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I'm looking for all the information I can get on the Blending Tab in the Paint Room


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I'm busy trying to get patches of texture, made from Normal Map relief and Diffuse Color to blend smoothly. I've done some searches on this and I'm playing with falloff settings and using the Paint tool with Shift so smooth out the edges of each patch of painted texture. I'm also experimenting with painting individual patches on their own layers with varying settings like Overlay or Multiply and then merging them later.

All these tactics are yielding varying degrees of success.

I do wish there was more manual documentation on them.

One potential asset in the Paint Room particularly piqued my interest; the Blending Tab.

If anyone has any info, documentation or instructions on how to utilize this tab could you please share it with us?

The manual passage is very brief and doesn't really say much.

post-3590-0-18225200-1342290024_thumb.jp

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A little more workflow information would be helpful on the blend smoothing problem.

Are you using a material (under the material tab) to paint your normal map for height (details) and diffuse map at the same time? Are you painting using the texture uv editor?

When you have additive paint turned off under your depth icon, it will only work on one layer at a time. If you switch to another layer and continue painting depth it will overlap. Which is something I think I will put under a feature request to change. When additive depth painting is turned off it should blend and not overlap other layers just like it does on one layer.

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A little more workflow information would be helpful on the blend smoothing problem.

Are you using a material (under the material tab) to paint your normal map for height (details) and diffuse map at the same time? Are you painting using the texture uv editor?

When you have additive paint turned off under your depth icon, it will only work on one layer at a time. If you switch to another layer and continue painting depth it will overlap. Which is something I think I will put under a feature request to change. When additive depth painting is turned off it should blend and not overlap other layers just like it does on one layer.

Well part of it has to do with the depth setting...If you're using a material Targa and the depth is set to say 52 and then you change to another very similar Targa material but it's not quite the same setting it's like you're forced to test back and forth to get it to the same depth setting (that may be completely different as a numerical parameter, say 32 or 75)

Specifically though I'd really like complete documentation on that Blending Tab. Obviously someone put a few days of work into designing it and inserted it there. It'd be nice to see what it was fully intended to do and how its parameters work.

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Ok, I got a solution to the blending problem using similar but different material images. You could call it a workaround but really it is quite useful.

This is for PPP but you should be able to use on MV too.

Solution:

Paint only your color map, no depth using the 2 or more material images. I normally use some brush alpha falloff to help with blending color textures...

Export your diffuse color map as a TIF file.

Now just Import the diffuse color as a "0" level is grey base displacement map, Yes, you can import displacements maps into PPP. You do not need to convert the color texture to a greyscale. You could of course if you want to and you would have more options in the importing but it's not necessary.

Next just use the depth parameters in the layers tab to increase the depth of your displacement to what you want.

In the first picture I used two different material images to paint the color map

Followed the above method

Increased the depth 500% after importing to increase the depth to what I wanted...

The displacement will be added to the normal map...

Second picture is the displacement in relief view only.

It's low quality as it was only a1024 map.

I hope you find this useful and maybe it will get the result you want.... B)

post-518-0-48103800-1342331928_thumb.jpe

post-518-0-18063100-1342332792_thumb.jpe

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Ok, I got a solution to the blending problem using similar but different material images. You could call it a workaround but really it is quite useful.

This is for PPP but you should be able to use on MV too.

Solution:

Paint only your color map, no depth using the 2 or more material images. I normally use some brush alpha falloff to help with blending color textures...

Export your diffuse color map as a TIF file.

Now just Import the diffuse color as a "0" level is grey base displacement map, Yes, you can import displacements maps into PPP. You do not need to convert the color texture to a greyscale. You could of course if you want to and you would have more options in the importing but it's not necessary.

Next just use the depth parameters in the layers tab to increase the depth of your displacement to what you want.

In the first picture I used two different material images to paint the color map

Followed the above method

Increased the depth 500% after importing to increase the depth to what I wanted...

The displacement will be added to the normal map...

Second picture is the displacement in relief view only.

It's low quality as it was only a1024 map.

I hope you find this useful and maybe it will get the result you want.... B)

Hey great minds think alike. I was sort of thinking of this solution yesterday. And you could take your diffuse map into Photoshop for some really detailed blending

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Thank you.

so maybe the solution is to just paint the separate patches as separate layers then blend them using the Blending Panel controls.

You would use the Clone Stamp tool in Photoshop to Blend between parts of an image...no? You have that in 3DC. Same icon as in PS. Except the hotkey to sample some pixels, is CTRL instead of ALT (as it is in PS).
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