Custom Shader texture Size, format and shape? Also trouble applying gradients.

[EmperorHamHam]

Hi there everyone,I've been using 3D coat for about a month now and I would like some information about constructing new shaders.  

This morning using 3D Coat 4.7.33 (GL64) Pro, I tried to recreate this tutorial by Fuad and it worked ok up to a certain point...

 

 

Combining the above tutorial and another one of Fuad's tutorials I see that he is using JPGs for his matcap textures and he has hand painted them, however I don't understand how the template works?

I tried to mimic this to see if I could figure it out.  So I created a new matcap as in Fuad's tut from the Clay preset, un-checked use cavity and flat shading as he did and then I created a new texture to base the behavior of the shader on by looking at what he did and using a copy of the mcubes_256.tga file that I renamed Toon5 and saved out as a jpg in Photoshop.  The resulting image below is it applied to one of the stock Team Fortress models. 

Although it appears to have done something cool the question remains on how is it doing what it is doing and how do I control it?  Do my ref images need to be round as in Fuad's examples?What size should that texture be, and what format is best for this. Additionally,  looking into the \Documents\3D-CoatV47\Shaders\PbrShaders folder I can see under each existing shader an mcubes_64 and a mcubes_256 tga file, what purpose do these files serve?  

I found this ref in the 3D Coat forum here by Monkeybrain but it leaves many questions more than it answers

"Posted April 7, 2012 

yeah it is possible, just open the shader window (in your voxelroom) and create a new from an existing shader...

but for some shaders u will need a spherical texture - image with 180°+180° degree - but its easy, u can use photoshop, gimp, or u made a photo from a bubble or u did have an fisheye for ur cam, or u did render a sphere. And for others u will nee seamless textures.

And dds, thats not so important, this dds file did wrote 3dCoat. U can work with PNG, TIFF and so on. But u can watch with an irfanview plugin (formats.dll) how dds textures are looking."

As this response is from 5 years ago, is there any current documentation on how to work with textures within shaders and an explanation as to when you would choose spherical or tiling textures?  Thanks

 

Question 2  Applying Gradients to a full sculpt

I have tried to apply a gradient to anchor my sculpt in the paint room using the Fill Tool and one of the Stencil presets however it does not appear that I am doing it correctly as the gradient remains tiled and disappears when I click on the tile option, and when scaled up loses its sharpness.  I've tried it with the gradient box clicked and unclicked in the tool options for the Fill Tool but no dice.  Also what is that ball that appears when you pick the Gradient Mode option?

To test further I created a custom gradient in Photoshop at 1920x1080 and imported it into the Stencils tab. This time when I selected it it did not tile as did the preset one but it remained washed out in comparison as to how it looks in Photoshop.  What is the correct way to work with gradients in 3DCoat?  

 

Thank you for reading this and if you can help out, thanks!  

 

 

[Carlosan]