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Not sure if this is entirely relevant but thought some people might be interested in seeing it. I made a quick workflow chart for total noobs showing a basic workflow of the 3D designer. I know there are of course a billion other workflows- but this is the basic core of it. I would of course like any feedback or ways I could improve it as I will be printing out my final version and posting it on my wall in my classroom ( I will begin teaching 3D coat, along with Cinema 4D + Unity next year). 3DDesignProcessForAnimationVGDWImages.pdf https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3697270/3dcoat/3DDesignProcessForAnimationVGDWImages.pdf

Hello. Retopologization of organic models in 3D Coat is quite pleasant. But it's about the other end of the surface world I'd like to ask a question about. How do you guys retopologize so called hard surface sculptures that are intended for further subdivision in your rendering and animation packages? Sculptures containing circular/curved holes on smooth, but curved surfaces. Sculptures for which you don't have any base meshes because objects were created in 3D Coat from scratch or maybe they were NURBS solids imported into 3D Coat for further modification and detail sculpting. I'm thinking things like toasters, guns, graters, walkie-talkies, hinges, tanks, planes, boats, etc. Do you have some tips or tricks to share perhaps? For me, retopologizing this kind of objects without a SubDiv base mesh already prepared is a hard and slow process because of the lack of standard modelling tools, Catmull-Clark subdivision, grid/object/component snapping available in the Retopo Room. Without these tools, creation of regular shapes like circles, ellipses, perfect grids, boils down to eyeballing and this is not good. I constantly have to switch between 3D Coat and subdivision modelling program in order to prepare mesh chunks for import to 3D Coat, inspect subdivision, align components, etc. It's not a very friendly workflow. I'm sure there are a better and faster ways to accomplish this kind of task and in hope of hearing about them I decided to write this post.

Hi I've been watching tonnes of tutorials. The mouse one, the pirate one, and seemingly hundreds of others. But I still get pretty confused by the overall workflow. Is there a video that goes from: Voxels > retopo/Autopo .(both options would be handy) > UV > Paint > Export. If not, it would be amazing if someone fancied doing one. I think it's the main stumbling block for people migrating. A lot of tutorials spend too much time on people sculpting away, which is only so useful (there's tonnes of tool vids out there), and not enough time explaining the workflow and all the various options. It would also be useful to see how to use only parts of the pipeline, like bringing in sculpts from elsewhere and retopologising then exporting... Although I guess the overview vid could cover that. Here's an example of my confusion (which I admit exists on many levels) V4 may have changed this, but if you create a voxel sculpt, and you're going to do microvertex painting. Does that mean that once the mid-level mesh is created you've effectively finished with the voxel sculpt? So it would be best to roughly sculpt the form in voxels, then do all the detail on the mid-level mesh created for painting on? Any de-confusing advice welcome cheers Olly

One thing I'm noticing in my workflow now, is, especially when I am bringing LightWave objects into 3DCoat by Importing for per pixel painting or Replace Geometry in an existing .3b file I have saved - is that I can't tell what version/iteration of my model is inside the .3b file at all. I have to examine the object inside 3DCoat, and/or look at the file system date of the .3b file and hope there is a correlation with my saved .LWO object files. Now before anyone tells me - yes I use subversion on projects to save histories, and I also name files and have a proper folder structure. But when being creative you don't want to care to stick to a rigid path of when to load the content into what application. If I want to model in LW and then paint in 3D Coat and then tweak in LW and then repaint or reUV in 3DCoat I should be able to go back and forth to whatever programs as often as I like without trouble. The only thing about embedding the LWO inside the .3b file as opposed to linking it to an external object file, is that you may have an iteration inside your .3b file which is older than a previous pass and it's hard to tell what is what easily. To that end, I propose at minimum, there is a "Notes" section whenever you import ANY kind of mesh/object/or file into 3DCoat that ends up getting embedded into the .3b file. Then there should be a mechanism - whether an additional popup menu called "NOTES" which shows you the time & date stamp of when the file was imported into 3DC and your text notes in a popup of the object. That would be immensly helpful. Perhaps later on, a better way of dealing with this could be to potentially allow the option of external linking of meshes and not having them embedded into the .3b file - which would then mean that particular .3b file has a dependency of that external .LWO file. This is common in programs like Lightwave and After Effects which commonly link to dependent files in the system - much like a project. Maybe that means there should be a new 3DCoat file format for 3DCoat projects? What do you all think - any one else have workflow issues related to this?

What should I set in both programms to correctly transfer zbrush vector displacement exr file into 3dcoat depth layer in both perpixel and pervertex modes?