3DCoat 2025 development thread

[Ctc_nick]

On 5/4/2025 at 9:47 AM, carrots said:

Version 2025.02
Latest build

https://drive.google.com/file/d/13OmytqD3C6xJ0mab0m1aHXtsPNVU6EUS/view?usp=sharing

- Fixed crash during automatic update
- Fixed problem of unnecessary ALT-rotation of the 3D-splines (used in pose/freeze)
- Automatically reload python modules when they change. You can enable this option in the extensions window for comfortable extension development without restarting 3DCoat
- Updated Python API
- Essential multiresolution improvement: Possibility to work with multiple objects simultaneously. All operations may apply to current object / selected / all visible objects. Also, retopo objects used as lowest multiresolution level should match the volume name to be able to manage multiple multiresolution objects in scene. It simplifies posing in big scenes very essentially.
- Faster rooms switching
- All scripts and commands converted to python
- Fixed Node Graph crash when shader debug mode is enabled
- Retopo/Modeling Room: Some tools ware polished.
- Retopo/Modeling Room: Smart Retopo - little Improvement.
- Fixed view modes for sculptured objects (smooth shade, relief only, flat shade, gloss only)
- Fixed node baking when using AO and curvature
- Once Ambient Occlusion is baked, it will automatically be assigned the Occlusion blend type.
- Fixed a bug where material previews were displayed black
- Automatic renaming of nodes with the same name.
- Fixed rendering of shader previews.

Hi! As for new (beta) versions, I have to say I very much prefer the Zip Versions, like you made!! Then you dont accidentially screw up your main install, and you also have a clean remove from your system.

So far everything is working fine. Even my new plugin, which is available on gumroad for testing: Snaptoolbox v1.2  -a Curve Tool.

[Stefka]

Dear Developers
I´m using version 2025.01, but my problem is related as well to all the older versions.
Hope this is the right place to talk about it!?
I´m using 3DCoat now for more than 2 years. I´m only doing hard surface modeling. One of my main problems is in the Modeling room.
It is the "non-manifold" problem.
As everybody knows, this function is deleting triangles anywhere in your model, neither showing you where the triangles have been deleted, nor giving you the chance to disable the deletion!
This unwanted deletion ruins many of my models and costs me a lot of time to repair. The non-manifold problem is not an issue for my models.
Because of the deletion, the modeling room is of no use for me, because it causes more problems than solutions. Instead, I´m using blender for this, because here I never got any complaints, nor did I ever get any parts of my model willfully deleted.

PLEASE!
1. Make the correction of any non-manifold problem optional in your software. User may disable this option and never again gets patronized. I think many may be greatful if you tell them that their model has some errors but nobody wants you to delete any triangles out of a 50´ - 100´ triangles and leave them a nice puzzle to solve.

2. If enabled, the places where you deleted part of the model should be marked.

3. The note that is posted, when triangles are deleted , should not be in the footer of the window. When working concentrated on something, and not expecting any messages, you will not see it. I think it´s better to place any error messages in the center of the screen.

So PLEASE again, set this function as an option.

Thank you very much for your kind attention.

Best regards
Walter

[Elemeno]

 

 

not sure what i did or how to replicate , but maybe you know instantly

 

[omniripple]

2025.01 and 2025.02 and 2025.3 in voxel mode, using the move brush on an unfrozen section, breaks freeze.

edit....turns out you could never do this, it always breaks the freeze......ok weird. i guess because it's adding voxels every time you use the move it breaks the freeze..........interesting. 

Edited May 21 by omniripple

[Oleg Shapov]

11 hours ago, omniripple said:

it always breaks the freeze

Could you make a video? I don't quite understand what the problem is.

[Elemeno]

8 hours ago, Oleg Shapov said:

Could you make a video? I don't quite understand what the problem is.

he was trying to use the mask"freeze" and then a move tool while in voxel mode but voxel mode doesnt use masking tools like that it ignores them and always has and thats what he was saying , 

however @omniripple masking "freeze" does work perfect in surface mode 

you really wanna use voxels for the blockout or base , get a good shape and then into surface mode for detailing

[DoubleCatPunch]

When using the 3Dconnexion SpaceMouse in 3DCoat, there is unstable camera behavior. After launching the program, navigation works correctly, but once a brush is switched, the camera may suddenly snap to the center point between the X, Y, and Z axes and become stuck. The only way to restore control is to restart the program. This bug is intermittent: sometimes everything works fine, and other times the camera freezes right away. Before locking up, the camera often jumps sharply to the center, though it doesn’t always get stuck immediately. The issue has been observed in versions 2024.30 and 2025.01–2025.03. The driver in use is 3DxWare 10.9.5.693.
And why does Smart Retopo work so slowly? In version 2025.03, the performance has improved slightly, but it’s still extremely slow. For example, on a model with 50K polygons, using Quadrangulation with U Spans set to 7 can take over 15 minutes to process. The same issue occurs when using R-Fill — the wait times are just as long. Is this expected behavior, or is there a way to optimize the performance?

[Elemeno]

does anyone know where to find the notes for 2025.3/4???

[Oleg Shapov]

14 hours ago, Elemeno said:

does anyone know where to find the notes for 2025.3/4???

You can read about it on the Updates manager page from the Start menu.

[Stefka]

Hi to all.
Maybe I do get a reply to this topic of mine this time.
Again, I only talk about hard surface modeling.
When I´m in UV room, imagine your point of view is inside of an object and you are marking with the rectangular marquee tool some edges, vertices ahead and then afterwards you go out of the object, you will see that the edges, vertices diagonally opposite to the ones you have selected are also selected.
Would be great if this strange behaviour could be solved.
Thank you and best regards
Walter

[Oleg Shapov]

1 hour ago, Stefka said:

Maybe I do get a reply to this topic of mine this time.

Hi! I don't see this kind of behavior. Or I don't understand how to repeat it.

[Elemeno]

1 hour ago, Oleg Shapov said:

You can read about it on the Updates manager page from the Start menu.

i just tried but it doesn't load , its not a serious thing im just a curious mind

[Oleg Shapov]

2 minutes ago, Elemeno said:

i just tried but it doesn't load

It doesn't load from 2025.01. It does load from 2025.03.

[wendallhitherd]

custom rooms lose top ribbon on 2025.03  and popup window that should be shown when copying a toolset up
on new room creation does not show up when clicked, cleared out local prefs and started from scratch and still occurs

[Stefka]

7 hours ago, Oleg Shapov said:

Hi! I don't see this kind of behavior. Or I don't understand how to repeat it.

Hi. Sorry maybe my explanation was poor.
Here are some pictures.
I have to mention first that rectangular marquee has to be set to islands.
Bild1: shows the view from outside the trailer, nothing selected.
Bild2: move to the inside of the trailer and select the upper left corner with the rectangualr marquee tool.
Bild3: Move out of the trailer and you can see that f.e. the fender and the fender holder and some other parts are selcted. These parts are not the same island.

Edited May 23 by Stefka

[Elemeno]

3 hours ago, Stefka said:

Hi. Sorry maybe my explanation was poor.
Here are some pictures.
I have to mention first that rectangular marquee has to be set to islands.
Bild1: shows the view from outside the trailer, nothing selected.
Bild2: move to the inside of the trailer and select the upper left corner with the rectangualr marquee tool.
Bild3: Move out of the trailer and you can see that f.e. the fender and the fender holder and some other parts are selcted. These parts are not the same island.

 

 

[Stefka]

Hi @Elemeno
Thank you for the video, but you are not in the UV room!
 

  

Did a short video as well.

Edited May 24 by Stefka

[Stefka]

Hi again.
Just to improve the next version, I would like to point out some facts on the layer system that are not working since I started with 3DCoat, within Painting room.
I texture different objects up to the final state and save these objects as .3b files. All of these objects do have a different number of layers within the Painting room.
Finally, when all the different objects for my model are finished, I start importing one by one. Reason is that I need a single texture for my future export to another software product.
The problem arises when I start importing the objects.

 

Here are 3 pictures showing the problem.
Picture 1 and 2 are 2 different objects with their layers.
Picture 3 shows the result when object 2 is imported onto object 1. The import is done within Painting room by, File - Import - Model for per Pixel Painting.
When you have a close look at the layers from the result picture 3, you will see that some layers got deleted and some are completely missing. The painted objects are still ok. As a result some of the information from the missing or deleted layers are mixed randomly onto other layers. Effectively the layer system is completely broken and not useable any more.
I also tried to copy the layers within an original object into a folder. When you import object 2 into object 1, there are not 2 folders each with the assigned layers, but the layers from object 2 are imported in the folder of object 1 and the result is the same: some are deleted some are missing, the layer system is broken.

Even if the names of the layers out of the different objects are the same, like Layer 1 or Layer 0, the system should manage this by renaming to Layer 0 Copy and Layer 1 Copy, like Photoshop does.

As a complete work around I have to combine all layers for each object and then I can import, but then also all layers are lost, so no real work around has happened.

Please repair this in the next version so that the layer system is useful. 

Thank you and best regards
Walter

[Stefka]

Hi again.
In addition to my last post there is another problem in the Painting room when working together with Photoshop.
When editing layers in Photoshop CS5 and adding effects in Photoshop, like Stroke, this effect is not transfered to 3DCoat.
Here are 2 pictures.

Picture 1 shows the effect, Stroke on the Shape 4 in Photoshop CS5.
After pressing CTRL-S in Photoshop, the effect can´t be seen in 3DCoat, the rest can be seen.
Best regards
Walter
 

[Stefka]

Hi again.
This problem also exists since my start with 3DCoat and nobody can explain, or solve the problem.

When importing Obj files into 3DCoat, it sometimes happens that there are some strange effects, I call them franctals.

 

Here you can see a picture of these fractals. As you can also see, these franctals are not assigned to any layer. As you can see on the right side, all the layers are disabled, but the fractals can still be seen.

As far as I found out, the amount of fractals depends on the size of the texture you assign when importing. The bigger the texture size, the less fractals. I normaly work with texture sizes 2k to 4k. I also think that the fractals are areas of very narrow and long triangles, but on the other hand not all of them, only some.

Because the fractals are not assigned to any layer, they can´t be deleted or edited. Another big problem is, that they are always in the foreground. No matter what you try, you will have these grey or intermittent grey areas on top of your texture. No way to overpaint them.

When I import the obj file to Blender, any version, there are no similar or strange effects.

I only work with triangualated obj files.

Best regards
Walter

[Carlosan]

try importing obj on latest version 2025.03

[Stefka]

Dear @Carlosan

Thank you for the fast response.

I checked with new version 2025.03. There seem to be some improvements, because there are less "fractals" to be seen, but there are still some left.

Before I post a report about a problem, I check the update information to see if there is anything in it related to my report. In this case I could not find anything related to the problem so I didn't think an update to 2025.03 was necessary. 

Anyway 2025.03 brought some improvements but not 100%.

Best regards
Walter

[wendallhitherd]

@carrots are you the main python api dev? is it fine if I ask you questions here?
I've been making a bunch of scripts for 3dcoat that do almost trivial zbrush things but in one step instead of multiple clicks like split hidden that cleans up the voxobject that was originally hidden, default behavior in 3DC is that hidden + separated voxel data remains in the original object) or split masked, and also replacing some methods in 3dcoat related to ghosting that force it to work more consistently -- there are bugs in toggling ghosting / visibility but coding the same thing in python seem to work around this with a fixed function that doesnt require memory of the scene. Another one is that the symmetrize function in 3dcoat will crash half the time when working in surface mode, so I wrote a script that re-symmetrizes to a similar polycount but converts to voxels before applying the symmetry to prevent the crash. 

I also prefer to work in surface mode, with multiple intersecting meshes while sculpting, so I have added convenience functions for remeshing while preserving parts etc.

One thing I've run into eg with split masked, is sometimes I want an addon configuration setting for behavior, personally I would always want split masked to close the holes in surface mode after splitting off the mesh part , but that setting should really be a toggle option for that script's default behavior in case for some reason the user doesn't want the holes to be closed. Any idea how I could set up such addon preferences? Also, are there ways to define tooltips so that if I were to share this addon, people would be able to get extra info on what the scripts do?

Edited May 24 by wendallhitherd

[wendallhitherd]

if I what?? https://pilgway.com/files/3dcoat/PythonAPI/classcoat_1_1_volume.html#acb966695bff0a64d3f59382e7e46685a 

Another few things -- angelscript had a function for 'to suggested polys' which runs a resample density similar to the default menu when you click this button, I can't find a way in python to get the suggested number of polygons for good voxelization



Other news, 'to voxels' when invoked with python changes the sculpt element mode but doesn't properly update the mesh (it doesn't turn to voxel topology like when you click the "S" button + follow that menu. ToVoxels() pretty much instantly break any mesh I throw at it if I convert to voxel mode w/ ToVoxel() and begin sculpting with a surface brush, you get the typical ripped geometry and exploding geo, and so I have fallen back to trying to use the UI commands & resampling twice: Once before toVoxel() and once after. However, I can't seem to pass in button arguments into `$VoxTreeBranch.VoxSurf."myvolume"` -- I can load the menu with python but can't then close it with code.

If you want to get fun results like this, try using ToVoxel() and then Relax Voxels, it instantly explodes your mesh
 

Edited May 25 by wendallhitherd

[wendallhitherd]

Sorry for the spam, but may as well post it because its making the 3DC experience less fun! Other issues, I'm not sure if this is 3dcoat or my hotkeys being messed up: these shortcuts seem to be hard coded. When I unmap them, they show up again instantly. The best I can do to unmap those shortcuts so I can use them elsewhere is to map them all to a discard hotkey


split tool (lasso, box) in surface mode, with symmetry enabled, will cause boolean mesh slivers and spikes which almost immediately make the mesh nonmanifold, preventing further booleans. I'm not sure if there needs to be a boolean special case for shapes that cross symmetry axes


On the bright side, my workaround tool works! "M" to lasso mask, and "P" to separate the masked part to a new object, and the script will fill all open holes on new sculpt objects


This is just an aside, but even though 3DCoat's voxel system is so great for hardsurface concepting and environment work, when it comes to straight up sculpting, IMO the surface tools feel way nicer, but surface mode seems more error prone than voxels, and especially surface brushes in voxel mode. a big thing that ruins the fun for me is surface mode mesh corruptions, (Esp. with topology changes when using "powerful smooth" mixed with the unavoidable additional sculpt Layers popping up when invoking tools)  Mesh corruption happens regularly enough that I am thinking more about how to avoid bugs than I am about my sculpting. I know yall are working hard on cool new features but some of these issues have been part of 3DC for a long time and I would personally be fine if you all just spent the next year working on stability and dealing with the little kinks that interrupt the 3DC experience. I would still purchase another update for my license for 2026 even if all that was offered was more stability and zero new features heh. It's a tiny coding team I know, and features like "incredibly stable surface booleans" are no small order! But any improvement there is worth 10x a new feature to me

split_masked.py

Edited May 25 by wendallhitherd

[Carlosan]

Try Hotkey Manager to map the hotkeys

Hope it help

[wendallhitherd]

9 hours ago, Carlosan said:

Try Hotkey Manager to map the hotkeys

Hope it helps

I have looked at that tool and it it's nice, but using that panel as well, the shortcut mappings return when it is closed. Maybe someone could help me verify this? repro steps would be to open hotkey manager, remove those mappings with backspace, save and open the window again. they should appear again 

[Oleg Shapov]

On 5/24/2025 at 11:01 AM, Stefka said:

Did a short video as well.

Maybe there are islands superimposed on each other?

 

 

[Stefka]

Hi @Oleg Shapov
No the triangles are not superimposed, all are separate islands.
Maybe one reason you don´t have this issue is that you are working with quads, I work with triangles.
Let´s say the direction of view is the axis and you are in the middle of the axis, the negative part of the axis has to go through another object in your back. When you do the selection now with the marquee tool, then the triangles in you back are selectd too.
Maybe you best construct a cube with each side a separate island. Get into the cube and select the upper corner, then islands in your back should be selected too.

Here is a picture from the UV map. The selected rectangular islands are the trailer walls that got selected. The other parts, f.e. the bottom left edge of the UV map, there are islands from the fender selected.

[Oleg Shapov]

20 hours ago, Stefka said:

Maybe you best construct a cube with each side a separate island. Get into the cube and select the upper corner, then islands in your back should be selected too.

Sorry, but I don't know how to repeat it. You try.

 

 

test.obj