Search the Community

I thought it a bit time consuming that the smart materials didn't have an option that directly connects to the installed alpha, strips and stencil extensions in the "condition mask" or "edge scattering" and mask field as a quick selection perhaps be clicking a small arrow or next button to cycle through the possibilities rather than having to open and load a texture. A small icon showing the alpha, stencil or strips would help as you cycle through them. I also mentioned in this thread title, the possibility of selecting a common animation style. This could be plasma, pulsing/flashing, scrolling up, scrolling down, left/right etc and or combos of pulsing and scrolling and this could be assigned to a texture in the smart materials or perhaps just apply it to the whole smart material.. This is also related to my other post about animating material properties http://3dcoat.com/forum/index.php?/topic/21323-animated-materials-for-each-layer/#comment-147512

Here is the process of creating a Octopus Walking Cycle for the more curious ones!

If your character is intended for animation, the Retopo room is where you would ready it for articulation and this website contains good guides for that task: http://www.hippydrome.com/

Dear 3d coat team, I have another idea, something that I believe is missing for your programme to officially compete with the likes of zbrush when it comes to creating character models for games, and these tools are the following. Rigging System, this tool would allow you to create a character rig inside of 3d coat negating the need to export the character into another programme getting rid of the need to compensate for the differences in both programmes used and all other checks you need to perform and the act its self of exporting the character model, overall speeding up peoples creativity and allowing people to create their models quicker and get them into the game engine fully complete faster. for this you could utilize the curve tool just like zbrush does with the zspheres, and if you include spheres 2 functionality you could create the rig first then paint over the rig creating the base mesh or if you have already got the base mesh use this tool to create the rig. plus if you create the rig first then the base mesh, the rig would automatically spend itself to the rig it is being drawn on but if you are creating the base mesh first then you have to append the rig to the mesh of your choice by hand. Weight Painting for character animations to work or should I say to be able to create character animations, the mesh needs to know how to behave when a bone moves that is in the local area, the way this is achieved is by weight painting the mesh, this could be done inside the paint room, currently you are able to paint, colour, normal/bump, specular/highlight, and emission, this would allow you to weight paint the mesh for character animations, a way to see how the changes affect the movement in real-time when the corresponding bones are moved would also be a nice addition, this would mean that you would not have to constantly move the character between rooms to see if the changes are any good, it would greatly improve speed and accuracy of the results and the fun factor, I do believe it would make the tedious task of weight painting more fun and therefore a task more manageable within 3dcoat which would be a good marketing ploy and win over some zbrushers, and since you can do all of your game character completely within 3dcoat with this improvement, why would you want to have any other programme other than this and the specific game engine of choice. it would become the perfect companion of game developers. the last point is character animations, the ability to create character animations inside 3dcoat so that you can create fully complete game characters inside 3dcoat, through applinkz, you could include support for other character animation tools in other applications that currently support applinkz therefore the person is not just restricted with creating character animations in either one or the other but can actively switch between the two programs to create character animations in both 3dcoat and his other animation too of choice whether that is blender or 3ds max. thank you I do honestly believe that this would be huge, and would definitely be the programme for the artist, just a note if you need to export something, then the programme is not finished and not artist friendly, any tool that allows me to do both inside the same application is a god send.