported to Carrara for rendering, with a little postwork in Photoshop. You can see it here: http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2167823 I was going to attach it here but that seems to have disappeared...

You can tell I'm a Newbie at this - not at 3D generally but the capabilities of 3DC. I didn't know you could export the voxel model directly as an OBJ - just tried it and it looks great when loaded into Carrara! OK, I'm starting to like this a whole lot better...

Hi Bob, Yes we cross posted - and yes, I am that refugee from the Carrara world, so thanks for your comment. I knew it was possible, just frustrated that I couldn't work out how! Thanks for your advice - I have now successfully exported from the Retopo menu rather than the File menu in the Retopo room (you can see how people new to this can get confused!). And successfully imported into Carrara. Maybe I'll stick at it a bit longer now I'm over that hurdle! Many thanks for pointing me in the right direction.

Sorry - I had a look but it doesn't help - to be honest I couldn't understand half of it. I've been doing 3D for over 20 years, but this was way over my head - perhaps I'm getting old. Just to restate my issue - Autopo has produced a mesh from my voxel object with 5044 faces - that's what it says at the bottom of the screen and that's what it looks like on screen. So why when I try to export it does it start talking about having over 1.4m. I must be missing a step or trying to export the wrong thing. I remember seeing a file menu option previously that said "export obj" or something like that. Now I am only getting File/Export and then sub-options to export model and three other options that say "high-poly mesh (0k poly). Previously I saw an option that was not a sub-menu item. Does this indicate that I need another step before my model is ready for export? Yours confused and frustrated, Phil

Sorry the file didn't get attached...

Thanks for the advice. It seems a shame that 3DC is capable of easily producing some very very nice spaceship type models - especially with Tinker's models set - but then no easy way to use this in the outside world. Anyway, I thought that I would try a few tests of retopology, which is a relatively new concept for me, and to make sure that I can use models in my target 3D app, Carrara. I decided to try a simple chain loop, again very easily made in 3DC where it would be much more difficult to do with traditional modelling tools. Autopo worked fine to produce a 5k poly mesh of this - great so far! Now my problems: - in the tree on the right there are two objects produced although they are both called something like Volume11. Why are there two rather than one? Which one do I need? - when I come to export the mesh, it offers to reduce the number of polys from 1.4m polys to around 700,000 polys and produces an enormous .obj file! But the display says I onloy have around 5,000 polys - I can even see them! So why is it exporting so much. I have attache a screen dump. Sorry if this is really basic but unless I can crack this, I won't be using 3DC much longer if I can't export useful models to other apps.

I have only been using 3D-Coat for a couple of days and am starting to find my way around, although it still does some unexpected things. I have produced a spaceship model with a fair degree of detail thanks to Tinker's wonderful greeble models. However when I use AUTOPO to produce a polygon model from this, a lot of the detail disappears - I went for 75,000 polys thinking this would be enough to capture a lot of the detail, but it seems to waste a lot of polys on flat surfaces and then not enough on detailed areas. I have selected the detailed areas in the AUTOPO dialogue. Is there anything else that I can do? It also took AGES to make the mesh and also to produce the UV maps, and the normal map that it produced seemed to be completely black. All help gratefully received! Thanks in advance, Phil