Dave_ah

For sculpting, where your geo remains inside Coat, its fantastic. I don't like ZBR, but like Mudbox. But my need is bringing meshes with clean perfect UV's and perfectly matching topo from 3DScanstore (www.3dscanstore.com) painting maps, sculpting displacement, then exporting the maps to 16bit halfFloat EXR, and rarely sculpt meshes as blend targets. To use maps as displacement maps in render engines I work with inside Maya and Houdini using Arnold, Renderman, Vray, and Redshift depending on client. The exported displacement maps have to replicate what I sculpted in Coat. I am not there with Coat on this issue. This scanning with inside depth and outside depth is weird. I thought I had got it, understood it, but I don't. Most pressing issue is that I cannot take a hirez paint mesh into sculpt room. The resulting sculpt mesh is ******! A few islands of poly's here and there. It makes no sense to me. None at all. So as workaround, which doesn't really work, is to bring in hirez mesh into paint, bring in same sourced hirez mesh into sculpt, and sub-d cage mesh into topo room. But its so confusing and confounding when things don't work. Leaves me with "Why are they doing this? Why would they design it that way?" I want to bring in sub-d mesh , sub-d mesh to arbitrary high rez, then sculpt and paint on it, with results visible in 3D view and resulting map in UV 2D view. But these room's concept is not for me. Having a sculpt object, a paint object, a topo object of same mesh, is no good for me. Since it is so easy to eff up and paint color on sculpt mesh, or sculpt on paint mesh, and not even know it, is just angst. They need to simplify from artist's point of view. Bring in mesh, or make your own from scratch in Coat. Then sculpt and paint on one object with layers. I can't even slide a decal around withoiut the spline tool going nuts. Any kind of error results in new control point. Grabbing a control point on control curve and moving it, ever slightly, results in weird uncontrolled twisting. I have no clue what its doing, and I am not getting better. The basic deisgn of tool, is built on faulty premise. Just emulate Photoshop for G*d's sake! Copy/paste a decal with alpha into a desired map on its own layer, like in Photoshop, then use transform tool, like in Photoshop, to slide the decal around. As long as mesh has good UV's. Instead I am presented with odd spline tool which twists and warps the decal in ways that I do not understand.

Sadly mine has been negative, and I find that unfortunate. THe processes of transferring meshes back and forth from paint to sculpt, back to paint, with retopo intermediaries works badly, and IMHO, designed poorly. From workflow point of view. Some critical functions don't work at all. Transferring hirez paint mesh to sculpt room is broken and does not work. But I find the concept objectionable. It is somewhat confusing, and really does not work as advertised often. Of course I am coming from being used to Mudbox, where painting and sculpting on object is done simultaneously. In sculpt you can get some really fantastic geometries, but getting that data into a usable displacement and normal maps is cludgy, unreliable, and inaccurate. After almost two months, experience is not getting better for me. I am not quite understanding how a group of intelligent and experienced artists and developers would deploy a workflow that is no error prone , confusing, and just chock full of issues. Sorry! I really can't use this application. A lot of these 3D paint and sculpt applications suffer from messed up interface and tools. Becouse they do not work in coherent intuitive way. They should work as they would in Photoshop. An example is sliding a decal (image with alpha) on its own layer, and seeing result in realtime in 3d and 2d UV view. Place image on its own layer, grab the transform tool and slide it around. In Coat the spline tool, which is used for that, does not work at all in my hands. Watching training videos, I was left with a sense, that tutorials are lying to me, as tools do not behave as shown. Some of those I can't follow the narrator at all. I lose them at same point, no matter how many times I rewatch it.

Yes ,I have seen it. Now that is. Thank you. But the video 'lies' to me! The spline image tool is what I am attempting to use, and it does not work at all as in video. After placing two spline end points, any drag on handle results on uncontrollable twisting. Any unintentional error on clicking on handle that 3DCoat does not like, results in new point being added, and is undeletable, unless done with UNDO. Coming back to the spline image, after other operations, I am unable to reactivate spline handles. Seriously all that is needed is grab and transform tool as in Photoshop with decal on its own layer. 3DCoat has been a disappointment overall. Tools are so badly implemented from user point view. Basic function of sending plantroom paintable object to sculpt room is broken. Does not work in my hands. That was in my earlier post, to which 3DCoat dev replied that it is currently broken.

Paint room paint mesh to sculpt is still broken in 2022.39

I am having problem placing decal image, onto surface. Issue is wrangling those handle circles. Aside from thats it is somewhat cumbersome, the image gets all twisted by handles. How do we rotate them? Any error in click on the handle results in another hand circle being inserted. Is there a better way? Imagine placing tattoo images with alpha on a separate layer in paint room or fracture room.

Thank you. Fault is mine. I have watched them and others. But its not really computing with me. Maybe I am just dumb as a rock. Becouse when I try to apply it in practice, it does not work for me. Then I am told, its a bug, they are fixing it. But overall, for new user , there is no practical way to figure out what is not functioning. Is it the user, is it the assets, is the tool (rarely it is). Introduce malfunction of software, and it really becomes confounding. I just find the whole process convoluted in 3DCoat. I do not understand, at any step, why we are baking or importing. For example, Current Object. How do we know which object is current. Becouse it looks like that its one per room. But then when DELETE CURRENT OBJECT I don't see which one it is. Sometimes wrong object, sometimes nothing is deleted. Its messed up. The workflow logic escapes me, and these videos don't register with me. I've been using Maya, Houdini, NUKE, Adobe for years, with 15 years in VFX post production. My concern is that there have been applications I have come across, that left a bad impressions on me rather quickly. I abandoned them and never looked back. In my experience, if frustration factor is high, it is the software!!! At least it is for me. Its quite simple what I want. I want to bring in a polygonal sub-d geometry with UV and simultaneously paint texture maps, sculpt&paint a displacement directly onto geometry. Look at the screen grab I posted above, and tell me why this is so difficult in 3DCoat.

OK is there a workaround or do we just have be patient until it is fixed?

I don't understand why paint mesh and sculpt mesh are different meshes. They need to be one in same. So colors and sculpted displacement, tangent normal or bump are painted simultaneously. Or am I missing something or misunderstand the app? Also if hirez paint mesh and sculpt mesh have same UV , why do we need a third intermediary retopo&UV mesh. Its just so confusing and convoluted. Which room is for decaling textures. A tattoo for example. I have tattoo RGBA image. Copy/Paste in the Paint room and slide it around. Except where is this done? Fractures room? VerTextures is that PTEX in Coat?

OK

Looks like I am back to clueless mode. I watched the recommended and thought I understood, but sadly I do not. After 30 days, I am not anywhere close where I need to be. This application is confusing and convoluted. I do not understand what it is doing at a particular stage. There is something really wrong with this application. Tried a practical exercise. Intent: Create high resolution sculpted geometry from sub-division polyobject with existing UV's. Accentuate existing color texture with skin scars and imperfections. Extract resulting color , tangent normal , and displacement textures. Import FBX (saved in centimeters out of MakeHuman) Apply retopo with UV Export FAIL! A lot of my cluelessness stems from that I do know what is meant by "Current Object" when in different rooms, or how to tell which object is 'current'. This is a mess. Steps 1. In Paint room File/Import/Import For Per Pixel Painting . Preferences In/Out FBX Export Units: centimeters. Note there is no FBX Import units. Scene scale: centimeters. Fixed scene scale.(BTW what is 'fixed scene scale?) File comes in . It is real world scale bit shy of 2 meters in centimeter units. Verified that in Houdini and Blender. There is no world scale transform in import options for FBX. Geometry appears very large and is not with its feet on the floor, when exported out of Make Human. Tried exporting FBX out of MakeHuman with meters as units. Same result in Coat. FBX comes in at scale that is incorrect and incorrect Y position. I do not know what to do. FBX was brought in with subdivision for painting and sculpting. UV Room : UVs are correct 2. Retopo room. Mesh/Import/same FBX geometry (without sub-division) for retopo and texture extraction baking. This appears to have worked 3. In Sculpt room: Geometry/Paint Mesh to Sculpt Mesh.. TOTAL FAIL! Does not work. The resulting sculpt mesh is ****** so there is nothing to sculpt . Attached the files. MakeHuman 1.2.0 project, FBX, OBJ, and rar of Coat .3b AfrNubianFemale_001.fbx AfrNubianFemale_001.obj AfrNubianFemale_001.mhm AfrNubianFemale_001.rar

"If this does not help, you should be able to click the little House icon in the center of the Navigation bar (just to the left of the Camera icon), which resets the camera to the default position. If that still doesn't help, please try to:" As I stated in post. Reseting view does not work in this situation. I'll try camera icon next it happens. But little house in the fade in menu does not work in this situation. For all I know this could be an issue with OpenGL or RTX Nvidia drivers, where the whole 3D gui has died. But this seems to return when a scene is reloaded after re-start so I am guessing that camera position is an infinite NaN. Maya used have this issue. Not so much anymore. Is your screen name AbnRanger means you are, were, or plan to be U.S. Army Airborne Ranger (11B)? I myself am prior service US. Army Res. 13A MOS (Field Artillery officer Fire Suppourt ).

So what is the procedure when view ZOOM goes in or out into infinity and will not fit view or reset to camera to default? I keep getting into this. When I am zooming out or in, all of a sudden everything disappears. Fit view (to object) does not work. Neither does Reset camera. The screen remains blank. Adding new object, like box, then fit view , likewise does not solve view issue. Restarting and reloading scene does not resolve. I have three scenes files that have been 'bricked' due to this. I use WACOM, but also a mouse. Why does this happen? Is this user error? If this is useer error what can I do prevent it. As all I am doing is zooming in and aout using alt mouse button for navigation as in Maya, Houdini, and Blender. BTW, I am looking forward to exploring Blender-3dCoat live connection. Wish there was 3dCoat-Houdini live connection. But it is not critical.

It was the UNDO files, not the autosaves. I see benefit of saving undo steps. Benefit decreases very quickly after 16. In my case 8. Maya used to do that, possibly still does. I limit UNDO steps in 3D apps to 12, sometimes to 16. Beyond 10 steps, I save the scene.

I'd be happy to. About 2GB in size for the .3b and original mesh. I am making an animated erosion using staged displacement. Where strength of subsequent displacement texture is animated to smoothly transition from one to another and so on. Thus I sculpted 16 layers, but it looks like I lost about 5 of those, as 3DCoat failed to save project due to temp data issue above. The inverse value of the displacement texture also serves as emission map & mask for particles and fluids in Houdini. This is personal RnD and thus there is no NDA attached to it. I started by projecting L-Systems growths onto the geometry in UV space. The points on L-Sys were stamped with SDF metaballs with per point radius, strength, and other attributes. THe negative SDF was then subtracted from SDF of surface. Process that is similar as used in 3DCoat and Zbrush. SDF is just a metaball. But that result looked 'artificial'. Painted sculpted displacement is more organic and more directable, and I wanted to expand from using Mudbox, and becouse 3Dcoat can render directly to Renderman from inside 3Dcoat. I am curious if 3DCoat's internal GPU renderer is based on Unreal PBR?

May have found it C:\Users\MyUserName\Documents\3DCoat\data\Undo\id10358 28GB in this folder. Krazy!