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V4.1 BETA (experimental 4.1.17D)


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The sphere is ideal (with the exception of just a gizmo "line") it provide a controlable radius that serves as the intended distance information. A cube could theoretically work but you can still get a wrong impression if the base is not sitting in the proper axis of the area you're trying to get (vert normal) the distance information from. The sphere get the "points" as closest and farthest with its poles and it's also a homogeneous volume which helps to judge if your distance grabbing is the one intended..

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I should say that I love Beta 13 & 14 and am happy with many of the features and improvements! However, I still have problems importing.

In Beta 14, PPP import appears to be broken again. Something is going wrong on import (when in fact, I am successful in not crashing 3DC and it actually imports that is). Since no one responded to my SOS thread, I will post here since this is related to the latest beta.

If you import a LWO with many textures and UV maps, this is what results (if it actually can indeed load it - as I said in the other thread, LW will load the object in under 15 seconds on the same machine all with 4K maps, 3DC will choke for 15+ minutes and may or may not come back from "Not Responding"): see the attachment ppp_broken_01.png

Then, in order to get it to work. You have to manually import each of the color, spec, & displacement map textures for EACH of the UVs which takes forever. And, although it is sort of possible to get things to load when you manually load each layer (as opposed to the "collapsed/flattened" single layer that the import does on its own, the manual layers displacement maps are different now than they used to be. In earlier versions the same displacement maps worked fine at default texture import settings. Now I have to change the Blending modulator to ~0.15 for them to look roughly the same as they used to.

See the 2nd image to see what it looks like when I manually start to import each of the layer types one by one ofr each of the UVs.

I think more work and fixes on the import need to happen before 4 is released. thanks!

post-2650-0-04370600-1365430958_thumb.pn

post-2650-0-59467500-1365431654_thumb.pn

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Also, what are these depth artifacts in Beta 14? I get little dot-diamonds appearing in the depth channel when I paint?? See the pic here please.

I assume this is user-error, or possibly it is some kind of setting that got reset weirdly when I uninstalled Beta13B and installed Beta14?

My Brush options look ok - though I probably missed something... Is this a new problem with 14 or have I made a mistake here? (my last post about the importing is not a mistake though - that I've triple-checked).

thanks for any help or comments if you are experiencing this on Beta 14 too.

EDIT: It appears these artifacts in Beta 14 depth painting are only with brushes created from Curves. The image brushes don't appear to have this problem.

EDIT2: It appears these artifacts in Beta 14 depth painting are also only related to brushed created from Curves which have Falloff on.

post-2650-0-41324100-1365436651_thumb.pn

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Spline painting may be partially broken/buggy too now. I never noticed this before Beta 14, but occasionally now, painting with splines doesn't actually paint on the spline but on the camera projection of the spline. Take this picture for example, I did this particular attempt like 3 times and once it did this when pressing Enter. What it should have done, (and what it used to do all the time, but now occasionally is buggy like this) is paint the stroke on the spline (which as you can see is on the leg/thigh surface) all the way around the spline. So this problem appears to be intermittent. I'm assuming this too is a bug. Has anyone seen this?

i1JylU1.png

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The sphere is ideal (with the exception of just a gizmo "line") it provide a controlable radius that serves as the intended distance information. A cube could theoretically work but you can still get a wrong impression if the base is not sitting in the proper axis of the area you're trying to get (vert normal) the distance information from. The sphere get the "points" as closest and farthest with its poles and it's also a homogeneous volume which helps to judge if your distance grabbing is the one intended..

I found it much easier just to add more detail to the retopo mesh rather than try to compensate with these extra spheres of influence, and by the way, a gradient map would work with volumes as the map just describes how much to increase or decrease the distance along the normal to look for surface details, just as the sphere of influence does, the only difference is the ease of painting compared to creating a sphere, re-sizing it, giving it a value and placing it on the mesh.

T.

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as the map just describes how much to increase or decrease the distance along the normal to look for surface details

yes,but what he means is it does not let you see the distance,while the sphere does.

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Spline painting may be partially broken/buggy too now. I never noticed this before Beta 14, but occasionally now, painting with splines doesn't actually paint on the spline but on the camera projection of the spline. Take this picture for example, I did this particular attempt like 3 times and once it did this when pressing Enter. What it should have done, (and what it used to do all the time, but now occasionally is buggy like this) is paint the stroke on the spline (which as you can see is on the leg/thigh surface) all the way around the spline. So this problem appears to be intermittent. I'm assuming this too is a bug. Has anyone seen this?

i1JylU1.png

This is not a real bug. Set your pen options like in my attachment. 3D Coats default pen tip spacing is not good some cases.

post-955-0-57995800-1365512734_thumb.jpg

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This is not a real bug. Set your pen options like in my attachment. 3D Coats default pen tip spacing is not good some cases.

hi, sorry, you may have misunderstood my query about this one. I'm not talking about the spacing in the stroke or the spaced dots in the stroke - I'm talking about if you look at this spline, it fully wraps around the thigh, however in this case it doesn't draw the stroke around the thigh (even though the spline is on the surface of the "cylinder" of the thigh) - instead OCCASSIONALLY, this happens here. Where the "angle you see the projects of the spline when you pressed enter is where the stroke gets drawn on the front/camera facing surface.

I think the confusion is I mentioned that I did it 3 times and showed 3 images. What I meant was that these 3 images are differnt angles of the 1 time (of out 3) where 3DCoat did it wrong - but I included different angles so you could see the stroke does indeed go around the thigh, but the drawn (pressed Enter) stroke only gets projected on the camera facing portion. Which in this case was the first image was where the viewport camera was positioned before I pressed enter.

When it does work (which it does most of the time) is in this case it will draw the storke on the spline - the whole way around -- whereever the spline is regardless of camera position in the viewport. Hopefully that is clearer...

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Were not talking about sculpting an area of influence, nor a normal map just to drive an area of influence. Perhaps a FFD primitive (sphere, blob, capsule or cube), borrowed from the Voxel Room, could provide a good compromise for more customization. Or enable an FFD cage for the projection mesh, similar to the way any model in the Model's pallet can have an FFD cage applied either in the Pose Tool or with the Primitives tool selected.

Yes, I understand what was intended, but I do like the idea you have of using an FFD cage.

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Also, what are these depth artifacts in Beta 14? I get little dot-diamonds appearing in the depth channel when I paint?? See the pic here please.

I assume this is user-error, or possibly it is some kind of setting that got reset weirdly when I uninstalled Beta13B and installed Beta14?

My Brush options look ok - though I probably missed something... Is this a new problem with 14 or have I made a mistake here? (my last post about the importing is not a mistake though - that I've triple-checked).

thanks for any help or comments if you are experiencing this on Beta 14 too.

EDIT: It appears these artifacts in Beta 14 depth painting are only with brushes created from Curves. The image brushes don't appear to have this problem.

EDIT2: It appears these artifacts in Beta 14 depth painting are also only related to brushed created from Curves which have Falloff on.

I'm getting a TON of these errors. Did you by chance report it on Mantis yet?

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The smooth tool in the paint room is cause huge swathes of a weird, sort of inverted on the Y, version of my mesh. Like looking through a glass bottle.

Just narrowed it down: Smoothing out the areas that have these depth artifacts (as mentioned above) causes the mesh to turn black.

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I have a strange problem that just started, so I assume it's related to the latest 3DC beta. While I'm using 3DC rather frequently my scree freezes and flashe with screwy colors and little blocks all over, stays like that for a few seconds, then goes black and comes back fine with a notice that the nVidia driver has stopped working and recovered. Then everything's fine until the next time, except that if LightWave is running in the background it crashes. Recently this has been several times a day, but only while using 3D-Coat. Anyone else having these issues?

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hi, sorry, you may have misunderstood my query about this one. I'm not talking about the spacing in the stroke or the spaced dots in the stroke - I'm talking about if you look at this spline, it fully wraps around the thigh, however in this case it doesn't draw the stroke around the thigh (even though the spline is on the surface of the "cylinder" of the thigh) - instead OCCASSIONALLY, this happens here. Where the "angle you see the projects of the spline when you pressed enter is where the stroke gets drawn on the front/camera facing surface.

I think the confusion is I mentioned that I did it 3 times and showed 3 images. What I meant was that these 3 images are differnt angles of the 1 time (of out 3) where 3DCoat did it wrong - but I included different angles so you could see the stroke does indeed go around the thigh, but the drawn (pressed Enter) stroke only gets projected on the camera facing portion. Which in this case was the first image was where the viewport camera was positioned before I pressed enter.

When it does work (which it does most of the time) is in this case it will draw the storke on the spline - the whole way around -- whereever the spline is regardless of camera position in the viewport. Hopefully that is clearer...

Ow... I see. OK. Hm... strange... will test it. But it seems to be a small bug.

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While I'm using 3DC rather frequently my screen freezes and flashe with screwy colors and little blocks all over, stays like that for a few seconds, then goes black and comes back fine with a notice that the nVidia driver has stopped working and recovered.

...

I have flashing screen sometimes. But I do not have small blocks all over the screen. Usually small blocks over the screen happen when your video card is overclocked. I have NVIDIA Quadro 4000, Driver version 311.15. I use 3d-coat GL version.

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I didn't find any reports, so here it is:

http://3d-coat.com/m...iew.php?id=1094

No I didn't report it yet, I wanted to make sure those depth errors of those tiny diamond dots (like in my screenshot) were really a bug. In my case they happen only on depth channel, only for Curve-created brushes, and only when the falloff is high (say above 70%). Thanks for adding it to Mantis. I will check it out and see if there's anything I can add to it to help.

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It seems to happen on the depth channel with all sorts of ePanel modes, brushes, etc.. I couldn't narrow it down, other than it happens no matter what in the paint room using PPP. Hopefully Andrew is able to crush this one quickly. It's causing some seriously slow down for me getting work done.

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I haven't seen those blocks appearing like you guys are seeing. Granted, you're likely using the most up to date NVidia driver, whereas I can't. I've been stuck with the card manufacturer's 2011-2012 driver.

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It's really doing it like every 5 minutes now, and only when using 3D-Coat, no other 3D programs even. I couldn't take a screenshot of it so I took a quick cellphone picture. The model is normally a black/dark blue color (with green retopo).

post-466-0-79254000-1365555338_thumb.jpg

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hi, sorry, you may have misunderstood my query about this one. I'm not talking about the spacing in the stroke or the spaced dots in the stroke - I'm talking about if you look at this spline, it fully wraps around the thigh, however in this case it doesn't draw the stroke around the thigh (even though the spline is on the surface of the "cylinder" of the thigh) - instead OCCASSIONALLY, this happens here. Where the "angle you see the projects of the spline when you pressed enter is where the stroke gets drawn on the front/camera facing surface.

...

I've tried to reproduce it. Used a similar object (with two legs). But it doesn't happed here. I am using v4beta14.

Do you have an example model wich can be shared with us and results in the same problem?

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It's really doing it like every 5 minutes now, and only when using 3D-Coat, no other 3D programs even. I couldn't take a screenshot of it so I took a quick cellphone picture. The model is normally a black/dark blue color (with green retopo).

Try and delete all the files (not folders) in your MyDocs/3D Coat directory, except the license file. Then install the latest driver update for your graphic card, cause it sounds like a driver issue. Something in 3D Coat may be triggering a glitch in your driver install (CUDA?).
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3D-Coat Projection Painting Engine

I found it better than current Modo projection paint that being too slow and crashing. Zbrushes projection paint = "microverts method" requires models to be subdivided to insanely high levels in order to project in perfect pixel-accurate quality and navigation cannot be customized.

3D-Coat per pixel paint in Paint room can import a low-poly object, but is a lot more stable than Modo, in fact 100%.

I always use 2 x texture resolution to later halve that in Photoshop.

Navigation is customizable, created full material manipulation controls.

I noticed that when the function in the menu Camera--->rotate around current pick point is used on a material it exactly replicates Photoshops Transform Selection arbitrarily placeable pivot by rotating the material 2D image at exactly the picked pixel!

This absolutely super feature combined with mouse+keyboard bindable material rotate/move/stretch/resize makes 3D-Coats projection painting the most powerful today on simple computers on old systems with only 4GB memory.

Only one thing could be improved: AUTO SHOW MATERIAL should only disappear when left-lick is touching the canvas = artist is drawing. Currently when the material image is manipulated , Auto-show-hide hides the material, which is not good.

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It's really doing it like every 5 minutes now, and only when using 3D-Coat, no other 3D programs even. I couldn't take a screenshot of it so I took a quick cellphone picture. The model is normally a black/dark blue color (with green retopo).

You definitely have a hardware problem. Your video card is overclocked or overheated. If it is not overclocked or overheated then try to remove your video card from motherboard and insert it back. It might be a bad slot contact. Check if video card fan is working.

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You definitely have a hardware problem. Your video card is overclocked or overheated. If it is not overclocked or overheated then try to remove your video card from motherboard and insert it back. It might be a bad slot contact. Check if video card fan is working.

Yep...that's exactly what happens with mine, when I try to overclock it. Runs fine for a while and then I get that same exact result on screen. I have to reboot after that.
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I've tried to reproduce it. Used a similar object (with two legs). But it doesn't happed here. I am using v4beta14.

Do you have an example model wich can be shared with us and results in the same problem?

Hi, It's not model related. It happens in any model when I am using the (awesome new) spline painting tool. Creating the spline is no problem, but occasionally (and this is intermittent) hitting enter to paint the stroke paints the stroke as if it were projected through the viewport camera, not onto the actual spline. Hitting undo undoes that, but when this happens, hitting Enter a second time repeats the error on projection even if you've rotated your view after undoing and before redoing the Enter to paint.

Once it is in this error mode, it gets stuck like this not being able to paint on the spline and only painting on the projection of the spline unless you hit Esc and clear the spline and redraw it from scratch and then hit Enter a second time.

I cannot reproduce this perfectly every time, but it happens enough to notice this. There is a chance that this is related to cylindrical objects like arms or legs or necks? or due to Loading or Saving splines or to switching back and from from Closed to open splines, or it could be related to the Camera Viewport being in Orthographic mode. I am not sure entirely. Maybe you could try these things and see if it happens for you. Thanks!

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You definitely have a hardware problem. Your video card is overclocked or overheated. If it is not overclocked or overheated then try to remove your video card from motherboard and insert it back. It might be a bad slot contact. Check if video card fan is working.

Are you guys saying that the problem Phil has is the same as the one Javis and I are having with depth painting getting those tiny dot artifacts? I'm fairly certain mine is not a hardware issue...

The dots in the pic I posted are related to curve-created-brushes with high falloff painting into the depth channel... and this is new since 14 I think..

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Yep...that's exactly what happens with mine, when I try to overclock it. Runs fine for a while and then I get that same exact result on screen. I have to reboot after that.

Hopefully it's as simple as cleaning the dust out of the filters, if he has any that is. Now that spring is here in the northern hemisphere and the average temperature is slowly increasing, the potential for crashing increases, especially for gaming video cards which tend to come pre-overclocked. I'm worried about it because this PC has never been run during summer before and all of it is very overclocked lol. I had water cooling in there but the stress of what could happen got to me, so I switched to air cooling. The point is that now is the time to start paying closer attention to that sort of thing.

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I wanted to bake some amient occlusion on a UV-tiled model I have 22 UV-tiles but somehow 3DCoat instantly crashes when I want to import + assign 4k maps to each tile...

So I tried a small workaround, import UV-tiles with 2k maps and then edit the texture resolution through: edit--> mesh and texture resolution

This worked perfectly, no crash but the real pain in the ass was I had to click 4096 for width and 4096 for height all UV-tiles individually.. is it possible to simplify this in future releases?

post-7933-0-86725800-1365715766_thumb.pn

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I wanted to bake some amient occlusion on a UV-tiled model I have 22 UV-tiles but somehow 3DCoat instantly crashes when I want to import + assign 4k maps to each tile...

So I tried a small workaround, import UV-tiles with 2k maps and then edit the texture resolution through: edit--> mesh and texture resolution

This worked perfectly, no crash but the real pain in the ass was I had to click 4096 for width and 4096 for height all UV-tiles individually.. is it possible to simplify this in future releases?

johnnycore, seems the universe is demanding this feature ;)

I just mentioned this workaround to someone else having this problem, but it seems you figured it out on your own. I was importing as 128 size textures and changing resolution to 4096 after loaded:

http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=11666&pid=89849&st=20entry89849

Take a look at that thread, it also shows mockups to the import dialog of my suggestion to Andrew about making it so you don't have to set them individually. He is working on it and says the loading problem is fixed and hopefully he adds this minor feature as well. I've also asked him to not "flatten" imported textures to one layer so different channels of different surfaces will each have their own layer on import if they exist when you import. That should make tweaking much more flexible and easy.

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