3D Coat - have we done this yet?
polycounter lvl 18
http://www.3d-coat.com/
Rick and I are just playing with this in work - seems to have a cool featureset and for the price certainly could do a few things very very well - enough to justify the price, anyway.
3D paint - retopo tools - sculpting - PSD layers - a whole bunch of stuff:
Be warned though - the UI is programmer art and pretty grim.... but once you find it hidden in a submenu, you might just find it very useful...
Mike
Rick and I are just playing with this in work - seems to have a cool featureset and for the price certainly could do a few things very very well - enough to justify the price, anyway.
3D paint - retopo tools - sculpting - PSD layers - a whole bunch of stuff:
Be warned though - the UI is programmer art and pretty grim.... but once you find it hidden in a submenu, you might just find it very useful...
Mike
Replies
An older thread.
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=52659
The Re-Topo tools are interesting but I already have ways of handling that efficiently.
It suffers from some of the same ui issues Zbrush does. If I was going to have a bear of a time learning one or the other I'd have to pick the expanded feature set and mountains of documentation for ZBrush.
The gallery examples are not that amazing, I see a lot of;
Dino's: Dino skin is one of the easiest kinds of very forgiving detail, see the mudbox2009 frog painting demo. Hopefully the dino examples are pointing to its modeling prowls?
Bugs black/grey fill + spec, ding done!
Aliens classic hallmark of "every time I try to make a pretty human it comes out alien"
and
Poorly painted faces. Not sure how much of that is the app holding the artist back or the other way around.
Maybe its too early to tell, maybe this is just the first step in many to come. Rick wasn't wrong about Silo so I'll keep checking on this one. It's worth watching this one grow when the titans are not thrashing about making headlines.
Needs more of a battering i think
I've decided to buy it just for the paint and retopo tools for now, but I want to play around some more with the sculpting to see what I can do with it anyway. You can paint directly to the normal map with depth info - which might be more useful once Andrew adds better support for working with low rez meshes (also coming soon).
If you haven't been following this software, this guy is a friggin machine. The updates have been coming fast and furious since it was released not too long ago. 64 bit and cuda support also on their way, which will give it a massive performance boost.
Make suggestions on the forum, andrew is pretty good at answering and implementing new features that way. Hell I submitted a bug report a few demos back and he sent me a new .exe with a fix when it wouldn't run on vista 64. That's pretty cool. I've only seen response like that from Nevercenter with Silo in the past. Definitely worth keeping your eye on this one.
This is something that i've been wanting to see out of an app for a long time. It just seems like common sense. If you could crank out your Low-Medium freq. details, bake that down, then load up your lowpoly and be able to use the same sculpt/paint tools to create the high freq. detail. Seems like a much better solution that needing to create some 25 million poly mesh just for little details.
Realtime painting of specular values is great, but I want to play with it more.
It's a helluva lot more intuitive that Zapplink, and the painting engine (with MULTI LAYER PSD SUPPORT!!!11one) is worth the money alone.
I'd like to see it get a an overhaul in the UI front (too many options and menus, it almost like Blender). There are 6 or 7 load/import/merge options which could be drastically reduced (this is something I can't praise Silo for enough).
Oh, it's Mac and PC.
-Better integration of PSD files (currently it doesn't always keep layer order on reimport.)
-More solid mesh recapture in the Retopology tools (doesn't currently match Topogun on this one.)
-Paint tools are a bit flaky still as it works on a type of subdivided vertex painting system instead of uv space. here
-faster brush speed, currently it doesn't always produce smooth results.
-colour spec.
having said that it does many other things well so I can forgive them.
Yeah, same here, but i'm waiting for these to buy.
Plus :
- Meshes with PSD assigned doesn't load with the PSD
- We can't paint on alpha channel in PSD yet
- Brushes engine isn't well finished and comprehensive yet
I just felt personally offended when reading that eula - why would the software author want to impose personal beliefs on his userbase? I just don't get it, that's quite disrespectful of other people beliefs if you ask me (no matter what they are).
I can't remember what the exact statement was exactly but I'm sure the jest of it was just a plea not to create controversially lied/distasteful work, not to pirate is software, and be good to one another?
It ain't no biggie, or something to get worked up over if u ask me. I can't see anything wrong with asking that of people. But thats just me & my 2 cents.
GetDown, my problem lies exactly here. What if someone wants to make some kind of art statement through a distasteful or controversial piece? Not everything is spacemarine or CareBear. Asking for a certain type of artwork and not another is quite naive, like Pea said. This text sure has no weight whatsover, but I just have that one weird chill down my spine when I read it! By this I am not saying I feel offended in my beliefs ; mostly offended by how the software author considers that one type of art is right, and not another. I am fine with him believing it; but asking users to share this point of view *is* being disrespectful to them.
Can't wait to try the demo tho haha!
As for the EULA. We know that unreasonable EULAs (such as this one) never hold up in court if it would come to that. I have to say the devil in me kind of wants to break it on purpose just for the hell of it.. :shifty:
I still might use it, but I don't like the idea that someone tries to sneak extra stuff into the EULA that really doesn't deal with the software.
You could, but he might revoke your license
Ok back to 3D-Coat
When sculpting I find its workflows need ironing out and the tools need refining. I think there's a big danger of him taking on too many feature requests from hobbyist and neglecting it production values. Although in its current state it can be very useful.
I'll give you the heads-up as its not immediately obvious how 3dcoat works when you start playing. A lot of people think it's just like zbrush/mudbox. But youre not actually sculpting in its main window, your creating normal maps, thats then are converted to a displacement maps, that then updates a large subdivided mesh. So your initial strokes are actually flat and won't be in relief until your brush stroke ends and then it immediately updates the subdivided mesh. Sculpting is done in a different mode.
Sculpting onto a 2d plane is another good way to start complex forms, since you can just thicken them up from there and bend them into the pose/shape you need with the new transpose tool (needs some work too but works ok for a start).
The 'videos' on the website aren't too helpful in that regard, they're more instructional than being good for showing off the tools.
I'll see about doing some vids - I'd like to do some for work anyway. I also started a wip/sketch thread on the 3dcoat site to sort of document some of my stumbling around in the program. Nothing fancy, just quick doodles messing with the tools and fishing for workflows. I put up a couple images there that sort of show how quickly you can get from a sphere to a human body if that helps. I didn't use anything other than the build brush and the transpose tool, with maybe some move brush thrown in for tweaking.
I'll keep updating it as I go... I want to mess with other areas too like retopo and painting/baking stuff etc.
Link: http://3dbrush.kriska.hvosting.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=1850
Note: one thing that was pointed out to me (after I found out the hard way) is that increasing the voxel resolution in the tool panel causes a performance hit. I did this a few times without realizing when I was goofing around with my first sketch. You can get around it somewhat by hiding parts of the sculpt but I would just avoid up-rez'ing at all for now if possible. The performance hit you take for it isn't worth it. So in that sense, you still kindof need to start low, and work up just like in mud/zb. It's best to just let the program add volume to the sculpt as you build it out on its own. My second sketch shows the resolution changing automatically as I flesh out the piece.
http://nathanfulton.com/resources/gallery/PRM_3Dcoat.jpg
I'm used to Bodypaint's interface, and right from the start 3d-coat's interface made a ton more sense to me than zBrush. I was able to bang out a mesh in Maya, bring it into 3d-coat, texture and sculpt it all up, and export it back into Maya with normal maps and everything after about 30 minutes of messing around with it. I can't say the same for zBrush in my own experience, though I think zBrush definitely has a ton more features.
I was sold on 3d-coat after a couple hours of using it. Bought my own copy the next day. If you're already a zBrush expert and actually own it, then this program probably wont do much for you. Otherwise, it's definitely worth the price in my opinion. Just my $0.02
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/92176/3dcHand1/3dcHand1.html
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/92176/3dcHand2/3dcHand2.html
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/92176/3dcHand3/3dcHand3.html
The retopology tools look really good, i'm wondering how they compare to silo, modo, topogun, etc?
I really like the retopology tools myself. I was thinking of doing another vid on their use in fact. The best thing about them is that you can use them right over top of your voxel sculpt - no need to down rez and export to another program. They are like a mix of most of my favorite features in all the other programs.
I should point out that using that 2d - Paint brush to sketch out the hand at first could probably have just resized the brush and done the hand in under 10 strokes. I messed around with it later and got a much faster base sketched out. Another fast way to tackle a hand would be to take the default sphere, flatten it a bit to block out the palm of the hand, then use the curve tools to draw out each finger (curves turn into voxel mesh, which you can then control the thickness and length of at each control point - kinda like zspheres). You could also just brush the fingers out from the hand using the build, spray/thaw or airbrush tools with a high strength setting - kinda like this dude I did really quickly just to test out my camtasia settings:
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/92176/3dc1/Untitled.html
With no real topology limitations you're free to sculpt whatever complex shapes you want from a simple sphere.
I started this with the default Silo man primitive and arrived at this. It'd be hard to switch from a biped to a slug's body mid sculpt in ZB, but it was painless with this.
No subtools, brush feel and detail would be the cons. The ease to lose yourself in a sculpt is right up there with ZB already though -- the interface is natural, if a bit cluttered.
Also is there a way to change the camera bahaviour? Seems like it is locked to the last surface being hovered on. Super annoying haha
The 2nd video I linked above in the hand series shows me using transpose right at the start, along with 'Select With Pen' as the falloff type (Transpose mode). This allows you to paint the area you want the transpose tool to affect.
Probably will end up being a lot of fun to use but I can't see voxels being used in the office
GetDown, yeah sure more flexibility is never good huh!
...just another quick update to add. Andrew included a turntable render feature in the latest build so I did a couple quick renders on some sketches I've done with voxels lately.
Mostly just quick stuff, though I've been going back over the swamp troll to see if I can refine it further. The CUDA support will definitely allow me to push the detail more on it so we'll see how it turns out I guess:
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/92176/SwampTroll.mov
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/92176/zombiesketch.mov
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/92176/zombieHead.mov
And a retopo i also did in 3dcoat from the voxel zombie sketch (optimized in silo afterward):
https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/92176/ZombieLow.mov
Voxels truly are fantastic to work with. Find myself thinking just like with real clay instead of worrying about mesh stretching aso. It feels new just like in the days when Zbrush first came out - except, much more flexible!! I'm glad this tech is not limited to that expensive FreeForm app anymore.
Great for a first pass to be mudboxed later. I can see a new breed of alien test heads coming up! :P
A few minutes worth of voxeling around:
Eheh it's nice to see how your artistic touch is very well transposed on voxel clay