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3D-Coat 3.5 updates thread


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I dont think you're understanding me, it's not an overlapping UV issue it's a problem where the tools are painting through geometry where it shouldn't. I do have overlapping UVs because it's perfectly symmetrical on the X axis, but that isn't what I'm complaining about.

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Hey b33nine, do you by chance have orthographic mode turned on? There was a bug some time ago doing the same thing that was exclusive to orthographic mode (even with Ignore Backfaces turned on).

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I can't say for sure Abn, the UV's are symmetrical and I 95% of the time have the visible plane turned off. I have noticed some issues where the symmetry was turned off and I was getting weird draw-through problems.

This is in 3.5.23c as well in orth view. I haven't used the later versions and can't find which build is a stable version. Really frustrating.

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Updated to 3.5.27 (win).

- I made a big work of improving stability and quality in LC. Usual surface tools will also well compatible with LC. There is checkbox "Remove stretching" in usual surface tools to remove stretching after the end of stroke.

- Reset primitives problem solved - http://bit.ly/ohOCtV

- To center mass/boundary center/... in merge tool work correctly

- I fixed problem in sketch tool - http://bit.ly/rdNCam

- Sketch tool/reference image are corrected to work well with non power 2 textures and to avoid shadowbox preview in tools but Sketch tool.

- I made correct transition to voxels after LC tools, correct Undo/Redo after voxelization, solved problem related to "explosion" of the mesh.

- Framing centering is now correct.

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First thing I tested was Absolute because I was just noticing it was broken in the last version. It's still broken but in a different way. It doesn't not work right at all over LiveClay surfaces. In the first part of video below you can see that it's fine everywhere except where it hits the LC spot and goes crazy. The second part of my video is on non-LiveClay areas. With RemoveStretching turned on some random areas go crazy.

http://screencast.com/t/ebnuBzT8MBf2

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First thing I tested was Absolute because I was just noticing it was broken in the last version. It's still broken but in a different way. It doesn't not work right at all over LiveClay surfaces. In the first part of video below you can see that it's fine everywhere except where it hits the LC spot and goes crazy. The second part of my video is on non-LiveClay areas. With RemoveStretching turned on some random areas go crazy.

http://screencast.com/t/ebnuBzT8MBf2

Absolute and LC are still strongly incompatible because initial surface quickly getting lost...

I hope I will find some solution.

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What is Live Clay exactly? Is it voxels or something else?

It's polygonal like everything in Surface mode, but it remeshes the polys in realtime so that there is no stretching. It also has the ability to change the resolution dynamically... in specific areas.

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this is what I had been hoping for! Surface mode feels so much more complete now. I have more "trust" in surface mode now. I used to always keep surface mode at knife point so that it would not misbehave, but now it is like its own super hero.

congratulations guys.

I can finally make defined nostrils very intuitively in 3dCoat

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It's polygonal like everything in Surface mode, but it remeshes the polys in realtime so that there is no stretching. It also has the ability to change the resolution dynamically... in specific areas.

Aha, thanks for that. So the workflow is similar to dynamesh where you use Live clay to sculpt out your basic shapes and forms and then use voxels for fine detailing? Or is fine detailing not an issue for Live clay?

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Aha, thanks for that. So the workflow is similar to dynamesh where you use Live clay to sculpt out your basic shapes and forms and then use voxels for fine detailing? Or is fine detailing not an issue for Live clay?

imo u have freedom to CHOOSE!

But typically, it would be voxels first, then surface mode at least for me - but what's so great now is that with such an advanced surface mode there is less and less and less need for high density voxels. So voxels for low res, and then surface/Live Clay for details.

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Actually I'm just using voxel primitives and directly going to surface mode, from there upresing at will and liveclay/surface brushes. In fact with enough resolution you don't even need liveclay (except if you want to add finer details) now that removestretching is in the game !

Like kay_eva says: you're free to find your own workflow, it's vastly superior to zbrush in that regard.

Oh ok, so you guys are doing it the opposite way I described. Makes sense, thanks!

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A great first pass at "Remove stretching". I know this will take a few passes to get all the kinks worked out.

I noticed that sometimes it will do a great job of remeshing and other times not so well.

In the picture I moved the polys and some remeshing happens but other polys stretched. The first move seems to remesh fine but further moves will start the remeshig problems.

The picture shows examples of what I mean after a few moves on each area I used the move tool on. It happens on the other tools also.

This was tested on the default appox 250,000 sphere.

I no longer get the run time error on win32 non-cuda (version 3.5.27) when stwitching from LC to surface mode brushes

What is hookbase tool for?

Liveclay brush still does nothing on the above version, no building, nada...

Edit: no extreme moves were made...

post-518-0-51663500-1319663672_thumb.jpg

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I'm still continue to have the same 2 main problems as in the previous release.

The first.

When I start sculpting in surface/live clay mode all is working well,but,as the complexity of the shape grows(I mean curvature complexity more than polycount),my wacom starts to give some issues(I mean that the stroke doesn't give any result,or(sometimes)it gives only some little spot of displacing along the path of the stroke(it looks like when in painting application the spacing between dabs is too high)

The mouse seems able to do the work instead.

The second,about performance.

It seems there are slowdown really at low polycount(80000/100000 tris).

Practically,performance are good only for 5 minutes,after there is a huge degrade.

What it's really odd is that is I resample(going in voxel mode) this surface with performance problems,and after I go again in surface/liveclay mode the performances return again really good.

For example,resampling a mesh with 167000 tris to 500000(voxel mode) gives me much more performances than working on the original 167000 tris(without the resampling it's not workable,with the resampling is really fast and pleasant to work with).

Of course as resampling doesn't preserve details,currently it's not really a solution

Keep in mind that everytime I'm testing liveclay I tried to do always the same stuff,(ie doing a human from a sphere)this is what I want to do with the tool and it should be doable easily(for now simply I was not able to do it,this it's not a great thing)

btw,when it will be a new linux version I'll try again to see if things are better there(on windows I really don't have fortune it seems)

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I know the reason of the slowdown. After some time cells with polygons become very distorted (because geometry is very distorted) and even subcells can't save situation. We with Raul have one solution and I will try to post today build with this solution today or tomorrow. We will reorder cells to be more regular. It can be done manually by some "Cleanup" command or in hidden mode sometimes during dropping to undo. But reordering is little lag (less that 0.5 sec on 1 million mesh). Also it will add additional Undo step in queue. That was two reasons why it was not included in this build. But probably it worth to include.

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The latest version is really great, i made a 12009699 Tri Sphere to test LiveClay :)

post-1319-0-93589400-1319713312_thumb.pn

There is a few problems however and of course i get slowdown after a certain amount of tri's but it seems very good now. One problem i am noticing is the surface breaks with the SmudgeClay tool after a certain distance is reached, with short brushing it seems ok but i sometimes get a slight indent where i start form.

post-1319-0-01496900-1319713461_thumb.pn

In surface mode the Draw tool also seems to build up way too fast, the only way i can use it is with a mask or very low depth set.

Any dialogs with merge action also seem to be cut off slightly but that is not too much of a problem as they can be re-sized, it would be nice if that was not needed though :)

Specs for the computer i tested on are - Pentium D 2.8GHz, 2GB Ram, NVIDIA Geforce 9600GT (3DC CUDA version)

Also i was just wondering is LiveClay boosted with CUDA?

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Any sort of ETA on when we can expect an update for Mac? Been quite some time since Mac was two versions behind Win (and given problems with 25C on Mac, really more like three behind), starting to get a little bit concerned.

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Thanks 3dioot for the feedback,when you have a problem that nobody has it's a really bad situation,knowing that I'm not alone make me feel a bit better :)

Andrew,really good to know that you have a solution.

From my point of view I don't see any problem in updating manually the mesh(at the end it will be like when I use voxel sculpting where I use the toggle proxy mode to restore system performance for voxel)

If you mean 0.5 sec once after some time I don't see problems also in an automatic version,but please don't call this function for everystroke(at least if it can't be really fast).

Thanks for the hard work.

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Remove stretching aka "remeshing" will go through I'm sure a few different test to get where it needs to be... I know that waiting at the end of a stroke would be hard for most of us. Andrew is very much aware of this. I not overly worried that we will get a long wait in the final remove stretching routine. The unwanted stretching I think on the most part is just Andrew's first go at. He is very good at optimizing and improving his code. Right now if the polys get too stretched it causes a small bumpy surface and there is no way to completely smooth it out. When I watch the remeshing in action using the "W" it's kinda messy. This is what I think Andrew said about having a more order cell structure to improve it. The manual clean up command woud be good when using the move tool as you create your larger forms.

Right now, I use the inflate tool set to a depth of "0" to remesh the stretched areas before they get too stretched and cause the small bumps. That way I just keep having fun at the first pass. :yahoo:

Here is a picture of the bumpy surface you get with the stretched polys when the remeshing does not work right.

post-518-0-80855800-1319732331_thumb.jpg

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@Andrew and Raul

A question has been on my mind ever since "remove stretching" was implemented (in fact even since liveclay was started). I know this is blasphemy to most of the users here who love to have "options" but I personally value smart design over redundant options. (note the word redundant)

Is it not time to unify the sculpting experience in 3d-coat?

Liveclay seemed to me to be a step up from both voxel sculpting and "surface tools". Let's sum up it's primary qualities.

Resolution free sculpting

- The benefit compared to voxel sculpting is that you can define resolution locally instead of only globally (big gigantic plus)

Cutting of holes and creation of bridges

- With the added benefit of having the CHOICE of having surfaces merge or not. This is a really big, big plus compared to voxel sculpting. It also allows the masking tools to be more sophisticated and efficient.

It has the potential to be considerably faster then voxels especially since you can turn on/of merging as you desire. This is a big one because quite frankly the performance for voxel sculpting just isn't there. People have to jump through hoops to finish their works (yes I consider exporting to zbrush for detailing a hoop). This is undesirable.

----------

To me this means that the surface tools are redundant. If you set the detail slider of the "liveclay" tools to zero you get surfacetool brushes. In this way you can even offer a classical multi res way of sculpting if you choose to do so. This unification of tools would be fantastic and it would only be a matter of exposing the right settings globally instead of per brush. Sculptris has the detail slider globally exposed for this very reason. Set it to zero and all your tools will act like "classic" brushes and not change the topology.

As far as voxel sculpting I believe it's much the same thing. Are there tools that need to be "in voxels" to work with the advances we've seen in liveclay? I doubt it. This means you can offer a single, clear and beautiful sculpting environment.

----------

In general about "remove stretching" on surface tools. Why was it created? To show you can do something like "dynamesh"? Don't you believe that with liveclay you are actually creating something better? (because you are) "Remove stretching" has various problems of which the biggest is that it introduces lag at the end of the stroke. Pixologic cheats with their dynamesh. Its not live; you have to initialize it yourself. In that way its much like an enter with surface tools and voxel mode. And the resolution has a hard cap! A hard cap! They knew how limited the solution was that they created. To present it the way they did (manual initialization and hard cap on res) is not user friendly at all but its a great way to hide that its actually a slow process.

I remember when using surface tools in voxel mode made the surface change be converted to voxels at the end of each stroke. I don't think it's still an option in the latest version but I do remember that NEVER became fast enough for fluid work. You need to be able to quickly make strokes. Hatch and crosshatch. And any waiting time (after each stroke) is simply not acceptable. This "remove stretching" thing sounds like it will end up failing in the same way. A single big process at the end of the stroke. This time its not converting to voxel but remeshing the entire area that was deformed by the last brushstroke.

---------

Have you and Raul thought about unifying the sculpting experience?

What was the reason "remove stretching" was created? What is its role in the bigger picture?

Kind regards,

3dioot

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