ghib

This does not work with Maya 2016, can anyone else confirm?

VERY good suggestion TimmyZ. It's all about the Pole

Ah I see. Maybe go to their forums and suggest it, some people might find it useful. Interestingly he's just added a blur parameter to the brushes.

PolyHerz what do you mean by sharpen brush? you mean a real-time brush that operates like Photoshop's Sharpen filter? RE: background colour, I couldn't agree more and it's been requested on their forums a number of times. It works perfectly in programs like Procreate.

Amazing and thank you for sharing L'Ancien. Really appreciated.

My currently favourite 2d Painting app is going for the iPad Pro. http://www.paintstormstudio.com/ I wish these 2 guys all the luck in the world; in my opinion it's the best most natural 2d painting experience around. Lovely brush engine.

This could get messy very quickly. I do agree with your sentiment however.. Emissive I think is a layer blending mode no?

Thanks for the Photoline mention Herbert. I'm going to have a look at Photoline, it seems like the perfect Layer based masking system (the next best thing to going Node based) Another thing that bugs me with 3DCoat Layer Masks; it's not a solid Black/White mask like Photoshop it uses transparency. So transferring any Layer masks from existing Photoshop files is a pain.

AbnRanger, good suggestions there for improving Layers. The more visual and immediate the feedback is the more clarity 3DC will have. I would add to the idea of Layer Masks to make them have their own Layer System parented under the Layer they are influencing; if you get my meaning. Quite often in Photoshop I've wanted to be able to layer up my masks i.e. One mask for material ID, the next for local grime detail, another for masking out specific details like Stitching etc. Being able to stack masks would be very powerful.

I can tell you feel passionate and defensive about your chosen tool. None of what you're saying is 'TOO DIFFICULT TO GRASP' so I'll leave you to it. I on the other hand will continue to evaluate ALL tools available and give my feedback where necessary. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

Hello yet another typical AbnRanger knee-jerk reaction. Calm down fella. Both barrels blasting? This is NOT the wild west p.s. May I also quote myself After re-reading your responses I feel your reactions are "Way over blown" Being critical of a shortcoming is completely different from Bashing,

AbnRanger - Ok firstly, I feel that you may have just had another knee-jerk reaction. Let's try and keep in civil without any inflammatory insinuations, thanks. ( I'm not here to start a fight, merely to talk about possible limitations with a package I have personally invested a LOT of time with both beta testing and using professionally. I feel personally responsible for the majority of artists in our studio using 3DCoat. Wouldn't Andrew want to improve his application or at least listen to as many active users who may well have valid ideas about how to improve it? It could very well lead to more sales in the future. As I said in my previous posts we are currently reviewing and streamlining our pipeline here and each artist is testing all available packages on the market. What is becoming apparent is that for our purposes 3DCoat is lacking with versatility in its Layers system. Let me explain... In Substance Painter & QS all your Substance (Smart Material) settings are available at all times rather than locked inside a Material which then gets applied to a Layer. You can have as many Masks as you like applied to that Substance so you can keep your detail separate e.g. Material ID, edge wearing, painted specific details etc. It’s a very elegant system. Compare this to 3DCoat and you realise that it’s far superior. Imagine an Art Director reviewing your work and asking for you to change a whole bunch of parameters in your Smart Material in 3DCoat; you will need to go back to the original Material and build a new one (change parameters) then start again on your Layers from scratch. It’s destructive like I said. Why can’t we paint on a ‘Mask Layer’ in 3DC if it’s hidden? Is this a bug? If not then I find it very obtrusive. Also visually you need to perform a workaround to distinguish your Mask layers from ordinary paint layers. I use a prefix or suffix _MASK_ but again it’s not elegant and you need to remember to have all those layers hidden. You may work differently but I tend to try and keep all my details on separate layers to attempt to be as non-destructive as possible (I’m used to ‘Art Direction’) Double this up with many many Mask layers and you can understand our frustration. Our characters are VERY complex with many different elements to coat. Keeping all of this in one scene in 3DCoat with the current layer system is a nightmare if I’m being kind. Have you tried using an ID mask layer in 3DCoat? The magic wand tool is horrendously slow. To the point where it’s actually unusable. It is quicker to send ALL layers to Photoshop make a wand selection and create a new layer fill it with solid pixels and send it all back to 3DCoat than it is to make an ID selection within 3DC. Oh and this is another bug bear of mine, rather than being able to link one ID mask to as many Layers as you want you need to create a new MASK layer for every ID. It’s clunky. Anyway, as I mentioned in my other posts I do actually prefer using 3DCoat as it has many advantages over the other choices I mentioned i.e. you can link a mask layer to as many layers as you like. It has served us very well in the past but as I've outlined its Layer system is becoming less appealing for our particular needs.

I wish I weren't correct as we are currently overhauling our own internal pipeline and reviewing the available 3d Paint packages on the market. I love using 3DCoat but unfortunately it has become apparent that it's not very flexible/powerful in the Layer dept. There are of course pros and cons with all the packages so I'm not being unnecessarily harsh on 3DCoat. At the moment, for our needs, 3DCoat is coming at the bottom of the heap (much to my displeasure) p.s. I would happily work closely with Andrew to help improve this side of 3DCoat but I fear that there is such a large backlog of ideas/bugs that this is not realistic.

You guys are forgetting how bad 3DCoat's Layer system is. No intelligent Layer Masking, Text only?, Layer Groups having no 'Pass Through' 3DCoat needs an overhaul in my opinion as it's starting to feel quite archaic. Both Substance Painter & Quixel Suite have a far superior Layer masking system which allows for rapid changes on the fly in a more non-destructive way. I honestly don't see anything changing in 3DCoat with regards to this for a LONG time. 3DCoat Smart Materials are nice but they are destructive. Meaning that once you've painted them down onto a layer it's set in stone. If you want to tweak the values you have to go back to the Smart Material and start from scratch again on your layer. This to me is a massive shame as I think 3DCoat with a much better Layer system would sit it head and shoulders above the competition.

Thanks for the reply Carlosan, yes I agree that group blending mode should override all child layers if set to anything other than Pass Through. It is the lack of the latter mode which breaks the current 3DCoat Groups setup in my humble opinion.

Painting with 'Single Polygon' selected in the Stroke mode panel seems broken in this latest build - Windows [4.5.23] Instead of painting fully the whole polygon it seems to make you to paint within the highlighted poly with a feathered alpha. Is this by design? Also it seems very familiar, legacy bug from the distant past.

So I have a group with two layers (both layers blend mode is set to Multiply) The group blend mode overrides the individual layer blend modes. Is this by design or a bug? I can't find a reason you'd want it to be like this. Desired result would be for the Group Layer be set to "Pass Through" as it is in Photoshop. The group layer thus having no effect unless required. Just another o.O 3DCoat moment.

I can't find any info on this so forgive this potentially noob question. Is it possible to paint the Flat normal colour on a new layer and see the results in realtime? I don't want this to be a destructive thing, so new layer is essential. As far as I can determine the only way to paint flat normal information (RGB 128,128,255) is to do it with the Normal Map in the diffuse blending modes, which isn't ideal as you can't see your results of the normal map in realtime.

Sorry for not responding (I've been meaning to but too busy in crunch right now) If I get the time I will look through my message history to see if I can find the posts where I was complaining about this issue. It was a long time ago and I believe that I did send across a file where it was broken. Whatever form that took, I might have uploaded something to my dropbox etc.. I would really like to see this bug squashed at some point as it really breaks my workflow with 3DCoat (and that can be schedule destroying sometimes) Andrew, once I'm out of our crunch period I will try to get together a file to send to you. p.s. I am marking this thread as unsolved, I hope you don't mind.

Thanks Javis, yes this is an obscure bug that I can't reproduce 100% of the time. It used to happen in the past, a long time ago maybe 3 or 4 years, and has happened inconsistently since. it's infrequency makes it difficult to pin down exactly why it's happening, but I have submitted files to Andrew in the past to help identify the problem. It doesn't seem app specific either because we used to use XSI and now Maya and the problem happened with both apps. One thing I've always found strange is that the Material Objects that come into 3DCoat from Maya seem to be named not based on their Material names (in Maya) but from the Shading Group name. This is a bit of a pain and an anomaly; why is this so? Anyway. The Bug. I have Several Objects in my paint scene. Each with their own UVSet, some objects with multiple UVSets to split them. e.g. Body has two Skin Materials (face & body) Expected result: Layers sent through to Photoshop using a specific UVSet will export the correct Layers and reimport to the same UVSet after editing and saving Layers.psd. Actual result: on Saving Layers.psd and focussing back to 3DCoat it will bring the Layers.psd but place them onto the wrong UVset (e.g. instead of SkinFace UVset it will reimport the layers to Hair UVset) Like I said it's not consistent and I can't seem to reproduce it. All my objects and UVSets have unique names. Clues. I thought it might be something to do with my own method for transferring objs around between apps by saving over the same temporary OUTPUT.obj file for every single mesh. Then renaming inside 3DCoat after import. Is there something hidden in the scenes that will keep the original name of an imported OBJ? As far as I can determine 3DCoat has a name for each object in the scene which is exposed to us in the Paint Objects tab, and a name for each UVset under the Surface Materials tab. Is there anywhere else that I need to check in case there are duplicate names in the scene? I can only deduce that duplicate names are the reason for the Sync Layers and Edit All Layers functions to confuse which UVset to place the temporary Layers.psd file on. Anyway thanks for taking the time to reply, it's much appreciated.

I have this occasionally with 3DCoat (and have done as far as I can remember) Syncing Layer/Layers with External editor will return the saved Layers.PSD to the wrong UVSet. This is intensely annoying and embarrassing (it has happened while demonstrating 3DCoat to someone new). Andrew if you have time I'd appreciate it if you could take a look at the code for these functions. It's getting to a point where I want to stop using 3DCoat and not recommend it to people any more. This is not just an annoyance to me personally as we are starting to rely on syncing layers to create PSDs for the purpose of outsourcing. thanks

BUG: Cannot colour pick from the Texture Editor window if object is hidden. Why is this necessary? Can we have it changed please.

Perhaps I'm doing something wrong but File > Import > Import Vertex Positions doesn't seem to do as described in the mouse over help. I have a Head object that I need to bring in a morph target to paint the inside of the mouth. The topology is identical in both existing model and on the obj that I want to import using said method. Can anyone confirm or deny this?

Thanks for adding carlosan.

Shame really, as it's extremely useful. Especially now that we can do more in 3dCoat with the PBTexturing I spend longer in the program than I ever have as it's more 'on-target' for Unreal Engine 4. This lack of decent magic wand speed is really the only thing that is slowing me down as I tend to make a multi-coloured Mask layer that I colour pick from to work on the fly in Photoshop. I like to keep my layers to a minimum.