3D-Coat 3.0 ALPHA

[3dioot]

Wow lots of posts! And excellent works! I am so happy :lol:

@3dartist

Yes something like that would be perfect. Ofcourse it needs to be on an easy to get to place in the interface and you would need to have a set of 3-5 curves always available so you can quickly choose between a shallow or deep brush, a rounded or a slash etc. And yes; this definately needs to work on all brushes.

@crusoe

I have several of those papers on my pc. This has also been something of interest to me although not of particularly high priority for this version since 90% of the users will prefer a manual retopo anyway. Especially since all "inbetween" retopo's are gone because of voxel sculpting. You only have one left; the perfect animatible one for film or games or the super optimized one for static game content. Both require human hands/experience. It would be sweet though to finally see one of these methods implemented. Afaik no other app has ever made use of this technology.

@sonk

I agree 100%. I dont really want to say it out loud because ill be bood and hissed at but voxel sculpting is the way of the future. Every new technology has asked for an increase in hardware (yes even the so praised zbrush; who here honestly feels he has enough ram to satisfy zbrush?). Why? Because its essentially the other way around; the new hardware makes new technologies viable. This is no different. Voxel sculpting is the future. If not now then in the near future there will be no need for mesh based sculpting at all and Andrew will have the premiere and the headstart. Not saying mesh based sculpting should not be in but i share your vision; voxel limitations will dissapear soon enough simply though hardware advances. I personally have a slow to moderate system but id still like Andrew to go full out and treat voxel sculpting like its the holy grail (because it is). Any optimization he does will benefit me in the end and even if i would not be able to use it a full 100% now i will soon enough.

@tree321

Fantastic elephant! Thank you so much for making such a nice sculpt to inspire everyone including andrew (and me; lol).

@JuanCarlos

Nice alien head. And wicked detail on the monster sculpt. Andrew really should go full out on the voxel sculpting and make pen also a true voxel tool (thereby replacing carve most likely).

@3dartist

Haha I love the little bulldog. I think its awesome. It has so much character. I cant express how happy i am to see so many hquality sculpts all of a sudden. Perhaps Andrew will understand what he has now.

@Andrew

I strongly agree with Sonk. It is an incredibly tight deadline to say you want to have v3 finished by december. I think you started about halfway september. That would give you what? Around three months? I dont know if you need to release a new version for stable income but if you can give yourself more time i feel you should. If you need 6 months to take it right make it 6 months. If you need 12 months to make it right take 12 months. I can wait. I would wait. I would also be willing to pay more if thats what it comes down to.

I dont mean to place you in a position where you defend yourself. I am sorry. But look at this thread. Look at the works. Dont make the same mistake zbrush made which remained a painful toy for much too long before maturing (and is still extremely bug ridden and quirky). Do it right from the start. You have the skills. If you want to make a high quality sculpting app then make a high quality sculpting app! Its not the current state of the alpha im worried about. I think that is extremely promising for what it is and the timeframe you did it in. Im having high hopes for the next update.

@crusoe

"will add all sorts of good tools when all is said and done" The time to add "good tools" is not when all is said and done. The time to add good tools is to think about them right from the start and work towards them piece by piece. And i really couldnt care less if you think you can invalidate my opinion by tagging me as a "development expert".

This "development expert" will give you an example. The curve thingie Andrew has created. It is based on mesh objects. The biggest strongpoint for 3dcoat is its mesh independance. You can literally sculpt something out of nothing. In zbrush even primitives have to fulfill certain topology requirements which is why its often handy to even import simple primitives from outside of zbrush because you can optimize their topology for their purpose. 3dcoat doesnt have that limitation.

Now one of zbruhs's so called strongpoints is that you can do so much inside the program. Mesh extract. Subtools. The way its managed. Lets imagine full scene management would have been in place in 3dcoat with the posibility to select individual voxel sculpts. How much better would it have been if instead of refering to a mesh based object outside of 3dcoat you could just quickly sketch up a tentacle part in 3dcoat, draw a curve and use that part that you sketched in that same scene to create your tentacle? It would be enormous added value and it would make SENSE not to force users to go outside the program for something they want to use inside the program while they are sculpting. (and no i dont care if below the surface of 3dcoat the mechanic is that the mesh cage of the voxel sculpt you picked in your scene is used for the generation of the lofted voxel shape; thats not the point here)

Im certian Andrew could still make this but personally i dont care much for this specific tool. Im certain others will use it to create great works though and thats fine. Its nice you get control over tube through curves. That was what was needed in general. I think its a shame you cant use a curve drawn on the surface as an extrude shape (missed chance there). But the point is that there are benefits to a structural approach. It will lead to a program that maximizes its possibilities without putting an insane amount of stress on the programmer to tweak tools afterwards to fit the general workings of the rest or to make use of all thats possible in hindsight. Point of all this. There is a time for everything. There is hardly a base to speak of. A base in a sculpting app is a few core brushes, the brush engine and the ways to tweak and work with them (fallof, profile curves, presets etc).

GrtZ 3dioot

PS

Very cool TOXE!

[akira]

Nice shader!

Is the CustonSampler1.dds a volumetric representation by slices? I hope that makes sense.

Yup, it's a box of precalculated perlin noise, very useful for generating procedural textures.

Pardon my ignorance in regards to shaders, that term is used so broadly across the entire spectrum of 3d game/film that I'm not sure if I'm understanding what it entirely is capable of... Is realtime AO (Ambient Occlusion) considered a "shader" of sorts? Or is this other higher-level functionality that would need to be integrated? Not that I'm asking for Andrew to whip something up, but I'm just curious as to what we're capable of seeing produced shader-wise now that the hooks are in . Great wood shader btw Akira!

There are several ways to mimic AO in real-time, the most popular one must be SSAO.

I have implemented SSAO already in RenderMonkey, it's like a kind of post effect.

But if you want me to port SSAO to 3DC, I will need a depth buffer in screen space from 3DC to do so.

here's the screenshot in RenderMonkey:

These are raw samples, will need another pass for blurring them.

[TOXE]

Hi Andrew,

glad that you like my strange man. About the snake tool, see the image... About patterns, do you mean 3d pattern as .obj?

-TOXE

[TOXE]

To the captain A. Shpagin.

Two request if it's possible:

-a command to center the object like "A" in lightwave

-repeat the last brush track or if you think can be useful a palette where can we save the tracks that we want to use later with different brushes/tools

-TOXE

[Andrew Shpagin]

Ok, I will give you depth field soon

And maybe shadow map also.

It will open full set of effects - SSAO, DOF

[3DArtist]

Ok, I will give you depth field soon smile.gif

And maybe shadow map also.

It will open full set of effects - SSAO, DOF

[artaq]

Ok, I will give you depth field soon

And maybe shadow map also.

It will open full set of effects - SSAO, DOF

Wow, that certainly would be impressive! What sort of performance hit would we look at seeing? Understanding this early in development many optimizations are still being done or are scheduled to be done later, but with all these post-like effects happening can you still work at a decent framerate? Again, just wow... to see this being integrated, even at this early of a stage is truly impressive!

[Andrew Shpagin]

ALPHA updated to V.15

Changes:

1) Closed curves

2) Sharp edges on curves

3) Profiles of curves - hemisphere, cone, arrow, spike, worm

4) Better positioning of curves (direction of details is more logical)

5) Better support of custom shaders - now you can choose different shaders sets from menu Shaders. Custom shaders and textures are stored in subfolders of Shaders\UserShaders\...

Ok now I will move to better brushing. Maybe shaders will be improved. I am not sure that I will have time to work tomorrow more then 2-3 hours, I also have weekend

Only Win is compiled... Excuse, I am not sure that Mac will be done today.

[Christoph]

Ok, I will give you depth field soon

And maybe shadow map also.

It will open full set of effects - SSAO, DOF

GREAT... Specially SHADOW MAPS

[Andrew Shpagin]

oh, just forgot to change version number - there is 2.10.10

[Monsoon]

I'm not sure if it's the same issue as Toxe illustrated but when voxeling and I use the stylus for manipulating menus, nav, and or anything off to the side and top, the snake and similar brushes leave parts floating in the air. It doesn't seem to happen when I go back to using a mouse.

[Juan Carlos Montes]

Downloading Now Thanks Andrew.

[TOXE]

I'm not sure if it's the same issue as Toxe illustrated but when voxeling and I use the stylus for manipulating menus, nav, and or anything off to the side and top, the snake and similar brushes leave parts floating in the air. It doesn't seem to happen when I go back to using a mouse.

Mmmh i've noticed it only with the Snake, but to be honest my mouse is covered with dust, i only use wacom... Are you on OSX or PC? BTW i'll try also with mouse.

-TOXE

[Juan Carlos Montes]

Andrew I think you need to improve the Move tool , Its leaving random artifacts over the surface an is Slow,

It would be great if you simply modify the sphere with the move tool to get the base form and continue adding detail with other tools, but know its kind of difficult

Volumetric sculpt feels great but I feel that its so hard to the deform that sphere.

any one agree with me?

Here is a example.

[3dioot]

ALPHA updated to V.15

Changes:

1) Closed curves

2) Sharp edges on curves

3) Profiles of curves - hemisphere, cone, arrow, spike, worm

4) Better positioning of curves (direction of details is more logical)

5) Better support of custom shaders - now you can choose different shaders sets from menu Shaders. Custom shaders and textures are stored in subfolders of Shaders\UserShaders\...

Ok now I will move to better brushing. Maybe shaders will be improved. I am not sure that I will have time to work tomorrow more then 2-3 hours, I also have weekend

Only Win is compiled... Excuse, I am not sure that Mac will be done today.

Enjoy your weekend. (so will i) Looking forward to the next update and thanks for the work so far. Also quite chuffed to see you included some stuff of me in the examples on your devblog. :lol: Im honored to sit among the dog and other works from the other artists.

3dioot

[TOXE]

Volumetric sculpt feels great but I feel that its so hard to the deform that sphere.

any one agree with me?

Hi Juan,

yes i totally agree, it would be nice to have deformations using a sphere with falloff or something

-TOXE

[tree321]

There may be a problem with undo in latest alpha.Anybody else having problems or just me?I mean with the curve tools

[renderdemon]

Andrew I think you need to improve the Move tool , Its leaving random artifacts over the surface an is Slow,

It would be great if you simply modify the sphere with the move tool to get the base form and continue adding detail with other tools, but know its kind of difficult

Volumetric sculpt feels great but I feel that its so hard to the deform that sphere.

any one agree with me?

I completely agree,my point is that with such a tool we don't need nothing than a sphere to start,so improving the move tool is important.

btw,now that I know I can save I want to try some sculpting,I like how works clay brush

[3dioot]

Andrew I think you need to improve the Move tool , Its leaving random artifacts over the surface an is Slow,

It would be great if you simply modify the sphere with the move tool to get the base form and continue adding detail with other tools, but know its kind of difficult

Volumetric sculpt feels great but I feel that its so hard to the deform that sphere.

any one agree with me?

Here is a example.

Yes i completely agree with you. I havent given good feedback on the move tool yet because i wanted to wait till i had posted up something new. But yeah. Really simplified these are some things i noticed:

I still get surface>voxel conversions when i use it which really surprises me since i thought it was a pure voxel tool. This happens randomly and i cant seem to replicate the exact circumstances for when it happens.

Also something that really screws it up is if you change the pressure WHILE you use it and you have pressure linked to radius. I.e. you grab with a strong press and while you move you apply less pressure it will try to adjust what it has grabbed (radius) and this ALWAYS goes wrong. I think this is a really big one. Strength doesnt seem to do anything for move so thats fine. Try how much more predictable move becomes when you unlink radius from pressure. Perhaps the link for radius to pressure could be disabled for move?

Continuation from last point. Each brush should hold its own settings. I.e. radius, and wether its linked to pressure or not for carve is for carve and for move is for move (this applies to all brush settings ofcourse not just radius and wether its linked but to all brush properties). This may sound like a small thing but will get bigger with more tools. I would prefer smooth to keep the radius from carve OR have a setting where you can apply a multiplier for smooth compared to carve radius. For example; smooth brush size = 1,5 This will make smooth always have a radius thats 1.5 times bigger then carve. This is great because you carve most often with a smaller brush and smooth with one that is slightly bigger. Ofcourse this is a setting that everyone can adjust to their liking.

Also, just rembered this one, move seems to take alpha into effect. This is something to be alert to since a wrong alpha can do weird stuff. Id love to be able to select NO alpa (i dont think that option is there currently; a tool either supports it and uses it or it doesnt) and just work with the falloff value.

3dioot

PS

Having some kind of hierarchy to voxel details levels may help too. But i dont think Andrew has said anything about that being possible or not has he? Currently the only way to go is up. Even i can understand its hard but does anyone know wether he has tried that yet and said its not feasible or is there still a chance that it might be possible?

[buqa]

I know it might be one of the biggest request of voxel sculpting at all, but I'm just curious:

Andrew, are you planning (or maybe "is it possible") to bring some "non-linearity" to voxel sculpting?

Curve tool is great example. You make a curve, set everything, confirm, model of curve is transferred to voxels ... but later you realize the the curve needs some adjustments. It might be easy to adjust it by some tools (move) and it might be not (if you few hours later realize, that you in fact need sharp corner instead of round). And it would be great to have a chance to edit the curve even after the confirmation a use of other tools.

It could be applied for merge tool as well and maybe for others.

I think it was in one of those videos from other software packages here. They had some objects which could move independently (like subtools in zBrush, but using of subtools in zBrush is like living in World of Pain) and when they had came closer, they welded together "voxel way". A then you still could transform both objects separately etc.

As I said, I'm not sure whether it is possible in philosophy od 3D Coat, but as we all know, for Andrew, so called God of Code, impossible is anything

[TOXE]

There may be a problem with undo in latest alpha.Anybody else having problems or just me?I mean with the curve tools

I have an undo problem with snake (again) and i need to open the file again to erase changes, the curve tools work good with undo on my Mac.

-TOXE

[tree321]

I know it might be one of the biggest request of voxel sculpting at all, but I'm just curious:

Andrew, are you planning (or maybe "is it possible") to bring some "non-linearity" to voxel sculpting?

Curve tool is great example. You make a curve, set everything, confirm, model of curve is transferred to voxels ... but later you realize the the curve needs some adjustments. It might be easy to adjust it by some tools (move) and it might be not (if you few hours later realize, that you in fact need sharp corner instead of round). And it would be great to have a chance to edit the curve even after the confirmation a use of other tools.

It could be applied for merge tool as well and maybe for others.

I think it was in one of those videos from other software packages here. They had some objects which could move independently (like subtools in zBrush, but using of subtools in zBrush is like living in World of Pain) and when they had came closer, they welded together "voxel way". A then you still could transform both objects separately etc.

As I said, I'm not sure whether it is possible in philosophy od 3D Coat, but as we all know, for Andrew, so called God of Code, impossible is anything

I agree.It would be nice to have some kind of history stack or maybe a way to save the curve and retrieve it like you would a mask or selection.saving curves would also be good for adjusting mesh and further posing. Like bones.That's been mentioned.But I did post a video on "Claytools" way of doing things which I think is really good.Given time I'm sure Andrew will make "most" of our wishes come true.

[TOXE]

Ahhh, what a beautiful thing the freedom of sculpting! My latest exercise with alpha, starting from a sphere. I don't see the hour to texture and render this guy. Let me know what do you think

-TOXE

[3dioot]

lol the revolution is here. :lol:

I see i dont have to worry about impressive sculpts being done with the alpha. Cool stuff TOXE! Your on a roll!

3dioot

[SonK]

Andrew I think you need to improve the Move tool , Its leaving random artifacts over the surface an is Slow,

It would be great if you simply modify the sphere with the move tool to get the base form and continue adding detail with other tools, but know its kind of difficult

Volumetric sculpt feels great but I feel that its so hard to the deform that sphere.

any one agree with me?

Here is a example.

Yes i agree with you, i get the same artifact and speed issue. being able to tweak forms is essential for build further detail(wrinkle, pores,etc). It is the foundation of a sculpt. I use the move tool alot in Mudbox when i'm defining the form/shape before jumping to more detailing. So it's an important tool.

[Monsoon]

@TOXE.........I'm on PC. It acts like the stylus stays active even when taken away from the main field. Or it's hypersensitive.

As a gamer, I always keep my trackball handy but for artwork nothing beats the tablet and pen.

I'll test it some more when I get home from work.

@Others....I've been having artifacts left from the move tool for several builds now. I agree that to really deform that voxel sphere would be handy.

[Monsoon]

Oh...and by the way, how do I increase the effect of the smoothing? Mine is very weak. But if I use the slider up top, I get no change unless I put it up to about 2 but then it just tears up the mesh. What are yours set at?

[3dioot]

@monsoon

I usually have mine set to .7 to .8 I only put it at 1 when i really want to "erase" surface noise. Smooth brush is a combination of smooth strength and radius. If your not getting the effect you want try increasing the radius a bit, it might help.

3dioot

[Deadman21]

im testing the move tool also.

What I noticed is that if I use only the mouse to move the surface I get much more success. Once I use the pen it begins to fall apart and create artifacts when moving surfaces.

[3dioot]

im testing the move tool also.

What I noticed is that if I use only the mouse to move the surface I get much more success. Once I use the pen it begins to fall apart and create artifacts when moving surfaces.

Try unlinking radius from pressure. You can do this by pressing the little brush in front of radius. When it turns a little discolored radius wont change with pen pressure anymore and it will act the same as with your mouse (which has no pressure; just on and off).

3dioot