Henry Townshend

Hello! When working in 2022.34 (But also happened to me before, I feel less often though) certain crashes will cause 3D Coat to reset itself. This means UI Theme will reset, Preferences settings are gone and all hotkeys are deleted. This causes tremendous setback in workflow. I think this should not happen. There is no bug report available when it happens. It will just severely crash, causing any audio background music I listen to to stutter and then the app just closes down. After that, I can not see my "Recently opened files" and everything is just reset, as if I had a fresh install of 3D Coat. Now, I know my way around 3D Coat to customize it again, but it is annoying and unnecessary, a major stability/trust flaw on the long run. You don't want to be anxious for an app to crash just because it resets the entire settings of the app to default. That is a real productivity problem. I don't know why this happens, but to me it seems there is something severely "unsafe" that was overlooked in development when the application crashes in a certain way. I think it happens mostly to me when I use the Cut Tool. Seems to be during cutting operations. Not entirely sure if that's the only occasion though. Wish I could provide more info, but there is nothing to extract unfortunately, because it just terminates itself. My hardware: Ryzen 5900x RTX 3060ti 64GB DDR4 Hope this can be solved somehow. Not sure if I am the only one who experiences this. I am working more and more in 3D Coat now as a long time Blender user and I am loving it the more I am using it. Everyday I discover something new jaw dropping that amazes me and is not easily done in other apps. The way the app handles high poly with lots of data and gives you the freedom to just cut and punch how ever you see fit is just fantastic. The Pose brush for me is awe fulfilling, and insanely powerful and artistic way to model once you understood it. The powerful curve toolset is jus insane. Hope rough edges like this could be evened out. I feel this is something high prio if it might affect a lot of users.

It would be really, really urgent to fix this problem. This is one of the major things that blocks 3D Coat's full PBR texturing potential. I have written Andrew a pm. Hope that it is somehow possible to fix this by now as 3D Coat has progressed in a lot of areas.

Great! Thx for passing it on.

It is a general problem unfortunately, not tied to a specific project. It is the same across the app for me. I just loaded up a new fresh project. (See video above, first entry) You can or at least should be able to repro it by choosing from the welcome screen -> Voxel Sculpting -> choose any mesh. When you try to set a different FOV than the default of 50, it jus jumps back all the time, as if the FOV setting is locked.

Amazing and inspiring works. Every single one.

@Carlosan Can you maybe recreate my original issue? I feel that it got overshadowed now? Or am I overlooking something? Can you repro the FOV slider not working ?

Hello @tokikake ! I dont understand how your issues relate to my post. My post is about the fov slider in the menu not changing the fov. I have no trouble with zooming at all. Only with altering the FOV. Maybe there is some confusion? I feel these are two different issues and yours not really related to the FOV setting. Thanks for your input nevertheless!

2022-06-26 21-21-41.mp4 I have a problem with the FOV setting. I can not set it anymore. Please see above video on how it behaves. Is it locked or something? It does not matter which file I work on. Fresh file with loading a mannequin behaves the same. I remember I never had problems with the setting in previous versions.

Wonderful!

Any news or plans on this maybe ? I like to demonstrate what I mean by a direct comparison. @Andrew Shpagin Here is the same model with the exact same textures and the exact same HDRI at the same rotation in both programs. First comparison pic shows the regular sRGB viewport inside Substance Painter. Both Environment maps are set to the same brightness, as you can see by the highlights. Contrast is at zero in 3D Coat: There is a good match to be observed. 3D Coat's viewport looks really high quality and crisp. In fact, I feel it has even higher quality in terms of surface details clarity (I am using the GGX , Burley UE4 view. Substance viewport quality is set to "Ultra 256pp"). Now, the same setup with ACES tonemapping enabled in Substance Painter: You can see, this makes colors more punchy and general the image is more contrasted. This is how most game engines or cinematic renderers display their colors. ACES is the standard tonemapping used in Unreal, but also in Unity, and film. Not using it is an artistic choice, but in general, ACES is used to get a film like look. However, texturing in 3D Coat makes it hard to predict the final result in terms of colors and contrast due to the lack of ACES tonemapping in the viewport. Previously, Substance Painter also did not have it, but users had an inofficial custom LUT to get an approximation. In recent versions, they implemented it themselves as a dropdown in the upper viewport. Marmoset Toolbag 4, also a modern texturing app, that gets more and more powerful, also comes with ACES natively inside the program's camera settings. You can try to mimic the ACES look a bit more in 3D Coat by increasing the contrast to about 70% and lower the brightness to about 80%, which gets it closer, but it is not quite the same, as colors are not affected, as they would be with true ACES applied: I hope this maybe will be implemented. 3D Coat is a fantastic texturing software. But it makes a game art or movie workflow, where you need to predict results for use inside a game engine difficult without ACES tonemapping. It would help a lot and also make the tool more modern in that regard, especially now where more people will use 3D Coat very likely also to create content for Unreal Engine 5.

Thank you for looking into the file! I am finished now with the retopo and started on other files, where the problem did not pop up again, fortunately. Yes, I went through some iterations for trying to solve the problem. One of it was going "Paint Mesh->Sculpt Mesh", to bring the reference mesh to sculpt room, where I lowered the res by "resample", to test out if it would perform better. Also, I occassionally bake normals to see how well my topo bakes. My suspislcion is, that my initial mesh I brought in via app link from blender was too high and that that started to show later in the process and got sinked in, even if the mesh was later replaced by a lower version, my guess is it still was somehow in memory. I used 3D Coat now for retopo more and this did not occur again in any other file so far. Everything is super snappy. For anyone might reading this running into this problem, I would suggest to have the initial reference mesh just a few mio tris. Higher count with tertiary details is usually not needed, only medium details. Another suspicion I had was that I had the same high poly sculpt open in Blender while working in 3D Coat during the process. Blender is exceptionally bad in handling high poly counts, introducing undo problems, etc. Not sure if this has something to do with it, but I did transfer the reference mesh via applink, so it came from blender directly. Doesnt make much sense I would think but who knows.

Hello! I find it odd that this is a "per session" based setting, as user preference regarding rotation behavior won't likely change between sessions. Already thought about giving it a shortcut, but it would be a waste of a shortcut imo. Plus you have to think about it at the beginning of each new session, or get reminded because you suddenly realize your preferred rot method is not set, yet, again. I think it should be a general, global setting, just as you can do it in Blender Preferences. Not a huge deal, but kind of unnecessary having to set this as a user for each new session.

Today I worked on the file again, and the lags disappeared. I have a suspicion now: I do test bakes occasionally during retopo to foresee how my normals are gonna look (Loving that feature in 3D Coat, it is so quick, just amazing). I noticed that at some point, I deleted my layers in paint room and did not do any bakes anymore. But still, even when I do a test bake now, I have no delays. This is strange. I am starting to think the issue might be caused by something external, not sure. I am on windows 11. Here is the current file on which the lagging just disappeared: https://www.dropbox.com/s/2r7aqn09fz3cntj/et_retopo_124.3b?dl=0

Thanks! I tried it with this option, however, it is slowing down opposed to using the applink for some reason, becoming unworkable, even with my mesh only being 1.2 mio. This option introduces problems I did not have before. The scale of the model gets altered when using this option as opposed to using applink, which would be not a huge deal, but, it gets really small inside 3D Coat and it seems that the smaller my brush size is in this mode, which is needed cause the model being so small, the slower the tools, for instance drawing curve or smart retopo gets really slow and taxing, and you can feel the tools are not meant to work at such small scale. When using applink, I have zero problems with speed nor scale. All is working at light speed. The same when I use the first option "Import Reference Mesh up to 2-4 million", or going over "File->Import for Vertex Painting/Reference". The speed is incredible fast using these modes, a pure joy to work with. But not when using the "huge reference mesh option". This "Huge Reference" options slows down the entire experience, not was I was used to. It is also much more taxing on the CPU. I have much lower, next to non tax on CPU using the other import modes. Like stated, my only problem arose with switching tools once I reach a certain amount of tris, as described above. It is not about any viewport performance hit caused by mesh density. That is not the problem. It's gotta be something else that sneaks in in later stages of retopo, when there are more polygroups and faces present. Maybe you could try to send the devs my file for inspection to check if they can reproduce? At this point don't think it has something to do with setup or choosing import options. It would be so nice without tool switching lags. I meanwhile started retopo on other meshes, the problem is not present when you start retopo. It only happened once I reached a certain level of finish, like when my retopo mesh was at around 12k tris. The performance otherwise was no problem, blazingly fast, only the lags between tool switching occuring was the problem.

Hey, thx for the swift reply. I go via applink. I bring my model from zbrush to Blender first via GoB addon (inofficial Blender Zbrush bridge, works well). I then go to the 3D Coat applink addon in Blender, and choose "Reference Mesh" and hit "Send" (works well). I have opened 3D Coat in the Background already before doing that. So not using the start menu, jus opened with an empty scene. The model then gets imported into 3D Coat, showing up as paint object. Is there some misstep in this process? Or maybe applink? I love applink, the send back forth from/to blender is flawless for me. Would like to keep this workflow. But I will certainly try the "import heavy meshes". But, I usually decimate my sculpts for retopo, so I think it might not should be the cause of the problem, as they are not really "heavy". I started this file at the beginning with the full 17 mio tris sculpture though. It worked without flaws. At some point where the tool switch lagging started, I replaced the geo with a decimated version, but the behaviour did not change. I am thinking maybe it has to do with this, that somehow using the 17mio at first left its marks for some odd reason, even though it got replaced later. Otherwise the program runs quick and snappy, no issues regarding performance at all. On the contrary, even with the 17mio refence in it did not break a swaet in terms of viewport performance. The only thing that happens is the tool switching lag. Otherwise its fluid as butter.

Forgot to mention: I use shortcuts for almost every tool (mostly a combination of "Alt+some number"). Not sure if it has something to do with it. I experience the same when I just select the tools via the "SPACEBAR" menu though.

Hey, I read this was something that happened in past 3D Coat versions and was supposed to be fixed in some later update in v 4.x , but it happens to me now during retopo. First, as there was only like 1k or 2k or even 4k faces, everything worked fine. But when I got around 7k, now am at 12k faces, quickly switching between tools sometimes lags for a few seconds. It happens seemingly randomly ,at least for me, sometimes everything goes quick, but then, occasionally when I switch for instance to "Add/Split" or "Delete Edges" tool, it hags a bit until it has switched. Not sure whats causing this, this is my first time doing a full character retopo in 3D Coat. I remember int he past that happened to me also during painting in paint room, when I have had a lot of alphas in my brushes folders. The more alphas I had there, the slower it was to switch tools. But there, it was at least predictable and happened every time. So I got rid of the problem by keeping number of alphas reasonable. Not sure if this is related somehow or helps. I would love to see this resolved, as I fell deeply in love with 3D Coats retopo room, it is a dream come true. The occasional lag is a bit distracting though. Not sure if maybe also I am doing something that's causing this, but wouldn't know what really. Here is the file for investigation. You notice when you switch for instance after a longer time of working with one tool, it can happen. I can not see any predictable pattern unfortunately. https://www.dropbox.com/s/lo1ugq43c07cwca/et_retopo_119.3b?dl=0

Ah thanks! Thats good to know. Makes sense for Smart Material usage. I mean an auto assignment of the maps, like in Substance Painter, which makes the maps available from within the project, would be even better. I was specifically looking for painting though, not necessaraly applying Smart Materials. But now as you say it... ok, that is also super poweful. You can basically procedurally texture your sculpt also during vertex painting. Another incredible opportunity, I just realize...

Unfortunately, I was too early, no luck. This does not prevent the pop up of this menu in the retopo room. Disable this option, then go to retopo, click rmb. It will still pop up. Not so often and severly when using tablet, but the behavior has not changed.

Awesome! Thanks! I would never expect this to disable it also in Retopo room as well, as it explicitly states "Sculpt Room".

That's a great way to get the preview of the conditions!!! Great! thx ! Didn't think of that. You could also do it with a solid color instead of freeze and then simply undo, jus the way you do in ZBrush with settign up mask by options. Really like this system with the 3 parameters "Cavity width", "degree" and "contrast". I meanwhile imported a model via file menu instead of the starting dialogue, not sure why that would give you different results for the import, but it somewhat does I think. I would advice anyone who reads this against directly using FBX exported from ZBrush, as Carlosan said, their scale is super tiny. But this won't show when importing via start screen -> Vertex Paint. But only when you go over the menu it seems. I think that these are seemingly not delivering the same looks in regards of scaling, can potentially confuse users. For me it worked when I put my model to a reasonable scale in Blender first, which most of the time scaling from "0.01" which is the scale coming from ZBrush FBX, to "1" in Blender, which gave me the measurments in meters the model was build with in mind (1,4m). When then bringing it ouf of Blender to 3D Coat via FBX, baking generally seems to work as expected. The AO looks terrific now: Even though I have some problems when baking the head, which I don't know where it could come from right now: I think I will figure it out from here. Thanks much for the support! Eager and excited to do some full PBR vertex painting in 3D Coat in future! Amazing what this program offers

Thx again @Carlosan I am aware of the freezing being equivalent to mask in ZBrush. But, can you also "freeze by Cavity" or "freeze by peaks and valleys" or "freeze by AO"? IYKWIM? For these, I thought I need to use the conditions menu "more an concave" and "more on convex", right? I thought 3D Coat works differently, by storing bakes into vertex color layers to drive that conditions, instead of using masking(freezing). How does freezing come into play with this in 3D Coat? I would also love to know if we could visuslize the condition tweaks (cavity width, contrast) in the viewport, jus as we can visualize our "mask by" mask intensity levels in ZBrush. I feel very comfi Polypainting in ZBrush, but the option to fully PBR paint on sculpts in 3D Coat is jus insane and tempting to work with it. I also like the renderer. The option to bake it down to several maps when done or transfer it to Blender nodes via applink is the sweet cherry on top. Sadly currently, for me, I am not really getting it to function as I expected, probably I am doing something wrong. I I think it sould be possible to have a similar experience to ZBrush painting, if you know how.

Thank you! Does not really help unfortunatley, as I already know how to bake Cav and AO for Smart Material usage. What I struggle with is getting decent results with them when Vertex Painting, using the "Conditions", to get something similar to what I have in ZBrush using various "Mask by" options.

+1 These options can all already be accessed via the wonderful SPACEBAR menu, no need to have it popping up and interrupt workflow. @Andrew Shpagin I just ping you here cause why write private emails instead of discussions in official forum? Would be nice if we could have the possibility to disable it. I love 3D Coat Retopo deeply. This menu however occasionally drags me out of the flow, too. @Evyatar Barok That's some crazy fantastic art you got there on your Artstation!

Any idea also maybe how I could use the conditions for fine grain masking? Like only painting the indents of pores? I have tried with various conditions and different "Degree", "Contrast" and "Cavity Width" settings. All giving me broader results without fine grain. Does this have to do with the above problem that my map is not fine grained enough? Or even the sculpt itself... I assume.... My Curvature Map seems to generally include these fine details though it seems, here is a screenshot from flat shaded view with active Cavity layer: I also noticed that everything I paint comes out with sharp pixelated edges. Also a result of the curvature map not being fine enough? Or would there be a way to get smoother results ? :