I actually think it used to be like that in the alpha when he just introduced the voxel sculpting. Unless I'm actually crazy and imagining things.
I remember wondering where the feature went when I tried V3 first anyways. There were seperate sets of buttons for voxel scultping and surface sculpting. Would love to see this back!

Do you have CUDA? Also check in the Voxels menu and make sure the Incremental Render box is checked. This basically does what you asked with the voxel grid updates, except what it does is only updates the area immediately around the brush for each stroke. You can see this if you turn off the symmetry plane, it still stays there until you rotate the camera but if you don't touch the a camera and start working in that area, you'll see only the immediate area around the bush is being updated.

The only time I really see this pause it's only for a split second and it's only when I'm using a large brush on a very dense mesh.

Originally Posted by Peris

I actually think it used to be like that in the alpha when he just introduced the voxel sculpting. Unless I'm actually crazy and imagining things.
I remember wondering where the feature went when I tried V3 first anyways. There were separate sets of buttons for voxel scultping and surface sculpting. Would love to see this back!

This feature has now become a full mode. Look at the Vox Tree, right next to the name for each object is a Cube icon, showing that you're in voxel mode. Click it and it will change to a squiggly line, showing that object is now in Surface mode. Surface mode is great for smoothing a thin area out without punching a hole in it.

Here's a little video example:
http://screencast.com/t/84AiayFKWfh

3D Coat 3.1.03 released with a bunch of bug fixes and a few new features. Here's a quick vid showing the new Rasp-File tool as well as more about the Muscles that I missed in the last vid.

http://vimeo.com/6418098

Next update released, 3.1.04

- Massive improvements in curves tool. Curves got 4 modes: extrude, move, rotate, scale to build mesh base rapidly and have very good control over the curve.
- Moving points in curve tool improved - if you will click and drag point handler will not appear but point will be moved in screen space. You can constraint movements with keys 'X', 'Y', 'Z' or using combination of them.
- New checker in curve tool - "Stick to ground" to fit curve better to the surface if need
- Full support of Drag&drop of files from explorer to 3D-Coat done. You can open or merge 3B files, models for painting and voxeling, create pens, assign reference images, create new layrs with texture, create materials, masks, fill fields with filenames. You can drop directly to viewport, then you will be asked how to use object or drop image/object to specific place like materials/pens/masks palette to perform action immediately without questions. Drag&drop supports dropping images not only from file explorer but from web too! For example find some image in google images and drop directly to 3DC without saving it to file!
- I improved cutting of with lasso in voxel room - use CTRL+SHIFT to cut off what is beyond lasso.
- fixed: incorrect preview of fill mode in microvertex painting
- fixed: sometimes splitting face in retopo tool resulted with 2 faces in different retopo groups.
- fixed incorrect combining retopo layers with Shift+Drag

Curves changes are not final - some additional changes are required there. I am trying to make it really perfect.

http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=3594

One of the other 3DC forum members, Leigh Bamforth, made a video of the newer features of Curves.

http://vimeo.com/6508309

Version 3.1.05 released. Linux version update comes tomorrow.

- fixed most important and BIG Linux bug - point at the beginning of the stroke
- Curve tool usability improved essentially taking into account all requests.
- Save/Load buttons in curve tool
- Bug prevented drag&drop in many cases fixed.
- Also the reason will be displayed - why drag and drop failed if it happened. Some recommendations will be given automatically.
- fixed: Smoothing speed was working incorrect in muscle/rasp-file tool
- fixed: symmetry plane was not updated in primitives and curves tool after merging
- fixed: Sphere primitive does not respect symmetry
- fixed: crash in "Make symm" that happened if source side was empty (mentioned by haikalle).
- symmetry plane shift fixed in clone and degrade
- fixed: bug in retopo tool, pints and quads, when you was trying to zoom with RMB over the model.
- same navigation bug fixed in curves tool.

I just finished my first production asset with this software today. Voxel sculpt to retopo, send to uvlayout and back, bake color, normals and AO, then paint. Cavity painting over normal maps is the shit!

UVlayout was the only real detour I had to take and that was painless. I think I'll do my next personal piece completely in 3dc though just to give the uv tools a real test and then give feedback on where they need work. They seem to be the weakest link in the software at the moment.

The new curve tools are much better for blocking out characters now. Very easy to sketch out a rough skeleton and then just start sculpting.

Andrew is currently working on adding ABF unwrapping for the UV map tools.

That's cool, I was thinking of approaching my evaluation more from a workflow perspective though... selection/manipulation of unwrapped pieces etc. Not to duplicate UVlayout by any stretch but basically just make it more desirable to keep that part of the process in 3dc as well. I haven't touched the UVs since before 3 shipped though so he may well have already handled it. =]

I see. honestly I haven't really used the UVs myself much, I was using LightWave and the PLG plugins to do it, but I know he has updated it it. There's a new gizmo for adjusting UV islands, I saw that much.

it seems like the uv tools are in the process of being updated in the latest version of 3Dcoat on the forums http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.p...opic=3594&st=0

new tools like this one look useful

http://www.screencast.com/users/PalS...9-a048f089fa09

Yeah I'm really happy with the UV updates so far. I used to take my model out of 3DC to do the UVs in LightWave. In my current project I didn't have to do that, it's been in 3DC since it started.

Latest update makes the surface sculpting mode much more useful, in tandem with voxels. Andrew added a 'chisel' brush, which works similar to the ZB polish brush when in surface mode, but overall I'm just liking how the surface mode has more familiar brushes that produce expected results.

I'm starting to develop a fairly seamless workflow between voxels for their unlimited freeform nature, and surface mode for fine tuning using more familiar and capable polygon tools. The switch between the two is fairly seamless so I'm finding I go back and forth without thinking now, depending on what I want. If I need more volume I work in voxels, if I need to refine I toggle the surface mode. Pretty cool!

Can't wait till he adds multi-resolution to the surface mode, along with vertex painting.

Originally Posted by renderhjs

a religious software

just check out the website and or some youtube videos. It can do many things, is cheaper and might fill gaps between certain techniques better as other tools.

as long as they make it a request not not try to force people to be moral in their sense of the term, I'm okay with it.

i'm just testint the latest trial, is there any way to increase the density of the quadrangulation mesh? not matter what i set up, the same mesh comes out and it is very rough, way too rough for my purpose

Maybe you guys could help me out...

I downloaded the demo and been trying it out but I get this stupid seam where the UV seams are. I thought you used this software to paint away seams?

I have this image, it's kinda hard to see....but I can't seem to paint a few pixels away from the UV seam edge....anyone experience this?

looks like an padding or mipmap error to me, can't you set it up to pad around the texture?

Neox, are you talking about the voxel density?

Originally Posted by Neox

looks like an padding or mipmap error to me, can't you set it up to pad around the texture?

I have no idea how to do that.

Pior, well dunno... i have a mesh from zbrush, its a toony cave interior, very flowy, very smooth forms, now what i want to do, is shortcut the retopopart, as its a cave, i just need the forms, not a superfancy animatable topology. So i thought i'd import that to 3dcoat and use the quadrangualte feature to automaticly create a topo over it, but its waaaaay too simple and loses a lot of forms.


@Autopsy: i haven't either, but thatd be my best guess in any other package

Neox can you paint over seams with one swipe without the problem I'm having? I thought it was the model it self....but it seems to be ok.

Well I did exactly that on that hairstyle I was doing and it worked fine - no need for retopo, just procedural quads. Not perfect of course esp for a character but for a cave it should be just fine.

Can you send me an obj of a similar mesh you try to convert? I'll see how it behaves in my current 3DC copy (not the latest).

That is odd... I thought you could control padding too... maybe it was just for baking. Either way, I just tried to paint outside the uv borders in the UVTexture window as well and it wouldn't let me. I'll definitely request this in the feedback forum if you haven't already.

Neox: the Quadrangulate settings are pretty useless I've found. What I do to get around those and retain some detail from a voxel mesh is to subdivide the quadrangulated mesh after it is generated. You can do that using the retopo tools. It's a general solution though since you really have no control over density in specific areas unless you delete those and retopo them by hand. But it does work if you are just looking for a fast way to retopo and retain some detail from the original.

James I started a thread on the same thing a week ago? I started it in the painting bug section, don't know if that was the place for it....

http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=4663

Unfortunately I haven't had any feedback on it.

I really would like to buy it, the retopo tools are freaking awesome!