I'm considering 3D coat

Support Modeling
1

Hi guys

I am currently churning out lots of projects like this and I don’t yet have the skills or time to retopologise these efficiently.

retopo.JPG853×715 65.5 KB

At the moment I use the remesh modifier to convert from triangles to quads and then perform manual clean-up of certain structures prior to attempting to retopologise, however it’s a real bottleneck in my workflow currently and I’ve realised I need a faster solution.

I came across the auto-retopology features of 3D-coat and am impressed, and am considering investing in it just for this aspect of the program.

Just thought before I drop a serious bit of cashish I’d get your thoughts, any welcome!

2

As with every 3d software, it needs some time to get used to. But it is well worth every dime. You can also download a 30 day trial to test it before buying it.

3

Thanks Tiles

I see you’re a user on their forums.

Unfortunately I’m getting a crash with every version (CUDA, DX, OpenGL etc). I’ve filed a crash report but was wondering as a Blender user you might be able to offer any quick insight as to whether there was anything obvious I’m doing wrong.

Importing file as a ply from other software into Blender where I’m remeshing from triangles into quads.

Exporting as a ply and then importing into 3D coat. Gets a crash everytime I try to automatically retopologise. The .ply has ~100,000 vertices

I’ve also tried exporting from Blender as an obj but same issue.

And that’s using the above file…

4

No idea where the crashes comes from, sorry. Obj works fine for me. It may be a hardware issue. Or there may be a mesh error somewhere. I had this before too. I would wait for the developer to have a look at it.

5

i can see very low resolution, open holes in geometry and crossed vertices.

at 3DC forum you got a reply

6

Thanks both

So the geometry has to be closed for starters?

I’ve read the V4 manual but it’s very light on pre-requisites for successful retopo. I’ll await a reply there.

7

Didn’t I recently see a post about a user who found a snag in the 3D Coat license agreement which prevents them from re-selling their output objects/mesh. We were all shocked of course, but it might be worth reading over their EULA before purchasing.

8

I suggest try this it has a retopology in 1 click

http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/

opensource, free

9

?! Crikey, thanks for the heads up!

10

About Atom post, is true for Education version.
For commercial usage you need to buy Professional version.

Limitation of Education version:

  1. no commercial usage
  2. textures size to export is limited to 2048x2048
  3. layers amount is limited to 7

About your model

  • You need to export only the select object, the export have some meshes used for lighting emission
  • model is full of holes and floating parts
11

Didn’t I recently see a post about a user who found a snag in the 3D Coat license agreement which prevents them from re-selling their output objects/mesh. We were all shocked of course, but it might be worth reading over their EULA before purchasing.

Odd. Do you have the source here?

Anyways, i doubt it is legal, eula or not ^^

12

yeah, will be great to read the EULA… never seen this before… im working commercially using 3DC for years without any trouble

anyway

fast autoretopo test after mesh cleanup inside 3DC
no crash

RETOPO_18K.jpg696×881 98.8 KB

13

Can say after playing around with myself that I already love this software, voxel sculpting together with the auto-retopo tools work very well for my purposes.