3DCoat 4.9 BETA testing thread

[digman 1,206]

Version 4.9.57 

The preset panel keeps rearranging my brushes alphabetically. I have a certain order not arranged by the alphabetic.  

My workaround atm., is to put the letter A in front of the name of the brush and so on down through the alphabetic to keep my brushes how I like them. 

This is shown in my picture. 

Is possible to have as an option not to arrange the brushes alphabetically but simply keep them in the order I arrange. 

Also, make it possible for 3DC to remember which preset is loaded when exiting the program.  When you open 3DC the preset panel defaults to the default preset. 

By the way thanks for adding the ability to add more folders.

Thanks... 

[stusutcliffe 171]

Yeah , 3dcoat always starts on the default. Its annoying having to find  to my preset folder .Which I have renamed  with an A in front just so I can select quickly.

Also I seem to collect presets I have not put there myself, they just appear randomly.

I am wondering if some of them( not all ) are put in by the developers and are left there when they upload the latest betas.

[Jamie Norton 10]

Guys, I am about to ask possibility the dumbest question I have ever asked. How do I create a quick emissive object to test the new illumination features please? 

My excuse is I have been leaning heavily on blender for rendering for quite awhile now, and I can't vaguely remember how to illuminate an object in 3dC. Really keen to test it out. I did google it, and can see how to make an emmissive material, but wondering how some of these scenes were done, specifically the sci fi corridor..... Cheers all 

 

 

Edited August 22, 2020 by Jamie Norton

[Silas Merlin 92]

2 hours ago, Jamie Norton said:

Guys, I am about to ask possibility the dumbest question I have ever asked. How do I create a quick emissive object to test the new illumination features please? 

My excuse is I have been leaning heavily on blender for rendering for quite awhile now, and I can't vaguely remember how to illuminate an object in 3dC. Really keen to test it out. I did google it, and can see how to make an emmissive material, but wondering how some of these scenes were done, specifically the sci fi corridor..... Cheers all 

 

 

The video with the spheres is made with shaders your have in your Misc folder for sure.

The one with the corridor could be the same, I don't know, but if it is uv-mapped mesh and painted, then the emissive is painted on one layer that has layer blending set to emissive.

Those are the only two methods I can think of

Edit : Third method, a hybrid of the two : use any non emissive shader on the sculpt, but paint it with vertex painting on a layer set to emissive for layer blending

 

 

Edited August 22, 2020 by Silas Merlin

[Jamie Norton 10]

Thanks @Silas Merlin!! 

 

 

[stusutcliffe 171]

The "polymer" shaders have light emision also.

I got a really nice render. ( apart from the eyeballs)

I wonder if we will ever get refractive glass.

[digman 1,206]

A test using vertex painting setting the layer to emissive. 

Render Room. Under Screen Space illumination using the Secondary Light Intensity to control the amount of emission. 

Only a test not quality here. 

[Mihu83 11]

On 8/20/2020 at 12:39 AM, bocs said:

"Screen space reflections and lights! "

 

Options only visible in OpenGL, missing in DX.

Yup, same in my case and I don't know if it's normal or not.

[animk 90]

On 8/19/2020 at 3:39 PM, bocs said:

"Screen space reflections and lights! "

 

Options only visible in OpenGL, missing in DX.

Same here

[Andrew Shpagin 1,463]

26.08.20 4.9.58 (stable)

- Cloth tool PAUSE problem fixed.

- Dependency parameters disappearing fixed.

- anisotropic noise fixed (in noise tool)

A lot of improvements in Brush engine

- New modifiers - Relax, Sharpen, Eat details.

- New brushes - Sharpen, Super smooth. That brushes are valency - independendent,  based on reprojection onto the regular grid. Sharpen performs local pinch toward the convex/concave details of the surface.

- Roof pinch to preserve details during the pinch.

- Plane offset problems fixed.

- Position sampling introduced.

- Picking normals and position methods separated in UI.

[Silas Merlin 92]

1 hour ago, Andrew Shpagin said:

26.08.20 4.9.58 (stable)

- Picking normals and position methods separated in UI.

When I saw this I thought maybe this fixes my issues with picking.
Sadly, no.

The two issues :
1. Color picking fails most times on mesh with vertex color
2. Sphere tool has difficulties picking the initial location of a stroke.


Videos to demonstrate :

Color picking, first I pick repeatedly on the background and you see the color palette react accordingly.
Then the cursor gets to the mesh painted in vertex color and I am still picking repeatedly, but as you can see it is very difficult to finally pick a color there after many attempts.

 

Sphere tool issue : when I start a stroke on existing geometry, 3dCoat usually gets confused for a moment and then recovers : the end of the stroke is what I expected, but the start is all messed up :

Workarounds :
For the color picking issue, I just keep clicking until it works...

For the sphere tool, I was just unable to use it for many months, until I discovered by chance that one setting in the brush options panel fixes the issue :
"brush along stroke"





 

[Silas Merlin 92]

Maybe this is not the appropriate place to post this, and I apologize, but I do think it is relevant, since work has been done recently to improve the 3d mouse navigation.

I have been begging for a "freecam" mode for a long time, but maybe it is not clear what I meant. This is what I am going to try to explain now.

3d-Coat offers the choice between several types of navigation in the camera menu. They all amount to "what are you rotating around when you rotate the 3d mouse device ?"

Well... here are the available options :

 
 

All of these are fine.... as long as you are sculpting a teapot or a jar and that's all there is in your scene.

But, what if you have more than a teapot in your scene ?
What if your teapot is on a table, in a room, in a castle, in the middle of a vast landscape with mountains in the distance ?

Well, I have found that among these options, the only one that kind of works is "rotate along current pick point".
However, what this means in practice is that you have to constantly be aware of where your mouse/stylus pointer is.
And even so, taking care not to touch something in the distance, it is unavoidable that sometimes your cursor is going to touch that tower in the distance while you are rotating.
This results in a jolt, your smooth navigation is suddenly broken and the farther the point you rotated around is, the more your camera view is thrown off course.
And you can find yourself lost in wilderness, miles away from the teapot you were working on.

Please bear with me, I am serious.

Here is a video to demonstrate the issue. I am sketching lines in a rough circle, and then rotating around it, keeping the mouse pointer in the middle of the screen to show what happens :

Now, let's take this same sketch to an environement that offers a true freecam mode.
That is, in short, the camera rotates around itself.

I hope this is a clear demonstration of the issue and what is needed to make the sculpting experience with a 3d mouse more enjoyable, less frustrating.

I believe it is all the more important now with the new additions to the render room :
Freecam would make it much easier to build a scene as opposed to a single object (the teapot).


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



One last point, the icing on the cake would be to add a bit of "feathering", or "inertia". That is, when you let go of the device, let it slow down gradually rather than stop abruptly.

 

Thank you.

[animk 90]

4.9.58  There is spacing issue using ctrl ( lower only) with clay brush. 

[tcwik 4]

[4.9.58] Some bugs in the Extrude tool /stroke mode-all lasso tool's /symmetry mode [voxel mode]

Edited August 28, 2020 by tcwik

[digman 1,206]

Since a new version is coming, I will be put in a request. 

Autopo,  The ability for Autopo to really do hard surface models.

There are remeshers out in the market that are able to  auto retopo hard surface models.

I know some of the new curve features will create retopo meshes on the fly but still having a Autopo that shines at hard surface retopo mesh creation would be outstanding and a good selling point as well.

https://stanford.edu/~jingweih/papers/quadriflow/

A paper from 2018 that you might have seen. Of course I have no idea if it would help in hard surface Autopo. 

So many features have been added since I was away so thank you very much for these. Increasing the power of Autopo only enhances 3DC even more.

 

[digman 1,206]

New Curves beta. Version 4.9.57. I did not see that was mentioned as a fix in the current beta of 4.9.58

Voxel brushes

There are some operations not working correctly when using in conjunction with the new curves tool.

Pressing enter does not work on some brushes to apply the curve. You have to right click on the curve and use the apply curve from the popup menu.

The Grow brush will cut through the entire object when holding down the Ctrl plus left mouse button. This is even with a small depth percent.

I would suggest for the development team to test each Voxel brush and correct any unexpected behavior with the new curves.

Picture shows grow brush cutting through the object using Ctrl plus left mouse button. The right curve is the same grow brush setting but extruding.

 

[Silas Merlin 92]

I was recording this video to demonstrate how the projector can be used to reconsctruct a whole scene from a single image...

It ends abruptiy in a crash.
3dc became unstable when using the split tool. It prompted me to save my work, which I did, but... The save didn't work.
Autosave was disabled.

It doesn't matter, really. However, this is what I want to say :
 

I have autosave disabled as a workaround for a bug.
The bug is that whenever the scene is saved (or autosaved), all the ghosted volumes become visible.

The reason I need to ghost volumes is a workaround for a missing feature.
The missing feature is "rotate around camera position" : If I leave all the elements visible, it become very difficult to navigate the scene with a 3d mouse, because  it will rotate around any point in the scene my cursor happens to touch...

Edit : Ironically, the reason I was using the split tool (which lead to the crash) was so as to be able to ghost more areas.
 

Edited August 30, 2020 by Silas Merlin

[Carlosan 2,495]

Next time please remember to send crash report. 

It will be very helpful for future bug fix.

[gbball 202]

I noticed a bug in version 4.9.58 GL version only.

The polygonal lasso and freehand lasso tool don't work when using the cutoff tool.  Works fine in the DX version.  

Can someone confirm?

[tcwik 4]

Works fine [surface/voxel] but I work on gtx not rtx ... works almost fine because still have that lame line/shading when u cut thru..

[gbball 202]

Trying it again, I'm not having the same issue.

I think it might be related to a different bug where when I open the color picker by pressing the 'b' key, the color picker didn't disappear when my cursor came off the window.  

After testing a little more.  It happened in both GL and DX versions of 4.9.58

Unfortunately, I can't seem to replicate the bug.  But it seems when the color picker dialog remains open, the polygonal and lasso cutoff tools don't work in either version.  I haven't tested to see if it's the same with other dialogs like the alphas window.

I'll post again if I can get more clarity.

 

EDIT:  Okay, steps to reproduce.

Open the Color Palette Dialog through Windows->Panels->Color Palette.  

Undock it if it's docked.  It should stay visible whether your cursor is hovering over it or not

Try using the cutoff tools polygonal or freehand lasso tools and it shouldn't work.

 

EDIT II:  After Digmans response I tried using the new Beta Curves to see if that would work and it did.  After using the Beta Curves, I was able to get the polygonal and freehand lasso tools work correctly while the undocked Color Palette dialog was opened.  However, in subsequent attempts, the Polygonal Lasso tool and Freehand Lasso tool are no longer working again when the Color Palette is open.  Very strange.

Edited August 31, 2020 by gbball

[digman 1,206]

What curves are you using, the old or new beta curves. Need that information in order to test. 

[gbball 202]

@digman I hadn't been using the new curves, just the polyonal and freehand lasso tool.  All the beta features are enabled though.  

I edited my earlier post to mention that after your comment I did try to see if the curves would work and they did.  Subsequently, the polygonal lasso and freehand lasso tool did end up working as expected.  However, this only worked the one time I tried it and subsequent attempts to get the lasso tools working properly by using the curves first didn't work.

[digman 1,206]

Version 4.9.58 Windows. GL version.

@tcwik....

I get clean cuts not what is shown in your picture using both New beta and old curves.

@ggball

Old Curves:

I confirm the bug when color palette is undocked. I tested clicking somewhere on the 3DC interface but not on a tool or menu item after undocking.

Then drew out another curve for cutoff and it starting working again. I ran through the test a few times.

Maybe it is a focus issue. 3DC remains focus on the Color palette till you click somewhere else on the interface which is a bug.

[gbball 202]

Thanks for confirming Digman.  I had a feeling it was probably a focus issue.  Hopefully it can get sorted out.