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2byts

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Everything posted by 2byts

  1. PBR, is just physically based...which of course all of the offline renderers support. It is generally not understand that "Metal" just means Fresnel. Just the terminology is different. For Diffuse/Rough/Metal workflow when using Arnold Diffuse Texture: Diffuse and Specular Color of the Shader Metal Texture: goes into the Fresnel of the the Shader Gloss/Rough: Roughness of the Shader - you may need to invert the texture when using Arnold because Black=Chrome and White=Lambert For Diffuse/Gloss/Specular workflow when using Arnold Diffuse Texture: Diffuse Color of the Shader Specular Texture: goes into the Specular Color of the the Shader Gloss/Rough: Roughness of the Shader - you may need to invert the texture when using Arnold because Black=Chrome and White=Lambert Because the latter method does not have any control for Fresnel, it would better to use a Metal Texture as well.
  2. Alovrdr, feel free to view my youtube channel where I have collected some turntables of the creatures http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOoDmyxKtME&list=PLb_g4t6AEcj3XXJd-67iNSfHFKaH8TRPK&feature=mh_lolz
  3. Some of our recent work used 3d Coat for sculpting and retopology of Insects. Because of its Live Clay features it proved invaluable for working with our scanned data of real insects. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShDgtDad5TM&list=PLb_g4t6AEcj3XXJd-67iNSfHFKaH8TRPK&index=5
  4. I just wanted to mention I am working on a feature length documentary intended for IMAX and in stereoscopic. Some of the shots we are doing involved digitally recreating skin at the microscopic level. We have scanned referance from electron microscopes, Art Director wanted 40+ million poly resolutions to get incredibly detailed inter cellular structures. The work would be impossible to do without Voxels in 3d-Coat. I was working with 100 million points often enough, with instances and layers so I found perfomance acceptable at these resolutions with an intelligent use of caching and downsampling. Also, I quickly discovered that 24gb of RAM is not enough to export a 100million triangle mesh so there was no point in trying to work in higher resolutions. Because of the nature of interlocking cellular structures i was creating, doing any retopology work would be impossible so creating UVs was not an option. Exporting as quads is an awesome feature that proved really useful for simpler assets, but still required cleanup of non-manifold geometry. Just want to say that painting on voxels would be the perfect logical step forward, but how is the color data going to translate into other applications?
  5. For those thinking it is similar to AUV tiles in Zbrush, it is not at all. Zbrush still creates UVs, just automatically and per polygon but uses a single texture map. This is no different then unitizing and an automatic layout of UVs within Maya. The differance here, is that each polygon gets a 0-1 texture space. So imagine each polygon gets its own texture map, and the user decides the resolution of this texture map. I imagine there is some clever way of loading and unloading each texture map so you can work at highResolutions but not have the entire texture set of the object in Memory. Film Characters will often get hundreads of 4k texture maps! The issue of course is that the only supported render engine is Renderman. Wether the other render engines integrate it is pure speculation.
  6. What does sound of use as Frankie pointed out, is using it for masking and such. Very wicked tools that would not require a lot of RAM to implement. But for actual texturing, its of little use -namely because the artist will want to use a 2d paint program in juxtaposition, and also, whatever solution you choose, if the artifacting and filtering degrades the texturing process - it is of little value. That is one thing that really shines with projection painting in Mudbox....there is very little quality loss.
  7. cheers! this thread is way to long to actually find bugfixes
  8. hmmm.... i am getting the cudart.dll error on all of the exe except for GL64.exe which is fine cuz i am running Vista 64. My problem is that the fonts of the UI are reduced to black boxes, so I cannot read the UI OS: Vista 64 card: Nvidia 260 gtx
  9. Sliders have to be big...absolutely! I am trying to point out that the screen space is the entire slider....ie: place cursor in text field...and just hold lmb down and drag acrossed the screen. No tiny slider is even needed to click on... And dimming text is not an issue for any kind of custom UI colors.
  10. The most elegant solution for this is what Mudbox does(copying and improving from Artisan of Maya).......for brush size, you just hold a hotkey....and then drag the cursor to the size you want. For intensity, you do the same with a different hotkey. When you do this away from any geometry....it scales up and down in increments of 1.0, when you do this with cursor over geometry...you scale in increments of .01 (for finer control). This palette is necessary when you need to turn off features, or need precise values (especially for spec and alpha). I dont mind so much the location of this pallette, but it really needs to be consistent and all values need to be in one place.
  11. I personally feel that Modo and Blender are not good examples of UI. One of the most elegant UIs i have seen is Nuke 5.1 (compositing app) which is why I am really passionate about my suggestions on this. Please understand that I am not making aesthetic design suggestions.....i am making functionality suggestions that improve and speed up the workflow. The important factor with UI design, is that although it has to look good, it is not the priority. The priority is working fast and intuitively. To do that, one must minimilize to the point of making it a religion. The holy grail of UI design.....is no UI at all...and the easiest way we can achieve that is by eliminating as much as possible without sacrificing. I think we could do without the visual representation of sliders as well.....but if you click and hold in the text field you activate the slider and can drag left or right (like channel box in Maya) The checkbox is made redundant by simply highlighting the attribute name instead. The functionality is exactly the same -a dimmed text means it is checked off- but without the extra clutter in the Menu. This gives more space and a cleaner interface.. The problem with the previous design is it had 4 seperate hot areas (check box, left arrow, textfield, and right arrow) to click in a very small space...which is cramped. I am reducing it to 2 hot areas (name is the checkbox and textfield can be dynamically used as a slider, keyboard input, and arrows for incremental changes) and still maintain the functionality and design concept.
  12. I had some issues with the functionality of your design Arkanis. It looks really beautiful....but i think we could streamline the elegance even more. Making it as minimalistic as possible is very important. http://img377.imageshack.us/my.php?image=3dcoatwipep9.jpg Also, about the pie menu design....which is straight from Modo....i dont know if you ever used Modo, but the pie menu is actually slow in response when comparing to the marking menus of Maya which are lightening fast. In fact, i strongly suggest trying to reproduce the speed and feel of Maya marking menus. The speed is essential, because the user will want to press a button, and drag in a direction so fast that they will never actually see the icon. In the case of these kind of menus, speed is the entire point....so the user will want to keep things clean and simple....and to do that, having it all text and only 4 available menus is optimal. Speed selecting with 8 directions is impossible. Of course, ideally, the user will want to create their own menus....with the choice of icon or text. I say this because when I model in maya, i am constantly flicking through marking menus without every looking at the menu intself because of muscle memory. You cannot do this with a 8 pie layout, or with the Modo pie menus. Maya uses the direction of the mouse drag to recognize which menu is selected, whereas Modo uses zones....which is slower.
  13. Changing the look wont actually change the essence of the UI. I am thinking more in how the user interacts with the UI. Icons and color schemes are purely superficial. Something like that is worth having a 3d artist that knows the demands of 3d production and how other software solved these issues. Even photoshop CS3 brought in an entirely new solution to battle the floating pallette syndrome. But working at game studio for several years, I know the difficulty of something like this is quite demanding and is not solved in just a couple weeks.
  14. I just want to add that 3d Coat is really starting to get impressive, and is already starting to be taken seriously by professionals in the 3d community. If you can pull off Voxel modelling....its really going to turn some heads and once that happens the big companies start wondering where everyone went. Now that 3dcoat has a lot of tools....having a powerful and fast UI is going to keep the software from turning into Zbrush. What I mean is....hotkeys are great, but if the right hand is on the mouse, the left hand is naturally on the left side of the keyboard...hot key options are going to be limited. When you have such a large number of tool possibilities...having context sensitive hotkeys will save a lot of space and make the software much more pleasant to use. Marking Menus come to mind.
  15. Dave claims he gets the same performance on a 8800gtx card....and I do believe he said they were not using Cuda. But it is correct that mudbox will be more demanding on the GPU. But even game engines like Unreal 3 are claiming to have real time Ambient Occlusion now. Truth be told, Ambient Occlusion and any other shader have a very limited value unless they can be baked to a texture map.
  16. 3d Coat is starting to get an extensive feature list, and with that comes more buttons and more mouse clicks. At this point its starting to become a hindrance. I was just realizing while playing with the retopo tools in the latest beta that there is an uneccesary number of mouse clicks when changing tool options. One mouse click, or a modifier hotkey should be enough to change the entire behavior. Currently it is necessary to go through pull down menus every time you change a tool when doing retopo work. I can post screen caps of ideas if you wish...but in essence things should be streamlined considerably now. I personally think the Adobe CS3 collapsable side menus would work well for 3d coat. Its just that when in different stages of working, the majority of the UI pallettes and tools are completely uneccessary. It is also a worthy solution to consider a modular approach like Maya, where changing modes will change the UI. With this method the visual appearance and even the hotkeys would change wether you are in a Retopo/UV mode or brush painting mode.
  17. i have to strongly agree that a baking the lightdome instead of a true Ambient Occlusion is problematic. For texturing purposes on real time models, its not beneficial to have shadows on the model....but we do need detailing from cracks or crevices.
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