ggaliens

Very nice. Have not used the tool in a while. But when I scupt again, this will be super handy.

I do this external to 3DCoat (in wings3d) and then I import the instances into 3DCoat. It is actually a bit of a scret backdoor way of getting instances into 3DCoat. There is a slightly modified version of .OBJ files where an OBJ object is followed by plain od R3 matrix list on comment line. Don't know if this is at all helpful. But it is how I have done some cool arangements.

Well ... this is all related to fact that I've been doing lots of long renders ... actually trying to "TUNE" my render processes. But this brings up what is for me ... a related issue. The renders are not very "TUNABLE". For example ... if I pick 60 rays per frame ... if I'm doing a turn-table ... 60 rays for frame 1 is maybe much much brighter than 60 rays for frame 2. Some aspect of brightness is wild at low rays per frame. This makes ray per frame USELESS when it comes to taming down turn-table render times.

Actually ... as much as I'd like to be forgiving where 3DCoat is concerned ... The interruptable behavior of 3DCoat during render on my machine is horrible. 3DCoat does not give back enough CPU cyles and does not poll often enough ... is not threaded such that ... USER CANCEL can be made to a render. It is very very hard to do on my machine.

How to get 3DCoat to be a good CPU sharing app ? When I'm doing a render ... my PC becomes unusable for simple other things like wed-surfing. Can I change some settings to make it better at sharing ?

Can I find more shaders ready for 3DCoat ? In addition to ones I find in shader menu from VoxRoom ? I think I saw a picture of more of these during my forum and 3DCoat site travels. Please advise. Thanks.

Wing3D to VOXEL Room. Then apply two shaders and render in 3DCoat. BTW ... I see lots of small improvements in 3DCoat Vox Room and VoxTree over the last several releases. I love it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_5UyyN5Cj0 Slightly different version ... a bit more plain but with the web density changing around the bunny where ears, eyes, feet are concerned.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eU2ym4D_ttw

After a quick SEARCH online and through menu system ... I'm still going to ask ... WHAT is the super secret password ? How do I find the tool in 3DCoat ? Sorry if my eyes are blind.

Use 3DCoat to produce a Triangle Tessellated Mesh ? I want to export a mesh as a triangle mesh where 1) Frequency of triangles increases in area of high-detail on model. 2) regular triangle shapes are favored over long and skinny. I know I can do this a bit in MeshLab ... but I was wondering if 3DCoat could do this in light of the fact that 3DCoat is extremely good autoretopo if you give it densiy hints with brush.

Voxel Colors Ideas ... I saw Andrews twitter, and I'm hopping that while he looks at adding some colors to VOXEL room (surface mode), that he can think about how a user might add a color on a per-object basis. Like when you select one or more objects in VOXEL tree (can you do that ?) ... then you could say "Edit/Color" or "Edit Shader Color" and then you could get a COLOR PICKER and select your color with a dropper and any suitable color display widget. I'm keeping my fingers crosses.

I wish I had time to do some more footwork in this ... Andrew asked me to get new NVIDIA drivers. And despite it being a new machine ... with a NVIDIA with CUDA sticker on it, and with factory software and settings, 3DCoat didn't work. I think the card was a GeForce 9100 class card. It is an HP Pavilion Feb 2010 vintage. 8GB Ram and 64 bit Windows 7. After upgrading to latest NVidia drivers for that card ... all was well. Not too crazy ... but I did run around in circles until Andraw suggested all I needed was latest NVidia driver and 3DCoat 3.7 I remember more of a software stack for 3DCOat from days gone by including a separate CUDA download. I'm glad it ended up being simple enough to fix and Thanks to Andrew for prompt reply to my message. I consider this case as closed.

Uh ... YUK. Tried very latest 3.7 something B. No luck. Should we not be able to get older versions if we are paranoid. I don't know what would have happened here. Vox primitives spheres, CUBE, Cylinder ... they don't show up as VOX. EDIT : Also ... a bit more info. I've been using 3.7 almost exclusively for rendering and turn-table renders. All of that work. It seems like just the scuplting in VOX room is not working.

3.5 to 3.7 problem. (Nothing works with VOX) As soon as I go to build or smooth or clay tool ... The tool is 100% destructive. Seems to remove all VOX under the tool cursor. Restarted 3DCoat several time. Tried different models. Tried Sphere primitive (does not even show up). I think I'll revert to 3.5 as a sanity check. Any other advise is appreciated.

Here's a video link. http://youtu.be/VLCfXn3QXz4

".I can model some kick ass, trillion billion devastating model...but I won't get it out to 3Dsmax. As I mentioned before..Zbrush models look so much cleaner to me. while 3D-coat seems a nice playground with no production value." I agree with the above sentiments. I do view 3DCoat Voxel Room and a SINK. But I'll take the "playground with no production value". To be a positive. As much as I love to visit ZBrush central to see some highly polished works with hard clean edges ... I also used to like to visit EAT-POO to see sketchy works and could be blow away by either approach / respository. A lot of us can have a great deal of fun trying to create edgy, dirty, raw, cool, sketchy things, fast. And for a lot of us .. that is probably enough. Yeah ... I would like to see some UI things cleaned up. It would be very cool if Andrew could place more value in finding a RUSSIAN to ENGLISH consultant to help simplify a few of the wordings and GEEK-ISMS out of the VOXEL menus ... as well as just streamline them. But I love 3DCoat. And I want more VOXEL stuff ... less production value efforts (throw rotten tomatoes at me now). JMHO. ".I can model some kick ass, trillion billion devastating model...but I won't get it out to 3Dsmax. As I mentioned before..Zbrush models look so much cleaner to me. while 3D-coat seems a nice playground with no production value." I agree with the above sentiments. I do view 3DCoat Voxel Room and a SINK. But I'll take the "playground with no production value". To be a positive. As much as I love to visit ZBrush central to see some highly polished works with hard clean edges ... I also used to like to visit EAT-POO to see sketchy works and could be blow away by either approach / respository. A lot of us can have a great deal of fun trying to create edgy, dirty, raw, cool, sketchy things, fast. And for a lot of us .. that is probably enough. Yeah ... I would like to see some UI things cleaned up. It would be very cool if Andrew could place more value in finding a RUSSIAN to ENGLISH consultant to help simplify a few of the wordings and GEEK-ISMS out of the VOXEL menus ... as well as just streamline them. But I love 3DCoat. And I want more VOXEL stuff ... less production value efforts (throw rotten tomatoes at me now). JMHO.

Chris ... you just gotta have fun (#1 thing). And from you works ... it looks like you do have plenty of fun. I like what you have done.

Similar problem with merge subtree in Vox mode. Needs some kind of feedback. Progress bar that moves in count of object increments.

http://s331378245.onlinehome.us/3dcoat/testcoat_hard.obj I can't subdivide the above while merging the instances into recursive dodecahedron ... can you ?

Maybe more important than progress bars would be that it just works when I pick subdivide. This instance import does not ever work for me if I pick subdivide during import.

3DCoat VOXEL import mesh supports an instance aware version of OBJ that Andrew and I hacked up. Call it extended WaveFront or something. Recursive arrangements can be made with matrices. So really ... only 1 of say the 256 objects would have real geometry. The rest would be references to the real geometry ... and a matrix ... hidden in a WAVEFRONT COMMENT ... so that it still a legal Wavefront file, although less interesting. Small file ... lots of details and instances.

Missing Progress BARS ... I've been importing .OBJ (Wavefront) specifications for atristic fractal-ish shapes into 3DCoat. If I'm importing 256 object into a scene, could the 3DCoat at least toss up a progress bar that moved along on increment per file ? Maybe no timing per-file ... but at least some feedback for end user. I don't think it important that progress bars always move linearly in time. They just have to move at descrete times. End user can usually fill in gap with some imagination. Right now I have an import going ... and I just don't know it it will ever end. It might be one order of magnitue longer than I wanted for various reasons.

Glad to get come comments. Thanks. Was fun to build some of the LOGIC for how to import this into 3DCoat. The logic could be a bit cleaner between 3DCoat and Wings3D/ManifoldLab, but it is certainly usable. Some of the performance aspects in 3DCoat still need polishing once a bunch of instances are imported.

Just continuing to play with VOXEL instancing.