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I agree that going up and down in resolution is important, but why would anyone sculpt everything in high res?

You are right, What I meant is: once you are in highres (for details) you just cant comeback to a lowres for broad stroaks. From this point on you are sculpting everything in highres...

A good example is to sculpt Hair in (Zbrush/Mudbox). you start with a few strokes for the overall shape (lowres) and then go for a really highres for fine hair details, jump back to base mesh to sculpt it again...you are never "afraid" of subdiv the mesh one more time because you know you can cam back to the lowres or even delete the highres layer...In 3DCoat if do some fine hair detail every other adjustment has to be in that resolution (highres).

That doesn't seem to be important at first because you can use broad strokes in highres. but the more you model -- you realise how important is to be in the "correct" resolution for every stroke (fine, broad)...

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Please describe better "drop of quallity"

I tried test - made 3M sphere with noise, add polygon in retopo, subdiv couple of times, unwrap, merge for microvert painting.

All worked ok.

Here is what I mean. http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=2780

in the beginning I don't remember it having these seams in it.

Also I'm using per-pixel because I'm baking for real time game engines and so I'm baking to low poly models.

Here is another example.

post-1190-1246119475_thumb.png

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Win version updated to 3.00.08B

Changes:

- UV-Sets in DP/MV can be renamed in import dialog

- smoothing in high res meshes in surface mode improved. It still has big potential to be improved.

I had only couple of hours today, so there are not too big changes.

Thanks Andrew. Changing the UV sets on import, or using the UV manager was not working before (it would not stick). I will try the update this afternoon.

b

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Thanks Andrew. Changing the UV sets on import, or using the UV manager was not working before (it would not stick). I will try the update this afternoon.

b

A quick question about the importing: I find that sometimes when I export a group of objects as .obj (from Max) and import to 3DC the import gives me one UV set and object, although the sub-objects show up fine in the list, and sometimes the import will show a different uV set for each object, so each gets its own texture. How do you control that?

Also: 3DC often generates a name like "wire11199302" for the uv sets of each object - could it use the sub-object name instead so we can tell which object is which on import and name the uv set properly?

Thanks

b

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A quick question about the importing: I find that sometimes when I export a group of objects as .obj (from Max) and import to 3DC the import gives me one UV set and object, although the sub-objects show up fine in the list, and sometimes the import will show a different uV set for each object, so each gets its own texture. How do you control that?

Also: 3DC often generates a name like "wire11199302" for the uv sets of each object - could it use the sub-object name instead so we can tell which object is which on import and name the uv set properly?

Thanks

b

Just to clarify this issue: the uV naming now seems to be working, thanks Andrew, but I am not at all clear on how the UV sets get determined in a multi-object import.

I exported a model out of Max. It has 27 separate objects as parts. Each has a unique name like "hinge1", "rivet 2" etc. They came from 5 layers in Max, and there are 5 material id's assigned to them. I used some Unwrap UV modifiers to arrange some objects UV coordinates so that I could put several of them together on single texture maps, but each has it's own uv's.

I export that out of Max.

When I import for per-pixel painting in 3DC the dialog box I see 10 UVsets (so 10 materials) and each is name some variation of "wire1133002" (wire and some string of random numbers). What I don't get is:

1) Why 10 UV sets? Where are these coming from - why not 5 for the material ID's or 27 for the unique objects? When I do import them I see all 27 subobjects in 3DC, so it sees them all on some level. I have no idea how to control that properly.

2) Why the odd name wire/number name? If 3DC is seeing the sub-object names - which it does because each has its proper name in the sub-object list, then why isn't the UV set getting named properly too?

Thanks in advance for any help.

b

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Will the new voxel -> surface functionality eventually allow for the ability to go up and down resolutions (ie Mudbox, ZB) and then either keep it surface or drop it back into voxels? welcome back! Turkey looked like alot of fun :D
Seems it is not hard to do. At least it worth to be done.

http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=2871

Oh, thank you Andrew, I would be so happy to have this as I said in my thread. It seems like this is very popular request to have ability to increase or decrease poly count like ZBrush so please if you can implement this in Per-Pixel and Voxels this would be the best feature ever!!! :)

And welcome back from Turkey Vacation! :)

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my only request right now is to improve the voxel baking quality ^^

Baking to microvertex works much beter, so use microvertex. Baking to DP has some major mathematical problems, but I am trying to solve it.

Anyway one possible non-problematic way - bake normalmap, not displacement to DP.

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The more strength on surface smoothing is a great improvement,thanks!

In mho,now 3 things are needed to improve the workflow as smooth and fluid as possible.

--First,pose tool improvement

2 things here are bothering me.

If you use the pen tool to paint the masking area("select with pen") and you do a mistake,if you do an undo,the manipulator axes are lost,you have to redo the axis line,the rotation/scaling/moving axis shouldn't be affected by undo on pen selection masking

And the "select with pen" must be more precise,I don't know why,but selecting a forearm is a pain,you always have areas where the masking isn't full,so when you start the posing some part of the surface/volume(I have found that here the behaviour is the same)aren't trasformed completely but only for a small percentage,breaking the shape,and you have to redo(sometimes losing the previous selection like with the pose manipulator)

So please make the undo not affecting selection and axis but only posing in this contest.

---Second,as someone has allready pointed out, surface flatten shouldn't work on backside(maybe an user option for brushes could be cool).

--Third, if you find a way to switch to a low resolution to do moving and posing transformation the tool could be really easier to work with(sorry for bothering,I 'm sure you know this)

A good artist can work without multiresolution but it's a limitation,it's force the user to a linear workflow,if you have fine arts experience isn't a problem but the beauty in computer art is freedom,if your target is computer artists this limitation can give really frustration(btw,I find linear workflow really interesting to improve personal skills,in this way you have to focus better on shapes)

Bye

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There are a few things still missing. Most of these are long standing requests. Some are bug fixes.

- Freeze for voxel sculpting (also referred to as masking).

- A flatten brush for voxels

- Rapid brush for voxels. Since this is a volume building brush i think a pure voxel version would be great. It would be even better if you could use different alpha's and pen settings.

- Scrape brush should have a working strength value which multiplies the pen pressure. It would benefit the brush greatly and make it more controllable. (not to mention it would make the brush actually usuable for people that are stilling using a mouse)

- I think carve could be removed in favor of extrude. You could add an option under voxel options to "show carve" but i dont think anyone will miss it.

- Vox pinch needs to be improved. Currently it works like the pinch brush works in zbrush and mudbox by pulling from the sides towards the imaginary corner under the brush center. This gives very lackluster results in voxels not to mention the benefit this brings in mesh sculpting (creating a local increase in mesh resolution) is wasted on voxels.

This brush needs to be looked at fresh as a pure voxel brush. Personally i think the answer lies in not pulling towards the center but filling up the center with the missing corner. This would also remove the distortion on the side of the brush and would actually make it a cleaner pinch brush then the one in zbrush and mudbox. If i need to draw this out let me know and i will.

- Brush profile curves. (i dont think these need any explanation)

- While i think its nice to have a surface smooth available im not a fan of having to switch from voxel to mesh just to smooth a thin area out. Is there any chance of implementing the functionality for a min thickness when using smooth and move in voxels?

- The hide tool is completely useless in its current state. It hides in big enormous chunks. This means i cant hide a finger without hiding the hand. I cant hide an arm without hiding part of the torso. I cant hide an ear without hiding half the head. This is a very serious problem. This is an essential tool and it should just work flawlessly.

The good thing is you allready have all the functionality for a great hide function in the split tool. What this does is allow you to clip away a part of your sculpt and move it to another layer. The only thing you need to do is instead of putting it on another layer store it in memory (or on disk; whatever works). When the user unhides merge it back in on the same layer it was hidden from. A perfect hide function! Its precise, its fast and most importantly it allows you to work freely on the part that is still visible as a VOLUME (its still closed as it should be). So you can use hide to create a cavity. This may sound small but is really, really usefull. It will free up the trimming and cutting tools for a MUCH wider use! Currently there are often times where i want to trim away volume and i cant because i cannot hide the parts that are in the way! I think its very important you spend some time on this.

- All surface tools create voxel streaks perpendicular to the symmetry plane when symmetry is turned on. This bug is easy to replicate because it always happens. It makes surface tools completely unusable in combination with symmetry. Not only that but surface tools become quite slow when used in combination with symmetry. This may just be because each stroke has to be transfered to voxels twice (on both sides of the symmetry plane) but perhaps there are ways to optimize that or its related to the bug.

Ill leave it at this for now. I really hope at least some of these get fixed since quite a few carry over from v3's alpha and beta period and are long standing requests.

3dioot

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....

1) Why 10 UV sets? Where are these coming from - why not 5 for the material ID's or 27 for the unique objects? When I do import them I see all 27 subobjects in 3DC, so it sees them all on some level. I have no idea how to control that properly.

2) Why the odd name wire/number name? If 3DC is seeing the sub-object names - which it does because each has its proper name in the sub-object list, then why isn't the UV set getting named properly too?

Thanks in advance for any help.

b

While waiting for some help on this I was playing with other export options and it just made me more confused :) I exported the same object set out of Max as an fbx file instead of .obj and it imports into 3DC with 27 uv sets, but all have blank names by default. How do you possibly control this so you can choose which objects can share a UV set and texture, and which get there own individual ones?

b

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There are a few things still missing. Most of these are long standing requests. Some are bug fixes.

- Freeze for voxel sculpting (also referred to as masking).

- A flatten brush for voxels

- Rapid brush for voxels. Since this is a volume building brush i think a pure voxel version would be great. It would be even better if you could use different alpha's and pen settings.

- Scrape brush should have a working strength value which multiplies the pen pressure. It would benefit the brush greatly and make it more controllable. (not to mention it would make the brush actually usuable for people that are stilling using a mouse)

- I think carve could be removed in favor of extrude. You could add an option under voxel options to "show carve" but i dont think anyone will miss it.

- Vox pinch needs to be improved. Currently it works like the pinch brush works in zbrush and mudbox by pulling from the sides towards the imaginary corner under the brush center. This gives very lackluster results in voxels not to mention the benefit this brings in mesh sculpting (creating a local increase in mesh resolution) is wasted on voxels.

This brush needs to be looked at fresh as a pure voxel brush. Personally i think the answer lies in not pulling towards the center but filling up the center with the missing corner. This would also remove the distortion on the side of the brush and would actually make it a cleaner pinch brush then the one in zbrush and mudbox. If i need to draw this out let me know and i will.

- Brush profile curves. (i dont think these need any explanation)

- While i think its nice to have a surface smooth available im not a fan of having to switch from voxel to mesh just to smooth a thin area out. Is there any chance of implementing the functionality for a min thickness when using smooth and move in voxels?

- The hide tool is completely useless in its current state. It hides in big enormous chunks. This means i cant hide a finger without hiding the hand. I cant hide an arm without hiding part of the torso. I cant hide an ear without hiding half the head. This is a very serious problem. This is an essential tool and it should just work flawlessly.

The good thing is you allready have all the functionality for a great hide function in the split tool. What this does is allow you to clip away a part of your sculpt and move it to another layer. The only thing you need to do is instead of putting it on another layer store it in memory (or on disk; whatever works). When the user unhides merge it back in on the same layer it was hidden from. A perfect hide function! Its precise, its fast and most importantly it allows you to work freely on the part that is still visible as a VOLUME (its still closed as it should be). So you can use hide to create a cavity. This may sound small but is really, really usefull. It will free up the trimming and cutting tools for a MUCH wider use! Currently there are often times where i want to trim away volume and i cant because i cannot hide the parts that are in the way! I think its very important you spend some time on this.

- All surface tools create voxel streaks perpendicular to the symmetry plane when symmetry is turned on. This bug is easy to replicate because it always happens. It makes surface tools completely unusable in combination with symmetry. Not only that but surface tools become quite slow when used in combination with symmetry. This may just be because each stroke has to be transfered to voxels twice (on both sides of the symmetry plane) but perhaps there are ways to optimize that or its related to the bug.

Ill leave it at this for now. I really hope at least some of these get fixed since quite a few carry over from v3's alpha and beta period and are long standing requests.

3dioot

Carve is useful for snapping a layers to another.

I agree with other stuff,even if I think that hiding with a medium/high res works not so bad(how can you do ears and fingers without medium/high resolution?)

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Lots of suggestions for improving 3dCoat, it keeps getting better and better.

My 2 cents(especially useful for a current project I have):

1) A simple "place picture" tool. For instance for drawing windows on a low-poly house. When giving this option handles, you could easily place square images(without tiling)

2) An easier way to rotate images when using the "Cube Mapping" option. Perhaps a preview window which shows how much it has altered?

3) An option to create UV's automatically for all poly's which didn't have a UV yet.

Thanks in advance.

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Just to clarify this issue: the uV naming now seems to be working, thanks Andrew, but I am not at all clear on how the UV sets get determined in a multi-object import.

I exported a model out of Max. It has 27 separate objects as parts. Each has a unique name like "hinge1", "rivet 2" etc. They came from 5 layers in Max, and there are 5 material id's assigned to them. I used some Unwrap UV modifiers to arrange some objects UV coordinates so that I could put several of them together on single texture maps, but each has it's own uv's.

I export that out of Max.

When I import for per-pixel painting in 3DC the dialog box I see 10 UVsets (so 10 materials) and each is name some variation of "wire1133002" (wire and some string of random numbers). What I don't get is:

1) Why 10 UV sets? Where are these coming from - why not 5 for the material ID's or 27 for the unique objects? When I do import them I see all 27 subobjects in 3DC, so it sees them all on some level. I have no idea how to control that properly.

2) Why the odd name wire/number name? If 3DC is seeing the sub-object names - which it does because each has its proper name in the sub-object list, then why isn't the UV set getting named properly too?

Thanks in advance for any help.

b

Please send me the model to support@3d-coat.com, I will look why it happens.

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Hello Andrew, you are right the micro vertex works better, but I didn't find a simple way to bake the normal microvertex and then export the low poly and then close the micro vertex paint object and then to reimport the exported low poly obj for per pixel with the normal map of the microvertex object already applied. Maybe if that entire process was automated with the click of a single option. ^^

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1) A simple "place picture" tool. For instance for drawing windows on a low-poly house. When giving this option handles, you could easily place square images(without tiling)

I think this is a big one. For example, I'm currently reworking an old shot in LightWave:

th_reel_2009.jpg

While I was working I was thinking about how difficult it would be to apply the stars and other various decals to this plane. Something else that's difficult is the Starbucks building I've been texturing in 3DC (which I swear I'm going to finish). It has lots of signs with Starbucks logos and other things that would be pretty difficult to place with Materials. Speaking of which, along the same lines there would need to be a more simple way to load in "decal" images. The Materials panel is somewhat cumbersome for this since it asks you to load color, normal, and spec, then once you are finished the image stays there in the panel. That's great for materials, but for something like decals it shouldn't stay.

Perhaps if there was a panel where you could load in a bunch of images at once, then somehow place them on the model. A good way to do this can be seen in LightWave where you can use a null as a reference object for an image. So you can move / rotate / scale the null to position the image on your model. Then when you're done placing all of your decals you can click one button to empty the "image storage" panel.

Here's a quick video showing that null thing:

http://screencast.com/t/r8WiiWXb

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Crash bug in Mac OS 10.5.x:

- In Retopo, select an outer edge of a geometry

- Press "L" to select the loop

- Extrude the edge, release the mouse, 3DCoat starts saving, the popuo window never goes past the first bar

- The window caption says 0% and 3D Coat hangs

Hope this helps

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Perhaps if there was a panel where you could load in a bunch of images at once, then somehow place them on the model. A good way to do this can be seen in LightWave where you can use a null as a reference object for an image. So you can move / rotate / scale the null to position the image on your model. Then when you're done placing all of your decals you can click one button to empty the "image storage" panel.

Agree - would definitely improve usuability.

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Carve is useful for snapping a layers to another.

I agree with other stuff,even if I think that hiding with a medium/high res works not so bad(how can you do ears and fingers without medium/high resolution?)

Thats a very good point about carve. I had noticed that before but had forgotten about it. You mean this effect right?

Movie1

I think however that should be an parameter of a brush and not hardcoded behaviour. What i mean by that is that carve has it (you cant turn it off), extrude doesnt have it (cant turn it on) and sphere brush has it (cant turn it off). To make matters worse the sphere brush even shows this behaviour on HIDDEN layers. So if you have a volume on a hidden layer and you use the sphere brush it will act like that layer is visible and always take it into account.

I think it would be a much better solution if it was one of the parameters of a brush. So you could toggle it on or off for the extrude and sphere brush. Something like "draw on all layers". As a local option to the brush ofcourse (not a global option). If that would be the case would you still feel you need carve? :)

In regards to hide. Here is a very simple example where i try to hide the lower lip and chin on a sculpt.

Movie2

While i find this hugely annoying on its own keep in mind the potential a true volumetric hide would give you. Imagine how it would open up the cutting and trimming tools for much broader use. That alone warrants a new hide imho. :)

3dioot

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1) A simple "place picture" tool. For instance for drawing windows on a low-poly house. When giving this option handles, you could easily place square images(without tiling)

In typical 3DC fashion there is already something that exists that allows you to do this. Try...

Transform/Copy tool. Import a psd file that contains your image. Make sure the PSD file contains 3 layers. Specular, HeightMap, Color. In that order from bottom to top. Then you can stamp it down onto your mesh in a projection manner using Enter on the keyboard.

Works really well. I love this tool.

*Edit*

Just tried deleting HeightMap & Specular Layers to see if it still worked and it does. Your PSD file only needs to contain the info that you want to stamp.. Good job Andrew :D

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Thats a very good point about carve. I had noticed that before but had forgotten about it. You mean this effect right?

Movie1

I think however that should be an parameter of a brush and not hardcoded behaviour. What i mean by that is that carve has it (you cant turn it off), extrude doesnt have it (cant turn it on) and sphere brush has it (cant turn it off). To make matters worse the sphere brush even shows this behaviour on HIDDEN layers. So if you have a volume on a hidden layer and you use the sphere brush it will act like that layer is visible and always take it into account.

I think it would be a much better solution if it was one of the parameters of a brush. So you could toggle it on or off for the extrude and sphere brush. Something like "draw on all layers". As a local option to the brush ofcourse (not a global option). If that would be the case would you still feel you need carve? :)

In regards to hide. Here is a very simple example where i try to hide the lower lip and chin on a sculpt.

Movie2

While i find this hugely annoying on its own keep in mind the potential a true volumetric hide would give you. Imagine how it would open up the cutting and trimming tools for much broader use. That alone warrants a new hide imho. :)

3dioot

Yes,I mean that !

Btw,I like ideas for improvements,I think here all we want the same thing, making the tool always better.

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In typical 3DC fashion there is already something that exists that allows you to do this. Try...

Transform/Copy tool. Import a psd file that contains your image. Make sure the PSD file contains 3 layers. Specular, HeightMap, Color. In that order from bottom to top. Then you can stamp it down onto your mesh in a projection manner using Enter on the keyboard.

Works really well. I love this tool.

*Edit*

Just tried deleting HeightMap & Specular Layers to see if it still worked and it does. Your PSD file only needs to contain the info that you want to stamp.. Good job Andrew :D

post-920-1246307647_thumb.jpg

ghib, thanks for this tip but for some strange reason I can't get the image to show up when I hit "return (mac) "enter" (pc). I just opened 3DC and selected Per-Pixel Painting then created a cube and used "auto-UV" then clicked on the transform/copy tool and selected Import to import my .psd file. Does my .psd file have to be a certain number of layers or do I have to save the cube as a .3b file first before this wil work for example?

Thanks

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Yes,I mean that !

Btw,I like ideas for improvements,I think here all we want the same thing, making the tool always better.

I think so too. Curious to see what improvements/fixes the next update brings.

3dioot

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Andrew, glad to hear your eye surgery went well. :) Working on the computer all day is hard on the eyes.

Is there a download of 3DCoat 3.00.08 for mac yet. I went to downloads and it started downloading 3.00.07?

Andrew, can you please tell me how possible it would be to add the option to increase/decrease subdivision count on meshes. Is this something that could be available soon or will we have to wait for a next release? I am finding it increasingly difficult and frustrating to work without this feature on a daily basis.

Thanks

Also I think "Mesh Extraction" is a feature that 3DCoat will eventually have to incorporate if it wants to compete with ZBrush as it's very fast and efficient for creating clothes, helmets, gloves and many other objects from any piece of geometry. (please see the link)

http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Mesh_Extraction

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Hello

How about a Voxel to curve tool, Ive been toying with the 2d paint tool for figure/form creation but it is hit and miss often with narrow or flat results, growing mass from shperes generates almopst controllable results. Thing I would like to be able to do is rough out forms quickly (Like Z-Sphere in ZB) and growing or 2d painting of mass requires quite a lot of correction/Tidying to bring back to usable. Now both Pedro and myself touched on a ZSphere type implimentation for voxels in our thjreads, which would be great, but i wonder if you could not use the curve tool as the base for this? if we could control the size and length of curve in 3d space then grow mass along it you would be 3/4 of the way there. giving a much more usable fast form result that does not require lots of tweaking.

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