We are glad to announce the release of 3D-Coat V3 powered by volumetric sculpting feature 9th June 2009. 3D-Coat V3 will support NVIDIA's CUDA™ technology which considerably accelerates volumetric sculpting performance.

Within 30 days following the release, 3D-Coat V3 will be offered at a special discount price of $200. After the first month of sales the price will be increased. Upgrade from V2 to V3 will be offered at a reduced price of 60$ (80$ for users who purchased 3D-Coat before 16 September 2008) in the first month of sales, and will significantly increase thereafter.

If you are not yet a 3D-Coat user, you have a unique chance to buy 3D-Coat V3 for a mere $185. Once you register on the web-site you will receive an e-mail (please type your e-mail address correctly) with a special link. Using that link you will have a special $15 discount on the current 3D-Coat V2 for the 15-day trial period. This allows you to purchase 3DC V2 for 125$. Then throughout the 30 days following the 3D-Coat V3 release, you may upgrade V2 to V3 for 60$ and have 3D-Coat V3 for only $185 total.

1. Traditional and Volumetric sculpting comparison



- Traditional sculpting can result in stretched polygons
- Larger alterations to the topology can be difficult (if not impossible) with a traditional sculpt

2. Artist's Instrument?

- Artists want to draw, to sculpt, to create - The last thing they want to think about is the geometry of an object
- They want to focus more of their time on form and texture, and less on polygons and edge flow
- They want to feel like an Artist, rather than an engineer

3.Volumetric sculpting principles



- Voxels are dots in space with a value between 0 and 1
- A marching cubes algorithm allows you to modify the actual volume of an object rather than just the surface.

4.Voxel operations examples



Voxel video operations examples:

5.Example: Scale of an old fish.



- Result

5.Example: Coral Reef

- Using “Move”
- Cutting holes
- Merging objects



- Pay particular attention to the moray eel and the tentacles on the jelly fish
- 3D-Coat has a powerful system of curve manipulation

6.Example:

- You can use any closed OBJ file as a profile
- You can create basic forms very quickly
- You can put details on objects (chains, hoses, stitches, rivets, buckles, etc.)

7.Example: Hair

- Hair is also made using curves
- Curves can be merged on pen or be positioned in space



More Example Videos

Models were provided by Rick Sarasin

8.Tools



- Besides voxel operations, there is a full set of operations that are familiar to ZB/MB users
- Surface deformation with masking, fine detailing, etc.
- Transpose – Adjusting the object's position, local rotation, translation, and scaling.

9.Technical difficulties

- Necessity of proceeding a great dataflow. Hundreds of millions of voxels.
- Due to special optimization object requires as much memory as an equal polygonal
- Proceeding with 20 millions of polygons even without hardware acceleration (without CUDA).

10. Using CUDA

- NVidia CUDA is supported as an option for voxel calculation acceleration

- NVidia 8, 9, 2 series
- Even an inexpensive NVidia graphics card (120$ - 220$) can increase acceleration 4-7 times

11. Prospects

- Release of v3.0 will be in the first quarter of 2009
- Essential improvements to functionality – volumetric layers, several primitives for fast creation of 3D sketches, hundreds of millions of voxels

12. Render



- Realtime (up to 50 million triangles)?
- User created shaders
- Offline rendering