Is it my imagination or is 3D Coat AUTOPO now just as good as Zbrush Remesher?

[L'Ancien Regime]

It's been two years and frankly I'm astounded at just how good AUTOPO is. I know it's not going to give animators the kind of precise mesh they want but still. I'm just amazed at the results it's giving me compared to the junk it was putting out before.

What happened. Can one of you historians of 3D Coat and Andrew tell me just what has been going on in this department?

 

This is 4900 polygons with internal space for the mouth and nasal passages and eye sockets as you can sort of see. That alone should have confused it and made an atrocious mess.

 

Bravo Andrew.

Edited August 27, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime

[L'Ancien Regime]

So on further reflection I did a lot more work on Autopo, adding painting the voxel area where you want more detail and also adding indicators for mesh flow. After many tests my verdict is less is more but having said that, it works well. I felt it was particularly important to have more geometry flowing around the nostrils and it worked not too badly. I went from  4900 to 10,000 polygons and didn't have to even touch up a single ngon or tangled mess anywhere. Using symmetry was essential to good results.  My only critique would be around the rim of the eyes but when you start drawing in too many splines and insisting on two many conflicting flows that's when things start to get tangled up in the overload. I can live with this.

 

  

 

Well actually I went back and tried an added loop around the eyes with three lines coming out of the eye sockets; one across the bridge of the nose, one straight back to the top of the ears and one up into the forehead. Really, there is no need for ZRemesher at all now. 3D coat can handle it all.

 

 

Oh and I just discovered "close holes" and "remove n-gons".  Very nice for those unreachable problems in the eye sockets and other enclosed areas.

Edited August 28, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime

[AbnRanger]

12 hours ago, L'Ancien Regime said:

It's been two years and frankly I'm astounded at just how good AUTOPO is. I know it's not going to give animators the kind of precise mesh they want but still. I'm just amazed at the results it's giving me compared to the junk it was putting out before.

What happened. Can one of you historians of 3D Coat and Andrew tell me just what has been going on in this department?

 

This is 4900 polygons with internal space for the mouth and nasal passages and eye sockets as you can sort of see. That alone should have confused it and made an atrocious mess.

 

Bravo Andrew.

In a lot of situations, it does a really good job. It requires some finessing when the object has complex shapes, but still very useful. I like using it on secondary objects, like teeth, tongue, belts, buttons, etc. Those could eat up a lot of time doing it by hand, and they don't have to have perfect topology.

[L'Ancien Regime]

On 8/28/2019 at 6:30 AM, AbnRanger said:

In a lot of situations, it does a really good job. It requires some finessing when the object has complex shapes, but still very useful. I like using it on secondary objects, like teeth, tongue, belts, buttons, etc. Those could eat up a lot of time doing it by hand, and they don't have to have perfect topology.

It royally kicks ass.

 

 

I remember the bad old days. This is amazing and complex as hell with that nasal sinus area above the palate and those eye sockets are not simple at all; they're thin semi spherical membranes and not a single tangled mesh or uneven mess in sight. And FAST.

As good if not better than Zremesher.

 

15000 polys with no splines or painted weight maps.

Edited September 5, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime

[yoohasz]

Cool experiments. I had a retopo session last night. Hmmm yummy, and I really enjow solving topo problems (perv) I started out with autopo and did a manual pass after that it speeds up so much of the work! I think 3Dcoat is unmatched in manual or auto retopology.

[L'Ancien Regime]

2 minutes ago, yoohasz said:

Cool experiments. I had a retopo session last night. Hmmm yummy, and I really enjow solving topo problems (perv) I started out with autopo and did a manual pass after that it speeds up so much of the work! I think 3Dcoat is unmatched in manual or auto retopology.

Post em. Let us see. 

I'm particularly impressed with the way it automatically detects and works out flow lines. Andrew or whoever worked on this should come in here and tell us as much as he (they) (zhe?) can without giving out trade secrets. 

[yoohasz]

I actually just found a bug that I'll report in the beta forum, meet you over there! 3Dcoat still the *goat* though!

[L'Ancien Regime]

I just did this test for a much more complex retopo job for a 3 year old project I'm reviving. It took several tries but just straight up Autopo with no painted weight maps or contour splines added gave me this adequate result  with a final setting of 10,000 polygons. 15000 was too much and 7500 not enough; the retopo just crumbled at the outermost fine extremities of the topography. Two or three years ago there's no way Autopo could have given a result like this. This is such a relief. I hate doing big complex retopo jobs by hand. The retopo took far more time than the initial voxel model to sculpt. I spent an entire month going crazy on one retopo job. It was crazy.

 

I went as mad as a march hare trying to do this by hand. It was like solving some insane calculus problem that wouldn't work out no matter how you tried to solve it.

 

Edited September 6, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime

[yoohasz]

wow and these are thin objects that I always find hard to retopo. Nice!

[Dmitry Bedrik]

Why mock the program, trying to do such simple things (I mean - the edge of the wings and other "straight" things) using retopology, when it is faster and easier to make them polygons, and then export to 3Dcoat? 

[Dmitry Bedrik]

As for the retopology and comparison with the zremesh - maybe I'm wrong, but can I somehow automatically (of course, if this check box is checked) replace the current mesh with a retopology? And whether something like subdivision in a blender or 3Ds max will be added (so that a low-poly retopology can be turned into a more or less high-poly and detailed)?

[L'Ancien Regime]

1 hour ago, Dmitry Bedrik said:

Why mock the program, trying to do such simple things (I mean - the edge of the wings and other "straight" things) using retopology, when it is faster and easier to make them polygons, and then export to 3Dcoat? 

It's not mocking the program whatsoever. That wing autoretopo is just a test for a much more complex retopo job that would be a pain in the ass to do otherwise. It passed the test with flying colors.  This is going to be a job that requires a good autoretopology program, not otherwise. I'm looking forward to some extremely satisfying renders with all that gold, enamel, pearls and cut crystals in it. I'm doing it in 3D Coat. It's got all the tools I'll need outide of the render engine which will probably be Renderman or maybe AMD's ProRender.

 

 

Edited September 6, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime

[Dmitry Bedrik]

Hey, this was not an attempt to be rude.

I mean that a number of things are easier to make polygons in another program. When I tried to do something in a сoat with such subtle objects, it turned into torture. Starting from through holes with smoothing and difficulty with adjusting shapes.

Edited September 6, 2019 by Dmitry Bedrik

[L'Ancien Regime]

5 minutes ago, Dmitry Bedrik said:

Hey, this was not an attempt to be rude.

I mean that a number of things are easier to make polygons in another program. When I tried to do something in a сoat with such subtle objects, it turned into torture. Starting from through holes with smoothing and difficulty with adjusting shapes.

OK. But I used to use that technique and this workflow is much better. That autoretopo with the long spindly loop is quite the technological accomplishment I can assure you, since you do seem to be new to this subject. In fact I'm amazed by it to no end. It's a huge liberation for artists in 3D computer graphics. It wasn't possible 3 years ago. 

 

The 3D Coat/Zbrush/Mudbox workflow is to sculpt with 10, 20, 30 million polygons or voxels, then retopo, by hand or automatically, a much simpler poligonal mesh then bake out the fine details of the original sculpt onto the UV mapped retopology, then render the UV mapped poligonal retopo with it's Displacement, Normal Maps, color maps and ambient occlusion and curve maps, gloss maps and perhaps even emitter map.

 

 

Edited September 6, 2019 by L'Ancien Regime

[Dmitry Bedrik]

How will you create this cell structure?

[L'Ancien Regime]

4 minutes ago, Dmitry Bedrik said:

How will you create this cell structure?

I'll clone the original solid wing several times. then I'll cut out the intricate web of gold holding it all together. Then I'll take another clone with the cut out web still visible but ghosted and cut the crystal cells out by hand with the cutting tool or just extrude a clone of that gold web and use it as a boolean tool to cut out the solid wing. Something like that.

[L'Ancien Regime]

This is pretty incredible workflow, though, I must say;

 

There's a plug in so that you can draw in whatever polygroups you want to create with Polypaint. It's right around the 9 minute mark. That is pretty cool stuff I must admit.

[Carlosan]

 

[Carlosan]

I am trying to mimic that ZB workflow. 

Using freeze as guides, any test finding the way is very welcome. Thx