3DCoat 2021.53

Key improvements:

- Auto-Updater introduced: find the Updates manager in the Start menu, it notifies about the available updates in correspondence with the Edit->Preferences.

- The new RGB cavity was introduced as the default calculation method (see "Edit-> Preferences-> Tools-> Use RGB cavity as the default cavity calculation method"). In this case multi-range cavity will be calculated on the GPU, additional control in UI of conditions/smart materials will appear - the "Cavity width". It allows you to vary the cavity width/smoothing in real time, it is very important for realistic PBR texturing. If you already have an old cavity layer in the scene, you need to delete it to use this feature. This is a very significant feature for PBR Painting over the Texture/Mesh.

- Smart Materials->Add Existing Folder completely rewritten. Now it takes into account all types of maps, all imaginable texture names aliases, recovers displacement from the Normal map (if no native displacement is found), assigns cube-mapping and generates the preview. If there are images without aliases at the end they will be treated as flat color maps.

- We corrected a long standing problem (since the beginning of voxels) - when a partial voxelization happens (after surface strokes) almost invisible square border appears around the modified area. If you do it again and again it becomes way more visible. This was the reason why mesh was voxelized entirely in V2021. But now that problem is gone and partial voxelization is clean and nice.

- Pose tool may perform normal extrusion or regular transform - the choice is yours.

 Minor improvements:

General:

- Now you can keep and distribute custom rooms in the File->Create extensions .

- If you assigned a hotkey to the preset and switched to the other presets folder, the preset is still accessible by hotkey.

- In preferences you can tell to be notified only about stable updates. And you can turn off notifications if needed.

- After the first launch the Auto-Updater creates the link in StartMenu. So you will be able to use Auto-Updater even after switching to versions when it was not supported. In this case you can call it from the start menu instead of Help->Updates manager.

- Translation system got a major update. Now the targeted translation shows possible translation options right in the form, you can check  and correct, it should speed up the translation a lot. Translation with other services is also possible, but still requires a bit more clicks. Also it is possible to review and translate all new texts with Help->Translate new texts.

Texturing:

- Correct look of the Texture editor UI in 4K, better look in 2K.

- Added the "To Uniform" Color effect to the Textures/Adjust menu that converts the layer texture to uniform, you can use Overlay or Modulate 2x to blend the layer with the color of the layers below, and combine multiple textures.

- Better support of ABR brushes. Now they load correctly, at least those alphas that were reported on the forum. And you can also drop them to the viewport to install. Pay attention, zipping huge alphas may take some time, so please wait till zipping ends before exiting (progress visible in the 3DCoat's header).

Sculpting:

- The rotation (bending) axis preview in the Bend tool. It is important because without that axis nothing is understood about what happens there.

- Geometry->Visibility/Ghosting->Invert volumes visibility, the tooltip: this function inverts all object visibility. If the child is invisible, it becomes visible and the parent becomes ghosted. Ghosted volumes become visible. In this way, this operation is exactly reversible but vanishes the initial ghosting.

- Surface Brush Engine now compatible with the incremental voxelization. It means that after using surface brushes only the modified part will be re-voxelized keeping the rest unchanged.

- "Undercuts->Test the mould" works correctly with tapering.

- Pose tool settings shown correctly, better line preview in Pose/Lines mode.

- Picker tool (that can be activated via the V hotkey) now works correctly over the sculpt layers. It also got additional functionality. First off, you can choose to pick the color from the screen always in the tool settings. Secondly, even if this option is disabled, tap V second time over that same color and the second tap will pick the color from the screen. The first tap takes the color from the layer, if available.

Check out this video series of Rhino creation process:

Retopo/UV/Modeling:

- Strokes tool, cut slices by red line works for Paint/Reference objects as well. But it has lower priority than the Sculpt objects. If the cut stroke captured something from the sculpt, the paint objects will not be taken into account. Only if the slice has not touched the sculpt, the paint objects will be sliced.

- Added a possibility of scaling by Right Mouse for the "Surface Strip" and "Spine" tools in the Modeling Room

- Added a possibility to use selected edges as profile for "Surface Swept" in the Modeling Room

- The Preferences->Beta->Treat retopo groups as materials has the correct value in the checkbox now. Actually, nothing changed in this logic, just the checkbox shows the inverse value.

- New "Array of copies" tool added to the Modeling Room.

- ApplyTriangulation and ApplyQuadrangulation added to the Retopo Mesh.

Bug fixes: 

- Fixed the problem when Edit->Customize UI vanishes the pressure curves for Depth/Radius/etc. The other related problem fixed - when you switch from the tool with nontrivial curves to the tool without those curves it takes the curves from the previous tool, which messes up the pressure curves.

- Fixed the PSD link problem: with several (not all) blending modes the opacity of the layer resets to 100% after getting the image from Photoshop.

- Fixed Smart materials pack creation problem. If materials in same folders refer to different (by content) files with the same name then they may overwrite each other during the pack creation. Now md5 of those files is calculated and files can be renamed, if needed.

- Fixed the problem related to the Migration master. Firstly, the default source path is correct now. Secondly, copying Smart materials is now correct, there was a problem if the images were in folders named using the native language characters. The 4.9 uses ACP, while the 2021.xx version uses UTF-8, so there was incompatibility in the texture names. Now the names are converted correctly.

- When you use the Move tool and change the radius - now it does not lead to the surface breaking.

- Fixed a Texture editor problem when you needed to press the wireframe button twice to get back to normal view.

- Fixed the problem of clicking on 3DCoat's window when inactive leads to unexpected actions. This was especially problematic in the Move tool.

- Fixed the problem when each tool selection turns the "Auto snap" ON in the Retopo room and OFF in the Modeling one. Now the user's choice is kept for each room (Retopo/Modeling) till it is changed manually.

- Fixed the Move tool + CTRL issue.

- Delete panorama dialog fixed.

- Fixed cube-mapped (and other mappings as well) stencil scale when lasso used over the voxels.

- Symmetry plane disappearing with res+ fixed.

- Fixed a Brush engine problem when brushes that should only indent (like Chiesel) were lifting the surface a little as well. So making accurate bevels with Chiesel was almost impossible. Now it is corrected. We recommend "Restore defaults" for the Chiesel to get it close to 4.9.

- Fixed a bug where the Unlink Sculpt Mesh menu item detached only the first PolyGroup.

- Fixed the problem when painting over the attached Smart material with soft stroke skips some areas of the model.

- Fixed the lag during the Painting/Sculpting. This lag is really tricky, was happening sometimes, not regularly, so it was really hard to reproduce and fix. On our side Painting/Sculpting became way more responsive. Now we need to understand how it influenced the Sculpt/Paint speed on your side.

- Fixed the problem when "File->Export model and textures" changes the type of workflow without the user notification.

- OBJ importer takes the order of materials from MTL file (if exists), not from order of appearing in the OBJ file, so the order of materials kept unchanged during the export/import. It fixes the problem when you use "Bake->Update paint Mesh with retopo Mesh" and materials/uv-sets list becomes swizzled.

- Measure tool multiple problems fixed, the tool cleaned up - no lags, clean UI, clean rendering, correct background rendering.

- A LOT of UI corrections regarding correct size of buttons, controls in tool parameters, especially in primitives and gizmos done.

- Fixed the problem of Move tool jittering and the whole family of related problems when pen position and the preview round were in different places.