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Twitter discussion: What Andrew is currently doing.


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  • 3 weeks later...

More Twitter news!

I got GTX 480 from NVidia and resolved the problem of incrorrect work of 3D-Coat for CUDA on this video card.
The rason was that some textures was aligned on 64 bytes, it was not enough. I set alignment to 256 bytes and all started to work nicely.
Overall speed of CUDA-based tools was improved by the way.
Now I am working over multicore support of poly-merging-based tools.
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Now I am working over multicore support of poly-merging-based tools.

Now that is a Tweet from Andrew that REALLY has me looking forward to the next builds :-) Multithreading of merging-based tools is my most desired feature upgrade for 3D Coat, and now you've gone and begun the process Andrew. THANK YOU!!! I'll be very much looking forward to the developments in this area! :-)

Oh yeah, of course its cool that there is faster CUDA too, hopefully OpenCL someday. But IMO far-more-importantly is the work on the multithreading of 3D Coat.

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This is really one of the strongest strengths in 3d-coat. Because Andrew is the only devellopper and knows 3d-coat inside out

he can still add features into 3d-coat. And maybe just week or two before siggraps starts to fix small bugs. And even in the show

if he sees a bug he can fix it right there. (Bug free show is of course the best thing) This is not possible with bigger firms like 3dmax or zbrush.

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I often check this thread from time to time but i was thinking one thing that would be good is if the main website or forum made use of the API they have. This way it would be seen for anyone visiting as soon as Andrew made a new tweet about something.

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Andrew just tweeted

I worked couple of days over making all surface-merging-based tools like move, pose, surface->voxels transition to work very clean.
... and succed with it. It is most important part of all voxel sculpting, I am much happier now with it's speed and quality.
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oh man, a GTX 480 ALSO working on the merging(in additional to the multithreading) would likely be ultra ultra fast...

I would hope that andrew at some point also includes OpenCL support AFTER he's multithreaded the heck out of 3D Coat.

Oh, and to sound like a broken record... I would really enjoy the ability to open the same files on Mac 3D Coat, as I can in Windows 3D Coat... 64bit support please... proxies are not the answer to a lack of 64bit support in OSX 3D Coat.

Back on topic though, the commits Andrew has been making to 3D Coat as of late are awesome IMO, thanks Andrew.

EDIT: AbnRanger, your youtube 3D Coat vids are great, thanks for taking the time to record and upload them.

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Now here's an update I've been asking for for a long time:

I made possibility to choose texture resolution if you want to export ptex as usual model+texture. Look it in change local res tool.

Yeeeees! Great! One more bottleneck less!

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+1 for the christmas in july. Things are looking up for 3D Coat. I hope Andrew continues along the very recent path he's chosen for 3D Coat development, at leas for a while. Thank you Andrew!

does anyone have a link to the url Andrew referenced in the new auto-retopo. The compressed URL isnt loading for me, thanks in advance

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On a serious note...I honestly think more major studios are going to have to now take 3DC seriously, and that spells....Job Openings (for 3DC artists...who are already ahead in the learning curve).

good point! Thanks for the link too. That is a far more intelligent approach to auto-retopo/quadrangulation. I hope that eventually makes it into 3D Coat.

Now if only the actual selecting (line/sphere/brush) of the pose tool in vox mode was multithreaded, I'm getting too spoiled with the MASSIVE speed increase I've received from the new beta, I'm now noticing a small number of things, like the pose select mode I mentioned, that are slowing things down a bit. none-the-less, the new multithreading performance increase has taken an average merge time of about 4 hours down to about 2 minutes, amazing, stunning even IMO.

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for me, its not the pose tool that is slow any longer, its the actual initial selection process with the pose tool. ie, clicking and dragging the influence gradient to then use the pose tool, that initial selection process doesn't appear to be multithreaded yet, I dont mean to be picky, but mentioning it. all merging is VERY fast for me now on 8cores.

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Wow, excellent news for so many users! What would we do with out high end computer science to keep these Ukrainian minds humming and not building rockets?

Personally I think this a top notch feature. If it's as good as it looks to be in the PDF, then I'd almost rank it up there with the addition of voxels or re-topo tools!

It would be especially awesome if he makes it so that it can be done to any imported model as well! That alone might sell another batch of licenses.

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It would be especially awesome if he makes it so that it can be done to any imported model as well! That alone might sell another batch of licenses.

I don't see why it couldn't, same as how you can quadrangulate any imported model now. Just merge it into the voxel room and quadrangulate.

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I don't see why it couldn't, same as how you can quadrangulate any imported model now. Just merge it into the voxel room and quadrangulate.

True enough, but it's rather easy to get undesirable results. It would be better just to be able to import the mesh and auto quadrangulate IMHO.

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IMO, it could be interesting to see what a little feature like a "random initial seed" value would do, if applicable, to such an auto-retopo/quadrangulation process. And better yet, if the user could see simultaneously 3 examples of the auto-retopo/quadrangulation side-by-side, again using a random seed to generate 3 quick options to choose from. If, of course, the process allow for such a thing...

better yet, if anyone remembers the old days of "kai's power tools", after you select one of the 3 initial seed auto-retopo's that you favor, you could then be presented with 3 more (auto-generated retopo)choices based on the initial seed the user chose. I could go on, but just and idea.

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+1 on that too. I personally dont mind, and sometimes enjoy retopo work, so for me, I might not even use the auto-retopo. But I might use parts of it, then retopo by hand the other areas I would need specific loops @ for animation, etc.

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+1, +1, +1

This will be the best thing added to 3D-Coat in my eyes - Auto-Retopo!

Hope its on all imported models - please :)

For next-gen modeling - this is big, it's a pain doing retopo and takes a bit of time. ( you would beat Topogun )

GO 3DCoat!

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+1 on that too. I personally dont mind, and sometimes enjoy retopo work, so for me, I might not even use the auto-retopo. But I might use parts of it, then retopo by hand the other areas I would need specific loops @ for animation, etc.

Quadrangulation is very important, especially for nonanimated objects. It saves a lot of time.

@maxfax09: "Auto-Retopo" (quadrangulation) works already, by the way. But the current routine is good, but not good enough.

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