New features in 4.8 - Attach material to the current layer

[houGenie]

Hi guys,

there are three new features in 4.8 which interest me but I cannot find any documentation or videos how to use them:

1. Attach material to the current layer. What does this feature and how can I use it?

2. Material History? Is this only for selecting a material, one already used? What is the advantage to selecting the material from smart material window?

3. Working with 1k textures but exporting 4k. How can I do this?

 

Thank you very much!

[AbnRanger]

4 minutes ago, houGenie said:

Hi guys,

there are three new features in 4.8 which interest me but I cannot find any documentation or videos how to use them:

1. Attach material to the current layer. What does this feature and how can I use it?

2. Material History? Is this only for selecting a material, one already used? What is the advantage to selecting the material from smart material window?

3. Working with 1k textures but exporting 4k. How can I do this?

 

Thank you very much!

There will be some, soon, so stay tuned. 

[houGenie]

2 hours ago, AbnRanger said:

There will be some, soon, so stay tuned. 

Okay thank you.

Can someone answer the questions? In 4k 3d coat processes very long so I would like to use 1k textures for work. 

[houGenie]

Okay for resizing textures the new function is Textures -> Mesh & Texture Resolution. If you reduce from 4k to 1k it works, but from 1k to 4k the quality is the same like in 1k but with 4k resolution. This means this is a simple resizing and not a recalculation. I am doing something wrong or is this a bug ?

[Carlosan]

Attach material to the current layer allow you to resize textures -Textures -> Mesh & Texture Resolution-  without loose quality.

Create a new layer.

Attach material to the current layer.

Paint over it.

Textures -> Mesh & Texture Resolution: change to 512x512 > Paint

Textures -> Mesh & Texture Resolution: change to 2048x2048 > Paint

Can you see the changes ? Texture resolution increase keeping the painted zones intact.

[houGenie]

5 hours ago, Carlosan said:

Attach material to the current layer allow you to resize textures -Textures -> Mesh & Texture Resolution-  without loose quality.

Create a new layer.

Attach material to the current layer.

Paint over it.

Textures -> Mesh & Texture Resolution: change to 512x512 > Paint

Textures -> Mesh & Texture Resolution: change to 2048x2048 > Paint

Can you see the changes ? Texture resolution increase keeping the painted zones intact.

Ah nice. I will try it.Did not know that the attach material function was thought for proper resize of the textures. Is this the only function to "attache material"?

[houGenie]

Okay it works how you mentioned it Carlosan. Unfortunately manual changes like text and strokes will of course not be recalculated but only resized. So this approach works only for materials without handdrawing on the model. The handdrawing will not be recalculated (would only be possible if the strokes are stored as vectors). I am thinking how one could circumvent this, otherwise it is not really practical ;-(

Edited November 5, 2017 by houGenie

[Carlosan]

To recalculated handdrawing you must use layers masks.

That is the usual way of working

 

[Carlosan]

Clip Mask Layer

Clip Masks are used, when you wish to mask a selected layer, with another layer. In this function you can specify the layer you want to use to Clip Mask the selected layer. Using the Invert Clip Mask function, will invert the clipped area. Note that channels from one layer, will mask the other. For example, Color channels mask only Color. Depth channels only mask Depth, Spec. only masks Spec., etc..

This function is very good for when you have a detailed painting that looks new in appearance, and you wish to “dirty it up” or make wear and tear. You can use one layer to paint the areas you wish to have wear and tear, and use it to Clip Mask the painted layer with all the details you want to be worn.

[houGenie]

Carlosan, thank you. I appreciate really your help. You are very active here, thank you!

I am not sure we are talking about the same thing. Let me illustrate it with some pics.

In pic 1 we see a smart material attached to the layer in 4k.

In pic 2 we see the same material but with a stroke.

In pic 3 we see the material downsampled to 512 with Textures -> Mesh & Texture Resolution

In pic 4 we see  upping to 4k with Textures -> Mesh & Texture Resolution. Now you see that the storke is aliased, because it was only resized not recalculated. So how can one avoid that the strokes are aliased when one upes the texture resolution again.

[Carlosan]

When you attach any smart material to current layer -using RMB over the icon-

The object remains unpainted, but can see the attach icon on the layer

Only Painting over the object using any stroke the material reveals

Showing the Smart Materials settings

Used on The Smart Material Properties

 

 

[AbnRanger]

I fail to see the significance of Up-scaling Texture size and expecting all paintwork to be magically better. I never really understood the logic behind that feature in the Smart Material Attachment. Somebody must have convinced Andrew that it was a good idea to paint blindly in a lower resolution, and export a higher resolution version. Why not paint at the maximum resolution level so you know what you are going to get? And if you need to export a lower resolution, you won't degrade the quality much. 

You don't work backwards like that in Photoshop. It's makes no sense trying to do a lot of work on a low res canvas and later upscale the document or DPI size, expecting it will improve the resolution of the work you already did. That's like pouring a pint of milk in a pint sized container and expecting that if you pour that pint in a bigger container, you'll get more milk. It doesn't work that way.

You always want to start with the largest image size/DPI you anticipate using, and if you need to scale down later on, you can without much if any degradation. That's simply how raster images work. However, the way the attachment of Smart Materials works, is that 3D Coat re-projects it back onto your model, as if you were applying it all over again on a larger res model. There is no real magic to it. So, no. If you painted some text on a model > upscaled to a larger UV map size, there is no magic feature to make it look better.

However, if you imported the Text or Shape through the E-Panel's LOAD SHAPE feature, you could repaint it on the upscaled version, and get a clean look. Why? Because it's using a VECTOR shape to paint/sculpt with.

 

[Michaelgdrs]

Example with the milk just had me laugh my a** off lol.

Although its totally doable....

 

[houGenie]

9 hours ago, AbnRanger said:

I fail to see the significance of Up-scaling Texture size and expecting all paintwork to be magically better. I never really understood the logic behind that feature in the Smart Material Attachment. Somebody must have convinced Andrew that it was a good idea to paint blindly in a lower resolution, and export a higher resolution version. Why not paint at the maximum resolution level so you know what you are going to get? And if you need to export a lower resolution, you won't degrade the quality much. 

You don't work backwards like that in Photoshop. It's makes no sense trying to do a lot of work on a low res canvas and later upscale the document or DPI size, expecting it will improve the resolution of the work you already did. That's like pouring a pint of milk in a pint sized container and expecting that if you pour that pint in a bigger container, you'll get more milk. It doesn't work that way.

You always want to start with the largest image size/DPI you anticipate using, and if you need to scale down later on, you can without much if any degradation. That's simply how raster images work. However, the way the attachment of Smart Materials works, is that 3D Coat re-projects it back onto your model, as if you were applying it all over again on a larger res model. There is no real magic to it. So, no. If you painted some text on a model > upscaled to a larger UV map size, there is no magic feature to make it look better.

However, if you imported the Text or Shape through the E-Panel's LOAD SHAPE feature, you could repaint it on the upscaled version, and get a clean look. Why? Because it's using a VECTOR shape to paint/sculpt with.

 

You are of course correct. Unfortunately I work in 4k and the performance is really slow. So I would at least work at 1k (which is fast) and export 4k. But you are correct, Painting will not be scaled properly. By the way my computer is a newer one but for some bigger models it is a pain to work.

[houGenie]

4 hours ago, Michaelgdrs said:

Example with the milk just had me laugh my a** off lol.

Although its totally doable....

 

hehe, nice one.

[AbnRanger]

On 11/9/2017 at 9:58 AM, Michaelgdrs said:

Example with the milk just had me laugh my a** off lol.

Although its totally doable....

 

Dang....I stand corrected. It seems magic is a standard feature now. Who knew?   

[AbnRanger]

On 11/9/2017 at 2:29 PM, houGenie said:

You are of course correct. Unfortunately I work in 4k and the performance is really slow. So I would at least work at 1k (which is fast) and export 4k. But you are correct, Painting will not be scaled properly. By the way my computer is a newer one but for some bigger models it is a pain to work.

 It depends. If you are trying to paint with a really large brush radius, that is one thing that will cause performance to decline w/ 4k+ maps. It's best to use medium sized brush strokes or smaller. I think Andrew has one of this developers working on a GPU brush engine, that could help in that area. But generally, in my experience, even on an older i7 970 (6-core/12 thread) CPU, painting on 4K maps was pretty fluid until trying to use a very large brush radius. 

[houGenie]

6 hours ago, AbnRanger said:

 It depends. If you are trying to paint with a really large brush radius, that is one thing that will cause performance to decline w/ 4k+ maps. It's best to use medium sized brush strokes or smaller. I think Andrew has one of this developers working on a GPU brush engine, that could help in that area. But generally, in my experience, even on an older i7 970 (6-core/12 thread) CPU, painting on 4K maps was pretty fluid until trying to use a very large brush radius. 

It is Independent of brush radius. Everything is really slow, if I use 4k textures. For example if painting with fill. It takes everything some seconds to process. The polygon count is not so high, around 30 000 polygons in paint room and 5 million in sculpt room. Have a 1070 GTX with i7 6700K and 16 GB ram.

[AbnRanger]

8 hours ago, houGenie said:

It is Independent of brush radius. Everything is really slow, if I use 4k textures. For example if painting with fill. It takes everything some seconds to process. The polygon count is not so high, around 30 000 polygons in paint room and 5 million in sculpt room. Have a 1070 GTX with i7 6700K and 16 GB ram.

16GB is actually pretty low if you are trying to use 4k maps. My guess is that Windows is doing a lot of writing to the pagefile. You can monitor this using the Task Manager, under the PERFORMANCE tab. If you RAM usage is over 12GB, Windows will probably try to write the pagefile, as you are approaching your limit. I would notice this happen on some heavy scenes, when I had 16GB. That's why I upgraded to 32GB several years ago. The rest of your system looks good, though. So, just keep an eye on your RAM consumption until you upgrade it.

[AbnRanger]

....also, you shouldn't expect FILL to be instant. It usually takes a few seconds with 4k maps. Each layer has essentially 4 maps...Color, Depth, Gloss, Metalness. 4 x 4 = 16K x Multiple layers = not so instant.  

[houGenie]

25 minutes ago, AbnRanger said:

....also, you shouldn't expect FILL to be instant. It usually takes a few seconds with 4k maps. Each layer has essentially 4 maps...Color, Depth, Gloss, Metalness. 4 x 4 = 16K x Multiple layers = not so instant.  

yes, the load is big. So I am not expecting it to be faster, wanted only a work around. ;-)