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[Solved] Critical Bug with Hide/Unhide all command in Surface mode


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This is the second time since installing 4.0.06a (cuda) 64bit that I've encountered this serious bug with the program. I will do my best to explain what happened.

 

Firstly, I have gone through the normal process of creating a voxel from curves, sculpted, adjusted, converted to surface mode with 8x decimation and then started getting in to the fine details. I was getting annoyed at the camera "grabbing" on to a close set of faces (an arm/hand) when I was working on the chest. So I decided to simply hide the arms so they wouldn't get in my way.

 

I proceeded to use LC Buildup to add some scaly details to the surface of the model. When I was finished with the head and body and ready to move on to the arms I hit unhide all. At which time half of the face just.. for lack of a better term.. exploded. Chunks of the model reverted back to a prior state and others totally vanished. I attempted to convert to voxels, hit unhide all again.. everything I could think of to no avail. This was a very VERY painful bug as I had been saving over my last save rather than doing it in increments. Luckily I have an incremental save from many hours ago to fall back on.. but it has still cost me an entire days worth of work. Please find the image below as a reference of what the effect of this bug looked like. I've already expended my knowledge of explicative language because of this so I can only hope the problem is solved in a coming up date so that this never happens again.

 

wtf-error-bug-grrr.jpg

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And for the record the first time it happened I had no idea what caused it. This time I am sure. Both times it had to do with unhide all command.

 

Using:

Win8 64bit

Asus - G75VX

GTX 670MX

22GB RAM

SSD HD

 

Open GL Version of 3d Coat.

Edited by Aethyr
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Looks very similar to the problem I had last month: http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14755 (especially that stacking of the current and some earlier version of the sculpture).

Unfortunately, I didn't find a way to fix this, other than reverting to an older incremental save.

The only advice I can give, is that before hiding anything, check if there is already some hidden, unwanted geometry in the "buffer" that holds hidden mesh. Just invoke Unhide All. If some weird geometry appears or crazy thing happens, then:

- if you're still in voxel mode: Delete hidden,

- or if you're in surface mode: duplicate your VoxTree layer. The new layer won't have any hidden items (Delete hidden in the surface section of the voxel menu doesn't seem to work in this case).

And only then start hiding parts of your model.

Now, the above is just my unverified theory, but it worked for me once.

Edited by ajz3d
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Looks very similar to the problem I had last month: http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14755 (especially that stacking of the current and some earlier version of the sculpture).

Unfortunately, I didn't find a way to fix this, other than reverting to an older incremental save.

The only advice I can give, is that before hiding anything, check if there is already some hidden, unwanted geometry in the "buffer" that holds hidden mesh. Just invoke Unhide All. If some weird geometry appears or crazy thing happens, then:

- if you're still in voxel mode: Delete hidden,

- or if you're in surface mode: duplicate your VoxTree layer. The new layer won't have any hidden items (Delete hidden in the surface section of the voxel menu doesn't seem to work in this case).

And only then start hiding parts of your model.

Now, the above is just my unverified theory, but it worked for me once.

I'm curious.. if you duplicate the mesh after it's been screwed up did this fix the mesh or you mean duplicate before doing an unhide command? Just wanted to clarify to try to at least prevent this from happening again to me before an official fix is released.

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Aethyr, before I answer your question, could you please do a quick test and select your broken mesh, duplicate it and see what happens? Looks like duplicate command automatically unhides all areas hidden by the user, but I think that it drops the unwanted unidden hidden items at the same time (because it helped me to prevent this nasty thing from occuring again in my scene).

---

edited out a mistake

Edited by ajz3d
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I'm curious.. if you duplicate the mesh after it's been screwed up did this fix the mesh or you mean duplicate before doing an unhide command? Just wanted to clarify to try to at least prevent this from happening again to me before an official fix is released.

It did fix the problem from occuring, so after this I could hide stuff, sculpt and then unhide it without any problems. But I tried this on one of my earlier incremental scenes where I didn't have any parts of the model manually hidden yet. I did not try it on a scene where I had stuff already hidden by me. I don't have those files now, so that's why I asked you for a quick test. Maybe it will fix the mesh and preserve the parts you hid?

Until this problem is resolved, I always do an Unhide All operation every time I'm about to hide some parts of the mesh. If I get corruption showing up, I duplicate the layer and work on it (I remove the original layer). Also, while sculpting with hidden items I try to run Unhide All (followed by Undo) from time to time, just to check if everything is still intact.

This is a rare bug and I have no idea how to reproduce it.

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Hi,

 

 

Please try using the Non-CUDA version to see if this still happens. Please also try the DX Non-CUDA version if it still happens in the OGL version. Let me know how it goes. I know this does happen sometimes, but I suspect it could be CUDA related. I don't bother with the CUDA builds any more, they seems more unstable than the Non-CUDA builds to me.

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Can you please make this more clear about 8X decimation. You can only get that specific number of decimation by going into proxy mode. Proxy mode stores the object's information to your harddrive and not your ram. I am not sure if this will cause problems or not using the surfhide tool once in proxy mode.

 

Not sure what you mean by camera grab.  By default it will rotate around the current pick point. you can choose the pick point, takes a little practice to get use to but works well. Also under the camera menu you can choose "Rotate around last draw Point" and there are other rotate settings as well.

 

Surfhide is never is a clean as voxel hide as it is polygon base and not voxels and is easy to leave small stray polygons that you do not see and you could intersect them while sculpting . Possible cause of problems later on. Use surfhide with a vigilance of making sure you get all the polygons. You have to spend the model around in every direction...

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I will give you my method of preparing a Voxel object for working in Surface mode / LC

 

First under the vox tree tab, select fill voids  and sometimes close invisible hulls.  You can get user created voids in the mesh when voxel sculpting. I run close invisible hulls to be on the safe side. Now I know that my voxel object is solid through and through with voxels.  I cured many mesh explosions in surface mode using this method. I think those voids do not translate well to surface mode as surface mode is true polygon based. I do this step each and everytime I go into surface mode with a voxel object.

 

Side note : Also if you switched back to voxel mode, you could have some polygons intersections that you did not realize you created and upon returning to voxel mode these created voids. The reason again I run the above when switching back to voxel mode.

 

Next if you have a 50 million voxel model, you should be able use the resample tool in voxel mode to reduce it to about 25,000 million or maybe even less depending upon your details. Resampling tries to keep detail as well using a resampling algorithm, much like resampling a photo down to less pixels. If your computer can handle 50 million voxels and more then well, no need to. 

 

Once in surface mode, In the bottom of the left hand toolbar there is a tool Named (Smooth All).

In the dialog panel choose Tangent smoothing and put it a setting of 2. Keep sharp edges selection if you have sharp edges.

The will convert the voxel triangle structure layout to a surface mode triangle structure layout. (This was confirmed by Andrew)

Tangent smoothing will not effect your details.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

Now the above does not mean, you will never have problems but so far it has worked out quite well.

 

There are some surface mode cleanup tools under the voxel menu but sometimes they fix stuff and sometimes you get mesh explosion...

 

Yes, from what other users report, Cuda can cause problems, Either Andrew I think will have to improve Cuda preformance or ditch it all together.

 

Please remember just being helpful as I can and no one hits the nail on the head all the time. I know I gave you information that you know already since you had 3DCoat for quite awhile but the information can help others...

 

This is something that Andrew needs to look at deeply to find a solution but this is the best I can give you for now.

Edited by digman
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Thanks for the replies. A lot to think about. I use the Cuda versions because I need all the power I can get out of it and it's a noticeable performance increase over the basic version. It's a shame to hear they are buggy by comparison though. I'm trying out various suggestions and hoping to get a mesh I can work with that doesn't explode. If all goes well I'll let you know. 

 

Regarding decimation. I've enabled and disabled it multiple times through out this process that is why I mentioned it. It was in surface mode when the problem occurred.

Edited by Aethyr
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  • Carlosan changed the title to [Bug] Critical Bug with Hide/Unhide all command in Surface mode
  • 4 months later...
  • Carlosan changed the title to [Solved] Critical Bug with Hide/Unhide all command in Surface mode

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