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V4.5 BETA (experimental)


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Thanks artman for the help and infos.

 

I bake now AO in Blender and send it to 3d coat.

The baking in 3d coat for PBR material is unasable as far as i see, as long as you work with Lowpoly objects only.

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Thanks artman for the help and infos.

 

I bake now AO in Blender and send it to 3d coat.

The baking in 3d coat for PBR material is unasable as far as i see, as long as you work with Lowpoly objects only.

I dont understand what you mean by "unusable" you dont need any baking with pbr materials on lowpoly,normal map is taken into account inside cavity map just using Fill tool is enough no baking needed...

 

edit:or you mean you can't get AO map for pbr material creation...thats another matter.

PBR  material themselves works really well on lowpoly meshes...there is surely a way to generate good AO using only lowpoly in 3DC. Beat seem to say it looks fine when baking it from itself in Surface mode....maybe you should try that.

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You missunderstand me.

 

Take a look into my WIPs

There are 3 new Turrets, all are Lowpoly created in Blender.

I have paintet it in Substance Painter. I only did some Normalmap stuff in 3d coat in Paint Room.

 

Now i want to do do the same in 3d Coat. So i start in PPP.

No sculpting, no retopo, no uvs and all the stuff.

I hope you understand it what i am trying to explain and to do.

 

Ok, now i want to paint over my lowpoly object.

I start with PBR Material -> Metal -> Metal_Old

 

If i click on it, a Cavitymap gets created and an AO map.

Cavity is not a big thing, but with the AO the problems begins.

 

No option of the 4 bakeoptions creates a similar map like i get if i bake a AO from Retopo Room.

That means. if i want to start in PPP, the AO baking is unusable, because of ugly or wrong calculation.

I think there is a missing option like i have in Blender, Xnormal, or Substance Designer.

 

How should i use a PBR Material like Metal_Old on a lowpoly object if i start in PPP ?

I remeber, you prefer, i have to start in Voxel Room to get nice results.

 

And if i think more about it, to start in PPP is useless, too.

Edited by Malo
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This is were I think I misunderstand is you saying pbr materials are useless when starting in ppp.....

The only thing that is not working is baking a nice ao map for lopoly.Not all pbr materials require Ao map.

Everything else works perfectly fine.

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You missunderstand me.

 

Take a look into my WIPs

There are 3 new Turrets, all are Lowpoly created in Blender.

I have paintet it in Substance Painter. I only did some Normalmap stuff in 3d coat in Paint Room.

 

Now i want to do do the same in 3d Coat. So i start in PPP.

No sculpting, no retopo, no uvs and all the stuff.

I hope you understand it what i am trying to explain and to do.

 

Ok, now i want to paint over my lowpoly object.

I start with PBR Material -> Metal -> Metal_Old

 

If i click on it, a Cavitymap gets created and an AO map.

Cavity is not a big thing, but with the AO the problems begins.

 

No option of the 4 bakeoptions creates a similar map like i get if i bake a AO from Retopo Room.

That means. if i want to start in PPP, the AO baking is unusable, because of ugly or wrong calculation.

I think there is a missing option like i have in Blender, Xnormal, or Substance Designer.

 

How should i use a PBR Material like Metal_Old on a lowpoly object if i start in PPP ?

I remeber, you prefer, i have to start in Voxel Room to get nice results.

 

And if i think more about it, to start in PPP is useless, too.

What Andrew needs to do is enable Occlusion baking to use the displaced mesh (when SHOW DISPLACED MESH is enabled in the VIEW menu). When you merge/bake to "PPP w/displacement," 3D Coat saves the baked sculpt details to a displacement map as well as a normal map. No reason the displacement mesh can't be used to bake occlusion. Just not enabled currently, for some reason.

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@Artman

Yes, thats correct, i am sorry. If i say all materials are useless is wrong.

Only the half or more are useless. Every material that have an edge effect or dirt effect.

 

@ABNRanger

I dont think that would solve the problem.

If i start in PPP, i dont have a displacement map to bake the AO.

 

Anyway.

I see i have to start in VoxelRoom.

 

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After working a few days learning about PBR  plus starting to understand it's functions in 3DC, I would say for sure we need now more than ever a better AO calculation method in 3DC. I hope this possible before the official release of 3DCoat 4.5...

Edited by digman
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After working a few days learning about PBR  plus starting to understand it's functions in 3DC, I would say for sure we need now more than ever a better AO calculation method in 3DC. I hope this possible before the official release of 3DCoat 4.5...

 

I remember asking for a real AO solution some years ago but apparently it wasn't a priority or important enough. I don't know of any software that even uses this hack of AO implementation we currently have in 3DCoat ;) 

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Zbrush can't generate Displacement Maps for thin objects like thin feathers that look properly in renders. All Multi Map exporter config options tried and the rendering of its EXR maps come out distorted.  Its official.  You might try to get the crown in 3D-Coat for these types of objects.   Only with X-Normal could I bake an EXR that renders properly in 3DSMax, using a lowpoly cage mesh created in 3DSMax. The lowpoly was specially re-done to hold its shape better, when smoothed / subdivided, just for displacement..

Edited by mercy
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Thanks, Artman.

In general, I think re-introduction of glossiness blending modes would be a bad idea, because things finally work as they should now (glossiness of a layer overwrites, with alpha-blending, the glossiness of lower layers). However, some kind of legacy solution would be welcome. I think most of us have some older projects "put away for finishing later" stacked up on our disks. If they contain paint layers with some kind of glossiness blending modes, then I suspect there might be a problem loading them correctly. I didn't try loading such projects yet, so I don't know what happens if I do so, but I assume that nothing good. I already ran into a destructive bug when loading an old project in which I didn't even use glossiness blending modes. The bug manifests itself with glossiness permanently disappearing from all layers, after visibility of one of them is changed.

 

A quick and simple legacy solution, off the top of my head, might be to allow people to keep two versions of 3D-Coat installed in different folders, and using different directories to store their settings. This would eliminate the need of juggling with 3D-Coat versions and settings just to work on older scenes in 4.1.x.

 

Yes please allow configuration folder to be customizable so we can have a stable release install and a beta release install.

I still have 3dcoat v3 installed for some things that v4 just interprets wrong in some file imports.

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Two Questions

 

1. Are there any plans about Fill Layers, similar to that we have in Substance Painter?

I like the workflow realy much. It is non destructive, you see in realtime what you did and you could modify it on the fly.

 

 

2. How did the Material converting works?

My folders are empty, and if use Convert Materials, nothing happens. I get only one new Default Material.

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I just checked, and some of my old bug reports are still open, so I'm just going to drop my notes/bug reports here. I apologise, but I won't put more work into it, as that just leads to me being dissapointed when it ends up being ignored.

-The Fill Tool's 'colour tolerance' only works for the diffuse/albedo channel. While the name does seem to imply this, it should at least work on the other channels when you're displaying those directly (like when pressing 3 for Gloss only)

-The 'Glossiness Brightness' slider in the Layer Blending panel doesn't have an effect.

-The 'Contrast' slider in the Layer Blending panel should probably go to -1? Right now we have to type it in.

Clone Stamp problems:

-Gloss&Spec channels paint transparancy (like when your source-point is on the edge of the mesh) as black. The colour channel correctly leaves this transparent.

-The colour channel always ends up being brighter than the source!

-Transform/Copy tool's preview is extremely bright. The tool does appear to work correctly, it's just the preview of what you're going to stamp.

-Spline Image Tool only has inputs for Depth, Color and Glossiness textures. Depending on workflow, it's missing Specular or Metalness. And currently it paints the 'glossiness' texture into the metalness map, and paints black in the gloss channel.

-I had some issues with freezing, but haven't tried to reproduce them in Beta 5 yet. If I do, I'll update this or make a new post.:Undo sometimes freezes random parts, but only when I've used freeze in the file previously and unfrozen everything again. (I tried,and can't reproduce it. If it happens again I'll let you know)

-Colourpicking (v) doesn't pick up metalness.

EDIT: changing sliders in the Layer Blending panel doesn't work with undo/redo.

 

Edit: As shown here, using the lasso (or other shapes) Stroke Mode results in only a small sliver around the edge of the shape being painted. The PBR Material Preview shows what it should have looked like.

Schermafdruk%202015-01-14%2013.25.11.png

Edited by Mighty Pea
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Seems I can't edit anymore, so:

 

Strips can only contain Color, Depth, Alpha and Specular, and if you import a psd with a Glossiness or Metallic layer it won't import at all.

 

edit: and every now and again, the strips produce this result:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17715/Schermafdruk%202015-01-14%2015.17.05.png

Edited by Mighty Pea
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One more that I'd like confirmed: View>Flat Shade and Specular are reversed.

 

EDIT: The eraser's pressure sensitivity doesn't work with certain brush shapes in 'Depth & Opacity Pressure' Stroke Mode. For instance: 'randomscratches(256x256), probably because the eraser doesn't feature an 'opacity' slider. It *does* work with 'Radius, Depth & Opacity' stroke mode.

 

EDIT: silly waste of time, but I was using the default bevelled cube for testing, and the unwrap bothered me, so here's my alternative:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/17715/3dc_cube.obj

It's straighter, so there's less distortion on straight lines

Edited by Mighty Pea
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