XRA

switched from 4.8.20 to 4.9.15 & having a lot of issues, the main one is: 3D Coat just goes unresponsive and locks up. It should not take this long to save (it never finishes after waiting 30 minutes), so I keep losing work. Scene is 1 voxel layer, low complexity (about 1 million triangles) Even opening the file with no changes and saving causes it to lock up. Opening the same file in 4.8.20 and saving has no issues, takes less than 2 seconds to save. What is the stable version of 4.9 ? or is 4.9 not stable yet. The downloads listed 4.9.15 as non-beta.

great work!, I'm using 3D Coat for similar You mentioned point clouds, are you rendering the exported data in an engine? Or just using the point clouds to construct a traditional mesh? Also are you exporting your assets as individual prefab chunks, or just doing it entirely custom? (as seen in the screencaptures)

64bit 27A non-cuda Surface tools are really slow for me, anyone else? Like, unusable slow... LiveClay works faster than any of the tools in Surface mode.

I agree that there might be some redundancy in the voxel and surface tools, but I would not want to lose the voxel + surface workflow. I really like being able to switch to surface mode and make changes, hit enter, and have it update the voxels, same with liveClay. I guess I still treat liveClay carefully, it seems like overkill to be sculpting 100% with it and ignoring the voxel mode. Rather than strip out features I'd much rather have clearer communication of how brushes differ to other brushes, and more control over adjusting the brushes. It would be nice if each brush were just built from smaller components, and the user could see the components and insert/remove other behavior to create more custom brushes. The brushes feel a bit "hardcoded" in a way currently. Anyway, not demands.. just my opinion on it from where I'm at with learning, I'm still trying to keep up with all the latest improvements that continually get added to this tool!

thanks for the video link! It would be nice if 3D Coat could get a bit more in-depth with the tablet and stylus (wacom features specifically), allowing use of the pen's angle and stuff like that for controlling how tools behave, much like some of the sculpting tools featured in the video.

thanks! it does remind me of Moria now that you mention it haha.. When I imported the curved mesh I had to scale it down when converting to voxels, I might not be too clear on how scale and voxel density translates in 3d coat. At first it was pretty bad performance (at around 19 million tris) But after scaling it I've been working at 2x res with about 9 million tris. I probably wont use Res+ any further since it is a large object, and I also found myself getting sucked into fine details far too soon, but that is because the new LiveClay is really fun. I was adding a lot of surface details using it with Masks, but started to realize my larger shapes weren't very interesting/developed and the detail would be better for a normal map..... so since then I've just been getting used to working looser/large while trying different brushes. here is another WIP, most of what I'm focusing on currently are the flat shapes far in the back, and then figuring out a good solution to reduce polys to bake and do normal map detail for the step surfaces. Are there any good methods for getting autoretopo to preserve hard edges? I haven't used it much, maybe I can manually do the steps so their shapes remain sharp and let autoretopo do the rest? *edit* Also I figured out that the keys 9 and 0 rotate the brush, though I still think having the arrow keys for adjusting the 3d object in Merge On Pen would be great, so you can keep the pen on the surface and tweak the alignment without constantly going back between the tool panel and model (adjusting yaw, pitch, roll, shift XYZ)

great work! I have a question about your workflow, did you bake the normals from 3D Coat or another program? Wondering because I've been unable to get 3DC normals to render properly in Marmoset when I was trying it out.

if you hit E there will be a menu for lines and strokes.. maybe you are set to line by default? Hit E to check. You would use the line tool for a straight line based on what I've seen.

are you painting within the Texture Editor window? That gives me the jagged edges when painting there, because it conforms the painted area to the wireframe. If you paint directly on the 3d view along that jagged edge, it should paint fine and blend across the unwrapped wireframe islands. You just have 1 layer currently, so the bottom layer you think you're seeing, the white blocks in the texture editor? Is actually just the gutter space I think, to help with resizing the texture image. You might want to try adding a new layer, maybe use the lowest layer as a solid color base (unless you want it to be gray). You can flood-fill within specific islands, or within the entire model I think, depending on where you click in the layer (in or outside wireframe islands) Or if you click on parts of the model in the 3d view. I'm still new to the paint tab so there might be more obvious info I'm missing..

This might be what you're needing to know?? You can hit the numpad keys to switch between side, top, etc views.. You can hold Shift when rotating the view to "snap" to certain axiis. If you are in perspective mode you may notice that your model doesn't appear centered.. so you may want to switch to orthographic view, that can be toggled by hitting 5 on the numpad. You can also click up on 'Camera' in the upper right corner of the viewport to access those views, and also the little icons to the lefft of Camera. OH also, hit F to place the camera pivot point on your model... wherever your cursor is, the pivot will be placed there when you hit F. This will help you rotate around parts of your model, basically it is needed when working with models that stray from the origin point.

woaa can't wait to try this! also looking forward to not having that weird baking bug which I think is fixed, thank you for the updates *EDIT* LiveClay is extremely powerful with masks for details!!! awesome!

is the low poly mesh exactly symmetrical? Only thing I can think of is if the mapping/normal map calculation is being warped a bit on that side by the mesh not being perfectly symmetrical, but I'm not sure if that would be a problem or not.

nice work, I like the style

yea that's true, I imagine that while moving the selection with the arrow keys I'd be able to rotate the camera at the same time to help with alignment. I started to use click-and-drag for moving the object though, which seems to be somehow relative to the camera, and then you can hold down Y to adjust the object's elevation if it starts to sink into the sculpt too much, works pretty well. I realized now that I could have done the step shapes much faster if I first made a step 3D object (a basic box) and used the Merge tool set to 'On Pen'. Although it seems like the Merge tool needs a quick way to adjust brush rotation while adding shapes with 'On Pen' mode enabled, similar to how you would hold [ or ] to adjust the brush radius. ...maybe I can bind it.. will have to check. Would be great if in Merge - On Pen mode I could use up and down arrows to control depth, and left/right to control brush rotation. Then of course next I'd want scaling controlled by arrows with a modifier key...

thanks! working on this currently, it is great how you can smash shapes together. I'm using the cube to make jagged steps, it started with a solid curve made in sketchup that is being used as a guide. It would be great if when the Transform gizmo is visible, the 4 Arrow keys on the keyboard could move the selection relative to the camera, like in screen space: (left right up down) the shift key could act as a modifer for away / towards. That would speed up repetitive tweaking of the gizmo

Could this be a similar issue to other programs not displaying normal maps from 3D Coat correctly? I admit I haven't used displacement yet, so I don't know how it works.. but I have noticed that my normals are always displayed incorrectly when I export and view my model in other 3d programs (marmoset toolbag, unity 3d). I've never gotten anything displaying correctly in Marmoset from 3D Coat, which sucks, but for Unity 3D I have to invert the Green channel in an image editing program for it to use the normal map correctly.

this was the first thing I tried with 3D Coat, I already had been modeling this low poly spacesuit, but I brought it into 3D coat for voxel sculpting and was impressed with the results for simply adding a bit of detail and baking normal maps. I didn't quite finish this yet Then I was messing with hard surface sculpting in 3DC, just making fictional computer equipment intended as low poly assets, I still have more to make...

I'm really impressed by 3D Coat, it is a very inviting program and has motivated me with 3D again (beyond sticking to low poly). I'll be posting random WIP images as I experiment, most of my assets are intended for game use.

I'm getting a bug with VERY similar results to this one, except with baking to normal map, using Merge with NM (per-pixel). It only started happening recently, seems kind of random, and is blocking my workflow. see my thread here: http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=8111

wow cool stuff, thank you, this will hopefully come in handy since I'm a Unity user that is switching to 3D Coat for my 3d needs