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Dear 3d coat team,

 

I have another idea, something that I believe is missing for your programme to officially compete with the likes of zbrush when it comes to creating character models for games, and these tools are the following.

 

Rigging System,

 

this tool would allow you to create a character rig inside of 3d coat negating the need to export the character into another programme getting rid of the need to compensate for the differences in both programmes used and all other checks you need to perform and the act its self of exporting the character model, overall speeding up peoples creativity and allowing people to create their models quicker and get them into the game engine fully complete faster.

for this you could utilize the curve tool just like zbrush does with the zspheres, and if you include spheres 2 functionality you could create the rig first then paint over the rig creating the base mesh or if you have already got the base mesh use this tool to create the rig. plus if you create the rig first then the base mesh, the rig would automatically spend itself to the rig it is being drawn on but if you are creating the base mesh first then you have to append the rig to the mesh of your choice by hand.

 

Weight Painting

 

for character animations to work or should I say to be able to create character animations, the mesh needs to know how to behave when a bone moves that is in the local area, the way this is achieved is by weight painting the mesh, this could be done inside the paint room, currently you are able to paint, colour, normal/bump, specular/highlight, and emission, this would allow you to weight paint the mesh for character animations, a way to see how the changes affect the movement in real-time when the corresponding bones are moved would also be a nice addition, this would mean that you would not have to constantly move the character between rooms to see if the changes are any good, it would greatly improve speed and accuracy of the results and the fun factor, I do believe it would make the tedious task of weight painting more fun and therefore a task more manageable within 3dcoat which would be a good marketing ploy and win over some zbrushers, and since you can do all of your game character completely within 3dcoat with this improvement, why would you want to have any other programme other than this and the specific game engine of choice. it would become the perfect companion of game developers.

 

the last point is character animations, the ability to create character animations inside 3dcoat so that you can create fully complete game characters inside 3dcoat, through applinkz, you could include support for other character animation tools in other applications that currently support applinkz therefore the person is not just restricted with creating character animations in either one or the other but can actively switch between the two programs to create character animations in both 3dcoat and his other animation too of choice whether that is blender or 3ds max.

 

 

thank you I do honestly believe that this would be huge, and would definitely be the programme for the artist, just a note if you need to export something, then the programme is not finished and not artist friendly, any tool that allows me to do both inside the same application is a god send.

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It would indeed be huge, a huge task for what is mostly a one man show. The power of 3D-Coat derives from not having been spread too thin.

I agree. I think Andrew might entertain a very basic skeletal rig...similar to ZBrush's or Modbox's implementation...for even quicker posing. But I don't  know that it's a good idea to try and develop a full set of rigging and weight painting tools. As Tony said, it's a very small staff (although Andrew does about as much work as a crew of 3-4, by himself), and there is already so much on his plate, as it is. This is pushing the app way beyond what it was ever intended to do. I was a texture painting app....then we pushed him to develop the sculpting. Well, with that, UV and Retopo tools, it has caused the Painting toolset to somewhat languish, and be further behind than it might otherwise be.

 

So, yeah....I agree with Tony. A small developer like Andrew has to pick his battles wisely. Adding a fancy render engine with nodal shading network, a hair & fut engine, etc....are all pushing beyond the boundaries of what an app like this is intended to do. I'd much rather it be darned good at what it does, then just ok in a bunch of things.

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As for the one man show, sometimes it`s time to hire some more employees

 

But these people also want money and that will  increase the  price for 3D coat

Also I have no interest in rigging and animation in 3D coat. I have my Tools that do it already for me.

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well... no

 

Rig is a hard task... why to develop a system when another apps like LWave, Maya, Max or Blender can do in a better good way NOW ?

 

This is pushing beyond the boundaries of what an app like this is intended to do.

 

dev time to make better rooms is the actual plan

 

Retopo Room, better autotopo and retopo tools

Tweak Room, pose tool more acurate and some polymesh edit tools

Paint Room, Photoshop mimic workflow and layer system

Render Room, passes and linear space gamma

Sculpt Room, improvement in sculpt tools, layer sculpt systema and morph layers for shape animation

UV Room, adding more tools and options

Scripting system more advanced

General UI tweak in all rooms

More export and tool options for 3D printing

General applink improvements

 

Others app are used like standard for your idea.

 

3DC compite with ZBrush, Mudbox and Mari, and is a GREAT app to combine with CAD systems for 3D print.

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  • 2 months later...
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A basic skeletal rig just for posing purposes is essential in my opinion and is a well overdue feature.

Zbrush uses its Z spheres as a rig maybe 3dCoat could use Curves?

 

That's exactly what I was thinking, all they would have to do is upgrade the curve tool that already exists, and since 3dcoat has applinkz, what 3dcoat could do is when exporting it could convert 3d coats rig to something that the host application can support. like if I was exporting a character I made and rigged in 3d coat into blender, it would convert 3d coats rig into blenders bone system.

 

and as for the weight painting, 3d coat has already got vertex painting tools, how hard can it be to upgrade the already existing tools to give it the ability to paint a weight map inside 3d coat.

 

and if you can rig your character in 3d coat, it would be able to give  and put your characters in more dynamic poses and for game characters, having to rig your characters in another application would be one task less you would not have to do, but more importantly it would not replace other applications rigging systems because some of those might be more mature but it would give people more options and possibilities.

 

but anyways i'm an artist and designer not a programmer, so I do apologize if i'm a little of on the difficulty of some of these requests.

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  • 1 year later...
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Well stepping into the future further and I figured I would update or add more here.  Mixamo now offer us the ability to do 1 free character rig per week or month or something and it does a reasonably good job.

 

The trick here would be that all you need to do is produce rigs that match a bunch of your 3D coat characters so each time you get a new rig it can be re-applied to other 3D models inside of Blender.  I believe there is a tutorial out there that shows how to do this as well.  It's not a great fix but I mean if you despise rigging like I do then this is always an option for those who don't wanna pay up the big dollars Mixamo Fuse are asking.

 

There was another software being developed called Boner3D but that got canned so the creator advised me and the actual functionality contrary to what is in the online media does not work inside of the game engine that they are also responsible for so that's a shame because it was a really amazing piece of software being developed.

 

Might be a while before any other viable 3D auto-rigging / semi-auto rigging software comes out.

 

The only reason why I feel that Andrew would produce a superb rigging toolkit is because when you look at how well the Automatic Retopo tools are now and consider that rigging would be using a lot of the same toolsets to calculate weight maps as well as the placement of bones with only a few additional guides required to identify key points in a structure.

 

Considering all of this, it may not be as big a job as has been previously thought now days and with hat functionality.. the only market competitor that comes close is Mixamo.. and they are asking $1500 per year for the privilege of using it.

 

I don't believe that actual animation would be something that 3D Coat needs to get into as there are a LOT of 3rd party tools for the actual animating but to prepare your models for easy import to animating software or game engines that use animation re-targeting would be advantageous and definitely something more worth while to consider now than ever before.

 

I guess the ability to still pose a character is one thing that might be helpful to include just so that you can test to make sure that your character is going to animate as anticipated but  timeline based animation system would be going overboard a fair distance I would think.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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I personally feel that this is one of the worst suggestions I've read on this forum.  There are SO many things that should be done to fix and make better the tools that already exist in 3DCoat that the list would stretch from here to the moon and back.  Too long to post on this thread that's for sure.  

 

I would hate to see 3DCoat watered down even more than it is.  The Voxel room has taken up FAR too much of Andrew's time and as a result other aspects of this app have been neglected.

 

Please Andrew never implement character animation tools.

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  • 2 months later...
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I personally feel that this is one of the worst suggestions I've read on this forum.  There are SO many things that should be done to fix and make better the tools that already exist in 3DCoat that the list would stretch from here to the moon and back.  Too long to post on this thread that's for sure.  

 

I would hate to see 3DCoat watered down even more than it is.  The Voxel room has taken up FAR too much of Andrew's time and as a result other aspects of this app have been neglected.

 

Please Andrew never implement character animation tools.

Yeah it's much better with improvements in existing rooms

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I do think a very basic rig, like Mudbox had/has, is a worthwhile request. Just for posing, not for animation. I think it could be done a lot more easily than one might think, because it could simply be based on the "Spline Stroke" Draw mode in the E-Panel. Where you can use your brush size to set the size of the Control Points (Joints in this case). It would need some kind of raycasting to enable the user to place the spline along the center of the mesh it is to control...sort of like Modo's bones work.

 

Then some basic weighting, similar to what we have with the Pose Tool. So, 80% of a basic posing rig could be accomplished with existing tools.

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