SERGYI

I have checked 3D-Coat 4.5.35 (64-bit and 32-bit) under clean install of Windows Vista 64-bit and 32-bit. Both install and work.

The compatibility with Windows Vista was temporarily broken in 3D-Coat builds from "4.5.26" to "4.5.33" (tested on 32-bit builds). But the next 3D-Coat build (after "4.5.33") will be compatible with Windows Vista again.

Starting from 3D-Coat 4.5.28 for OS X the key "CFBundleShortVersionString" inside "3D-Coat.app/Contents/Info.plist" is set to correct version.

We'll consider this in future builds of 3D-Coat for OS X.

“Smudge Tool” will work in the nearest build 4.5.22 for OS X.

Thanks for the bug report. It has been fixed in the upcoming V4.5.00 for OS X.

According to the log file the shaders have been compiled without problems. Please test rendering on standard models from startup dialog Voxel Sculpting > “Figure” or “Bust” and post the results.

Is this the only visual artifact that you have in GL mode? Are there any warnings/errors when building shaders on your system in the file “This PC/Documents/3D-CoatV45/Log.txt”? Do you see the same artifact in “Render” mode on standard voxel models from startup dialog?

Alternatively in your "Sword" scene you can simply select VoxTree > "S" icon > 20 000 > Ok.

How have you imported the model? It has insufficient density of voxels. To fix the problem with the clipping open your "Sword" scene. Select "File > Export > Export object > Sword.obj (or any other name) > Cancel" (do not reduce the polycount). Clear the scene by selecting "File > New > Don't save". In the start dialog select "Voxel sculpting > Open File > Sword.obj", scale it by dragging the cube in the center, click Apply. Select any other tool (like Grow) to dismiss the "Merge dialog". Select any "Depth" shader and the clipping dissappears.

The depth buffer in 3D-Coat is represented by RGBA render target - float numbers of depth are packed into integers. The precision is good within certain range and gets worse on small numbers. The aliasing is visible only when camera is very close to the model. But even in close shots the aliasing doesn’t affect rendering (please see the first attached screenshot). The clipping of the camera is caused by Z-near plane. All perspective cameras include Z-near plane in their perspective transform matrix. The distance from the eye to the Z-near is based on the typical scale of models in the scene. If Z-near is too small the precision of Z-buffer gets worse. If Z-near is too far we have annoying clipping. In other words the problems you have encountered (aliasing and annoying clipping) are because your models are too small. Your screenshot with sword reveals that the model occupies less than one square, the camera is forcedly too close and thus Z-near plane clips the model. To see the usable scale of models use “View>Show 3D grid” menu option. To understand the relation between aliasing/clipping and the model size use “Voxels/Objects/Merge/Select mesh/head.obj” on empty scene and try to scale it during import to be very small (the model occupies small portion of the grid cell) or scale it to be normal sized (the model occupies several grid cells). The second screenshot illustrates that. To experiment with data from depth buffer and to remedy aliasing on small models it is possible to add “bias” to the shader (please see the third screenshot).

The document regarding Linux shortcut creation has been updated with screenshots from Ubuntu 14.04: http://3d-coat.com/~sergyi/LinuxDocs/LinuxShortcut.pdf To solve the problem with hyphens the PDF-document has been exported in Office for Mac instead of Google Drive.

Please download the latest build 4.1.04A and report is this problem reproducible on that build. Just tested “undo” on three different distributions and it works fine.

Note about running 3D-Coat in Safe Mode under Mac OS X. According to this article http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1564 we have statement that “Safe Mode in Mac OS X v10.5 or later also disables Quartz Extreme (hardware accelerated graphics). Applications that depend on Quartz Extreme will not open.” That means that 3D-Coat in Safe Mode under Mac OS X 10.5 or later just can’t initialize hardware accelerated OpenGL API. But that was possible in Mac OS X 10.4 under which 3D-Coat could work before migrating from Carbon (32-bit) to Cocoa (64-bit).

Regarding freezes. The bug that bytemann has described manifests itself and is always reproducible on build 4.0.03. Tried it on iMac with Mac OS X 10.8.3 dozens of times. “Force Quit” doesn’t freeze the whole system when spinning ball appears. Maybe there are some other factors like specific application on the background, or administrative rights on 3D-Coat run? If you start 3D-Coat 4.0.03 (with the split voxels bug) and select the biggest voxel sphere, then do Objects/Split on the sphere, then select the child, then do again Object/Split on the child and get the spinning ball, then right click on the 3D-Coat icon on the “Dock” and click “Force Quit” does the whole system freeze? Do you see the standard Mac OS X bug report dialog with “Ignore” and “Report...” buttons?

Hello, bytemann! Thanks for the report! This bug has been fixed in the build 3D-Coat 4.0.04A. Please download it.

Tser, please download just uploaded 4.0.04A build. It has been tested under stress conditions with Autosave on every frame thousand times in a row. System>Administration>System Monitor>3d-coat-64>Right Mouse Button>Open Files shows that this build correctly opens and closes files.

Hello, Tser! Thanks for your observations! After quite a long research the reason of this problem has been found. But the reason has not been eliminated yet. You will see why later. It was possible to reproduce the OpenGL glitches with dots on the whole screen which affect any application under Linux (even menus and text). Sometimes the Linux hangs before those glitches appear and only hard reset helps. During those glitches CUDA version suffers from missing cubes under brush. As it turned out the memory management of OpenGL under Linux and under Windows differs. When 3D-Coat adds a texture the OpenGL driver under Linux sends it directly to the video memory. After a long time (after many added unique textures) the video memory of the graphics card ends up. OpenGL doesn’t report the application about the insufficient memory. OpenGL driver continues to successfully add textures, vertex buffers, shaders. They overwrite existing data in the video memory. There is a dialog which shows how many video memory left in the System>Preferences>More Preferences>NVIDIA X Server Settings>GPU 0 - (GeForce XXXX)>Used Dedicated Memory. Just before the described glitches appear the video memory is almost used. Just add a new texture to the 3D-Coat or create any new geometry and the problem raises. Especially fragile is CUDA version of 3D-Coat, because CUDA reserves big chunk of video memory.

As it turned out, the problem was related to the Ctrl/CMD-O hotkey combination for calling the Open File Dialog. It manifests itself only under Linux and Mac OS X. The builds of 3D-CoatV4-BETA14A for Linux and Mac OS X have been updated. If you experience such problem please download the images again.

Have you tried the previous BETA builds for Mac OS X, like 13A, 12B, 11, 9C, etc? Is this something new to 14A or previous versions have similar behaviour?

Please, download the disk image with 3D-CoatV4-BETA14A again.

Hi, Tser! Have you noticed any dependency from a particular tool? I mean does idle 3D-Coat result in such effect or particular tools have problems with OGL?

The disk image of 3D-Coat V4 BETA5 for Mac has been updated. As it turned out the problem was with the latest Xcode. The project target was set to 10.5 but the executable had dependencies from 10.6. Thankfully there is a workaround for that. Now 3D-Coat BETA5 should work under Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

Several builds ago the 3D-Coat project for Mac has been migrated to the latest Xcode 4.5. It was supposed that 3D-Coat would work under Mac OS X Leopard (under Snow Leopard and above 3D-Coat works for sure). Please wait till I quickly install Leopard on my workstation to see if it is possible to run the latest builds from Xcode 4.5 under Leopard.

Hello, Tser! Please specify is this something new to BETA5? Do the previous builds of 3D-Coat have such negative effect on other OpenGL apps?