Full Version: Funny thing at the opposite of Moi ;)

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Thanks Chipp! (Sorry for writing your name incorrectly up to now, I always thought your name was Chip P. Walters :) )

I'm currently happily swimming around in the lake of 3D Coat video tutorials, including yours.

I'm impressed by the versatility of 3D Coat. The highlights to me so far are:

• Very accessible and customizable UI. I'm very glad I could change the viewport navigation controls to what I'm used to, because sadly ZBrush doesn't allow navigation customization.

• Great and very flexible arsenal of primitives. Love the fact that they remain intact for further manipulation, and that you can instantly use Boolean operations when hitting Apply.

• Retopo tools. I did some first tests, comparing ZRemesher results to Autopo results, and most of the time Autopo has a slight advantage, especially when using curve guides. But the manual retopo tools are fabulous as well. 3D Coat will be my retopo tool for sure.

• I also love the many stroke types, including powerful curve tools. Curve tools are a weakness of ZBrush.

I still have to dive into the UV room and Smart Materials. Looking forward to that too.

Regards,

Metin

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Metin,

Glad you're getting up to speed w/3DC. Please do keep us posted on your findings...as I'm not a ZBrush user but I do have a couple people working with me who are, and I'd certainly like to stay up-to-date on the procons.

-C

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Hi Chipp,

The 3D Coat journey continues…

So far I'm particularly in love with:

1: Voxel sculpting.

— Pros:
• Total polygon-free sculpting freedom, with no polygon stretching, almost like sculpting with NURBS objects.
• Booleans never fail, because it's voxels, not polygons.
• Lots of great stroke tools, including versatile curves.
• Some fabulous tools to achieve quick results, such as the Blob tool and the Sketch tool, which works slightly more intuitive than the comparable Shadowbox in ZBrush.
• 3D Coat's layers are more intuitive and powerful than the subtools in ZBrush. For example, you can't create a subtool hierarchy in ZBrush, like you can with 3D Coat's layers.

— Cons:
• Blobby results if the resolution is not high enough, but that also goes for polygon sculpting in ZBrush.
• Sharp sculpting operations like creasing don't work very well, because of the absolute cubic nature of voxels. But in that case you just switch to Surface mode, or increase the voxel resolution.
• The smooth tool works a bit better in ZBrush. In ZBrush the results are smoother, and you can choose between two smoothing methods. 3D Coat's Smooth tool tends to eat away a surface area, a bit like the Smooth function in Blender's Sculpt Mode.
• ZBrush handles multi-million polygon models better than 3D Coat. But 3D Coat handles multi-million polygons better than Blender's Sculpt Mode.


2: 3D Coat's powerful retopology tools.

— Pros:
• Auto-retopo is solid, and more or less on par with ZRemesher in ZBrush. I've noticed that Autopo better follows your curve guides than ZRemesher does.
• The manual retopo tools are also great. In fact, the best I've seen so far in any tool.

— Con:
• There's still no holy grail of auto-retopo, especially when it comes to detailed models. Instant Meshes does a great job, but its curse is that it generates a lot of triangle dead-ends in the polygon flow that create ugly surface knots when subdivided.


3: 3D Coat's versatile Paint and Material tools.

— Pros:
• Lots of useful paint tools, including a text tool and a rubber stamp tool.
• Paint layers with opacity and all, like in Photoshop.
• Works great with both UV texturing as well as vertex painting (I'm not a UV lover).
• The Smart Materials are fabulous.

— Cons:
• When you export a textured result, you'll have to apply all textures to the right channels individually in an external renderer like Keyshot. That's easier from ZBrush to Keyshot, because there's a bridge between those programs, which includes polypaint (vertex color) support in Keyshot.
• 3D Coat's renderer is more like a realtime renderer than a sophisticated path tracing renderer. But starting with 3D Coat 3.8, you can choose to use Renderman.

Last but not least, 3D Coat's UI is more accessible than the UI of ZBrush. In ZBrush I dislike the many tiny, sensitive sliders, and a number of obstinate, odd approaches, such as the painful curve system.

Regards,

Metin

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Hi Metin!

@You : "...There's still no holy grail of auto-retopo..."

Yes :) The same old story!

No "push a button and do the magic" for us!

We...the "unlucky" people of retopo :)

Ciao!

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Marco: Hahaha, yeah, it seems that we can't afford to become lazy for now. I hope AI will change auto-retopology soon.

Speaking of AI — Michael, have you thought of using AI / machine learning for topology generation? Although MoI's topology generation is already the best in the field, machine learning might help recognizing shapes and optimizing polygon layouts. There are several open source machine learning resources available.

Regards,

Metin

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Hi Metin, it's an interesting idea but I don't have any experience in the area of AI / machine learning at all. I think it would require a lot of effort and research to attempt something like that.

- Michael

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Hi Michael,

I understand. Focusing on MoI V4 is much more important.

Can put on our tuxedos to attend the beta premiere soon? :)

Thanks,

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Hi Metin, well I've been targeting the end of this month but I may need an additional week beyond that, we'll see. I got stuck for a bit on a couple of difficult bugs which are solved now though. The final loose ends are coming together well. Probably the first release will still have a couple of things unfinished like maybe text label display in viewports.

- Michael

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That's exciting news, thanks for the update, Michael!

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Thanks Metin for the helpful list. Much appreciated!

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My pleasure, Chipp. Thank you for your very informative tutorials.

I'm still exploring 3D Coat, and I love it more every day, especially the voxel sculpting mode. It offers the highest level of sculpting freedom I've experienced so far.

Regards,

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Hi Metin!

@You : "...especially the voxel sculpting mode..."

Don't forget to discover all the great and powerful opportunities offered by "Surface mode" and "Clay brushes" also!

Ciao!

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Hi Marco,

Yes, exploring Surface sculpting — including Live Clay — is high on my 3D Coat to-do list, although I've already messed around with it a bit. Promising!

Regards,

Metin

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Hi Metin, well my extra week after the end of the month is almost up and I'm still not quite ready but it's awfully close. I just finished up getting everything except text labels (which I'm leaving out for the first release) drawn and so the only remaining thing is some work on shaders for shaded surfaces and line drawing. If it looks like it might take a while I guess I could leave the line drawing ugly for the first release.

- Michael

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Hi Michael
Will all the scripts that people have created work with version 4? I have become attached to them.
BW
Keith

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Hi Keith, yes it is intended that V3 scripts should work with V4. For a few scripts its possible some tune ups in MoI will be needed or possibly a couple of lines of the script might need to be altered but I think that shouldn't be very common. Once the v4 beta is out please let me know if you find any scripts that don't work.

- Michael

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Hi Michael,
Can we use the moi.ini V3 for beta V4 ? or copy / paste ?
It would be great if i could keep all my shortcut keys.
Thanks.

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Hi Finema, MoI v4 uses the same moi.ini file as MoI v3, by default the moi.ini file is created in a shared location in %AppData%\Moi on Windows or ~/Library/Application Support/Moi on Mac and all versions of MoI share the same one moi.ini file.

So unless you've customized the moi.ini file location (which can be done by moving it into the same folder as the MoI.exe or by giving a command line parameter with a path to the moi.ini file when MoI.exe starts up), V4 will use the same moi.ini file and have the same settings and shortcut keys as V3.

- Michael

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Yes ! very cool !
I can't wait to test it.
Thanks Michael.

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Hi Michael.

@You : "...I just finished up getting everything except text labels (which I'm leaving out for the first release)..."

What's this "text labels" you are referring to ?

@You : "...If it looks like it might take a while I guess I could leave the line drawing ugly for the first release..."

I think this shouldn't be a problem :)

Have a nice day.

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