Hastouki

24 core and a 3090...

I saw a fairly significant speed increase after subdividing the cube to about 6K quads, wasn't aware that the lower poly mesh could cause a performance drop. It seems counter-intuitive to me that this would be the case, but of course I have no idea how 3DCoat handles the 3D -> 2D projections under the hood. Looking forward to 2024.14!

One of the main reasons for my post was to show the performance difference between versions 2023.1 and 2024.13, I hadn't used 3DCoat for about a year and noticed a pretty drastic difference. If you take a look at the 2014 video especially, the brushes are NOT large, none of them. The last one, which was completely unusable, was large relative to the smallest one at the beginning, but it still isn't what one would call a large brush.

Hello! I originally did the 30 day trial period of 3D coat last year but had at the time decided to not purchase after the trial period for a number of reasons, none of which were because I disliked 3DCoat. I do love many aspects of the package and have had my eye on it ever since. I generally work in ZBrush and Maya, and Painter/Designer or Marmoset Toolbag 4 for texturing. I've decided that I'd like to get more into the hand-painted art style and have always heard amazing things about 3D-Coat in that regard, so today I decided to take advantage of the reduced price and purchased a license. First thing I wanted to do was play around with the 3D painting again, but instantly noticed serious performance issues, which felt quite different from what I tried last year. I have no idea what has happened under the hood over the past year, but the 3D painting feels basically unusable for me. I work on pretty heavy scenes in the software mentioned above and generally don't have any performance issues. I don't have the latest hardware by any means, but I also haven't felt a need to upgrade as my day job is software development. I'm using a Radeon RX 6750 XT, which is certainly not a super high end card, but has been serving me well enough. I went back and installed 3D-Coat 2023.1, which is the version I evaluated a year ago and used OBS to capture some footage of the performance difference. Just for reference, I also recorded the exact same 3D cube I was testing with (exported straight out of 3D Coat) and painted on it in Substance Painter and Marmoset Toolbag, all of them are painting on 4K maps. The 4 videos are there, named accordingly, 2013-1.mkv and 2024.13.mkv are referring to the 3DCoat version numbers (sorry about the background audio, blame my wife): https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Z_03uYfMh7sQrt7smj38vHbVvJei6rT2?usp=drive_link Any assistance here would be great, perhaps I'm misusing something, but I certainly don't think I can use the software as it is. If all else fails, what is the refund policy? I literally JUST bought it an hour or so ago, and was excited to check out the painting again. Thank you! Nick

Hey, can you point me in the right direction, I believe the video you posted no longer exist. I'm trying to figure out how this can be done in a more automated way like in ZBrush. I know I can start creating curves and doing things by hand, but obviously the real feature is the fact that ZBrush will help you generate the panels for you by understanding your mesh/polygroups and generating the required topology.

Hey guys, just found this thread and I'm curious if there is anything like this in 3DCoat now?

In theory you're doing a 1:1 conversion of the normal map to a displacement map correct? None of the smart material settings should affect what the conversion looks like, right? Meaning, I would assume I'm not doing something on my end to cause the displacement map to be generated flipped. I can't imagine any of the smart material settings would affect the conversion of the normal -> displacement as that should probably be a 1:1 conversion based on the source normal map. The texture maps of the PBR material are the same ones I emailed you few days ago, I'll email the link again in case your email inbox is a disaster Thank you!

Absolutely, though I should have been more clear in my post. Sorry, too much other stuff to post/write

Ok I took some time to test a few things. I generated a new TIF bump/depth map using the new features @Andrew Shpaginhas provided, then took the texture and performed an exact render using Marmoset Toolbag 4. This is so that I can demonstrate the differences between rendering the PBR using a normal map and the generated bump map. Overall, its a definite improvement from the issues presented previously, but I've also noticed some strangeness where the generated bump map doesn't match the details of the original diffuse/normal/roughness etc maps. Please take a very close look at the following images. I'm forced to upload them on my own server as the forum here has a limit on uploads. Rendered using Original Normal Map * Everything looks pretty good https://photos.ensoft.io/picture.php?/13/category/6 Rendered using Generated Bump Map (Invert option selected) * Please see how the features/indents on this map do not match the original normal map features, they do not line up. Take a look at the 3DCoat Generated map image below. The features also look "softer" and less sharp, which is why I'm testing with a crystal texture that requires sharp and exact edge details on the surface. https://photos.ensoft.io/picture.php?/12/category/6 NEW 3DCoat Inverted Generated Map * Please see how the features on this map DO NOT match up with the original normal map, https://photos.ensoft.io/picture.php?/15/category/6 Original Height/Bump Map (Provided with my PBR material) https://photos.ensoft.io/picture.php?/14/category/6 OLD 3DCoat Generated Map (Non inverted) for references * Pretty screwed up https://photos.ensoft.io/picture.php?/16/category/6

Thanks @Carlosan, I'll be doing some testing. The long conversion times are huge pain when trying out materials and being creative, but I appreciate the effort @Andrew Shpagin has put into this so far. Thank you!

Hey is there a way to trigger an auto weld vertices that are sitting on top of each other but haven't been welded? Something like in Blender where I can merge all verts by distance. I'm find it all too common situations where vertices that have "snapped" together, haven't actually welded together, only for me to find out that at some other point when brushing/relaxing the mesh. If someone can tell me why they sometimes don't weld together despite snapping together, that would also be very helpful. Thanks

Great, I'll give it a shot, thank you!

Hey Andrew, I understand why the depth is important, my question was more around why we use ONLY depth, disregarding the normal vectors during shading. It would be great to allow for normal map sampling directly. On top of the issues we're discussing, the conversion is very slow, productivity killer. I'll send you an email with a link to the texture files. Thank you!

Hey Andrew, just finished more testing and put together some more screen grabs. Things definitely look better than what 3DC was generating before, but there seem to be issues. I spent a lot of time putting together my previous posts, I would really appreciate if perhaps you can touch on why I should be expecting an accurate given the conversion of the normals. New 3DC Generated Depth Map Looks much better, can still see warping near bolts. You can see in my previous comments how this material looks in other software packages. Close-up of the new 3DC generated map Much better than the previous result posted above, but there should not be fading/gradient/warping present, but its clearly in the generated depth map. Another example, using Marmoset and the actual normal map And now the 3DC generated bump map, please notice the circular artifacts inside the crevices, probably caused by the banding seen below: and this is the bump map it generated, its hard to see the banding, but its there.

During retopology, I noticed these weird "cracks" just popped in out of nowhere while using the "Points to Polygons" tool. I'm not using any tools on the sculpt model itself, but yet these appeared underneath my retopo mesh, the artifacts are visible in the sculpt room too. I thought it was some real-time rendering glitch, but I saved to a new save file just in case. When I reopened 3D Coat and loaded the new save file the "cracks" were there. Any ideas why this could be?