3D-Coat 3.5 updates thread

[haikalle]

Looking really really nice so far. I love how you can add detail, zoom in, add more detail, zoom in, etc... Really shows the potential it

has. Great work.

[philnolan3d]

I think it's normal Phil. In fact, details should probably work better at ~0.3-0.7

What you have to check is the reducer brush, it's the most important.

I don't see any Reducer brush, am I just missing it?

[Andrew Shpagin]

I think it's normal Phil. In fact, details should probably work better at ~0.3-0.7

What you have to check is the reducer brush, it's the most important.

Reduction will come a bit later. Of course reduction is important too.

[michalis]

Reduction will come a bit later. Of course reduction is important too.

OK Andrew, sorry, just a macuser with some experience on sculptris LOL

The reducer tool as +- I suppose. A re sampler I could say.

[philnolan3d]

Yes I actually just expected that the LiveClay tool would reduce if I entered a lower detail number, maybe even a negative number. Although 0-100% would be best I think with 50% causing no change.

[michalis]

For this reducer tool, ctrl+click is more useful

[philnolan3d]

For this reducer tool, ctrl+click is more useful

More useful than what? Entering a number? Ctrl+Click already has a feature, it indents into the mesh like it does with most other tools.

[ghib]

More useful than what? Entering a number? Ctrl+Click already has a feature, it indents into the mesh like it does with most other tools.

I would agree with Michalis on this. Maybe not ctrl click but some quick hotkey for reducing (intensity set by number) would be nice for working on the fly.

[philnolan3d]

It could be more useful but I think it would then need separate sliders for more / less dense.

[BeatKitano]

Downloading, downloading.... comoooon...

Can't wait to try this and see for performance, the rest is less important as it's the first beta everything is wip :>

If it's as smooth as sculptris and go way beyond in polycount then it's all good

[EDIT] Ok, when all base will be there, *I think* quality of sculpts on those boards *might* jump a few bazillion lightyear forward....

[Andrew Shpagin]

Downloading, downloading.... comoooon...

Can't wait to try this and see for performance, the rest is less important as it's the first beta everything is wip :>

If it's as smooth as sculptris and go way beyond in polycount then it's all good

Sculptris is soooooooooooooo slow on my side even after tweaks in settings that described on pixologic's forum.

And speed will be optimized a lot But even now it is not a problem to scult im multiiple millions.

Btw, go to surf mede first better.

[BeatKitano]

Sculptris is soooooooooooooo slow on my side even after tweaks in settings that described on pixologic's forum.

And speed will be optimized a lot But even now it is not a problem to scult im multiiple millions.

It's butter smooth at start here, but as soon you get near one million everything gets sluggish and eventually crash, if that problem wasn't there I would probably use it as a companion for 3dcoat. But that won't be necessary with liveclay now, everything in one package with a standard navigation scheme and very fine performances, couldn't ask better

Btw, go to surf mede first better.

I don't understand.

Anyway, looking very impatiently forward to the development of liveclay.

p.s: may be a known issue already but the old "smooth and get holes in the surface" is back. I think it was one Haikalle closed before.

[Andrew Shpagin]

I am leaving Kiev for seveal days (wedding of my wife's sister), I will be back Monday.

[haikalle]

p.s: may be a known issue already but the old "smooth and get holes in the surface" is back. I think it was one Haikalle closed before.

I assinged this issue http://www.3d-coat.com/mantis/view.php?id=235 again to Andrew. BeatKitano. Do you know is this breaking mesh

directly linked into resample tool or do you get breaking some other way too?

Andrew, have a nice wedding weekend.

[LorenzoS]

Wow. LiveClay beta. Exciting.

[michalis]

well a misunderstanding here, one million faces or two ? We're talking about lot of details, we have dynamic tessellation now, meaning that 300-500 k could be enough in most cases.

When you create extremely dense areas, "stars" having more than 24 edges connected on vertices, you have to expect crashes and even useless exported meshes. The reducer (and the opposite) tool is crucial. Its not just a reducer, its a retopo tool. Think about it. I mean, it isn't the amount of faces the only limit.

BTW I don't agree with Andrew that sculptris is so slow. Not on my side.

[BeatKitano]

I assinged this issue http://www.3d-coat.c...view.php?id=235 again to Andrew. BeatKitano. Do you know is this breaking mesh

directly linked into resample tool or do you get breaking some other way too?

Andrew, have a nice wedding weekend.

It's my fault, it's a bug I guess it's because liveclay is not fully implemented.

I'm so used to merge my surface change to voxel when working in surface mode (it makes the mesh more uniform after drastic changes and correct the stretching of faces).

I did a merge after a liveclay session, undoed the merging as it killed all the benefit of liveclay local subdiv and then the breaking appeared when smoothing. You can try. I guess it's because the code for surf > voxel (subcells I think from the raul's latest post ?) is not there yet. I will not submit that as a bug yet, I think this will resolve by itself when liveclay get more advanced.

[philnolan3d]

I did a merge after a liveclay session, undoed the merging as it killed all the benefit of liveclay local subdiv and then the breaking appeared when smoothing. You can try. I guess it's because the code for surf > voxel (subcells I think from the raul's latest post ?) is not there yet. I will not submit that as a bug yet, I think this will resolve by itself when liveclay get more advanced.

I mentioned this in my first post about LC here, then I had to edit it out because I realized Andrew actually mentions it in the 3.5.20 announcement post.

[haikalle]

It's my fault, it's a bug I guess it's because liveclay is not fully implemented.

I'm so used to merge my surface change to voxel when working in surface mode (it makes the mesh more uniform after drastic changes and correct the stretching of faces).

I did a merge after a liveclay session, undoed the merging as it killed all the benefit of liveclay local subdiv and then the breaking appeared when smoothing. You can try. I guess it's because the code for surf > voxel (subcells I think from the raul's latest post ?) is not there yet. I will not submit that as a bug yet, I think this will resolve by itself when liveclay get more advanced.

I agree. I will close all my reports about this issue. It will be solved in the end

[spacepainter]

[Digital777]

I used Sculptris before mainly as a way to reduce meshes but it's just been replaced with Meshmixer for that.

As for the Sculptris speed i agree with what BeatKitano said, it's quite good until you get to higher details when it will be slow and can crash. Other than that it was a nice program for free but with programs like Meshmixer now and the fact blender now has quite decent sculpting tools there is better options available for free.

Now with Liveclay for 3DC also i doubt i would have much use for Sculptris really though. It was great for a while but after the ZB buy out not much has happened with it as i guess all of the main work is going to ZB instead.

[michalis]

It was great for a while but after the ZB buy out not much has happened with it as i guess all of the main work is going to ZB instead.

OK but have a visit at pixologic first.

This is a post from zbrushcentral

Originally Posted by DrPetter

Hey everyone.

Quick status update. We're close to releasing Sculptris Alpha 6 now, so you should be seeing a public announcement of that very soon. The main focus of this version is to add support for Mac OSX, fix bugs from Alpha 5 and improve the workflow by adding ZBrush navigation and GoZ mesh transfer. If you had any problems with Alpha 5 or couldn't run it properly, you should definitely check out this update.

This is a sort of stepping stone towards further updates, making sure the original stuff works very well before adding more. When Alpha 6 has been released, I will continue working on a bunch of exciting new features like those discussed in this forum thread.

Hope you will all continue to sculpt and have fun!

/Tomas

[farsthary]

Hi all

First of all LiveClay is still a WIP but it has an important milestone implemented recently: Subcells or the posibility to refine any voxel hierarchical to any level ... what this mean? unlimited small details, you can sculpt a small zone and have there 10Million polygons without too much hassle and can jump to a nearby zone of the model and continue sculpting without loss of performance (of course, hardware is the limiting factor but not the software) The current released beta have some issues (mesh output quality) that prevent to fully take advantage of that feature, so users can find a performance cap with very small pen radius and lots of polygons but still in that case the system is quite fast! Once fully aviable and implemented, trust me, performance won't be an issue no matter the amount of detail of the model, this will be a critical feature because 3DCoat will be able to dynamically sculpt incredible detailed models in a fully local way even on modest hardware

Just for testing I was sculpting using that feature and after reaching in a very small zone (the size of a voxel) 1,5 million polygons I quit because I got bored and didn't see any performance slowdown on a slow PC! of course, getting mesh gaps and disconected faces because of the current issues I talk about, that's why this is currently not aviable for public usage.

Previously 3DC used static voxels so in order to increase resolution you have to add globally more voxels, now you can refine any voxel into subcells and each of them into more and so on! currently is in a raw state and only functional for Surface LiveClay, it basically allows to have a hierarchical dynamic mesh partition so performance of LiveClay is fully local and is independent from the global mesh reosolution you can keep adding more detail and detail in smaller and smaller zones on the model as long as you want, I think this is awesome and can be used for the rest of the bruses since the required changes was minimal

Currently we are working toward improving mesh quality and reducing extraordinary vertices, this is very important too since dynamic subdivision by definition introduce lots of them, the work in this area will allow to solve the current performance limitation in order to take advantage of full locality and after that we will tackle dynamic Mesh Simplification/Decimation , that is the opositface of the same coin. LiveClay includes both features: dynamic mesh subdivision and simplification.

With this beta we aim at user feedback for tool usability and enhancements, we would like to see artist models and real life use cases since we developers tend to focus too much on testing fast usage and not heavy usage of the tool, of course this will not be the final GUI of LiveClay and expect some crashes too

Hope you enjoy it and feed us with some gorgeous models made with LiveClay

Cheers

Raul

[BeatKitano]

As soon as the reduction/local uprez tool part gets implemented, I will be on the line, even with an out of service wrist :>

[artman]

Hi all

First of all LiveClay is still a WIP but it has an important milestone implemented recently: Subcells or the posibility to refine any voxel hierarchical to any level ... what this mean? unlimited small details, you can sculpt a small zone and have there 10Million polygons without too much hassle and can jump to a nearby zone of the model and continue sculpting without loss of performance (of course, hardware is the limiting factor but not the software) The current released beta have some issues (mesh output quality) that prevent to fully take advantage of that feature, so users can find a performance cap with very small pen radius and lots of polygons but still in that case the system is quite fast! Once fully aviable and implemented, trust me, performance won't be an issue no matter the amount of detail of the model, this will be a critical feature because 3DCoat will be able to dynamically sculpt incredible detailed models in a fully local way even on modest hardware

Just for testing I was sculpting using that feature and after reaching in a very small zone (the size of a voxel) 1,5 million polygons I quit because I got bored and didn't see any performance slowdown on a slow PC! of course, getting mesh gaps and disconected faces because of the current issues I talk about, that's why this is currently not aviable for public usage.

Previously 3DC used static voxels so in order to increase resolution you have to add globally more voxels, now you can refine any voxel into subcells and each of them into more and so on! currently is in a raw state and only functional for Surface LiveClay, it basically allows to have a hierarchical dynamic mesh partition so performance of LiveClay is fully local and is independent from the global mesh reosolution you can keep adding more detail and detail in smaller and smaller zones on the model as long as you want, I think this is awesome and can be used for the rest of the bruses since the required changes was minimal

Currently we are working toward improving mesh quality and reducing extraordinary vertices, this is very important too since dynamic subdivision by definition introduce lots of them, the work in this area will allow to solve the current performance limitation in order to take advantage of full locality and after that we will tackle dynamic Mesh Simplification/Decimation , that is the opositface of the same coin. LiveClay includes both features: dynamic mesh subdivision and simplification.

With this beta we aim at user feedback for tool usability and enhancements, we would like to see artist models and real life use cases since we developers tend to focus too much on testing fast usage and not heavy usage of the tool, of course this will not be the final GUI of LiveClay and expect some crashes too

Hope you enjoy it and feed us with some gorgeous models made with LiveClay

Cheers

Raul

What I'm expecting personally as a sculptor,is perfect mimicking of ALL brushes behaviors,how they react to surface,alphas ,brush settings (ex:spacing,rotation along motion,interpolate(soft stroke) ect...

It has been a long journey for Andrew to finetune some of those brushes and i just hope Liveclay does not imply rewriting them from scratch.

First feedback :

(using default settings and various small alphas)

Well,its hard for me to give any feedback since I dont know which brush it actually mimics...I think its surface Clay.Am I right?

It works well with the basic soft alpha but gets really quirky and slow when using some custom alphas (small simple 8bit brushes really not crazy 4096x4096)

It seems to have some problems at the end of strokes also,some strokes end in a flatened lump(tablet interaction maybe)

Also some regions become "crushed" at some points when overlapping strokes from many different angles.

"Interpolate" does not work very well either.

I had only one crash with it while smoothing(I sent bug report)

Also its hard to test the brush behavior without a depth slider...

But as a first beta iteration it looks very promising and surprisingly stable.

Especially the subdividing aspect of it.Extremely efficient.

even with fine details The polycount increase so slowly....thats pretty cool

This will be very exciting to see this grow.

Nice work Raul and Andrew!

EDit:Ok,it seems slow down using alphas and "interpolate" occur if "use spacing" is activated and too small value is used(ex: 1%).Which was the value embedded in most of the brushes I used.With higher spacing values brush strokes work really fast.

[LorenzoS]

LiveClay for Mac users soon?

[kay_Eva]

I love it!

[XRA]

woaa can't wait to try this! also looking forward to not having that weird baking bug which I think is fixed, thank you for the updates

*EDIT*

LiveClay is extremely powerful with masks for details!!! awesome!

[Tinker]

LiveClay is awesome!

[Digital777]

I have tested LiveClay now and it is really great. I guess these are known since it's early beta but -

I noticed a bug when i use liveclay and then select another tool after as the tool options dialog still remains. Then if you close the dialog and later go back to liveclay there will be no dialog.

There is a droplist which doesn't seem to do anything, i guess this will be the modes later though and it simply is not complete yet.

Probably the biggest problem right now is if i am in liveclay mode then press the Res+ button, the moment i then go to draw the program will crash.

@Michalis - Thanks, i had seen that update before but it seemed it was mainly linking it to ZB which i don't own. I only have windows OS computers also so that update was not too interesting to me really but it's good to know Sculptris is still being developed however.