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Question

Does Adobe do anything to help users with modeler?

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
August 10, 2024
1 reply
1030 views

So I had a couple of questions regarding modeler that I reached out to the substance team with on X.

they directed me to their discord page.

after searching for answers in discord all I found was other users asking the same questions and going un answered.

I headed back to x and messaged the dimensions team again letting them know my results from the discord server and asked if there was a pdf manual I could download so I could learn the ins and outs of modeler for myself, they read the message and didn't respond.

I then tried 1 more and sent them another message which they have read and not responded to.

so I've made my way here and I'm seeing the same situation.

I understand their support team not having the time to answer every users questions but do they even weigh in on the discord or their own website?

I've seen questions in the discord server that are 2 years old go un answered.

Call me crazy but shouldn't there be a level of after sales support involved here?

Theres a lot of us that spend £50 plus a months to rent adobes software and tbh I find it really shocking how Adobe directs its users to other users for answers? This would be fine if there were answers..

ITS YOUR SOFTWARE ADOBE!

you should be able to help users, if you cannot help them directly then you should be able to direct users to a place that can.

for example "mixed reality" this along with Vr sculpting is my main draw to modeler.

This was a question I put to the substance team on x, I mentioned that I couldn't find an answer anywhere, only a Reddit post with people asking the same question.

They direct me to discord, discord has the same question un answered, I go back to the substance team on x with this result.

Read and no response.

I come on to adobes own site and find the same.

So adobe has a feature that people are trying to use, that doesn't seem to work and there seems to be zero evidence anywhere of mixed reality working. Users are asking how to get it to work, and receiving no help.

Why isn't there somebody on the adobe team answering these questions?

Is this a function that just doesn't work and adobe would rather leave users in mystery rather than fixing the problem or admitting that it doesn't work?

Question

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Paul Gresty

Community Manager

Hey Rosieboi, good to hear from you – and sorry that our lack of responsiveness is causing frustration.

You mention a few different points; let me try to respond to them all.

I’m not completely clear what your original question on Twitter/X was; if you can clarify that, I’ll try to help. I almost certainly won’t have the answer myself, but I’ll go away and pester people who do.

For any sort of technical question, Discord is the best resource. If you send questions to Twitter/X (or to Facebook, or LinkedIn…) they’ll go to our Communication teams, who will then probably have to redirect it to our development teams – that is, the same people you could just contact more directly and quickly yourself, on Discord. These forums are also a good resource, but they’re perhaps not quite as active as Discord.

Full disclosure: we’re a little shorthanded at the moment. We’re currently lacking somebody to devote full-time attention to the Substance 3D Discord channels – but our dev teams, including the Modeler team, tend to be pretty active over there. Here, on the forums, the wonderful Cyril Dellenbach is a fountain of technical knowledge and support – but he’s out on leave for a little while, so we’re doing our best to keep things running smoothly until he gets back.

Re the question about a manual: we don’t specifically have ‘fixed’ PDF manuals – Modeler in particular is ‘young’ software, and is constantly being updated, and so any ‘paper’ manual would quickly become obsolete. We do have the Modeler documentation pages; please feel free to take a look there, to see if those can be of any help.

Apologies again for any lack of responsiveness – and, as I say, please let me know if I can be of any help with your original question.

RosieboiAuthor

Participant

Thanks for your reply Paul.

The initial social media message was asking about a few technical issues which is when I was directed to discord to see the same questions unanswered.

Seeing 1 question that’s been there for 2 years that nobody seems to have an answer for lead me to asking whether adobe have any input in these communities.

Q1: mixed reality.

I’ve searched for an answer, I’ve seen a few people ask this question via different means and I can’t seem to see any examples of this working.

When I turn the option on, nothing happens.

I’ve tried to use it via quest link, virtual desktop browser and adding the app to steam and using steam vr.

I can’t get it to work.

Is there a way around this yet or is it not ready?

Q2: Is there any type of measuring tool or a way to have accurate measurements?

I know you can set a measurement in the options but it doesn’t even tell you what plane that measurement applies to?

I’m guessing it’s whatever plane is the biggest?

At the moment this is my workflow.

If I want my model to be 10cm high, I create another model with the height of 10cm and where that 10cm is the biggest dimension on that model.

Then I measure the model I’m working on against the height of that.

Then I’ll create another model that has the width I want (again making the width the largest aspect of that model) so I know the measurement in options reflects the width of that object, and then measure against that.

And so on for any measurements I need.

Is this the only way to get accurate measurements?

Isn’t there some way you can put in precise measurements for each plane? Or at least have a way to measure? Like if you click on the model it shows you measurements of each plane?

Q3: The gizmo.

I’ve seen this mentioned a couple of times with no answer aswell.

It appears that the gizmo will sometimes snap to weird angles. So say I put a cube down, I then use another cube as an eraser to remove a section of said cube. Sometimes it will snap at a random angle.

I’ll highlight the 3d cube model I am trying to cut out with my cube eraser, go back to the cube eraser, right click the control and it won’t snap the gyro to the position of what I am trying to cut out.

I can try the reset to world, parent etc through options and nothing makes it snap back.

I have seen more information regarding the gizmo in the link you sent so I’ll go through that to see if I’m still having the same issue.

Q4: Also with the gizmo, when I rotate the circles on the gizmo because I want to adjust the angle of my model, it changes the angle of my arrows. So now if I want to drag my model to the right, I have to make sure when I let go of the button the arrow is perfectly lined up to the right. I understand why this is handy, but again when I try to reset the objects angles via right clicking the right thumb stick, it can reset the angle of the object in the gizmo but now the gizmo arrows arnt lined up perfectly.

I know that you can grab a circle on the gizmo and pull the trigger on the left control so when you rotate the circle it locks into the angles, but it either makes models for every angle you turn, or you do it when eraser is highlighted and you have a load of rotated cuts out of your model.

The other option seems to be move your eraser away from the model to rotate it to the snapped angle and then put it back, but if you are zoomed in to work with precision it’s constant zooming in/out and moving your eraser back and forth away from the model.

Q5: Smaller increments snap to grid. I’ve seen from the notes you linked me to that you are adding that at a later date.

Maybe holding a button down while moving your object So that button would work like a shift key? Or even having an option to change the increments. I think using the analogue stick would be good. Pushing up or down to make the increments higher or lower.

Q6: Mirror planes. There seems to be no way off choosing the angle of the mirror so you can choose what side to add symmetry to.

Q7: does the steam version of modeler get the same updates at the same time as the creative cloud version? I’m not using any of the other substance apps so I’d rather buy modeler outright than subscribe to the full substance suite.

In regards to a pdf manual, obviously being a software that’s constantly updated the functionality of the app will constantly change, but isn’t it possible to edit the pdf manual when changes happen?

Id happily do video tutorials for the app and updates if I knew all the ins and outs as there doesn't seem to be a lot of info out there.

Paul Gresty

Community Manager

Thanks so much for addressing all of these Paul.

Q1: I'm not sure what the "beta section of the meta quest app." Is? I do have the developer options enabled on the quest 3, I'm away for 4 days but I will look into this when I am back.

however I can't currently get into modeler via quest atm, or steam vr, it loads on my desktop but on the quest it shows the modeler loading screen and glitches, it won't actually open the app any further than the glitchy loading screen. It maybe some settings I messed with in steam VR, I'll try to get this resolved and then look for this quest beta section you mentioned.

Q3: This is a known bug; we’re working to fi

Q6: "The ability to change the symmetry axis has just been changed" I have just seen this.

Q4, "I wasn't completely clear what the question was" sorry, I am quite new to modelling so my terminology isn't the greatest.

so you have the red, green and blue (I believe those are the colours) arrows, squares and circles on the gizmo.

when you click on one of the circles and drag up and down you rotate the circle.

This changes the angle of the path of your 3d object. So if your red arrow was at 90 degrees and you rotated the circle to 100 degrees and then dragged the arrow next to the circle you rotated, your object would follow a straight path at the 100 degrees you left the circle on.

the only problem is, trying to rotate this axis accurately. In VR you will get a degree of jitter on your hand movements so it can be quite awkward trying to leave the rotation (most movements to be honest) exactly where you want them.

i know if you hold in the left trigger while rotating an axis in the gizmo it snaps to the grid and allows you to rotate to precise angles. The only problem is, when you use this method it creates a 3d object for each angle you rotate through as you are holding the left trigger in. You can make sure you are using the eraser while you do this so it doesn't create clay with every angle change but then you are erasing an object if you are on 1.

obviously you can make sure you arnt close to a model when doing this but as the "snap to grid" rarely snaps where you need it sometimes you have to really zoom into an object so the snap to grid takes smaller increments. So when you zoom into the object to get the snap to grid placement in the right place, you have to then zoom out of the object, move away from it, use the gizmo, hold the left trigger while rotating, rotate with the left trigger held in so it snaps to the angle you want, zoom back into the model, find where you want to cut/add clay, add it, zoom back out and repeat.

so I didnt know if there was a better method of rotating an object that snaps at angles.

using the gizmo and rotating the circles while holding the trigger on the left control seems to be the only way I've found to snap the angles, and as mentioned before that creates clay for each angle or erases for each angle.

Q5 was 1 of the questions I initially had asking about snapping to grid in smaller increments but the link you sent me showed that that was already in the works.

"As I say, Discord is the best place to ask these sorts of questions in general"

in regards to this, rather than asking questions that other users have already asked and then expecting somebody else to answer the same question that's been covered I used google, discord, adobe to find the answers to which I couldn't.

I obviously haven't got an issue asking questions in discord but if I've seen a question go un answered for 2 years on discord and then the same question asked again a few months ago without an answer do you suggest using discord to ask that same question again?

if I take that course how long do I leave my question unanswered before trying different methods?

Or do I not try different methods and just hope to find the answer online somewhere someday?

im really sorry, im not trying to come across as rude, i can understand how this reads, im just trying to find the best solution and if I've seen a method used before that wasn't successful im going to try a different method.

and as it turned out, this method gained results 🙂

Whether you use Discord or any other method to ask a technical question, it will ultimately go to the exact same group of people: the Modeler development team. Maybe one of our internal artists or a community expert will weigh in – and here on the forum my colleague Cyril is great at technical support (though he’s out on leave for a while yet) – but aside from these exceptional possibilities, the question will be referred back to the Modeler dev team, because they’re the people who can answer it best.

The advantage with Discord is that it’s direct – if you ask the question on X, for instance, our social media manager can ask the Modeler team about it, but your message might be number #154 in the messages she has to respond to that day. If you go straight to Discord, you can speak with the Modeler dev team directly, essentially ‘skipping the queue’.

I don’t know what the circumstances were with questions being left unanswered on Discord. The reality is that it’s a small team, and things sometimes get lost in the rush. If a question’s posted during a particularly busy time (or even when a lot of people are out on holiday, for example), then it might get missed. In that case, there’s no harm in raising it again a bit later.

We don’t have a dedicated customer support person for Modeler just now – and I’ll raise the subject with the team concerning whether that’s something we need to implement. The strong point with this approach is that you have immediate access to the people creating the tool (for example, the head of development for Modeler, Lydia, is routinely in the Discord chat – and she answers a lot of questions from users).

Rather than me copy-pasting your questions into our internal Slack, and asking the Modeler team for answers there, I really think it’s easier and faster if you just skip the middleman (me) and ask the team any remaining questions, as concisely as possible, in the modeler-discussion section of our Discord yourself. They’re a very reactive and helpful bunch.

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