MkIII

I for one was born while those shows were being made, so that's at least one of us. I find it hard to believe that even someone who was born this century hasn't at least heard of Mary Poppins or Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Anyhoo. He is fairly well known in Lightwave circles to be a Lightwaver.

Is there no way to do this?

Interesting. I always assumed that was operating purely on the mesh, and since my work is on painting & detailing low poly game models, rather than creating new sculptures, I have avoided using it, not wanting to alter the shape of the base mesh. It hadn't ocurred to me that its smooth tool would be usable. Yes, the sculpt smooth option does smooth the mesh nicely, but when I go back to paint mode, the layers that I want to smooth (specifically the normal map), are not affected. How do I detail layers above zero & use the sculpt smoothing to smooth the depth/normals on those layers?

I know this has been mentioned before, but in both 2.10.xx.xx and the V3.0 beta, the smoothing function for the paint brush is very limited in strength, especially when smoothing the Depth channel (even with numbers greater than 1.0). To be clear, this is the paint brush smooth function, not the sculpture tools. Is it at all possible to at least increase the strength of the smooth paint brush action, on normal maps/height, so that it is capable of smoothing out more than very slight bumps. I'd say the range should be more like 10x the strength it achieves now. On a side note, why is it "depth", when, generally, this is known as "height", and the default action is to add height rather than create depth?

ZBrush does seem to have a fair chunk of small tutorial videos on their site, but the fact remains that ZBrush costs a 4 & 1/4 times as much as 3dc now (for those that pay for the commercial license, and will still be 1/3 the price when it is $200, assuming that ZBrush hasn't also risen in price by then. Maybe if more people paid for a copy of the app now, then A.S. would have more cash to get some tutorials made in time for 3.0? On a side note, It's probably sensitive information that Andrew wouldn't want to divulge, but I wonder how many commercial licenses have been sold compared to the "non commercial"? because to be honest, anyone using the thing commercially would make their money back in the first day.

Errr.... Not to mention the fact that it is permanently displayed on the Tile bar. [edit]...or should I say title bar

And if they ever did, he would be a bit foolish not to grab their money and run with it.

Now the reason for Softimage to drop it's Foundation user base completely has become clear. They didn't want all those non full fee paying customers cluttering up the place and freeloading while big takeover talks were in progress. Although blogs from Softimage employees claim that they knew nothing of the takeover at the time they decided to dump Foundation.

And yes - the latest update, 2.10.14 has a much more powerful smooth tool. Thanks Andrew. [edit] Hrmm. 2.10.15 seems to be lower. Could the power of the smooth tool be variable depending on some other random factor? Either way, I do wish that the smooth tool was able to smooth normal maps as much as it smooths colour maps

Nice. Do you intend to do the changes to the smoothing tool pressure in v2.10 that have been included in the 3.0 beta?

Apologies if this has come up before: The transparency setting is really the wrong way around, with higher settings equalling less rather than more transparency. perhaps this would be more correctly named Opacity?

It depends on other factors too, such as the brush radius, the focal shift and the falloff, and pressure sensitive settings of the tablet, and to some degree, whether or not you have depth set to additive drawing or not (hover over the Depth icon to set this). If you have made a large lump that you want to reduce, use the magnify tool to reduce it, or even better, use the plane (iron) tool - which also allows you to smooth using SHIFT. Basically, it seems like the smooth tool is designed more to smooth out rough edges, and remove small detail rather than removing solid masses. it will do that, but it takes time, and the other tools mentioned do that better. [EDIT] Having said all that... with the current version (2.10.10) my smoothing now seems a little bit unresponsive! Go figure... The smoothing in the 3.0 Beta is much more powerful. I hope that Andrew is going to provide this in 2.10 at some point.

I know I'm a bit late on this one. I only just bought 3d-coat ... ...but it's Japanese not Chinese. I tried translating it with various online translation sites, but the results were generally such gibberish, that even though it is clear what the subject is without the text, it was impossible to understand.

In addition to the above, it's worth noting that the default setting for "Padding Width" in the View/Options panel, under Normalmaps Export, by default seems to be set to a rather high number (64 pixels If I recall correctly). It might be worth setting this to a more reasonable number more like 3 to 6 pixels, depending on your texture size.

Is it possible to have (at least as an option), to have slightly more persistent dropdown menus so that they can be made to stay on screen a little longer in case we accidentally move the mouse off the menu? At the moment, they vanish the instant that the mouse leaves the confines of the menu. It would be useful if we were able to set a short delay to enable the mouse to be repositioned back on the menu if we accidentally stray outside the boundary.

I have just bought a copy of 2.10 for $140 (+VAT) - I haven't had the benefits of a years worth of free upgrades, and will no doubt pay the price of the upgrade to 3.0 (around $80 from what I can figure from this forum), so why don't I feel the urge to complain? Oh yes that's it - because 3.0 isn't out yet, it could be 3 months or more away, and I only paid for a copy of 2.10.. I knew there was something Seriously guys - if you want free software, it's probably best to stick to Blender, and Gimp. I wish my next Photoshop, Lightwave or Modo upgrades (not to mention Max & SoftImage) would be less than $100. As for additional game support. The more the merrier, I am personally quite happy with the lwo, Obj, and Fbx support so far, but to add my Off Topic 2p worth - the Gamebro .nif format (object and textures) is one I would like to see happen.