Morn’n Richard,
This is not as bad as it sounds – but – I’d really like you to take notice… I’m a huge fan of 3DC – and – I’m constantly touting the many advantages of 3DC to potential modelers in the forums… Even my forum "sig" carries the 3DC logo – so every post is an endorsement of your product… If I had to use TSM or GMAX I know I wouldn’t be modeling…
I like having new versions of 3DC as much as the next guy – but – there is one area – that has been brought up many times from various people – that seems to be a bit neglected… I’m not aware of any real changes to this area of 3DC – since I started using version 6… My absolute – least favorite part of building a model – is the texture mapping phase… To me – it is simply a royal pain in the butt… LOL… Part of the reason I dislike it so much is the available tools we have in 3DC are a bit crude and primitive… We’ve seen posts here where modelers are forced to export their models to other vendor applications to perform simple mapping tasks that should be available here in 3DC… I’m not even asking for really advanced features – the first two have been brought up many times…
1) [b:2z57zbjr]Full Screen Texture Mapping Windows [/b:2z57zbjr]- it’s crazy trying to work in those tiny windows that the current mapping operations provide… At a minimum – give us a full screen to work with… Texture sizes keep getting larger – I plan to move to 2048×2048 textures on my current model… It will be very difficult to work in those small windows…
2) [b:2z57zbjr]Rotate a Texture [/b:2z57zbjr]- I believe we have flip and mirror already – which I don’t think I’ve ever used… We do need the ability to rotate as more than once I have had to duplicate a texture – just because the original was running the wrong way… Even just 45 and 90 degree increments would be very useful…
3) [b:2z57zbjr]Mark Image File for Template [/b:2z57zbjr]- the operation that actually marks the base texture with the reference to the shape that is mapped to – is very useful – but totally unreliable… I have had it work sometimes – but – most of the time it doesn’t leave the required marks on the base template… I’m not up to mapping on my current project – so I am stating this from memory… I think if your base texture was a different size than 512×512 it didn’t work – I forget… This operation should work reliably on all size textures…
4) [b:2z57zbjr]Unwrap a Cylinder [/b:2z57zbjr]- Many of us use your software to build steam engines – and – it’s impossible to avoid cylinders with them… Unwrapping a cylinder is very difficult… The operation that I am aware of will let you texture a cylinder – but – the faces are always distorted at the top and bottom where the curvature of the cylinder causes an angled view of the face… The only way I have found to do this well – without significant distortion – is to map each face one at a time to an area on a texture… This way each face lies flat but it’s very tedious attempting to line up all the faces by hand… This seems like a pretty straight forward task – and – I would think it would be possible to create a tool to perform this task automatically… This would be a HUGE time saver…
For me – texture mapping is the weakest link in the entire 3DC modeling process… You have a great piece of software here – one that I like very much… My intent of this post was strictly meant as constructive criticism – to hopefully make a good product better…
Thanks for the consideration…
Regards,
Scott
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