3D-Coat 3.0 ALPHA

[erklaerbar]

Andrew, thank you for the updates. Its looking good for sure. However im not sure what to report as bugs, as im aware this is still alpha, so what i might consider a bug could be just unfinished and youre aware of it anyway. Nevertheless there is one thing that im having issues with since a lot of versions, it has to do with VS and CUDA. Whenever i have CUDA on i cant merge primitives (especially sphere) or meshes into scene. When i press enter it will calculate but not merging it, or just the most outer corners (leaving an inner empty cube). As said this is only with CUDA on. Hope that helps, as i surely would like to turn on CUDA.

thank you and a good weekend

E.

[SonK]

Hi there,

I'm having the same problems with my NVidia display driver as described by Phil Nolan. I have brand new PC with an NVidia GTX 260,

running Vista 64 bit. I've had the display driver stopped working error a couple times with computer rebooting, and also the so called

TDR errors, were the Display Driver stops working but then recovers itself automatically. (Read about TDR here :

http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=31913).

The problem has been happening more frequently recently and I tried everything reverting to older drivers, the newest drivers,

system restore (bad idea), but have not been able to get to the bottom of it. I had a serious bluescreen when running Mass Effect PC game,

bluescreen (nvlddmkm.sys = nvidia display driver)...and now even games that were running fine before are crashing after about 10 minutes.

But also in 3DCoat when I'm retopologising a model, the program freezes after a bout 10 minutes now, everytime, and I have to restart it.

(3DCoat_Alpha61). So now I'm not sure what is the problem, NVidia display driver, Vista 64, Mass Effect PC game or the installation of 3DCoat_Alpha

and the installation of the DX9 drivers to make it run ???

I was planning to do a new clean install of Vista, to repair any possible driver corruption, but not looking forward to that.

Maybe I'll try the newest Alpha (67) first and see if the problem persists....

cheers

stefan (hey I love those topology tools !)

I won't waste your time on a clean install, this is a driver issue more then anything(plus i did a clean install also, still same problem). I have a GTX 260 also and out of the dozen of drivers i tested only the recent 182.08 and the Quadro driver 178.46 works. It's a really hit or miss thing, those driver may not work for a different card say a 8800. Other people are having the same problem with Mudbox + Vista.

Those driver do work for running 3D applications, but you'll still get crashes when playing games once in awhile. Its not a heat related issue on my end, and i tested my system RAM.

@Andrew,

Found a bug with the texture editor in Alpha 67. I imported a OBJ for Direct Paint. then imported a tangent space normal map, in past alpha i had to invert one of the channel but not anymore(maybe related to bug number 2).

1. checker pattern appears in the color channel, but i haven't done any painting.

2. the "normal" are inverted and its supposed to be world space normal..looks odd?

[awnold]

This is a strange little bug, and not even sure whats happening (this is also with microvertex paint)

1) open the obj cube for for per-pixel painting

2) take a fully saturated red and put the brush transparency to 50%

3) paint on the left hand side like I did here

4) then put the transparency to 100% and paint on the right side

5) ok then change the color to a fully saturated turquoise

6) change the brush back to 50% transparency.

7) paint over the red on the left (keep stroking on top of the red paint to 'build up color'. you can see, you will never be able to build up a saturated color no matter how many strokes you do on top of one another.

8.) ok now move to the red on the right and do the same thing, here you can build up the full saturation, if you do repeated strokes, when painting on top of the fully saturated red.

Ok, im not sure if this is a bug, but its very hard to understand this functionality. I was painting and this really confused me. Now once your model is fully saturated you never see this again. But make a new layer and this weirdness comes back. its very confusing. I hope you can make sense of this.

Thanks!

Oh, btw, I thought I had seen the last of the crashing because the color selector bug is definitely fixed. Its still crashing, however much less often it seems. And there is no bug report (because everything shuts down) and really nothing special that triggers it...

[philnolan3d]

I don't mean to keep going on about the driver thing, but something new is going on which seems to be a more major bug. I was playing with modeling a car in VS and before I got very far the driver crash thing happened. When it recovered the front end of my car was a mess of stretched out polygons and holes. I restarted 3DC and started over with my car, this time being careful to save often. Within a few minutes it happened again. This time I took a screenshot of the mess. If I try to sculpt on it at that point it just gets worse (attachment #2).

[Rene Damm]

Some issues I came across.

- Symmetry plane won't be rendered regardless of setting in menu

- Crash when using "Save all textures" in layer export dialog.

Had some other things that I could not reproduce (layers being duplicated when saved in external editor; external going to wrong UV set after save).

3DC files sizes are pretty insane. I'm per-pixel painting on a ~2500 triangle model with two 2k normal maps and two 2k color maps and the file size is >500MB. 3DC needs a gig of RAM to run that. Pressing CTRL+S just about freezes the system.

The model in modo is 150kb and each of the maps is about 2MB.

Still, the new per-pixel painting stuff looks promising.

//EDIT: just for further comparison, a ZBrush tool with 5 million polys is ~40MB.

[Javis]

Phil, you're on Vista right? I don't have any of those issues on XP.

[philnolan3d]

Yes, unless I specify my laptop (or very rarely my Windows 7 machine), then I'm using the desktop in my signature.

[Javis]

Cool.

Well, I'll be able to test on my Vista machine this weekend to see if I have the problem you are, I'm certain I'll have it again. It did that to me all the time with LW (and other 3D apps that I use, XSI, Houdini, ZB) but not on my XP machine.

Anyway. I'm really stoked to see how far you are driving this pixel painting Andrew! I did up some textures briefly for a character yesterday, and I'm very happy with how easy it was to paint and export my textures. You sir, are a god send to us artists. Thank you.

[awnold]

Andrew any chance you can squash another bug? When painting in depth in DP mode (on the normal map) and hitting Shift (to smooth) it screws everything up (you will see, you cant paint depth in this area any more).

Thanks!!

[Andrew Shpagin]

This is a strange little bug, and not even sure whats happening (this is also with microvertex paint)

1) open the obj cube for for per-pixel painting

2) take a fully saturated red and put the brush transparency to 50%

3) paint on the left hand side like I did here

4) then put the transparency to 100% and paint on the right side

5) ok then change the color to a fully saturated turquoise

6) change the brush back to 50% transparency.

7) paint over the red on the left (keep stroking on top of the red paint to 'build up color'. you can see, you will never be able to build up a saturated color no matter how many strokes you do on top of one another.

8.) ok now move to the red on the right and do the same thing, here you can build up the full saturation, if you do repeated strokes, when painting on top of the fully saturated red.

Ok, im not sure if this is a bug, but its very hard to understand this functionality. I was painting and this really confused me. Now once your model is fully saturated you never see this again. But make a new layer and this weirdness comes back. its very confusing. I hope you can make sense of this.

Thanks!

I will definitely fix it. It is easy.

Oh, btw, I thought I had seen the last of the crashing because the color selector bug is definitely fixed. Its still crashing, however much less often it seems. And there is no bug report (because everything shuts down) and really nothing special that triggers it...

This kind of issue is most complex. Does your pc reboots? How much time have you painted before it occured?

[Andrew Shpagin]

I don't mean to keep going on about the driver thing, but something new is going on which seems to be a more major bug. I was playing with modeling a car in VS and before I got very far the driver crash thing happened. When it recovered the front end of my car was a mess of stretched out polygons and holes. I restarted 3DC and started over with my car, this time being careful to save often. Within a few minutes it happened again. This time I took a screenshot of the mess. If I try to sculpt on it at that point it just gets worse (attachment #2).

When it will happen again please press ALT ENTER and check if it will fix something.

[Andrew Shpagin]

@Andrew,

Found a bug with the texture editor in Alpha 67. I imported a OBJ for Direct Paint. then imported a tangent space normal map, in past alpha i had to invert one of the channel but not anymore(maybe related to bug number 2).

1. checker pattern appears in the color channel, but i haven't done any painting.

2. the "normal" are inverted and its supposed to be world space normal..looks odd?

It means only that shader for showing normalmap is not tuned well. I will fix it soon.

[Andrew Shpagin]

Some issues I came across.

- Symmetry plane won't be rendered regardless of setting in menu

- Crash when using "Save all textures" in layer export dialog.

Had some other things that I could not reproduce (layers being duplicated when saved in external editor; external going to wrong UV set after save).

3DC files sizes are pretty insane. I'm per-pixel painting on a ~2500 triangle model with two 2k normal maps and two 2k color maps and the file size is >500MB. 3DC needs a gig of RAM to run that. Pressing CTRL+S just about freezes the system.

The model in modo is 150kb and each of the maps is about 2MB.

Still, the new per-pixel painting stuff looks promising.

//EDIT: just for further comparison, a ZBrush tool with 5 million polys is ~40MB.

The size of file is ONLY dependent on textures size. Now it is close to simple memory dump. I will decrease it (I hope to 25-30% of current size).

[philnolan3d]

Well, I'll be able to test on my Vista machine this weekend to see if I have the problem you are, I'm certain I'll have it again. It did that to me all the time with LW (and other 3D apps that I use, XSI, Houdini, ZB) but not on my XP machine.

That's interesting, it's never happened to me with any program besides 3DC. That's why I thought it was a 3DC bug at first.

When it will happen again please press ALT ENTER and check if it will fix something.

OK, I will try that.

[Taros]

You should use "Import for per pixel painting" instead of usual import.

That's incredible, really!

Thank you very much!!! And the brush feeling is very good too!

Best regards!

[Rene Damm]

The size of file is ONLY dependent on textures size. Now it is close to simple memory dump. I will decrease it (I hope to 25-30% of current size).

That would be a great improvement. At that size, keeping multiple versions of your work around quickly becomes prohibitive in terms of disk space. Also, saving takes pretty long and is pretty disruptive.

Looking forward to version 3. You're pulling off some awesome work there.

[SonK]

It means only that shader for showing normalmap is not tuned well. I will fix it soon.

What about the weird checker pattern, it seems to be swimming across the editor(i'll assume thats shader bug)? I'm not sold on the Voxel sculpting, but i really really like the DP, so keep improving that i'll definitely buy a copy for DP. Mudbox 2009 is great in the painting features that 3DC 3 has, features i need for texturing.

That's interesting, it's never happened to me with any program besides 3DC. That's why I thought it was a 3DC bug at first.

I did mention that it's happen to some Mudbox 2009 user also..so this isn't a application specific issue, but a Vista + driver issue. Window 7 needs to come out sooner..

[Oliver Thornton]

At that size, keeping multiple versions of your work around quickly becomes prohibitive in terms of disk space.

For archiving purposes you may want to try the old-fashioned zip approach. I use this for storing my old 3DC files, and it generally knocks off at least 50% of the file size. Not a perfect solution, but it helps me save a few gigs of drive space. For example my Superman model uncompressed comes in at about 1.3 GB, but zips nicely down to 400MB.

-Oliver

[wailingmonkey]

getting some 1/2 second lag with voxel sculpting on a 1million tri 'merged' model when using my wacom

and version 6.1.0-6 tablet drivers...tested against a 2million tri sphere in Zbrush and I get no

such lag.... makes voxel sculpting a bit prohibitive since the results kind of 'jump' into place

(it's especially noticeable when using the ctrl key).

Only tried with 'Increase' 'Clay' 'Carve' 'Airbrush' and 'Build' tools, but it's noticeable with all of

them.

*edit* I should mention, I get no such lag when using the mouse and voxel sculpting.

.

[mocaw]

DP really is as exciting and nice to use- thank you Andrew for creating this so quickly- I'm still amazed at all your creations inside of 3DC!

A few buggy things when using the 67 64bit build using DP.

First- the layers pallet disappears if I delete a layer even if it's pinned down. It can be brought back up again, but this doesn't seem to be right. This is only in the DX version as far as I can tell.

Second- bucket fill doesn't work on both sides in symmetry mode. You have to manually fill each side if you've made a separate area to be filled.

Third- when using the spline tools to draw a curv, brush radius resize via the right and left drag method is disabled, but still works via the top slider input. The radius can also still be resized while right clicking on a node and dragging.

Fourth- Switching out to another program and back sometimes renders the color picking menus black. Minimizing and maximizing doesn't help. For some reason the program defaults at that point to making both colors black. This can be temporarily fixed by simply selecting a new color, however it re-appears each time I reload 3DC. If I restart my computer then 3DC will show the last used colors.

Filth- If I leave the program and go into the task manager 3DC no longer responds and seems to be frozen- even if I leave the task manager. 3DC must be closed by the task manager after that point. This also seems to be a DX version issue.

Sixth- A brush of any opacity under 100% (1.0) will only lay down that "color" instead of the selected colors transparency layering. So if you have a brush at .5 (50%) and it's solid blue- if you brush over it twice it will not form the solid color selected- only half the hue selected. This doesn't seem to happen in the GL version.

Seventh- the sculpt tools will not work on a dp mesh. Not the biggest deal- but might prove useful to have if one is doing morphs with different normal maps etc.

Eighth- the place image along spline tools preview color is not nearly as saturated and contrasted as the final output after pushing enter. It also has a tendency to repeat the texture in places that it was not placed.

Ninth- in the texture editor smooth does not work.

10th- Brush size seems to effect the depth size. Shouldn't these be independent of each other to some greater degree?

11th- If you draw a closed shape on your mesh's texture in the texture editor and then try and fill it with the bucket tool you'll get the fill OUTSIDE the are you intended to fill. AKA if you draw a square, try and do a fill inside of it, it will fill the area outside of the square instead.

12th- The paint brush now shows the alpha in use at 100% before pressing down and painting. It used to show it at something like 33%. This can make it hard to paint on certain areas as you can see where you're first putting you brush down. It appears correctly in the OpenGL version of the Alpha.

13th - Using fill with depth seems to produce no results.

These are while testing using the man2.obj file.

Intel 820 Dell

Vista Premium 64

4GB RAM

GeForce 8400 GS 512

[buqa]

I have a problem with painting over whole area of polygon. I click the polygon, paint it with color, but an area around some edges still remains grey.

It's easier to see with low-res textures. It's probably the problem of bleeding/padding.

[Tinker]

Hi! Tested your tool. Its Unbelievable!! Your changed my life.

[lc8b105]

Hi! Tested your tool. Its Unbelievable!! Your changed my life.

Cool

[Andrew Shpagin]

I have a problem with painting over whole area of polygon. I click the polygon, paint it with color, but an area around some edges still remains grey.

It's easier to see with low-res textures. It's probably the problem of bleeding/padding.

Try press 'E' and turn off backfacing. Maybe it is the reason.

[Javis]

I have a problem with painting over whole area of polygon. I click the polygon, paint it with color, but an area around some edges still remains grey.

It's easier to see with low-res textures. It's probably the problem of bleeding/padding.

Yep, that's the padding. You need to fill in layer 0 with a base color. (Not sure if that's intended, but that's what I do to solve it)

[philnolan3d]

Filth- If I leave the program and go into the task manager 3DC no longer responds and seems to be frozen- even if I leave the task manager. 3DC must be closed by the task manager after that point. This also seems to be a DX version issue.

I have not seen this specifically with the Task Manager, but it's the same thing as I was talking about a while back. If I switch to any other program and switch back immediately it's fine, but if go browse the web or something for a while, then come back 3DC is frozen like you describe. The thing is, it's not actually frozen, only the display is. You can actually affect things, you just can't see it. What I've been doing is double clicking the title bar to maximize the window, this causes everything to go all black. Then double click again and it returns to the way it should be, that's how I know it was actually working and only the display was frozen, because I can now see the effects of whatever I was trying to do while it was frozen.

[Javis]

I have my Vista machine handy, and can now confirm the bug Phil and wacom are talking about.

Luckily it's exclusive to Vista, it does not happen to me on XP.

[Andrew Shpagin]

I have not seen this specifically with the Task Manager, but it's the same thing as I was talking about a while back. If I switch to any other program and switch back immediately it's fine, but if go browse the web or something for a while, then come back 3DC is frozen like you describe. The thing is, it's not actually frozen, only the display is. You can actually affect things, you just can't see it. What I've been doing is double clicking the title bar to maximize the window, this causes everything to go all black. Then double click again and it returns to the way it should be, that's how I know it was actually working and only the display was frozen, because I can now see the effects of whatever I was trying to do while it was frozen.

Double ALT ENTER will also help in this case. I will fix it soon finally.

[philnolan3d]

Double ALT ENTER will also help in this case. I will fix it soon finally.

If it helps at all, I've never had it happen on my Vista Laptop (32 bit, GeForce 8600M). So maybe it's a 64 bit issue

Edit to save space:

There is a memory leak in the rubber stamp tool (non DP) in alpha 66 (I have to try 67) I picked up the tool and as soon as I touched the model the program starting lagging really bad. I didn't know what was wrong until I restarted 3DC and tried again. The same thing happened and as I came here to start typing this I started getting "out of memory" pop up errors and the whole computers was lagging. I couldn't get the Task Manager open but eventually after trying Ctrl+Alt+Del a few times it worked and I was able to get 3DC shut down. Wow, that's enough excitement for my day!

Update: Just installed 67 and tried it again. It still happened. This is on my laptop BTW, I'll try my desktop when I get home.

[mocaw]

To be clear- I can go and surf the web and come back to 3DC (I was writing my post while working with it) and use photoshop etc. I'm sure our problems are related, but mine ALWAYS gets frozen when I go to the task manager- it's nearly instantaneous. I'll see if the tricks work though to get out of it- like I said I'm sure they're related in some way.

UPDATE- OK, just tested it again in the DX version- and yes the two alt-enters brings 3DC out of suspended animation! Also I can confirm, at least with firefox and photoshop open that those do not cause 3DC to freeze.

Also- it's not task manager. If I press ctrl-alt-delete (to get to the screen with login and task manager etc.) and then hit cancel it freezes 3DC. Is this an Aero thing in vista or something? Unfortunately I have to have Aero on to do things in XSI...