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Graphics card(s)...


joa1
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Really 9800 gtx with 3DCoat is good option.Quadro equivalent(Quadro FX 5600) is too expensive for same amount of multiprocessors.

(as decribed in Tamarin post on first page)

I have a 280gtx that Im presently testing on a 32bit release.

It works very fast even on a 21 million sculpt,especially in surface mode.

The thing you need to understand tough is that you need to decrease brush size half each time you

increase resolution.

You dont have to do that in MB and ZB...but you also cannot make a whole model out of a sphere there neither.

It is something you need to understand enough that it does not bother you while sculpting otherwise you will always feel a bottleneck effect and you will be frustrated in your use of the voxel tools.

In all it means that in the 100 000-700 000 polys range your character "design" have to be complete ,

pose (attitude) and silhouette(presence).By "complete", I mean that you are satisfied enough that you wont go back to tweak legs size and head position ect...(nothing stops you from adding 27 subobjects in that same poly range tough... :D hehe.. that would not affect the performance with same brush size much more.)

When Increasing res you must ask yourself :Have I done all I could at this level to enhance character?

Only "then", you increase res and bring brush size to a half and so on... .More like real sculpting.

adding smaller details until a 5-15million per subobjects is reached.

It can seem limitating but once you've passed over that you can really enjoy the freedom of not having to retopologize until the end lowpoly ang go on sculpting forever. 8)

Hope that helps :)

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It works very fast even on a 21 million sculpt,especially in surface mode.

The thing you need to understand tough is that you need to decrease brush size half each time you

increase resolution.

It is something you need to understand enough that it does not bother you while sculpting otherwise you will always feel a bottleneck effect and you will be frustrated in your use of the voxel tools.

In all it means that in the 100 000-700 000 polys range your character "design" have to be complete ,

pose (attitude) and silhouette(presence).By "complete", I mean that you are satisfied enough that you wont go back to tweak legs size and head position ect...(nothing stops you from adding 27 subobjects in that same poly range tough... :D hehe.. that would not affect the performance with same brush size much more.)

When Increasing res you must ask yourself :Have I done all I could at this level to enhance character?

Only "then", you increase res and bring brush size to a half and so on... .More like real sculpting.

adding smaller details until a 5-15million per subobjects is reached.

It can seem limitating but once you've passed over that you can really enjoy the freedom of not having to retopologize until the end lowpoly ang go on sculpting forever. 8)

Hope that helps :)

Excellent advice! It begs the suggestion that brush size should automatically decrease when adding resolution.

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@artman :

I agree totally : that should this is the workflow :)

Some video tutorial called Voxel Wrokflow could help some people that don't understand the way of work.

Yeah, voxel are very new way of scultping, with lot more freedom !

Some rules :

1) Do like Zbrush workflow :

Work all you model parts and general shapes in default low resolution : faster to use tools as Sopy, Cut and Clone etc ...

2) Cut your model in several parts if you go crazy in million polygons (lot of sudivisions):

Once you have some definitive shape, before increasing resolution to add micro details , you can cut it in sveral parts to work more

smoothy and add micro details easily

two solution to assemble your final mesh :

- assemble your parts at final on 3D Coat and, get rid of possible visible seams

- Retopology independant parts and assemble them at final and their normal maps : than correct seams under 3D Coat

(painfull solution : ( )

I have a question , why not doing like Zbrush HD Sculpting ????

It's a solution :

We would have to isolate parts of the model where we want to work, and the rest of the model could be hidden and why not deleted from ram

temporary and copied on HD, when enabling all model , the rest of model would be restored from harddrive.

This way you would work in parts of your model with better speed and more memory ?

Another point could be taken from Zbrush perhaps :

In Zbrush , when you increase resolution a lot, and move , rotate your entire model, that's a lower resolution that is you rotate,

so manipulating the entire model is smooth.

And a last point :

Some brushes only work on visible voxels.

I don't know the fact to disable automatically non visible voxel, could speed up things ?

Perhaps a button option called : Disable Hidden Voxel ?

Before considering hardware it's lot lot better to consider software improvment !

(specially when some of us have very decent Nvidia 3D Cards)

Look at Win Vista and Windows Seven : Microsoft have understood it finally , why not us :) ??

Juts ideas :) !

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Well... The ZB case is unique on its own since they developed a strange (fast) way of showing triangles on the screen, its a custom renderer so I don't really know if things would or could work the same way, but I'm no expert...

Artman: I started applying your method beginning with the smallest sphere (fewest voxels) and I'm very pleased with what I'm doing, it all started making sense :yahoo:, and starting to love it. Ratchet is also kinda right too, ignorant people like me, open 3dcoat, start messing around with a high number of voxels, and gigantic brushes only to see how unresponsive and slow it is, so the workflow video seems like a good idea.

Before considering hardware it's lot lot better to consider software improvment !

The thing about 3d, can be related to money: when you earn 1M$ a year you already know to spend that and a little more, so there's never enough... 8)

I'll try to get on of those 200 nvidia series! :angry:

Cheers.

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  • 4 months later...

This thread's gotten a little old but I'm starting a big new job so I'm looking at updating my 2 year old card. My current card takes up two slots, one being a big vent / fan. While browsing NewEgg I noticed that some of them have this but others either just have a small fan or have a heat sink and these are fairly high end cards I'm looking at. Any thoughts on this?

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This thread's gotten a little old but I'm starting a big new job so I'm looking at updating my 2 year old card. My current card takes up two slots, one being a big vent / fan. While browsing NewEgg I noticed that some of them have this but others either just have a small fan or have a heat sink and these are fairly high end cards I'm looking at. Any thoughts on this?

Link? I don't think there is any good way around having a good card taking up two spaces...they really need a fat heatsink and large fan. The best ones to buy are the ones that have the aftermarket coolers on them. MSI is one brand that does this alot. I bought a Galaxy 275GTX...and they are another brand that really tricks out their cards with highend aftermarket coolers. It lets you get a nice overclock without breaking a sweat.

If you have a Frys electronics store nearby, I would go check it out...the model I bought, you can't find online...and I really like it. Plus, Frys is like having a NewEgg store location to shop at.

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I don't have a specific link, I actually noticed that a while ago. Right now as I browse I'm looking at this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130478

We don't have Fry's on this side of the country. The only real option is now Best Buy after Circuit City and Comp USA all closed down.

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Will there be support for multi gpu in the future? I have to think about a new rig, and there are some motherboards available with 3 pci-e slots. This will come in handy once all the render engines support rendering with cuda (octane render will be available in February, also watch out for arion, furryball etc) allowing for mindblowing render performance (e.g. with 3 nvidia gtx285).

Would be nice if 3Dcoat could walk the extra mile and grab all cuda power it could getting hold of.

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I don't have a specific link, I actually noticed that a while ago. Right now as I browse I'm looking at this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130478

We don't have Fry's on this side of the country. The only real option is now Best Buy after Circuit City and Comp USA all closed down.

Definitely go with an EVGA card with a lifetime warranty. They also have special drivers to overclock.

This site is very good for researching video cards, and here's an article that mentions several NVIDIA cards, including the one you're interested in

http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3539

This is good for checking prices:

http://www.nextag.com/

I went thru the process at XMAS, and ended up with a EVGA 02G-P3-1185-AR GeForce GTX 285 2GB from newEgg. Some other vendors were a bit cheaper, but they'd change the ship date and annoyed me.

So far, no complaints.

I think they just released a bunch of new cards, so you might want to see what's the latest and greatest (not to mention which has the smallest chip geometry, uses less power, has more gpus, uses less slots, etc.)

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Will there be support for multi gpu in the future? I have to think about a new rig, and there are some motherboards available with 3 pci-e slots. This will come in handy once all the render engines support rendering with cuda (octane render will be available in February, also watch out for arion, furryball etc) allowing for mindblowing render performance (e.g. with 3 nvidia gtx285).

Would be nice if 3Dcoat could walk the extra mile and grab all cuda power it could getting hold of.

When you have more than one card, there is very little spacing between them and thus extremely little airflow, so you will definitely want to get a case that has lots of fans to keep plenty of air flowing through it.

This is the one I bought around Christmas time, and it was $79 bucks at Fry's:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/NewProduct.aspx?Item=N82E16811129058

http://www.frys.com/catreq/-1590

This is the card...and it too has software that lets you tweak/overclock your card...to perform well above the stock 285GTX.

http://www.frys.com/product/6092488?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG

It would perhaps be a good card for your normal display, and then if you really want to use one of the Fermi cards later, you can put that in your second PCI E slot and designate that for your GPU renderer. Plus, you should be able to swap the cards as your primary display card from within Windows display settings.

This might be another to consider, as it has MUCH superior cooling to all the stock cooling you see on 90% of the same cards, and costs the same:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/NewProduct.aspx?Item=N82E16814127428

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