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3D-Coat 3.2 updates thread.


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But those buttons still doesn't work.

In 3DC 32bit on win xp 32 bit all is ok.

In win7 64 BIT both versions 3DC 32 and 64 bit left and right buttons don't do anything.

My personal suggestion is that buttons are somehow 'read' through SN driver which is 32 and 64 bit version.

Other software (3DS MAX, Photoshop, or even explorer.exe) can 'read' those buttons in both bit versions.

Only 3DC can not recognize 64 bit driver for buttons, as I suppose.

I'm very sorry for writing about this over and over again, but disabling SN buttons from use makes SN usable in half... or less.

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Linux build uploaded.

Hi Andrew.

I have tested v3.2.07 on Fedora Core 8 x64, but I still can't get a correct-looking result.

These are the steps I took to get to this picture:

1. Load [3dc_install]/samples/cube.obj with medium carcass (38528)

2. Paint something on cube

3. Export ptx (color, displacement, specular)

4. Load cube.obj into Maya. Setup scene.

5. Export whole scene to rib with RenderMan Studio 2.0.2 (rib archive for cube object created automatically)

6. Render scene rib with RifSubdivFaceIndex ri-filter (included with RenderMan Pro Server 15.0) and capture the rib to file

7. Take the captured cube rib archive (now with __faceindex primitive variable for face connectivity) and replace existing cube rib archive with it.

8. Apply ptex shaders on the cube object and render with RenderMan Pro Server 15.0

--> result

If I'm doing something wrong here, please let me know.

I have attached my ptex exports, rsl shaders, and the cube rib archive with __faceindex primvar baked-in.

Please try them out if possible. And let me know if you need the scene rib (it needs to be cleaned up) or anything else that might help.

cube_ptex.tar.gz

ptex_shaders.tar.gz

cube_ribarchive_faceindex.tar.gz

post-2565-12698784399005_thumb.jpg

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I haven't been keeping up to date with all of the new implementations but I was playing around with the Ptex and found I couldn't import a mesh with UVs and use that to bake to. Is there a way to do this? If not I think it would be a valuable option to have. Currently, regardless of the retopo mesh you bring in and it's UV's it converts it to a Ptex UV layout. My work around was to export the high poly mesh from the Ptex sculpt and bake the normals in xNormal.

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Phil the guy was asking if you could use uv's to bake out the textures.

is there some way of smoothing the texel density (is that the correct term when ptex is involved) between faces? The step can be quite evident

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I'm having the same issues that Roger_K mentions... time to go back to per-pixel and microvertex.. I've run into too many issues when exporting PTEX for real-time engines and some external render engines, as NONE of my 3d apps use PTEX currently. The step is just too evident at times, makes me have to go back completely to using UV's for working in 3DC for any assets that will leave 3DC to another app(most all of them, other than hobby sculpts).

Very glad to see Andrew knocking out some of the many outstanding bugs/issues with 3DC.... hopefully one day I can do final high-detail sculpting in the vox room once it's been multithreaded...and be able to stop going into ZBrush, ugh, that ZB interface is just plain wacky(gets the job done though :-(

On another note, has anyone heard of any news on the 64-bit release of 3DC for Mac OSX, I am running into "out of memory" errors in 3.2 for nearly all my medium/high detail vox sculpts :-( And my 64bit windows 30day trial of 3DC has run out, so now I just cant work on a number of my 3DC sculpts.

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Updated to 3.2.08 [beta] (Win+Mac, Linux - soon)

- Much much better correspondence between Voxel room and baked color in Paint room.

- Problem with incorrect "Framing" work in voxel tools solved.

- Framing improved - you can focus on object or on pen position (scaling depends on radius in this case)

- I have made command that is very useful when you have very many objects in scene - combine current layer with all children layers.

- Pick tool for voxels. It is very helpful if you have many layers and want to select current object visually without VoxTree

- Fixed Voxels->Ptex merging, multiple ptex objects merging.

- I have done very longstanding request from SL community - support of multiple SL objects in scene.

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Good news,the heavy testfile I use for merging to Ptex no longer hangs at the subdivision progress. :yahoo:

Also color baking of Lamblight shader looks amazing...I think I'll use it instead of occlusion map.

Thank you for this big update. :brush::good:

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If you want to keep your UVs don't use Ptex. The whole point in Ptex is A. it uses no UVs, and B. you can change the texture resolution at a per-polygon level.

I understand it's basic usage but it's full implementation is still meant for production which the above minus UV's is not good for. If all you want to use it for is personal still shots then it's great. But that's hardly what Disney designed it for and not very useful on the whole for production. I actually don't think it's currently working correctly as it makes no sense to convert a retopo mesh's UVs to Ptex format. A retopo mesh should contain the UV's it had so you can take your PTex sculpt and bake to it for displacement, normals, what have you. The advantage to sculpting with PTex is that you can tessellate areas arbitrarily for clean details. Eliminating UV's altogether would be ideal but until 3D painting apps get much better, it's not a suitable option.

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I understand it's basic usage but it's full implementation is still meant for production which the above minus UV's is not good for. If all you want to use it for is personal still shots then it's great. But that's hardly what Disney designed it for and not very useful on the whole for production. I actually don't think it's currently working correctly as it makes no sense to convert a retopo mesh's UVs to Ptex format. A retopo mesh should contain the UV's it had so you can take your PTex sculpt and bake to it for displacement, normals, what have you. The advantage to sculpting with PTex is that you can tessellate areas arbitrarily for clean details. Eliminating UV's altogether would be ideal but until 3D painting apps get much better, it's not a suitable option.

I'm not sure why retopo needs UVs. My Bruce Willis model in the WIPs area was done in voxels, then retopo, then Ptex (with baked displacement and normals), and I've done test renders of it in LightWave which looked great. Right now the only downside to Ptex I see is if you'd like to work on it in Photoshop. I made a little example video of doing that with projection

. That's not flat though so it's not perfect. The fix for this is I think in if you watch the original Disney made
they talk about laying selected polys out flat. So I'm betting if Andrew could lay them out flat like that you could use projection with that in Photoshop. Really though the need for Photoshop in my eyes is very minimal.
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I understand it's basic usage but it's full implementation is still meant for production which the above minus UV's is not good for. If all you want to use it for is personal still shots then it's great. But that's hardly what Disney designed it for and not very useful on the whole for production. I actually don't think it's currently working correctly as it makes no sense to convert a retopo mesh's UVs to Ptex format. A retopo mesh should contain the UV's it had so you can take your PTex sculpt and bake to it for displacement, normals, what have you. The advantage to sculpting with PTex is that you can tessellate areas arbitrarily for clean details. Eliminating UV's altogether would be ideal but until 3D painting apps get much better, it's not a suitable option.

I have not used Ptex (I guess I'll wait until I can read about it in the manual) but I would be tempted if it could be used for animations. If it can, would someone write the necessary steps?

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I have not used Ptex (I guess I'll wait until I can read about it in the manual) but I would be tempted if it could be used for animations. If it can, would someone write the necessary steps?

It should be exactly the same as any other way. After you've painted your textures, depth etc, just export your model, the Ptex textures will com out as one or more 2048x2048 textures that looks something like this (this is two texture images put together for the example):

post-466-12702489433868_thumb.jpg

Then just load it into your animation package the same way you would any other model.

Ptex generates a UV map for each polygon and would normally save out all of these little images into one .ptx file. 3D-Coat takes it a step further but laying them out on a big 2048 UV map, meaning that even programs that don't support .ptx files (max, maya, LightWave, etc.) can still use it.

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I understand it's basic usage but it's full implementation is still meant for production which the above minus UV's is not good for. If all you want to use it for is personal still shots then it's great. But that's hardly what Disney designed it for and not very useful on the whole for production. I actually don't think it's currently working correctly as it makes no sense to convert a retopo mesh's UVs to Ptex format. A retopo mesh should contain the UV's it had so you can take your PTex sculpt and bake to it for displacement, normals, what have you. The advantage to sculpting with PTex is that you can tessellate areas arbitrarily for clean details. Eliminating UV's altogether would be ideal but until 3D painting apps get much better, it's not a suitable option.

+1, preaching to the choir. Unless you are just creating your assets for rendering inside 3DC or a renderman engine, PTEX is a feature that is useless until render engines support it. no mental-ray, no lux, no octane, etc... I bet 90%+ of the 3DC users still need UV's for any inter-app exchange of 3d assets for realtime or film/animation work, I might be incorrect, though that is unlikely.

in the future it would be nice if the 3DC community would be polled on how many of us create for a renderman render engine pipeline, before a feature that is specific to that render engine is labored over for months. I have some renderman experience, but I dont have a shader-tech on hand, as likely most of us dont, so I use a non-renderman engine, as I'm sure 95%+ of the 3DC users will also attest to.

what game/realtime designer wants to load another full texture file into(RAM) a realtime engine every time PTEX overflows on one map? Anyone who has had to design for realtime will know what I'm talking about; waste of memory. UV's are still absolutely necessary for anyone trying to get real power out of any realtime engine when considering moving design work to PTEX(at least in 3dc's current implementation, which I'm aware isnt entirely complete).

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I'm not sure if it's been brought up. Is there any talk of 3d-coat moving gpu cudas support, to an open standard or support ati gpu.

many people have asked many times for OpenCL support, especially since CUDA can be AUTOMATICALLY converted to OpenCL for all windows/nix/OSX users with ATI cards.

who is really going to get a 600w power supply just to power a nvidia gtx480, some but not many IMO. MAny render engines are adding OpenCL support, I think LuxRender has or is about to release the first render engine with OpenCL support, and its BLAZING FAST. Others are in development.

http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=5298

that is one of the links in the 3dc forums asking for this request... please andrew, please.

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I don't understand how it's useless when I'm using it with LightWave on my current project and it's working great. As for loading an entire new image due to the overflow I agree that this is currently a problem. I requested what seems to me to be a simple fix here. (I know you've seen that ifxs)

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many people have asked many times for OpenCL support, especially since CUDA can be AUTOMATICALLY converted to OpenCL for all windows/nix/OSX users with ATI cards.

Yes OpenCL is a very important but I doubt it is as easy to do as pressing a "magic button". ;)

It needs good planning and it will come in the future. We don't need to know when really.

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Phil: you mean you are using ptex generated UVs for a game asset? I think all adam is wanting is to be able to bake his ptex work onto a properly UV'd mesh within 3dcoat, same as he would bake his normals and other maps from voxels etc., since there's no way you'd want to use ptex uvs in a game. That many individual uv verts would add immensely to the vertex count on export to the engine. Baking externally kinda defeats the purpose of using 3dc in the first place too - kinda like with the AO situation, which is pretty much not useable.

I haven't used ptex much lately because it was too unstable so if anything's changed it would be great. I just haven't had time for testing, and have to focus on the known, working tools right now, but I think my ideal workflow for using ptex (for games specifically) would be to send an autoquadrangulated mesh directly from the voxel room for final detailing and color work, then doing a proper retopo over the voxel mesh with good uvs, and then baking the ptex results to that hand retopo'd version. This is just me speculating on how I'd use it. If it works that way now then great!

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