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pixel painting brushes becoming unusable


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Over the past week or so my brushes have become more and more jerky and laggy - to the point they're virtually unusable. I've tried updating graphics drivers, installing the latest copy of 3dcoat - and the problem has remained. Anyone encountered this? It's driving me crazy

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • Member

Citation from FYI, possibly it will help:

Cheers - but don't think it's that. A colleague of mine has tested it with an identical graphics card and settings on the same model and gotten a smooth result. While mine is consistantly stuttering and jerky. A circle will appear with definite angular points in it rather than a curve.

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Cheers - but don't think it's that. A colleague of mine has tested it with an identical graphics card and settings on the same model and gotten a smooth result. While mine is consistantly stuttering and jerky. A circle will appear with definite angular points in it rather than a curve.

Please send me model to support@3d-coat.com, possibly I will be able to diagnose problem better.

And write your specifications please.

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That's a peculiar issue.

Have you tried downgrading your video card drivers by chance, or using a previous build of 3DC?

Will do - and it's not an isolated problem at my company (Lionhead - a branch of Microsoft games). We've got three artists here using it and all of us are finding the brush tools almost unusable for anything bar marking the placement of lines then importing into PS). I'm on the latest Nvidia drivers while my collegues are on early ones. I've yet to try rolling back to 3.1 but will give that a shot next as it's driving me crazy.

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I am one of those artists.

The strange thing about this issue is that it almost seems random across different meshes. Awsyme and I tried a little test using the same obj file. Where his brushes failed mine were butter smooth (very little lag and jagged strokes) That same afternoon I imported a different obj and the brushes were unusable. Incidentally this is only using PerPixelPainting by the way.

This makes it very difficult to pin down what the problem is. I thought initially that it might be related to multiple UV-sets but even importing a simple model with 1 UV-set gives bad lag on the brushes sometimes even at minute brush sizes. Again randomly.

I find it strange that noone else using 3DCoat seems to have this problem.

Is it possibly just a problem that we're having with our particular graphics cards?

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX

Driver Version 8.16.0011.9062

We have also tried exporting from various 3D Applications - XSI, Silo, 3DStudioMax, UVLayout etc..

I'd really like to work out what this problem is and see it addressed as I only really use 3DC for Per Pixel Painting and Retopology.

I am seriously reticent to recommend using 3DC for this type of work lately as the Brush Engine has seen very little work for a long time now.

p.s. Unfortunately we are unable to exchange models as they are all under NDA. I know this makes things hard for you to analyse but I'll try and recreate the problem at home.

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It looks like issue that should be resolved ASAP. I have found why strokes shape was jaggy sometimes and fixed it. In the next build strokes will be really smooth.

Several questions to clarify:

- this issue looks like performance issue. Right?

- Are there big faces?

- Do you have enough RAM?

- Is it constant slowdown or lags? How long lags are? How often they are? Do they become more frequent after some time?

It are important questions to reproduce and fix this problem.

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It looks like issue that should be resolved ASAP. I have found why strokes was jaggy sometimes and fi[ed it. In the next build strokes will be really smooth.

Several questions to clarify:

- this issue looks like performance issue. Right?

- Are there big faces?

- Do you have enough RAM?

- Is it constant slowdown or lags? How long lags are? How often they are? Do they become more frequent after some time?

It are important questions to reproduce and fix this problem.

Brilliant! Hope the fix works for us here!

In answer to the above:

Seems to be a performance issue.

The faces aren't particularly large no. The models I'm using are NDA games models - usually faces that have a reasonably even spread of polys across them - something like 1k to 2k for the features so we're not talking about gigantic polygons here.

Using 8800 gtx cards and 8 gigs of ram on a 64 bit machine running (sadly) vista.

And lastly - the painting occasionally speeds up on my colleagues machines - but on mine it's almost always very laggy. Drawing a circle usually has a slight delay and looks like I've tried to do it with the line tool, or comes out as a collection of stops and starts.

Thanks so much for looking into this though - huge help!

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Do lags happen after start of program or frequency grows constantly. How much time passes before painting becomes unusable?

Starts immediately. I've tried a full reboot of the system and running without any other programs on so I'm assuming it's not a memory leak.

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Is it dependent on model? Does it happen on standard models like wolf or creature?

Weirdly - on the standard head It works on every other stroke.

The first stroke I place on the mesh is smooth. The second jagged and horrible. Third fine. Fourth awful.

At any point clicking off the model and moving it resets this.

Very odd!

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The first stroke I place on the mesh is smooth. The second jagged and horrible. Third fine. Fourth awful.

At any point clicking off the model and moving it resets this.

Very Bizarre, I am now experiencing (for the 1st time) the same problem. This is using 3.2.07 [beta] I'll roll back and try a previous install.

*EDIT*

Just tried it with 3.2.06 [beta] Getting the same problem. Never noticed this before.

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  • 1 month later...
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I have been having this problem as well. I am using 3.2.11 and the brush lag is still happening for me. My machine is an i7 920 with 12 gigs of ram, nvidia GTX275 graphics card windows 7 64 bit. It happens if I just open the program and open one of the standard models (the cube for, instance) in per pixel painting. Microvertex is nice and smooth.

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Here is a screengrab. What happens, is this: I draw a nice curvy stroke, but the cursor sort of jumps from point to point, leaving straight line segments between jumps. The effect is exaggerated if I paint quickly, but also happens if the brush is moved slowly.

post-2174-12729183840891_thumb.jpg

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I was having this issue with ptex, but that was usually because there were stray triangles that I didn't notice at first.

What method are you painting with? Ptex? MV? PPP?

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This is with Per Pixel Painting. Micro vertex painting is much smoother, so that's what I used for my last project, but I think per pixel is the best method for my workflow - if I could get it to work correctly. :)

I haven't tried ptex, I'm not even sure how that works, I need to do some reading :)

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I'm afraid I'm stumped on this one, I've tried replicating the issue but I just can't get it to do this. I am sorry.

I'll have to defer to Andrew, he should be back at work today/tomorrow.

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Thanks for playing geo. :) Can I ask about your machine specs?

Of course. :)

Phenom 950 quadcore (the original one, it's a bit outdated now)

8GB DDR2 800

Nvidia GTX 275 1.896GB GDDR3

I'm going to keep posting about this problem on this thread: http://www.3d-coat.c...?showtopic=5589 Andrew posted there yesterday, and it's probably good to try to keep everything in one place.

Thanks!

John

Sounds like a good plan. I really hope this one can be solved very soon. Good luck!

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