amcmahon

Been away from 3d coat and painter for some time now and wanted to refresh myself with them. I wanted to add some detail to an old mesh I made via normal map editing. Painter's editing ability is fairly weak compared to 3D Coat. So did the details here, exported the normal map, brought it back to Painter to finish the textures but the new normal map made everything glossy. I tried several export options as well as flipping the green channel, but nothing seems to be working. Hoping others have insight into what is happening here.

Minor gripe in v4 but it does increase my time and effort to finish my task. Using the retopo tools and noticed the snap detection is much worse than before. Using Add/Split it will work great on the starting point, but when connecting the last point to fill the face, it has horrible detection and falls off the intended point half the time. In the previous version, you could circle the reticle around and it would continue to detect and snap to the final point. I can make a video of what I'm talking about if that helps Andrew. An easy repro is to make a quad in retopo and try to add a quad to it with Add/split. Increase brush size and circle your cursor over the final point. In version 3 it will stay locked. In version 4 it will unlock very easily. This has been a pretty big time killer believe it or not.

Sweet. Thanks Artman, it worked.

Andrew, I don't seem to recall having this issue before but it's been awhile since I've tried it so I can't be 100%. When exporting an obj from Voxels and exporting a retopo mesh wrapped to that voxel mesh I get 2 very different sized meshes. Is there an option or workaround that I'm missing to export a voxel (high poly) mesh and a retopo mesh the same size? The purpose for this was to bake out additional maps in xNormal. I checked the scale in other apps such as ZBrush and 3dsmax and they are consistent in that they come out different sizes. The retopo mesh is a good 3x larger.

+1,000,000. Outside of stability and performance I would like to see the auto-quadrangulate refined. With that and a good AO baker you'd have a near perfect production set of tools. Auto-Quadrangulate could be made 100x better than it currently is with existing features in retopo already and this would be a 1000x more useful than Ptex.

I understand it's basic usage but it's full implementation is still meant for production which the above minus UV's is not good for. If all you want to use it for is personal still shots then it's great. But that's hardly what Disney designed it for and not very useful on the whole for production. I actually don't think it's currently working correctly as it makes no sense to convert a retopo mesh's UVs to Ptex format. A retopo mesh should contain the UV's it had so you can take your PTex sculpt and bake to it for displacement, normals, what have you. The advantage to sculpting with PTex is that you can tessellate areas arbitrarily for clean details. Eliminating UV's altogether would be ideal but until 3D painting apps get much better, it's not a suitable option.

I haven't been keeping up to date with all of the new implementations but I was playing around with the Ptex and found I couldn't import a mesh with UVs and use that to bake to. Is there a way to do this? If not I think it would be a valuable option to have. Currently, regardless of the retopo mesh you bring in and it's UV's it converts it to a Ptex UV layout. My work around was to export the high poly mesh from the Ptex sculpt and bake the normals in xNormal.

Hi Andrew, Not sure if anyone else has ever tried setting up a ShuttleXpress with 3D Coat but I'm finding that 3DC won't recognize input from the jog dials. Was wondering if anyone found a work around or Andrew, if you might have an idea as to why it won't work? http://retail.contourdesign.com/?/products/22 The 2 jog dials in the center are rendered useless in 3DC. I'm using this on my Modbook (Tablet PC) as an alternate to a keyboard. All of the functions work properly in other applications. So I'm curious as to why 3DC doesn't like it.

Thanks 3dCoatWannabe. That's pretty cool. Like you said I'll have to find something on the PC like that.

I just started using a Mac keyboard for my pc laptop. Is there a way to assign the right command key as ctrl in 3DC? I'm left handed and the keyboard doesn't have a ctrl button on the right hand side. I tried to find an option to customize this but couldn't find one. If there is an option can someone point me to it. If not, Andrew, can you add an option? Might not matter for me soon enough as I might switch it over to Mac but there might be others as well with this minor issue. Thanks.

+1

Hey Andrew, great work on another amazing update. I think I ran into a bug however with the latest update. I used to be able to increase resolution of a voxel mesh without having it decrease in size using either the quick button at the bottom of the layer section or the voxels tab up top. Every time I try it now it shrinks the object in half. Any one else encounter this? I'm testing it on an older mesh of mine so I'm going to run a test with newly created primitives and see if I get the same result. *Updated* Turns out only one of the layers in my Voxtree was having this problem. Not sure why but cloning it and deleting the old one fixed the issue. Andrew, if you'd like the file for debugging just let me know.

Ok, I'll try that when I get home and let you know.

Using DX. I'm sure CUDA would work great but I'm strictly comparing non-CUDA right now since I want to use one OS and not have to dual boot. CUDA isn't compatible with some of my other apps.

Hey Andrew, there's a noticeable difference in performance using non-CUDA 32bit on XP and non-CUDA 64bit on Windows 7. I mean this in a bad way as it's obvious they are 2 different setups. I have 8 GBs of RAM and just upgraded to Win7 64bit. But I dual boot to XP. I tested the same file on both and found it more sluggish on Windows 7. Considering my specs that seems odd. Just wondering if you've looked into Windows 7 at all to see if there might be optimizations needed?

Was just doing some work with planar projections and needed to rotate my voxel mesh a perfect 90 degrees but found no way of doing this. The numerical editor for each axis isn't relative to world coordinates. It would be nice to type in 90 or 180 to rotate the object exactly. Or a nice snap/degree button like in 3dsmax.

I would just call it Planar tool. Since there's a flatten brush already. One thing I noticed when working in Voxels is that if you want to import a mesh it has to be closed or you get some unforgivable errors. Any chance of having it close holes better? Not an easy task most likely but if it could work like any cap or fill tool in most 3d apps that would be great. For instance if I import a body with the hands cut off instead of it capping the two holes on the wrists it tries to merge the two together creating a block between the two. Another feature sorely needed is the ability to center the pivot to an object. What I mean is that when you enter transform mode many times the axis is way off the mesh. Right now you have to check the box to move the axis only and position it to the mesh then uncheck. Having a single center pivot/axis button would be tremendously helpful. While not critical I was wondering if it would also be possible to import objs into voxel layers at their existing tesselation. Currently you have to increase the res of the layer by guessing the rough amount the obj is at when importing to maintain detail. There's also a scaling issue when bringing objects into 3dc. At least it seems like it. Everything tends to come in really small. Makes it hard to work with when bouncing between apps. Sorry this is kind of all over the place. Just writing it down as I think of it so I don't forget. 3DC is a brilliant app and has been pulling me away from ZBrush more and more. Thanks Andrew.

I'd like to be able to just center the manipulator to the object or new primitive. Unless there's an option I missed most of the time I have to zoom out to find the maniputlator and then move it to the object selected. This happens if you set the object to global space which is necessary most of the time for symmetry. I can't find a way to recenter the axis to the object after that.

Aha. See, that's what I was missing. Thanks.

Didn't want to start a new thread. Since there's no locked in ortho views such as right, top, etc. is there a way I'm missing to snap curves to a grid or along an axis at the 0 point? I have grid snapping on and even turn on ortho view but without being able to get a perfect side view my curves end up drifting off the center point. This is frustrating as it creates more work to fix it. If not in ortho mode the amount they are off is obviously more drastic. Also just a note. Using 64bit Cuda on Vista 64 I notice whenever I open my working file it adds a new empty layer to my voxel tree.

Can you tell me the steps you did to use it? For myself, I imported an obj for per pixel painting. Mesh is symmetrical on both sides but I have the verts pulled differently to make the sides uneven. I go into layers, select symmetrical transform copy red to blue. I select my red side and then blue side. Click copy red to blue and nothing happens. I also tried turning on symmetry across X axis first and then selecting my red and blue. Copy and nothing.

Any one else having issues with copying Symmetry? Maybe something changed from previous ALPHA versions but the copy symmetry doesn't seem to work. If I import an obj either as per pixel paint, reference mesh, vertex paint, or to sculpt it refuses to copy symmetry from red to blue. I'll tag the symmetry sides red and blue which it finds perfectly. Then when I click copy from red to blue it thinks for a second and does nothing. This feature used to work flawlessly. Am I missing something or did something change?

I was messing with the rendering today and came across this bug. I wanted to convert my texture to the specular so I converted color to specular. Didn't see any difference. So then I tried to invert specular to see if the colors read opposite or something. It produced this. Inverting it again doesn't fix it. Have to reload the file.

Bolba, try holding shift and then dragging your lines where you want them. This is for open space. Just draw like normal when connecting the lines on the mesh.

Hey Andrew, Not sure if anyone else is getting this but in Voxel mode a few of my brushes sometimes disable. For instance the entire first menu disabled so I couldn't use build or 2D paint. Then using the bottom menu (draw, clay, flatten, etc.) the clay was working then all of a sudden it stopped working. The circular cursor disappears and doesn't lay down any strokes. But draw, flatten, and the others still worked. Also, flatten doesn't work that well. Compared to ZBrush or Mudbox it feels unfinished to be honest. It's not flattening enough nor averaging with it's surrounding area. So you get very lumpy results. Strange my last edit didn't take. Small wishlist working in retopology. I liked being able to right click in empty space and bringing up the menu. Is it still there and I'm missing the option? Any chance of implementing a drag selection method? Using a marquee box to select multiple verts/edges/faces is so much easier than shift/painting over them. Very nice updates Andrew. The new UI and dockable windows is soo nice. I'm amazed at what you've implemented and how this app continues to grow. Great job.