ghib

Just wanted to ask this here before I go and submit a bug report on Mantis. I noticed that the isolated view 'Relief' lighting does not correspond to the 'Smooth Shade' lighting. Is this intended or a bug perhaps? I couldn't find controls in 'Relief' to position the light or change the intensity in any way (the icons at the top of the 3d window doesn't affect it in any way) cheers.

You can just paint as normal. No need to paint with the PBR Materials. So just choose the Brush tool, a colour, the Roughness & Metalness if you have the Gloss Channel on. Click on the 'X Close' in the PBR Materials tab. The PBR Materials are just a way of creating a Substance that you want to paint onto an object. If you think of it in terms of layers that would actually build up on an object in real life and you build up your own library of Materials then you'll actually be texturing your models faster in the long term. So you would have a metal object that over time would have dust gather in the crevices and Oxidization will occur, the object might be painted and scratch off over time. This is the clichéd PBR example but it helps to think of this when preparing your Layers, which could look like this: Dust, Grime, Oxidation Paint Metal (bottom) You can and will (of course) use both methods for texturing, typically by blocking out your model with pre-prepared PBR materials, and refining with bespoke details along the way. sorry if this msg came across as being a bit of a lecture. p.s. You can duplicate a material by right clicking on it. then right clicking on the duplicate and choose the folder (PBR sub tab) that you want it to be in.

Andrew, thanks for the response and the details on baking the smooth Occlusion map. It's great news that Raycasting method is being worked on; I think this will make a lot of people happy. Can you give any details on whether it will take into account any Normal maps or depth painting applied to the model? Or would that info be placed into the Curvature Map?

3DCoat's method for detecting cavities is superior to Mudbox's actually.. a ) It's not dependent on brush size, meaning; if you want to paint very tight cavities in Mudbox you need a very small brush size. This can take foreger to fill a large object with small cavity painting. In 3DCoat you can set the falloff independently from brush size. b ) 3DCoat can detect cavities based on geometry detailing AND normal map details. As far as I know Mudbox can't do this which is geometry based only.

Yes you can.. Depending on the size of your abr it can take a VERY long time to import. You'll think 3DCoat has crashed or hung indefinitely but leave it and it'll come back with all your brush alphas there ready to use. You only need to do that once and next time you load up 3DC they'll be there instantly.

I've always wondered but never tested this. Does 3DCoat recalculate tangent space normal maps when you use the apply New UVset function? If yes then this is fantastic. Headus' UVLayout is the only other program that I know of that can do this (re-bake normal maps to a new uv layout and recalculate the normal maps for you)

That's the thing, I don't want to switch to Substance Painter as I much prefer the 3DCoat Workflow for painting assets; even at this early stage of PBR I love it. It's no huge deal really as I already bake my other maps and details in Maya using Turtle. It would just be more useful if 3DC did proper AO calculation.

Not completely useless, but pretty useless if you're only doing game assets. For example, I recently was painting on a SubD model with the subdivisions baked; There was no high poly. ..and by the way Andrew has written in the release notes that the calculation takes into account a normal map that is applied to it. I haven't tested the quality of this yet but I presume it'll give a similar result to CrazyBump. Of course baking an AO map between arbitrary high and low res meshes will give you better quality results no doubt. 3DCoat baking needs modernising.

Update: At this point I'm giving up on this method for creating AO. It's just not feasible. The blotchiness artifacts that this method produces at acceptable render times isn't at all useful for our assets.

Ok just tried a quick Bake in Turtle in Maya using this object. Setup took around a minute. Render time 8 seconds The two are practically identical. With slightly higher settings the Turtle bake would be perfect.

The occlusion calculation is already pretty unbearably slow compared to other baking engines e.g. Turtle, Substance Painter etc. with 256 lights, I don't think we'll ever hit our deadlines. I don't see why Andrew doesn't look into a geometry/raycast method for AO. Is there a legitimate reason for this? I'm merely curious..

Just want to give a thanks to Andrew for looking into speeding up Occlusion calculation. Will give this a test today. p.s. Just gave this a quick test and I am not getting a decent AO calculation. Here's a quick image to explain. Even with a Post Smoothing Steps of 10 you can still see obvious individual Shadows cast by the lights. How was the Original Ambient Occlusion layer on this model calculated for such a smooth result. It doesn't seem right that I should ramp up the Post Smoothing Steps so high just to get a smooth bake. Thoughts?

..and he is but one man (even if that's a super man) I guess it must be hard to prioritise what is most important if there is a seemingly insurmountable mound of requests to get through. Especially if Andrew also has to fire fight the bug list at the same time.

Date Submitted - 2012-03-22 04:07 Does Andrew drop by here any more?

RE: pace of dev; that's great to hear; I miss the days of giving feedback to Andrew and for him to respond in person. I feel that super fast raytraced AO is a must if 3DCoat is to compete with the likes of Substance Painter/Designer (which does have very fast baking) It is an integral part of PBR Materials, as is creating quality curvature maps.

Oh. I didn't realise work on 3DCoat had slowed down that much. I haven't frequented these boards for a long time (though we still use 3DC at our studio daily) and from the outside it still seemed like the production pace was still frenetic. I still love this program though, and we're quite close to adopting using it to paint PBR Materials. It still needs a bit of refinement but enjoying how 'on target' painting is now.

Do any of you guys have access to Mantis, maybe we could add this request officially to get some action on it. Wonder what Andrew's thoughts are on this subject.

Yes, I agree. I am baking my maps in other apps until there is a more desirable result for generating AO. I remember this being an issue in 3DCoat, what? Maybe 4 years ago now.

This is more for the purpose of generating an AO map for PBR texturing on a SubD model straight out of Nvil. I wanted to test PBR but didn't want to have to generate a low poly mesh and bake normal maps etc. This would be the usual method when creating game ready assets. I was using Calculate Occlusion with the Lights method. I don't know any other AO calculation method that uses Lights.. what's that all about?

Baking Ambient Occlusion maps for PBR is extremely slow in 3DC. I'm wondering if it's something I'm doing wrong or is this just the way it is in 3DCoat? My UVs are fine, nothing overlapping or outside of 0,1 UV space. Baking in Substance Designer or Turtle etc is light years faster compared to 3DCoat; so I feel that baking is just slow. Any official word on this? thanks p.s. I also noticed that baking an object that has UVs outside of 0,1 textures space slows things up even more. I couldn't even import some objects into 3DCoat that had UVs like this. Again, it may be something I'm doing wrong but if it's not then I'd make some suggestion for changes.

I could be wrong but More/Less in Cavity used to work on any normal map you brought in AS WELL as any Depth you have painted on any of the layers. Has this been changed recently?

More in Cavity & More in Convex don't seem to use any 'Depth' that you paint into layers. It only takes model and Normalmap[ext] into account when calculating these modes. I think the same actually applies to Less on Concave, Less on Convex, More on Flat & More on Curved. This bug essentially breaks my workflow for using these modes.

I've been playing around with PBR in this latest beta. One thing occurred to me; it would be nice to be able to export all textures for your given workflow. Currently there is only an option to export objects AND textures.

ok thanks Jose. I'll test it a bit more. It seemed to be fine for a couple of times after I restarted 3DC but was back again. Might be jumping between old 4.1 and 4.5 was the issue.

I think that Sync Layers w/Ext. Editor and Edit All Layers in Ext. Editor are broken at the moment in the latest 4.5 Beta12A Could anyone confirm this? Load model with multiple Surface Materials and UV-Sets & Mesh parts attempt a sync with Photoshop or external editor. make change in Editor and save Layers.PSD attempt a second sync with a different UV-Set/Material Make change in Editor and save Notice in 3DCoat the wrong Material is altered.