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3D-Coat 3.7 updates thread


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Moving from CPU to GPU is precisely how Mudbox took ZBrush's crown (as of MB 2009) in terms of raw sculpting performance. 3D Coat can do the same, but not as long as the development focus is a continual rush to add more features. Mudbox focused on Performance and Refinement FIRST. Once the word got out (Siggraph 2008) that MB was now on equal (or better) footing with ZBrush in terms of performance, more and more studios took notice and added it to their pipeline. It is now considered an industry standard, right along with ZBrush. Until 3D Coat reaches the same level, it will only get harder to establish any kind of foothold in the industry. That goes for both sculpting and painting.

imho , the only thing that's missing to make 3D Coat an industry standard is not the performance, i find it more than reasonable.

I showed 3D Coat to one of our lead dev and he was impressed to see how it handles Voxel.

It's funny cause he asked me to increase the brush size to see how 3D Coat would handle it , it was slower but still he was impressed.

He just asked me if 3D Coat uses Sparse Voxel, thing that i don't know.

Anyway the big things that miss to 3DCoat is first communication, marketing and better data management.

To be able to import anything coming from production, and export data with ease.

Camera import

Float /Half support

FBX or at least FBX vertex cache support

Color management

Script support (Python would be perfect since it's standard)

This is why Mari and Mudbox is preferred over the rest.

Cause these feature are indispensable to production.

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imho , the only thing that's missing to make 3D Coat an industry standard is not the performance, i find it more than reasonable.

I showed 3D Coat to one of our lead dev and he was impressed to see how it handles Voxel.

It's funny cause he asked me to increase the brush size to see how 3D Coat would handle it , it was slower but still he was impressed.

He just asked me if 3D Coat uses Sparse Voxel, thing that i don't know.

Anyway the big things that miss to 3DCoat is first communication, marketing and better data management.

To be able to import anything coming from production, and export data with ease.

Camera import

Float /Half support

FBX or at least FBX vertex cache support

Color management

Script support (Python would be perfect since it's standard)

This is why Mari and Mudbox is preferred over the rest.

Cause these feature are indispensable to production.

I dont think 3D Coat uses sparse voxel octree, all voxels look uniform te me.. :)

Anyways.. I dont think we would benefit from camera import, or python scripting..

But dont get me wrong; I love scripting and I abuse Python heavily in other applications to increase workflow speed but in 3DCoat I cant think of anything to use it for.

Mari strength is performance with very very very heavy (animated) geometry, 32bit float painting, 32k image painting.

Im not sure what Mudbox's strengts are.. But I think its also the performance with sculpting, vector displacement, and baking tools.

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..Mari strength is performance with very very very heavy (animated) geometry, 32bit float painting, 32k image painting.

Im not sure what Mudbox's strengts are.. But I think its also the performance with sculpting, vector displacement, and baking tools.

Mudbox's painting is wicked fast too. It's not fazed by large brush sizes either. As of MB 2012, you had a map size limit of 4k (I think it got bumped up for 2013..not sure), but you could assign multiple UV maps, so that's not too big of an issue. Mudbox is still relatively new to 3D Painting, so it is somewhat behind in overall features, but it has made leaps and bounds in the few years since painting was first introduced.

imho , the only thing that's missing to make 3D Coat an industry standard is not the performance, i find it more than reasonable.

Don't misunderstand me, when Andrew did the multi-threading work, it made a HUGE difference and under many circumstances, it performs exceptionally well. However, you hit performance bottlenecks fairly often (large brush sizes especially). And everytime I do, I grow more and more frustrated that CUDA is not employed to work on the task. CUDA Smooth Boost makes a big difference in smoothing, and it's not even been updated to take advantage of all the recent (past 4yrs recent :) ) CUDA advancements.

The app would be so much more of a pleasure to work with if these limitations were addressed.

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Mudbox's painting is wicked fast too. It's not fazed by large brush sizes either. As of MB 2012, you had a map size limit of 4k (I think it got bumped up for 2013..not sure), but you could assign multiple UV maps, so that's not too big of an issue. Mudbox is still relatively new to 3D Painting, so it is somewhat behind in overall features, but it has made leaps and bounds in the few years since painting was first introduced.

I never really tried painting with Mudbox when I tried the 3DCoat demo I was sold immediatly.. :)

But yeah your right about the big brush size performance in 3DCoat I've seen you talking about it many times and I feel your pain.. really wish painting/sculting did not slow down with a big ass brush!

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Anyways.. I dont think we would benefit from camera import, or python scripting..

But dont get me wrong; I love scripting and I abuse Python heavily in other applications to increase workflow speed but in 3DCoat I cant think of anything to use it for.

Mari strength is performance with very very very heavy (animated) geometry, 32bit float painting, 32k image painting.

Im not sure what Mudbox's strengts are.. But I think its also the performance with sculpting, vector displacement, and baking tools.

Mary:

Actually we worked a lot with Mary, and not for the heavy animated geometry .

We use it because we can fix painting trough the shot camera with the same depth of the plate.(camera import,float support)

Even some of our matte painter begun to use it, just because the integration into the pipeline was done easily with Python.

So they can import any asset and shot through a custom UI build in python that access the database and then paint onto it.

So if you want 3D Coat to be well integrated you need that,by the way a lot of easy tools would be easily done by the community instead of Andrew.

Mudbox:

With Mudbox you can do some post animation , for the same reason FBX support .

But i'm really agree that you don't need this at home, for some casual sculpting.

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I dont think 3D Coat uses sparse voxel octree, all voxels look uniform te me.. :)

I don't see any voxels in 3D Coat, just a Marching Cubes onto a voxel.

I don't know what would look like a Marching Cubes onto a Sparse Voxel, this is why i was not sure.

I'm propbably wrong but sparse voxel is famous because it use less memories.

How do you see the voxel ? there is an option for that ?sorry for my newbies question

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But... Sparse Voxel is a raycasting geometry method ?

i was reading that

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/985893/what-are-sparse-voxel-octrees

what makes the SVO unique, is that it stores Voxel information, which is a point in space, that has properties such as Color, Normal, etc..

the idea behind SVO is to ignore triangles, and the need of textures, by putting them together into a single SVO which contains the Voxelized Triangle Hull(the Model), and its surface textures all in one object.

Note:

Pixo is showing the way to grow up. I agree

TY all for sharing your POView :)

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Im also not 100% sure what spare voxel octree's are but I tought it was something like adaptive voxel resolution depending on camera angle, creating smaller voxels (high detail) when you are close and bigger voxels (lower detail) in areas you dont see.

Games have adaptive tesselation with DX11 in creasing polycount based on distance and use the poly count to displace details procedurally. Sparse Voxel Octree I think does the same thing but the downside to voxels compared to polygons when you wanna increase/decrease resolution adaptively is taht voxels also requires you to increase/decrease the 3D textures on the fly.. with polygons you have a UV map with a texture which stays the same.

Then again im not sure if this is 100% correct, this is what I have been taught at school about it.. :)

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@Carlosa:Thank you to take it into account.

I should add, for home sculpting and painting i'm more than happy with 3D Coat.

I don't need more than what we already have,just few bug fix i guess.

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But... Sparse Voxel is a raycasting geometry method ?

I was really probably wrong, but i though sparse voxel store data hierarchically (like acceleration structure for rendering octree mbhv) , so i though may be it was use at least to reduce the size of the 3dc file.

A kind of where i don't paint after increasing the voxel size,will stay a the lower level.It doesn't really make sense but it's what i though.

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Andrew mentioned that he had planned to introduce Voxel Subcells that would correspond with and have the same effective use as Dynamic Tessellation using LiveClay. But much of that work halted when Raul had to go back to CUBA (which has very, very strict policies on Internet usage and extremely slow at that (dial up I think it still is). He is supposedly coming back to Kiev any time now, so hopefully things will pick back up on that front, soon.

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Anyone else having problems of loading new UV's onto a model and having it screw up your painting?

I have a model with two UV sets, I paint on that model, and then import the second UV's to export the map and when I import the UVs it screws up my textures I had just painted. Going back to version 14 the problem is not present.

Also, I'm having all kinds of problems with copy/pasting identical UV islands on top of eachother so I can do symmetrical UVs. Some times it works, some times it doesn't work at all and some times it copies everything over except for a couple of stray verts that stay in their original position. I went all the way back to version 12 and the problem never cleared up.

edit: I tested the UV problem on a different model and it's not having the same problems. The problem mesh is quite a bit denser though.

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We have a number of bugs across several beta versions. some reported and some not...

What I request from Andrew is when he has reach the end of the development cycle (adding new features) for Version 4 he would inform the community because the new features sometimes keep breaking what was just fixed.

Then we could all test the version 4 RC like crazy to find and get the bugs squashed knowing they will not get broken again with new features. Yes, boring for Andrew and anyone who puts in detailed bug reports but necessary.

As a house painter I would spend weeks doing the boring work, sanding, patching, scraping, priming, sanding again. more priming, straining paint to keep it clean and then finally the top coat which would only take a few days to complete.

If I had not done the dull, boring part of the job, my top coat would just have revealed all the bugs in a manner of speaking.

For a while I had to take a bug reporting break but hope soon again to produce some troubleshooting videos.

My hope for version 4 is that it will shine for new users and myself so we can have a sculpting, retopoing and painting experience free of bugs as much as possible.

We have a open beta type of development so the only way to communicate is by here in the updates thread or send Andrew an e-mail which I have done several times... The above is not meant to be negative but just a request.

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Hi People

Please will any1 to check if reference mesh/ Big mesh procedure is working ?

ty in advance

-----------------

FILE IMPORT

Reference Mesh. Import the mesh to use as a reference for the retopology tool.

Big Mesh. Import a large mesh (up to 16 M). This function requires two meshes; a low-poly reference mesh and a high poly mesh. Both should have the same non overlapped UVset. First import the low-poly mesh into scene using the usual import dialog, then load the high poly mesh using this option.

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Anyone else having problems of loading new UV's onto a model and having it screw up your painting?

I have a model with two UV sets, I paint on that model, and then import the second UV's to export the map and when I import the UVs it screws up my textures I had just painted. Going back to version 14 the problem is not present.

Also, I'm having all kinds of problems with copy/pasting identical UV islands on top of eachother so I can do symmetrical UVs. Some times it works, some times it doesn't work at all and some times it copies everything over except for a couple of stray verts that stay in their original position. I went all the way back to version 12 and the problem never cleared up.

edit: I tested the UV problem on a different model and it's not having the same problems. The problem mesh is quite a bit denser though.

I can confirm this issue. I have not yet tested 3.7.17 or 3.7.17A.

16 and 16a Javis. Going back to 14 the problem doesn't show up.

Spot on, happens in those builds, but not 3.7.14. Hopefully it is fixed in the newer builds that I haven't tested.

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I want to quote Chris (Taros) from another thread, so that people can see:

@Registered mantis users: So please check all mantis bugs and support them, if you have the feeling they should be fixed or reminded. There are some bugs existing already a very long time...

Please definitely get those reports in, check your past reports and whatever else you can do to get any major bugs squashed. v4 needs to be as spotless as can be. Also note that Andrew has asked people to put a "+1" on a mantis report if they feel it is important to them or have also found the same bug.

Thanks.

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Any bug reported is already in the current way we report a +1 to the user. The bug interfering with our workflow in most cases.

I will list the ways that I know of bug reporting. It starts to get confusing...

Fourm bug reporting.

Deadline bug reporting, A company or individual sends Andrew an urgent need through support for a bug to fixed.

A file sent to Andrew through the new method inside 3DCoat of sending problem files, maybe due to a bug.

Mantis, With it's already several ways of reporting a bug, Priority level, (Urgent) Type of Bug (Major) .These are just two, there is a list under each category.

Bugs are posted in the Updates thread after a beta release because Andrew is reading this to see if any major problems are with the updated Beta that need to be fixed ASAP.

Now, one more is added to Mantis, a "+1" report...

Ouch, my head is starting to spin... :wacko:

Personal opinion below:

Andrew is a very gracious person and is trying hard to help users so the bug reports from them do not get overlooked. I instead would suggest a narrowing of the field of ways of bug reporting for the release of Version 4 in a manner of speaking to "lean out time" or in other words put time on a diet. Keeping up with so many ways of bug reporting might be harder to do and use up more time.

Andrew, first has a family life, business next. In business, the daily running of the business itself, not development, just the things you got to do on a day to day basis. Then there is the development part plus your bug squashing which entails the reading of all the above ways. Also added to the list would be answering general questions that are sent to support through e-mail. He even takes the time to correct an incorrect statement I made to a user in the forum. Now that is what I call personal support from a developer...

What I am most concern about is that Andrew will burn out and we get a release that is not up to the standard we all would like it to be. Again my personal opinion and the last statement from me on version 4 as I have expressed it several times already...

Now unto the the job of bug reporting as I come across them and checking my older filed reports.

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Digman:

I totally agree with you in this matter. It seems everything, these days, just keeps getting more complex, not simpler.

This would not be a problem if people had an infinite amount of time in their lives and for their lives.

I vote for streamlining (making processes more efficient and less time consuming) these kinds of things - wherever possible - giving those who have work to do more time to do it.

Greg Smith

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Actually mantis was setup to help Andrew AND the users keep all bugs together and get a better overview. Mantis was made to make decisions and set priority to bugs. If someone think a bug have to get a high level, than it is not a problem to do this in mantis. A forum can never handle souch things. Andrew has much better tools to organise all bugs in mantis. A great filter system does a much better service than a forum can do ever.

It is a long way to move all interested users to mantis. Since mantis is online, I posted all my bugs and features into it. Unfortunately the history shown that I was one of a few people did this. Now some more do it too and this is a promising development that makes me hope for a better bug reporting future.

In my opinion: If you want really support Andrew and 3D Coat: Post into mantis. Discussing bugs inside this forum is completely ok, but post them into mantis too if you are shure it's a bug.

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I'd also like to add: for those who do not have time to post in Mantis, please feel quite free to post either a step-by-step description of how you achieved a bug or a problem of any kind (a numbered list) - or, a short video (link) that demonstrates those steps - right here on the forum.

I make weekly reports to Andrew of all such forum reports - so your input will not be overlooked.

Don't forget to include your machine specifications - (especially video card) - and which version of 3D-Coat you are using.

Thanks,

Greg Smith

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