3DC - What are your bad habits?

[Ghostdog]

In an effort to confess myself out of constant bad habits in 3DC I thought Id share to see if the public humiliation (and fun factor) makes me improve.

Painting I overpaint and tweak to the point of 2 or 3 hours solid painting & touch-ups before actually rendering! I render in Carrara and Vue (both now support normal maps so thats nice)

I then notice the overall effect of global illumination or whatever radiosity or render technique used makes the result entirely different to the previously pleasing 3DC display

Reference Images. I leave them in my head and almost never use them within 3DC. Im more an abstract artist so can get away with this a bit more than others

Voxels Oversculpting and not leaving the finer details for the real power of normal or displacement mapping

Not using the flexibility of layers to build my model in steps.

Pivot-point Never fixing the pivot point if it gets off centre.

Optimisation strategy - not deciding at the start where and how to apply the balance of detail versus optimisation

[3d_sculptress]

In an effort to confess myself out of constant bad habits in 3DC I thought I'd share to see if the public humiliation (and fun factor) makes me improve.

Painting I overpaint and tweak to the point of 2 or 3 hours solid painting & touch-ups before actually rendering! I render in Carrara and Vue (both now support normal maps so that's nice)

I then notice the overall effect of global illumination or whatever radiosity or render technique used makes the result entirely different to the previously pleasing 3DC display

Reference Images. I leave them in my head and almost never use them within 3DC. I'm more an abstract artist so can get away with this a bit more than others

Voxels Oversculpting and not leaving the finer details for the real power of normal or displacement mapping

Not using the flexibility of layers to build my model in steps.

Pivot-point Never fixing the pivot point if it gets off centre.

Optimisation strategy - not deciding at the start where and how to apply the balance of detail versus optimisation

ha, I learned my lesson on the pivot point (I'm assuming you're referring to the symmetry) when I sculpted a model without fixing the pivot point first thing, then after spending hours upon hours detailing, found it to be a lost battle trying to reset the pivot via split/clone/apply symmetry.....so I'm stuck without symmetry on finishing it....but now I always check my symmetry/correct pivot point before anything else....cause some tricks don't work so well when you don't have enough ram.

I'm getting better at using layers., especially after wasting hours chasin my tail in circles trying to fix parts that just keep blobbing into each other...I found that it makes things go alot quicker to just seperate certain parts into layers.

and I'm really bad about not using reference pics, and wanting to add detail before I get my form/structure up to par.but again with the 'chasin my tail in circles' scenario, it's easier to just use the reference pics as needed and work on my form first before adding too much detail.

[AbnRanger]

In an effort to confess myself out of constant bad habits in 3DC I thought I’d share to see if the public humiliation (and fun factor) makes me improve.

Painting – I overpaint and tweak to the point of 2 or 3 hours solid painting & touch-ups before actually rendering! I render in Carrara and Vue (both now support normal maps so that’s nice)

I then notice the overall effect of global illumination or whatever radiosity or render technique used makes the result entirely different to the previously pleasing 3DC display...

This is precisely why I was advocating a LIVE link to the different major 3D Applications (at least ones with a true IPR available to them...such as Lightwave, Max, C4D, and Maya). You can see a demonstration of how the live link would work by the following video covering the live link between Combustion's (Paint tools) and Max (Material editor):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGk_1MpxIFY

In Max, you have VRay RT and now FinalRender R3 with IPR's similar to the Lightwave Render plugin, FPrime. So, with such a live link, you can paint your materials, including bump, and watch them update in near real-time on your 2nd monitor in the other application. You can enable GI caching in both of those renderers so the updates would not have to re-render GI each time, and thus texture changes would be near instantaneous. The best part of all is that what you see is indeed what you get (at final render time)