3D-Coat 3.0 ALPHA

[Andrew Shpagin]

One bug still remains from 42, after rendering and hitting Esc. the sculpture disappears. Program has to be restarted to get it back.

Press "Home"

[philnolan3d]

Press "Home"

Oh OK, gotcha.

Not really a bug but during rendering the text in the top corner is really hard to read. It used to be much lighter, now it's barely brighter than the background color.

[jedwards]

Just adding to confirm the undo bug as well - both mesh and VoxTree corruption.

[GED]

Left one!

Please try again - download and replace folder Unicode (I have put there files from prev version)

About Undo - tomorrow I will fix it and other reported bugs. Today I need some rest.

thats more than we should ask for, thanks for all the hard work!

[artman]

alpha 43

Vox tree works fine as far as import,delete,toggle visibility on/off goes

Very cool!

increasing res works fine too exept that sometimes they swap(meaning increase becomes decrease and vice-versa)

seams to have a lot of issues with undo command

Transform button does nothing

will keep testing

fantastic update

(on the bad side ,13days seams to have magically disappeared from my trial length, )

[BluEgo]

I have some doubts about the transform tool. Currently the style of the handles are great for transpose stuff, but to position the subtools with better accuracy, I would prefer the older universal manipulator.

I also have a little suggest for the transpose tool. Cause we could use subtools to add "portions of clay" to the main object, I vould like having the possibility to deform in many areas this portions. So I thought it could be nice if one could place in a single stroke (something like the "line" option) a curve with 3 or 5 points inside the subtool, with the chance to move or scale these vertices and so deform the voxels.

If possible another request is to display two subtools as they would be the same mesh. Near the eye icon for example one could choose if the subtool should be blended with its parent.

Thank you andrew for this great upgrade.

[ldzywsj]

With the subtools been made,the VS is coming to a beta stage,so which functions or tools should be improved or added to this outstanding sculpting tool?

I have some ideas below:

1.A efficient base-mesh making tool.

some 3d artists or modelers want to make a character model by the front or side profiles, but there has't such tool in VS. Furthermore,some of the existing tools,for example,the sphere tool or curve tool,can be used as base-mesh making ,but you dont really know where the sphere or the curve will appear in 3D space.

I really love a 3d curve based base-mesh making tool like this

Here is the researchers personal Web site:

http://www.nealen.com/prof.htm

http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/te...eddy/teddy.html

2.A smart quadrangulate mesh tool or polygon-Simplification tool.

Now the retopo tool in 3dc is really powerful and maybe the best,But I still hold that retopologizing is a time-consuming and hard task.I know it is in Andrew's list but it is really a very large improvement for retopo.

perhaps the transpose should be improved,but we also worry about Andrew's health and enough rest time for him........

[geo_n]

With the subtools been made,the VS is coming to a beta stage,so which functions or tools should be improved or added to this outstanding sculpting tool?

I have some ideas below:

1.A efficient base-mesh making tool.

some 3d artists or modelers want to make a character model by the front or side profiles, but there has't such tool in VS. Furthermore,some of the existing tools,for example,the sphere tool or curve tool,can be used as base-mesh making ,but you dont really know where the sphere or the curve will appear in 3D space.

I really love a 3d curve based base-mesh making tool like this

Here is the researchers personal Web site:

http://www.nealen.com/prof.htm

http://www-ui.is.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp/~takeo/te...eddy/teddy.html

2.A smart quadrangulate mesh tool or polygon-Simplification tool.

Now the retopo tool in 3dc is really powerful and maybe the best,But I still hold that retopologizing is a time-consuming and hard task.I know it is in Andrew's list but it is really a very large improvement for retopo.

perhaps the transpose should be improved,but we also worry about Andrew's health and enough rest time for him........

Agree. Especially voxel simplification so we can export out the mesh clean and useable than just stills. Retopo takes as long as polymodelling in lw for me.

[Mantis]

The first video you shown ldzywsj is really good.

About the beta and alpha stage, I'm curious to know the Roadmap to the release.

There are tons of thing to add, and more to refine, and that does not only concern VS.

Is it possible to know what you plan to do Andrew, talking about VS, painting and Retopo.

Just minded because the release date seems really close to us.

[Rodney Brett]

I used to approach retopology the slow way. It was because before I was using Zbrush and retopo goes very slow because you cannot build large polygons on the surface, forcing you to use a poly by poly method. It goes by much faster if you treat it as if you were box modeling with a 3d reference image. Build large polys that flow along the masses, then subdivide afterwards or manually add edgeloops later. Not to say that I am not guilty of doing painful small poly by poly method myself. some tighter areas of detail are unavoidable. What's great about 3d-coat is the powerful retopo toolset. It has the best "smooth" brush while conforming to surface than any other program I've used. Before I would use Maya's "relax" brush, but I would always need to shrinkwrap the verts back to the surface as they would offset quite a bit. Here's some shots of my latest retopo job using 3d-coat. It's a hyper-real production style mesh, hence the density. I used the draw strokes a lot. Took me about half the time then using NEX tools. the 3rd and 4rd shot is the reprojection in Zbrush. Sorry for getting off topic..

[BluEgo]

The first video you shown ldzywsj is really good.

About the beta and alpha stage, I'm curious to know the Roadmap to the release.

There are tons of thing to add, and more to refine, and that does not only concern VS.

Is it possible to know what you plan to do Andrew, talking about VS, painting and Retopo.

Just minded because the release date seems really close to us.

I couldn't be more agree.

Currently there are a lot of tools, and I think that the best thing should be to adding very few new features if Andrew wants to release v3.0 in the first quarter of 2009.

What I think 3dc should have is:

1)masking

2)voxel painting

Andrew I don't want to sound harsh, but a lot of the current tools or features are not well refined.

A lot of brushes acually don't give an artistic feedback, wich is the most important thing. Nobody will use 3dc until sculpting in zb or mb will give the best and pleasant experience, even if you will add tons of features. Here there are some of the things I dislike:

1)There is not a valid clay tool

2)Higher radius slows down the strokes even on powerful pc (mine is a 8 core with 4 GB + nvidia quadro 5600)

3)Strokes are not well curved but usually they appear segmented due to a low interpolation.

4)There is a lack of a falloff curve and some tools like carve have always a hard falloff even if you try to set it as smooth as you can and you set a smoothed alpha.

Maybe should be better to spend a lot of time fine tuning the available tools.

Voxel sculpt is great, but currently there is no method to go back to a previous lower resolution to change some proportions and volumes. I think this should be one of the features you should definitly add.

CUDA is pretty useless if you have multicore and so in my opinion is not well implemented. If someone has at least a 8800 card, maybe owns also a multicore cpu, or at least I think everybody will have one in the next year or two.

The tree manager has to be a lot more refined than this, and above all you should implement the new GUI if you want to sell better your product. About the GUI, it should very very very well organized, and I assume this is a long task to accomplish.

In my opinion all this requests should require at least 6-9 months to let them show at their best.

Thank you for listening!

[Mantis]

I agreed too

Even If I find the Base mesh creation really cool and having this kind of stuff could be really fun, I don't think it is a major feature who is needed for the release.

In fact, for production we are using base mesh, and there with voxel it is much more usefull because you can split your mesh in many part.

Having several generic ears, hand, even Head and body that you can merge together and refine to do new character really quickly.

Some little tools are needed to improve the workflow, like smoothing an area instead of rubbing freneticly a surface with smooth brush.

But that's the kind of tool that you can add quickly (at least I think).

And yes, the Main feature you have to add is a better Brush engine that could match Mudbox one, who is finer than Zbrush on this field, it's smoother.

And being able to go up and down with subdivision.

I don't want to sound harsh but I think that the current date is a little bit optimistic, btw Zbrush is the master at releasing buggy features and it still loved (I'm a Zbrush user and quite used of this side ).

[Andrew Shpagin]

Ok, agree that serious work is need to get professional look & feel.

But anyway one sketching feature should be add (and it is easy) - fill in drawn curve.

About decreasing resolution. I have one idea. Yo must know that step up-down in voxels is much more difficult (almost impossible) because of details are placed in space , not attached ierarchicaly to lower level.

But I have one idea about multires:

1) Paint something

2) Duplicate space

3) Decrease space density twice

4) Merge object to new space

You will get object with lower resolution

5) Paint big details there

6) Move object to older space

I can automate this workflow if it will be found helpful

[philnolan3d]

If you can't decrease res. Perhaps there is a way to save each resolution to the object tree when you increase res. So if I increase res twice I will now have 3 different levels to choose from. Then, have some way to send changes from one res version to another. I don't know how that would work, I'm just brainstorming. One potential problem is that the file size might become huge.

[rimasson]

About decreasing resolution. I have one idea. Yo must know that step up-down in voxels is much more difficult (almost impossible) because of details are placed in space , not attached ierarchicaly to lower level.

But I have one idea about multires:

1) Paint something

2) Duplicate space

3) Decrease space density twice

4) Merge object to new space

You will get object with lower resolution

5) Paint big details there

6) Move object to older space

I can automate this workflow if it will be found helpful

It looks Ok for me

[GED]

nice retopo work rodney brett, thanks for the tip about using large polys, I hadnt thought of trying that and was just manually dragging out one poly at a time(still loads faster than max with no polyboost).

I agree with the others, in fact I would be happy to have all the tools that are currently in the V3.0 alpha just have them all in a nicer GUI and all tools feeling professional and well refined with powerful texture painting(not relient on mesh density but actual textures) and all imports, exports and conversion tools working.

[artman]

I also like that the subtools maintain their own symmetry even moved around. And importing and duplicating sculpts seems to work for me. cool stuff Andrew.

Wow!I just noticed this.

First I thought it didn't work because the cursor on screen act like the symmetry is off but,

when you start to sculpt it works fine,everything keeps it's symmetry even after many moves and rotates!

It's far better than Zbrush's local symmetry.Great!

I think It's the only way to truly enjoy sub-object sculpting.

Which means you can take a sword ,move it and rotatate it

on the side of the belt and still be able to further sculpt in symmetry whenever you want.

I think this and instant duplicates of subtools should be showcased features on the website

when v3 gets out.

On another topic:

How does skin extract and extrude works,people??

a little gift

:to try(on a fairly high resolution sculpt)

extrude brush with fourth pen and soft stroke setted at 500(yes 500) and inverted tool action on.

Merry wrinkling!

[Ztreem]

Wow!I just noticed this.

First I thought it didn't work because the cursor on screen act like the symmetry is off but,

when you start to sculpt it works fine,everything keeps it's symmetry even after many moves and rotates!

It's far better than Zbrush's local symmetry.Great!

I think It's the only way to truly enjoy sub-object sculpting.

Which means you can take a sword ,move it and rotatate it

on the side of the belt and still be able to further sculpt in symmetry whenever you want.

I think this and instant duplicates of subtools should be showcased features on the website

when v3 gets out.

On another topic:

How does skin extract and extrude works,people??

a little gift

:to try(on a fairly high resolution sculpt)

extrude brush with fourth pen and soft stroke setted at 500(yes 500) and inverted tool action on.

Merry wrinkling!

Skin extract works like a shell tool, it makes the sculpt hollow with a defined wall thickness.

Extrude works about the same but doesn't make the model hollow. It adds thickness outwards of the model normals.

[artman]

Skin extract works like a shell tool, it makes the sculpt hollow with a defined wall thickness.

Extrude works about the same but doesn't make the model hollow. It adds thickness outwards of the model normals.

thanx I know that, I think my question wasn't clear .

What I meant is I want to know how does it work.

When I set any value with either extrude or extract skin Just get holes in my modesls.

Am I the only one having problems with it?

[Ztreem]

thanx I know that, I think my question wasn't clear .

What I meant is I want to know how does it work.

When I set any value with either extrude or extract skin Just get holes in my modesls.

Am I the only one having problems with it?

I think you use a too low value so it's less then 1 voxel or something like that then it's not enough information to build a skin/shell without holes. (This is just speculation from my side, also remeber that the app is in alpha stage.)

[NinjaTaco]

Despite the negativisms that have been listed. This technology has a lot of great potential and the latest release reaffirms that for me. I hope none of us take these amazing updates for granted. Andrew, your hard work and determination is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

[Mantis]

Negativism?

Criticism has nothing to do with negativism.

We all know how incredible this technology is, but by giving our point of view we are helping Andrew and 3DCoat.

I'm sure Andrew know it and we all know how good is Andrew.

[SonK]

Andrew,

can you add a turn table button for the viewport(only need a full 360 rotation)? I don't need a render of my model, i'll just use screen capture software Camtasia to record the turn table. BTW what software do you guys use to assemble the sequence JPEG from the render?

[mocaw]

What am I doing wrong? This "voxel freak out" happens when ever I use the move tool with a brush that has a lot of points. It makes the voxel count go crazy and has crashed my computer several times (as it runs out of ram and then the never ending page file of death starts). I'm only dragging once- not re-clicking. Seems to happen on smaller brush sizes...

On a side note- yeah I agree that things in 3DC could be a little more "artist simulation friendly" in a sense...but I think saying that zbrush and Mudbox are the benchmark is kind of odd to me as they, while better in feel for sculpting, still don't feel "natural" by any stretch of the imagination. I also think this voxel tech is VERY cool as it's enabling us to do all sorts of modeling thats VERY hard to do otherwise, at least at the same rate.

Anyway- what about this voxel freak out thing? Any tips? It's happening on the GL and DX 64bit versions...

[mocaw]

Also...when I hit undo...sometimes my model disappears! The brush seems to think it's still there...but it's gone...even when I reload!

[tree321]

Also...when I hit undo...sometimes my model disappears! The brush seems to think it's still there...but it's gone...even when I reload!

mocaw,What are your system specs?I can't replicate the move error. There is a known bug in Alpha 43 with undo ,Andrew is fixing it.

[philnolan3d]

BTW what software do you guys use to assemble the sequence JPEG from the render?

Well since I always render image sequences I normally just import them directly into After Effects. But if It's something quick that I'm not going to do anything else with, Quicktime Pro works really well and it's a lot cheaper at $30 (USD).

[geo_n]

Andrew,

can you add a turn table button for the viewport(only need a full 360 rotation)? I don't need a render of my model, i'll just use screen capture software Camtasia to record the turn table. BTW what software do you guys use to assemble the sequence JPEG from the render?

AE will do. But for quick video compression I use virtualdub mod.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Andrew,

can you add a turn table button for the viewport(only need a full 360 rotation)? I don't need a render of my model, i'll just use screen capture software Camtasia to record the turn table. BTW what software do you guys use to assemble the sequence JPEG from the render?

I am using Virtual Dub. It is free and it takes couple of clicks (besides codec choosing) to compose video.

I recommend H.264 with default settings (see link on the first page). Camtasia will not give a uniform rotation...

[Andrew Shpagin]

Despite the negativisms that have been listed. This technology has a lot of great potential and the latest release reaffirms that for me. I hope none of us take these amazing updates for granted. Andrew, your hard work and determination is greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Really, I don't see any negativism

Constructive critics helps me to correct development in a right way. Othervice it will be "tool for programmer"

I was not able to update bugfixes yestarday, children are ill, also I tried to install Windows on new notebook... Without reading manual well...

I hope to make update today. Children feel better