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[Solved] Destroyed mesh !


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Surface mode, v4.0.05.

I hid parts of my sculpture to access areas that they partially obscured. After sculpting some medium details (I used proxy once, CleanClay decimation many times) I unhid everything and got a broken mesh as a result (see attached image). "Cleaning up memory" results in only a bigger mess and "Clean surface" command almost instantly crashes 3D Coat. Now I have to revert to the most recent, working incremental save.

What's going on here?

post-12523-0-21443500-1373647486_thumb.j

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I have also had these issues. My workaround is to be careful when performing certain operations in proxy mode, I find that this is the culprit. What I do is If I have an exploded mesh I will undo back to its correct state and change the resolution of the model to refresh it. Changing the resolution at some point fixes this issue for me. Obviously if you've got a lot of work done and this happens, your kind of screwed. So your doing the right thing by incrementally saving. So if your working in proxy mode and make changes go back to full res consistently to check your mesh.

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I've also had this happen simply by sculpting with the surface tools, and using the Clean Surface command, remeshing with the ENTER key and undoing. It would be nice to have a "Revert to Last Saved Version" command in the Undo options, as sometimes Undo will make things worse.

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I've also had this happen simply by sculpting with the surface tools, and using the Clean Surface command, remeshing with the ENTER key and undoing. It would be nice to have a "Revert to Last Saved Version" command in the Undo options, as sometimes Undo will make things worse.

You have AutoSave in the Preferences and you can set how many Auto Save files you want to use, as well as how frequently it saves. I have it set on every 20 min or so. It's pretty rare that I get a mangled mesh like that, but it happens once in a blue moon.

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You have AutoSave in the Preferences and you can set how many Auto Save files you want to use, as well as how frequently it saves. I have it set on every 20 min or so. It's pretty rare that I get a mangled mesh like that, but it happens once in a blue moon.

Thanks for pointing that out. I'll give it a try.

In the past, I haven't enabled that option since I'm in the habit of saving and incrementally saving every few minutes with all my 2D/3D apps. After a few bad experiences, I've learned my lesson.

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Folks, I did some tests and their results are quite interesting:

1. Surface mode. Without hiding anything with the SurfHide tool, I clicked the Unhide All command. Result: model broken as on the screenshots. It's almost like 3D Coat kept some early version of the volume in its hidden buffer and, on unhide command, tried to perform some merging operations with it and the current version of the mesh. No wonder it has broken the model.

2. Surface mode. I clicked the Delete Hidden first (by the way, there are two Delete Hidden menu items in the Voxels menu and I tried both) and then repeated point 1. Result: The same as in #1.

3. Converted surface to voxels. Then I clicked the Unhide All command. Result: Two meshes stacked on each other, but there were no visible holes on errors on the mesh.

4. Converted surface to voxels. Performed Delete hidden operation and then point 3. Result: No changes.

5. Converted surface to voxels, then converted it back to surface and clicked the Unhide All command. Result: Two stacked meshes like in point 3.

So, there's definitely a duplicate of some earlier version of the sculpture in the buffer that stores hidden voxel surface (voxel, because only in voxel mode it can be gotten rid of). The question is, why it's there? The first thing I hid was one of the fins, but it was in the surface mode. However, while in voxel mode I used proxy a lot, so maybe at some point 3D Coat got lost and instead of "forgetting" the high-res mesh it had stored upon entering the proxy mode, when told to leave the proxy mode it moved that mesh to a place in the memory where it stores hidden surfaces? Just a theory.

-----

The problem I have now is that because of the above and the fact that I have already sculpted plenty of LC details in the surface mode, I cannot convert the mesh to voxels in order to delete that hidden old version of my fish. Clicking any of the Delete hidden commands does not delete it. This simply means that I cannot use SurfHide tool any more and I still have the inside of the mouth to do which I... cannot do without hiding stuff. So I'm pretty much STUCK.

Ha, solved this one by duplicating the surface layer with my fish. It seems to drop all hidden items. Phew! :rofl:

What a day!

Edited by ajz3d
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First of all, I'd like to thank you for your help guys, which I forgot to do yesterday. :blush:

Second of all, I have a question about this autosave feature. How does it work exactly? I'm a bit afraid of autosaves, even in simple office applications.
From what I understand, it saves every n-th minute to k-incremental files (I've noticed that the quantity of those files I can set in the Preferences). But does 3D Coat leave the current (opened) scene file intact? What I fear is a situation when I open a file, perform some experiments on its contents (experiments that I don't want to be saved) and the next time I open the file it will contain those changes - meaning my previous work is destroyed.

---

Oh, I forgot.

If your mesh (in surface mode) goes crazy after Unhide All operation, could you please be so kind and load up the most recent incremental save from before you have hidden some stuff, and check whether invoking Unhide All reveals some old version of your model? I'm still puzzled if it was a user error on my side or not.

Edited by ajz3d
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  • Carlosan changed the title to [Bug] Destroyed mesh !
  • Carlosan changed the title to [Solved] Destroyed mesh !
  • 3 years later...
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Unfortunately, still not solved for me in 2023. Still happens to me unfortunately not as rarely as I would wish. It somehow seems to have to do (apparently) with a mesh being partially hidden with Surface Hide, or at least, this seems to increase the risk of it happening, but not sure. I also noticed maybe a different risk depending if you go back from proxy mode via the upward arrow icon on the layer itself, or, if you click again on the proxy "folder" like icon in the proxy mode bar again to get back/toggle proxy mode off. But also not sure about that.

I use Proxy mode a lot lately. I really fell in love with it. It is a genius function. I find it immensely powerful and liberating. Such an incredible 3D Coat unique feature that no other software offers. And it's incredibly fast, making it really a joy to use. If it could be made even more reliable to may prevent such occasional situations of the mesh breaking would be much appreciated.

It's not the hugest deal in the world if one is used to save incrementally, but it is an annoyance, if, lets say you did a change in proxy mode which you really like when you get back to non proxy, then sculpt ahead and only later during smoothing find out the mesh is again broken.

This way, you unfortunately actually do lose some of your work, which can be frustrating if you need to get going, needing to try to recreate a particular move or brush stroke which you already did before. It adds agitation to the process when working with proxy mode. If it would be preventable, it would be great.

Edited by Henry Townshend
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2 hours ago, Henry Townshend said:

Unfortunately, still not solved for me in 2023. Still happens to me unfortunately not as rarely as I would wish. It somehow seems to have to do (apparently) with a mesh being partially hidden with Surface Hide, or at least, this seems to increase the risk of it happening, but not sure. I also noticed maybe a different risk depending if you go back from proxy mode via the upward arrow icon on the layer itself, or, if you click again on the proxy "folder" like icon in the proxy mode bar again to get back/toggle proxy mode off. But also not sure about that.

I use Proxy mode a lot lately. I really fell in love with it. It is a genius function. I find it immensely powerful and liberating. Such an incredible 3D Coat unique feature that no other software offers. And it's incredibly fast, making it really a joy to use. If it could be made even more reliable to may prevent such occasional situations of the mesh breaking would be much appreciated.

It's not the hugest deal in the world if one is used to save incrementally, but it is an annoyance, if, lets say you did a change in proxy mode which you really like when you get back to non proxy, then sculpt ahead and only later during smoothing find out the mesh is again broken.

This way, you unfortunately actually do lose some of your work, which can be frustrating if you need to get going, needing to try to recreate a particular move or brush stroke which you already did before. It adds agitation to the process when working with proxy mode. If it would be preventable, it would be great.

i cant say ive ever used proxy mode, have you tried multires in surface mode?

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Yes I did. It's also very cool, but its not the same use case as Proxy mode. Proxy mode serves a different purpose, it doesn't need any "levels". You can downgrade your mesh at any density, even if dynamically tessellated, to any desired lower target triangle density at any time, do your changes, and then get back to the resolution you left, in a matter of seconds. So it doesn't require you to manage/add/remove any levels, or having to think of mesh structure to begin with. It's literally insane.

As of now, and how I learned using 3D Coat (before Multi Res) I enjoy freely sculpting without thinking about topology. Hence, I really dig Proxy Mode. But I also started using Multi Res for other use cases, e.g better control of clothing etc. It's basically a substitute for how you would work in Blender/ZBrush with MultiRes Modifer/Subdiv Levels as far as I understand.
 
I meanwhile encountered this problem again, and I think it has to do with undo in the mix. Something gets mixed up/screwed when using undo somewhere in the process of using Proxy mode. I think it has nothing to do with Surface Hide.

Here, I do two time proxy mode, where I hit undo of several Move brush operations. First time, all is fine. But when I hit proxy mode a second time, and also do some undo/redo, and I then go back to my source resolution, it will turn my mesh into a cool horror creature actually, but unfortunately this is not a good base to continue sculpting on anymore :P

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  • 1 month later...
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On 7/21/2023 at 1:06 PM, Carlosan said:

Yes, the old method of proxy mode was deprecated.
It is better not to use it because it gives errors.

image.png

Thanks for the hint @Carlosan ! In my case even with "Allow Proxy Mode" turned off, as it's seemingly the default in new versions, I have it still available.

I was already starting to assume that Multi Res might replace Proxy. I dug into it deeper now and it indeed offers everything of proxy mode and more. Took me a bit to understand that the multi res also works with any mesh structure in 3D Coat. Also, opposed to proxy mode, it's indeed a lot faster, but only once everything is calculated. You can level up and down, but also go to top level and the most bottom level in a single click then, without recalculation.

The one thing that it doesn't offer, is the ability to keep working with dynamic topology. You can simply "Remove Multi Resolution Data", and it will keep the current state. Then you can again work with dynamic topo until you wanna go back to Multi Res again.

However, if you need to lower your mesh resolution drastically for large sweeping changes, Multi Res doesn't beat Proxy Mode in terms of speed. Please see the attached video comparison, where I first use Proxy mode to decimate a 10mio mesh into something easily deformable. And then please observe that with Multi Res, I have to go like 6 levels lower and wait for each to get calculated, until I'm at a count where I can make large sweeping changes. Sure, this gives the side benefit of having levels now, but if I don't need that, the old system works still more conveniently and saves time when working on a high res dynamic topology mesh.

Otherwise, this is a good replacement, as probably most users don't want to go back to dyntopo anymore once they are at a certain stage where they wanna start using Multi Res (hence why it was requested).

Proxy mode is still something else tho and had a different use case afaics. So why it gets deprecated is a bit hard to understand for me, as Multi Res is not the equivalent, unless we may get a parameter to control the amount of reduction when we go down a bottom level. Maybe this is already in and I'm overlooking it, not sure.
 

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