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3DC V3.2 - The Future


ghib
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First off, I have to congratulate Andrew and team for the release of V3.2 All the hard work is really appreciated here and by the rest of the users for sure.

I want to take this opportunity to voice my opinion on where I'd like to see improvements now that there is a major point release out of the way. So my small list is this (in order of priority)

  1. Faster/improved Painting Engine (this for me is the BIG one. The brushes become sluggish very quickly with large brush sizes and with multiple UV sets on objects. With Mudbox painting is as smooth as butter but I'd like to see 3dCoat as strong)
  2. Sandbox Tiler (I know I'm being cheeky with this one but I've actually wished so many times during production that it were already implemented in 3D-Coat)
  3. More versatile Material System (please see this post for more info on how I personally feel it should work)
  4. Uncluttering of Retopology tools
  5. More modelling control of Primitives

I hope this doesn't come a cross as too demanding but I wanted to give my feedback on where I'd like to see a concentrated effort as a regular user of this app in a professional environment.

Thanks for listening always.

p.s. I hope that other users post here and voice their opinion

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First off, I have to congratulate Andrew and team for the release of V3.2 All the hard work is really appreciated here and by the rest of the users for sure.

I want to take this opportunity to voice my opinion on where I'd like to see improvements now that there is a major point release out of the way. So my small list is this (in order of priority)

  1. Faster/improved Painting Engine (this for me is the BIG one. The brushes become sluggish very quickly with large brush sizes and with multiple UV sets on objects. With Mudbox painting is as smooth as butter but I'd like to see 3dCoat as strong)
  2. Sandbox Tiler (I know I'm being cheeky with this one but I've actually wished so many times during production that it were already implemented in 3D-Coat)
  3. More versatile Material System (please see this post for more info on how I personally feel it should work)
  4. Uncluttering of Retopology tools
  5. More modelling control of Primitives

I hope this doesn't come a cross as too demanding but I wanted to give my feedback on where I'd like to see a concentrated effort as a regular user of this app in a professional environment.

Thanks for listening always.

p.s. I hope that other users post here and voice their opinion

I think the number one priority should be the long wait/calculation times in many voxel operations. You can have the fastest brush speed in the world, but what good does that ultimately do if you have to go grab a cup of coffee and may be some lunch waiting for excessive calculation times. It's the No. 1 workflow killer in the 3DC. Until that is tackled, I'm not sure we need more wiz-bang features like Ptex and such. The program has come a long way in such a short period of time, but some glaring issues still remain. Those need to be nailed down once and for all, or all the features in the world matter little. Just my 2 cents worth.
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Would like to see node base textureing in 3DCoat also - this is whats missing as far as texture/material control goes.

I do notice Andrew is running out of room to add buttons especially the VS room - i saw that coming along time ago, using the current method of stacking buttons/commands on top isn't the best move. 3DCoat is going to continue to grow expand and this issue will get worse over time.

A quick remedy is to add the scroll bar where the tools/commands are ;) - it would better to redesign the tool/command side of the GUI with years of expansion in mind.

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I do notice Andrew is running out of room to add buttons especially the VS room

And we can't even add shortcut keys to the right-click menu options, which i think would really help.

I hope we get to see an interface with at least the same amount of flexibility as Silo. :good2:

Especially in 3DC it would be nice to be able to create buttons and pages that could be hidden\shown on screen with a keypress.

Each user of 3DC has there own set of functions they use and being able to put them together in an easily accessible way would be great.

Speed and ease of use should be on the high priority list. At least that's what I think.

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#1 - Speed

#2 - Python scripting (most especially load/save of everything, export of textures, loading brushes/masks/materials)

#2.5 - Related, a revamp of the disk folders so that the base app is never modified, and user prefs/tools etc are per-user in a defined (by config file) location

#3 - Extensive expansion of Paint (Per-pixel) to reduce need to go to Photoshop

My $.02 :)

Cheers,

Peter B

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1- Speed/Improved Painting - including alpha/pen curve editing (similar to Zbrush, and would, of course, improve control over

voxel alphas) as well as better 'soft-stroke' user controls for more 'automated' strokes

2- Fully customizable short-cut assignment for ALL operations

3- True ambient occlusion map generation

4- Radial symmetry brush painting/sculpting

5- Color specular support

6- Quadrangulation improvements (similar to what looked to be a promising technique Andrew posted about based upon a

paper on the subject--buried in an old 3.1update thread) or some means of user-control on t-joint placement for edge-flow

7- Emmisive/glow map support?

:drinks:

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I think the number one priority should be the long wait/calculation times in many voxel operations. You can have the fastest brush speed in the world, but what good does that ultimately do if you have to go grab a cup of coffee and may be some lunch waiting for excessive calculation times. It's the No. 1 workflow killer in the 3DC. Until that is tackled, I'm not sure we need more wiz-bang features like Ptex and such. The program has come a long way in such a short period of time, but some glaring issues still remain. Those need to be nailed down once and for all, or all the features in the world matter little. Just my 2 cents worth.

AbnRanger - While I'm inclined to agree with what you've said; Voxels have seen a lot of love for a long time now and obviously they are of high priority still, but I'm quite disappointed that the Paint side of 3D-Coat has been neglected. I (and others) mentioned this way back when Voxels were 1st introduced to us, that brush speed needs much improvement in terms of speed. I feel that it is the core of 3D-Coat and the main reason I bought the app in the 1st place.

Voxels are great and I've created a lot of content and assets using basic shapes to get the rough large normal information then baking and painting the fine detail in the paint room. In many instances I've been inhibited by the brush speed to the point where it becomes almost detrimental as an alternative to Photoshop.

I'd love for Voxels to operate at light speed also, but for me it can wait.

p.s. I'm not even talking about brush speed in the Voxel room here. I'm concerned with the Paint room.

Cheers

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Would like to see node base textureing in 3DCoat also - this is whats missing as far as texture/material control goes.

I do notice Andrew is running out of room to add buttons especially the VS room - i saw that coming along time ago, using the current method of stacking buttons/commands on top isn't the best move. 3DCoat is going to continue to grow expand and this issue will get worse over time.

A quick remedy is to add the scroll bar where the tools/commands are ;) - it would better to redesign the tool/command side of the GUI with years of expansion in mind.

Well, you can collapse the different tool categories, to save space. I think One plan might be to have the Voxel Tools disappear when in surface mode...and vice versa when you switch back to volume/voxel mode...so that you are in a completely context-sensitive layout.

As far as node-based materials...I disagree, for now. That is the job of a full featured 3D Application...not a 3D painting/Sculpting. I'd much rather time be spent refining and fixing what is already in the program. It seems that it's a bit enticing to keep adding features, but long wait times is something that needs to be addressed well ahead of snazzy new additions. When speed across the application is on par with Mudbox and ZBrush as well as the brushes and toolset being polished and stable...that's when we should be talking about what features may or may not be good to add.

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AbnRanger - While I'm inclined to agree with what you've said; Voxels have seen a lot of love for a long time now and obviously they are of high priority still, but I'm quite disappointed that the Paint side of 3D-Coat has been neglected. I (and others) mentioned this way back when Voxels were 1st introduced to us, that brush speed needs much improvement in terms of speed. I feel that it is the core of 3D-Coat and the main reason I bought the app in the 1st place.

Voxels are great and I've created a lot of content and assets using basic shapes to get the rough large normal information then baking and painting the fine detail in the paint room. In many instances I've been inhibited by the brush speed to the point where it becomes almost detrimental as an alternative to Photoshop.

I'd love for Voxels to operate at light speed also, but for me it can wait.

p.s. I'm not even talking about brush speed in the Voxel room here. I'm concerned with the Paint room.

Cheers

I understand. I personally haven't experienced that much lag when painting. It may have a lot to do with how much horsepower you have under the hood of your PC. I'm sure it could stand to get some attention, for sure, and in keeping with that idea, I'd like to see Andrew add someone to his team to develop the Geometry based sculpting (Sculpt Room) to the point where they are very close to the tools in the Voxel Room. It's more time consuming to import a model into Voxels and then have to retopologize. Voxel Clay sculpting is great if you want to start there, or if you don't want to have to be concered about polygonal topology and such, but the Sculpting Room needs some love too, as many models I'd rather just avoid Voxels altogether.
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As far as node-based materials...I disagree, for now. That is the job of a full featured 3D Application...not a 3D painting/Sculpting. I'd much rather time be spent refining and fixing what is already in the program. It seems that it's a bit enticing to keep adding features, but long wait times is something that needs to be addressed well ahead of snazzy new additions. When speed across the application is on par with Mudbox and ZBrush as well as the brushes and toolset being polished and stable...that's when we should be talking about what features may or may not be good to add.

Yep, I really meant this thread to be a bit of a wishlist and to gauge what other users think about this program.

I for one find the current material system a bit of a hindrance (which is why I stuck it on my list) It only becomes apparent when you start breaking down a model into material clusters and multiple uv sets. You CAN'T have multiple Layer structure per material which is a major pain but can workaround by keeping things simplistic. However, more often than not, as things need polished the layers can become quite vast (especially when many you are creating many iterations) and it just breaks the workflow.

I agree stability of tools is important, but I'd say that is a given with any app.

Considering that 3D-Coat is primarily a surface creation program (hence the name Coat) having a strong material system is of major importance.

p.s. just thinking about this, 3d-Coat would need a bit of an overhaul. Not an easy job :(

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Multi-resolution/Subdivisions in Surface mode.

and Beyonce

Agree, but don't forgot to include that in the per pixel mode :yahoo: We already have this in Mudbox, would be nice to have in 3DCoat.

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  • 2 weeks later...
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I use zbrush and mudbox in a large studio that has a very rigorous animation pipeline and revisions on characters are numerous on almost every model. . Voxel sculpting for character poses some challenges in this environment.but before those issues are addressed I would like to see the core functions of 3d coat optimized. speed improvements for brushes, higher poly counts and stability.

and could you please make a option to turn off the brush outlines.

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IMO, I would vote for voxel speed ups of all sorts, it gets close to unusable around 20+million polys. This IN ADDITION to a multires surface mode in voxels would suit my current workflow enough to stop using the other sculpting apps I use for nearly all projects, and stay within 3D coat avoiding hectic inport/export time wasting.

And, please, multithread the various voxel operations, especially MERGE, sometimes I have to leave my cpu for 12+ hours to get a merge to complete, and even then, on many occasions the merge bar just freezes partially through and I have to end task/force quit.

Truth be told, Andrew's rate of updating 3D Coat is stellar IMO!!! I enjoy using 3d Coat and look forward to being able to spend less time waiting for endless voxel progress bars to finish and more time using 3D coat as a creative tool. P.S. I've moved to OSX 3D Coat and no longer windows 3D Coat, so the 64-Bit 3D Coat for OSX will be VERY welcome, no more out of memory errors on OSX, finally.

Thanks Andrew(and team)!!! you rock!

*****************

8x 2.8 XEON

20 Gig Ram

SSD

OSX & Win7 64

Radeon 3870 512mb

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On what kind of machines are users having speed issues (I'm too new to have any yet)?

Are some of these issues going to go away when newer high performance video cards are released soon? If so, I'd rather spend the money on hardware and have Andrew devote his finite time to new features (Yay Ptex!!!) and interface improvements (but a 12 hour coffee break does sound a bit too long to deal with).

It would probably be useful when reporting speed issues to mention your graphic card, VRAM, Operating system and whether 64 bit, number of CPUs and CPU speed, RAM, CUDA, etc. I'd guess hard drive speed might also affect some operations?

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On what kind of machines are users having speed issues (I'm too new to have any yet)?

Are some of these issues going to go away when newer high performance video cards are released soon? If so, I'd rather spend the money on hardware and have Andrew devote his finite time to new features (Yay Ptex!!!) and interface improvements (but a 12 hour coffee break does sound a bit too long to deal with).

It would probably be useful when reporting speed issues to mention your graphic card, VRAM, Operating system and whether 64 bit, number of CPUs and CPU speed, RAM, CUDA, etc. I'd guess hard drive speed might also affect some operations?

I have vista64 6gig ram,old 2.3 quad,a gtx280 and thats it (+20 gig virtual ram)

Nothing fancy here. :)

3DCoat speed while sculpting is always above 60fps with all brush strokes in surface mode and that up to 20million polys per layer.

I can merge to voxels models between 4mil to 16mil within a 4-5 minutes range max.

On a 17million torso a 20 minutes sculpting session in surface mode takes less that 1 minutes to convert to voxels.

..Of course,at 20mil Im using a small brush,not the time to start messing around with the character's pose.

If you use too high brush radius 5 brush stokes can take 5 minutes to convert.

At this stage Im supposed to add small details so i dont mind using a small brush radius...

There is no excuses to not have a complete character design that includes pose and proportions within a 500000/1mil polys range.

Then you increase...and add finer details

I dont understand why peoples with better rig than me are getting poor performances :blink:

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Do you mean a virtual RAM disk?

How are you using your virtual RAM drive with 3D Coat and other software, and who makes it?

I noticed that Farstone makes one, but I haven't tried it.

http://www.farstone.com/software/virtualdrive-pro.php

No,no...just plain old virtual mem from Windows preferences.

3DCoat use it a lot for merging and display of huge voxtrees.

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If you have Windows Vista or 7, you can make use of the ReadyBoost feature that uses your flash memory drive as a pagefile/scratch disk...which is solid state memory as opposed to a hard drive. It's faster. You can go to a retail store and buy an 8GB thumb drive for about $25-$30...so it's a cheap way to gt some extra performance. 3DC will use it heavily, as you can see from the performance monitor in Windows or download a ReadyBoost Monitor utility. Windows will actually determine if it's faster to fetch or write something to the normal pagefile you have designated on your hard disk, or to to the flash drive, and then use the faster source. Generally random read/writes will utilize your flash drive.

Readyboost will also make a noticeable difference in system boot up and shut down times, as well as loading your programs faster. I've currently got a Western Digital Raptor hard drive (10,000 RPM's compared to the normal 7,200 RPM's) dedicated for my main pagefile, and the readyboost drive...letting Windows decide which to use. It's recommended to have a 1 to 1 ratio. So, if you have 8GB's of RAM, then ReadyBoost is supposed to work best with 8GB+ of flash memory.

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At this point, I'm ready for 3DC to have a full polygon editing toolset.

It feels like I can do everything else BUT extrude some polys, make minor changes etc.

Frankly I wish 3DC had a poly modeler as good as or better than Silo or something similar to the Polyboost toolset enjoyed by Max users.

If I could poly OR voxel up a model, then retopo (for voxels), UV it and finally paint / export - what else would I need?

3DC would be my 1-stop shop for my art path into the Unity game engine that I'm using for my game development.

At times I also wish I could use my DarkTree Textures for procedural texturing within 3DC but Andrew would have to look at Darksim's Symbiont SDK (Skyler and the other guys over there are very helpful actually) to learn how to wire it in to 3DC's rendering.

-Will

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Personally, I would much rather see 3DC have an option to send any current geometry from the Paint and Retopo rooms to an external program (i.e. Silo, LW, etc) then auto-update the geometry when the file is saved in the external app. (ZBrush GoZ)

We can call it GoC. :good:

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Personally, I would much rather see 3DC have an option to send any current geometry from the Paint and Retopo rooms to an external program (i.e. Silo, LW, etc) then auto-update the geometry when the file is saved in the external app. (ZBrush GoZ)

We can call it GoC. :good:

I guess that would be okay also but it seems like it would be more work for him to keep track of all the supported modelers or having requests for each and every new modeler that comes along.

I would think that the gui and code used for the retopo room would be reusable for a poly room that just lets you edit at the polygon level directly?

Reusing that code should give Andrew a good head start on adding a polygon editing toolset.

I already love the editing capabilities of the retopo tools as it is - adding extrude, bevel, smooth shift etc., operations would be all that's needed.

Hell, the remaining poly deformation operations are already seen in the voxel room's parametric primitives - having similar at the polygon level would round out the polygon editing toolset.

Hopefully the gui and code from that could be reused as well...

-Will

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I guess that would be okay also but it seems like it would be more work for him to keep track of all the supported modelers or having requests for each and every new modeler that comes along.

I would think that the gui and code used for the retopo room would be reusable for a poly room that just lets you edit at the polygon level directly?

Reusing that code should give Andrew a good head start on adding a polygon editing toolset.

I already love the editing capabilities of the retopo tools as it is - adding extrude, bevel, smooth shift etc., operations would be all that's needed.

Hell, the remaining poly deformation operations are already seen in the voxel room's parametric primitives - having similar at the polygon level would round out the polygon editing toolset.

Hopefully the gui and code from that could be reused as well...

-Will

That makes sense. If there was an option to turn on\off surface snapping for selected points (or all points) in the retopo room would be nice. Then add a manipulator in the select tool. We could rename the Retopo room to Build room.

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I still would like to see Geometry sculpting tools receive the same equivalents as you find in Voxel Clay Sculpting. This way, those who bring in models from another program, which is most often the case, do not have to resort to modeling again (RE-topology), and doing UV's all over again. Right now, that is the weakest part of the program and hasn't been touched since it's early days. Voxel Sculpting is nice if you plan to start there from a primitive and such, but for those that want to bring in their own model, it forces more work upon you. ZBrush and MB artists can go in with their model, sculpt away and when they are done, either export out the hi-res mesh or bake down to normal/displacement maps. With 3DC, you're only half-way done....with 2 major steps to have to do. We're talking about hours more work. Why that is being ignored is beyond me.

One possible answer is to have accurate snapping and more controls of snapping in the Retopo Room, so that the original model can be used to conform to the new voxel sculpt. Currently, trying to do so, even snapping to a voxel sculpt with minimal changes, causes a rat's nest. If Mudbox can offer a full set of geometry sculpting tools and be as smooth as butter, why not 3DC?

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