Advanced Member vivi Posted October 30, 2011 Advanced Member Report Share Posted October 30, 2011 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted October 30, 2011 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted October 30, 2011 Ok, I am sorry you lost some work. Surface mode is for adding all your details and then "Retopoing and Baking". You "do not" have to leave surface mode. As you discovered if you go back to voxels you will lose detail unless you have tons of ram to boost the resolution up up very high. One of the reason surface mode was added was for adding smaller details as you would have to push the resolution so high in voxel mode eating tons of ram. Now the surface room has gotten even better for working in with LC and remeshing in the works. Voxel mode--- create larger and medium form Surface--- small to fine detail ( you have discovered this already) just your mistake of going back to voxels. Nice fish, sorry again you lost the work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member vivi Posted October 30, 2011 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted October 30, 2011 Ok, I am sorry you lost some work. Surface mode is for adding all your details and then "Retopoing and Baking". You "do not" have to leave surface mode. As you discovered if you go back to voxels you will lose detail unless you have tons of ram to boost the resolution up up very high. One of the reason surface mode was added was for adding smaller details as you would have to push the resolution so high in voxel mode eating tons of ram. Now the surface room has gotten even better for working in with LC and remeshing in the works. Voxel mode--- create larger and medium form Surface--- small to fine detail ( you have discovered this already) just your mistake of going back to voxels. Nice fish, sorry again you lost the work. Thank you for your reply... I see..so voxels are only for creating a sort of base mesh? cheers, vito Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted October 30, 2011 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted October 30, 2011 Yes, on the great part that is correct though voxels have some powerfull tools like sketch, curves,Instancer, cut and clone, clone etc. LC was added so we could as artist could have localized dynamic tessellation only adding polys where we needed them and no where else. Before LC you had to increase resolution to the entire model to get finer details. LC is still in alpha phase so it's rough around the edges. We are beta testers when we use the latest updates. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member kay_Eva Posted October 30, 2011 Advanced Member Report Share Posted October 30, 2011 Sorry about the fish. About what you said, I feel that 3d Coat Voxels are less of a "base mesh" and more of a "volume". Zbrush has a 2.5D Canvas. But 3dCoat's "canvas" is the voxels themselves. So when you go about voxel sculpting, consider the volume you are created as the very canvas in and of itself. This is the canvas that you will be "dropping" you're details into. To call it a base mesh would imply a relative lack of flexibilty that does not properly represent what the voxels (the canvas) are capable of. I would suggest that you fool around in 3dCoat and just play with it a bit more before you do full production with it. As the concepts behind it are a bit different than ZBrush. It seems to me that the issues you are having, based on your threads, are just workflow related and I feel like if you played around in it a bit more you'd be able to avoid a lot of these problems. For example I figured out the surface --> voxel detail loss thing also, but for me it wasn't a wicked kick ass fish...it was a sphere with a bump on it. IMO surface mode is the very last sculpting step. After you've 'perfected' the voxels. Many people here, like to go to surface mode ASAP, but I like to put it off to the very very end. And the difference in preference is just something that each person acquires from spending time inside of 3dCoat for themselves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted October 30, 2011 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted October 30, 2011 I have never seen a dramatic loss of detail going from Surface to Voxel mode. Some may notice a slight bit of difference, but the outer mesh gets resampled, when switching, so that you don't have any stretching or pinching. I actually like working in Voxel mode until I absolutely need to work in Surface mode (for performance reasons). On a 6core CPU w/16GB of RAM and a GTX 470, I can reach around 40-50million polys before I reach that point. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor digman Posted October 30, 2011 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted October 30, 2011 You said it much better than I did, Kay_Eva and AbnRanger is quite correct when you reach 40 to 50 million in voxel mode you can have your cake and eat it too... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philnolan3d Posted November 2, 2011 Report Share Posted November 2, 2011 Personally I normally do all as much detail as I can in voxels up to say, 20 million polys, then I actually prefer to do the rest in the painting room. I don't see any reason to make all of your details in the mesh, with the possible exception of having your model printed and even then it's not always necessary. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member simmsimaging Posted November 3, 2011 Advanced Member Report Share Posted November 3, 2011 I like to do all my work in surface mode, uprez to the point of not being able to see loss of detail while pressing enter. 3dcoat, same software, 3 workflow, that's why I like it ! And that's one of the things I don't like about it - can't please everyone My feeling is that there are too many half-baked avenues for most of the stuff I have seen in 3DC. It's suffering too much from trying to be all things to all people with all workflows. That's my POV anyway, although I know that issue has been beaten to death on the forums... On topic though: I have this same loss of detail problem with 3DC. Either i lose it in voxels moving from surface to voxel (although that is partly avoidable with higher res) even then I tend to lose all the fine stuff on exporting to the paint room. Auto-retopo doesn't seem to give me very good results on complex shapes. Retopologizing isn't something I've gotten any good at mind you, but even when the mesh is close the finer stuff seems to go out the window. I've had better results exporting a dense mesh out of the voxel room and remeshing it in Zbrush. The advantage to that is you can get sub-d levels back in the game, so you can actually UV and paint it still, but the detail holds up much better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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