AWAITING CONFIRMATION: Quixel Suite 1.8 issues and remarks
grand marshal polycounter
Hi Quixel staff.
A bit of background : I am familiar with various iterations of DDO as I have been testing the program for a few years now (Legacy and Suite). Most of my experience is with DDO Legacy, having used it on a few personal projects. I however never had the opportunity to use the more recent DDO releases to their fullest, and since I have some more time on my hands now I thought I'd use this as a chance to dive in deeper. On the technical level my goal is to produce results fully compatible with Marmoset Toolbag2 and UE4.
I should also mention that I have had the pleasure to chat in person with both Teddy and Ryan over the past few years, which always resulted in very interesting exchanges about the program.
I am hoping to use this thread to report everything that I find problematic or counter-intuitive about the Suite in its current state, in order to help its further development.
I am on Win7prox64, Photoshop CS5 Extended (12.1) with Windows set to its most basic theme (XP style) for maximum performance. I am running a triple monitor setup off a GTX750Ti.
I installed the Quixel Suite to C: \Program Files\Quixel, as the default install path for the program seemed to be inside my Windows user folder, which is not appropriate.
Inconsistent behavior on suite launch
Starting from the very beginning, I notice some inconsistent behavior depending on the way I launch the suite. Most of the time it goes as follows :
- If Photoshop is initially closed, and I launch the suite by clicking on the Q icon, both the suite and Photoshop open, but the suite widget is rarely displayed over the main Photoshop Window. It initially shows up properly on top of everything and I can actually click the widget, but as soon as I go on and start interacting with Photoshop the widget ends up being sent back behind the Photoshop window, which makes the suite unusable.
- If Photoshop is initially open, and I launch the suite by clicking on the Q icon, the suite successfully stays on top of the Photoshop window, and reduces itself as expected when Photoshop is reduced.
These two scenarios are shown in this video :
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcc6OQhVtUU"]Quixel suite 1.8 inconsistent startup behavior - YouTube[/ame]
The only way I know of to fix this disappearing behavior is to run a program like AlwaysOnTopMaker http://www.fadsoft.net/AlwaysOnTopMaker.htm and manually set the Quixel Suite widget to be always on top, but it goes without saying that I shouldn't have to do that
I also seem to have to run AlwaysOnTopMaker on the rest of the UI elements of the suite, like the Base Creator Window, in order to keep things visible.
Example projects fail to load textures in 3DO
While projects themselves seem to load properly (clicking Load Project and browsing to the appropriate Project.xml project definition file triggers proper PSDs to open), 3DO ends up showing an untextured model.
I do manage to load model and textures manually using "Open 3DO custom loader" but that shouldn't be necessary for established projects.
As a side note, the custom loader window has some odd tooltips :
"Load project" should not have "Clear map" as a tooltip as this is confusing, and the New Project and Load Project buttons seem to not have a reason to be here in the first place. Furthermore, these two buttons open Explorer windows asking the user to "Browse for folder" whereas a Quixel suite project is supposed to be an .xml definition and not just a folder location. These buttons are confusing and there is no clear explanation as to what they do.
Also, similarly to other Suite elements, the custom loader window keeps disappearing behind the main Photoshop interface.
Manually loaded projects (obj and texture) do not cause PSDs to open in Photoshop
I find it odd that manually loading a project through the custom loader does not keep the corresponding PSD textures open in Photoshop. They do open and flash in for a split second at the time of loading and are successfully applied to the model, but they are closed down instantly. This is probably just me not quite understanding what the manual project loader is actually doing though : seeing PSDs flash in makes me think that they are linked and ready to be edited, but maybe they are being closed in order to prevent the user from editing them, since they have not been loaded properly through the XML project file ?
That's about it for now - I am keeping my thoughts on actual DDO texture authoring for later. As a whole the suite seems to be as powerful as ever, but there seems to be still a lot of work to be done when it comes to user error prevention. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help !
A bit of background : I am familiar with various iterations of DDO as I have been testing the program for a few years now (Legacy and Suite). Most of my experience is with DDO Legacy, having used it on a few personal projects. I however never had the opportunity to use the more recent DDO releases to their fullest, and since I have some more time on my hands now I thought I'd use this as a chance to dive in deeper. On the technical level my goal is to produce results fully compatible with Marmoset Toolbag2 and UE4.
I should also mention that I have had the pleasure to chat in person with both Teddy and Ryan over the past few years, which always resulted in very interesting exchanges about the program.
I am hoping to use this thread to report everything that I find problematic or counter-intuitive about the Suite in its current state, in order to help its further development.
I am on Win7prox64, Photoshop CS5 Extended (12.1) with Windows set to its most basic theme (XP style) for maximum performance. I am running a triple monitor setup off a GTX750Ti.
I installed the Quixel Suite to C: \Program Files\Quixel, as the default install path for the program seemed to be inside my Windows user folder, which is not appropriate.
Inconsistent behavior on suite launch
Starting from the very beginning, I notice some inconsistent behavior depending on the way I launch the suite. Most of the time it goes as follows :
- If Photoshop is initially closed, and I launch the suite by clicking on the Q icon, both the suite and Photoshop open, but the suite widget is rarely displayed over the main Photoshop Window. It initially shows up properly on top of everything and I can actually click the widget, but as soon as I go on and start interacting with Photoshop the widget ends up being sent back behind the Photoshop window, which makes the suite unusable.
- If Photoshop is initially open, and I launch the suite by clicking on the Q icon, the suite successfully stays on top of the Photoshop window, and reduces itself as expected when Photoshop is reduced.
These two scenarios are shown in this video :
[ame="
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcc6OQhVtUU"]Quixel suite 1.8 inconsistent startup behavior - YouTube[/ame]The only way I know of to fix this disappearing behavior is to run a program like AlwaysOnTopMaker http://www.fadsoft.net/AlwaysOnTopMaker.htm and manually set the Quixel Suite widget to be always on top, but it goes without saying that I shouldn't have to do that
I also seem to have to run AlwaysOnTopMaker on the rest of the UI elements of the suite, like the Base Creator Window, in order to keep things visible.Example projects fail to load textures in 3DO
While projects themselves seem to load properly (clicking Load Project and browsing to the appropriate Project.xml project definition file triggers proper PSDs to open), 3DO ends up showing an untextured model.
I do manage to load model and textures manually using "Open 3DO custom loader" but that shouldn't be necessary for established projects.
As a side note, the custom loader window has some odd tooltips :
"Load project" should not have "Clear map" as a tooltip as this is confusing, and the New Project and Load Project buttons seem to not have a reason to be here in the first place. Furthermore, these two buttons open Explorer windows asking the user to "Browse for folder" whereas a Quixel suite project is supposed to be an .xml definition and not just a folder location. These buttons are confusing and there is no clear explanation as to what they do.
Also, similarly to other Suite elements, the custom loader window keeps disappearing behind the main Photoshop interface.
Manually loaded projects (obj and texture) do not cause PSDs to open in Photoshop
I find it odd that manually loading a project through the custom loader does not keep the corresponding PSD textures open in Photoshop. They do open and flash in for a split second at the time of loading and are successfully applied to the model, but they are closed down instantly. This is probably just me not quite understanding what the manual project loader is actually doing though : seeing PSDs flash in makes me think that they are linked and ready to be edited, but maybe they are being closed in order to prevent the user from editing them, since they have not been loaded properly through the XML project file ?
That's about it for now - I am keeping my thoughts on actual DDO texture authoring for later. As a whole the suite seems to be as powerful as ever, but there seems to be still a lot of work to be done when it comes to user error prevention. Let me know if there is anything I can do to help !
Replies
I did manage to properly load the example projects after all ; for the textures to load in 3DO I had to fiddle at random with some layers inside the main DDO panel. Definitely a bug here - not crucial and breaking, but important to solve so that a user doesn't assume that a project is broken when it actually isn't not.
Besides that I ran into a unexpected problem when using the app. I was in the middle of working on an asset, but had to tackle another unrelated task in Photoshop. I opened the files that I needed to edit (all unrelated to the texturing work that I was doing), and that caused DDO to completely lose connection with its ongoing texturing job ; all I was left with was an empty Base Creator panel. Is there a way to avoid this behavior and resume texturing without having to manually save all PSDs and re-open the project ?
First of, try running the suite and PS as admin, that should fix the dissapearing act!
The tooltips is just wrong and thank you for pointing that out!
The project not loading correctly is very strange, Does the path to the project have any non-alphanumerical characters? Ddi you load the project through the project file or re-create it?
If you open something else and go back to your project and is met with a empty base creater, simply close it and ddo will snap back to your project! (This should probably be explained somehow)
Many questions, hopefully some answers
If your project files all open up but the textures fail to initially load in 3DO there is a force refresh button in the bottom right corner of the DDO window that should make sure everything gets loaded into 3DO.