Mini-tutorials

[philnolan3d]

Every once in a while I'll come up with a little tutorial to answer someone's question on the forum. I figured it would be a good idea to compile them in one place. I'll start off with these and hopefully more will be added as I come up with them.

Using Cloth and Retopo to make clothing armor, etc.

Right now I'm working on these bullets. I made the bullet in LightWave and then loaded it into the merge tool with the "On Pen" option. So now I need a strap that goes across them. Here's the retopo, in this case made with Quads and then Split Rings around the edges.

I gave it a little Additional Extrusion too. Back in the Voxels room I picked the Cloth tool and hit Pick From Retopo. Hit the Subdivide button a few times and I have this:

Press Enter and I'm done with that part:

Render:

Remember you can also uncheck the box for Auto Snap in the upper left corner of the Retopo room and use the Move tool to pull the mesh away from the model. This is how I made this character's shoulder armor. You can also export the retopo mesh from the Retopo menu, load it into another app like LightWave and make changes to it, then in 3DC clear out the retopo room and load the altered mesh in, making sure you do not snap when the pop-up asks.

Making a zipper with Curves:

The zipper started as an object in LightWave:

I used the Copy tool to copy the zipper area to a higher res layer so I didn't have to increase res on the entire body. Then dug a "trench" for the zipper to go in with the Curve tool.

The teeth object from earlier was placed in this folder:

C:\Program Files\3D-Coat-V3\VoxStamps\Splines

Now it can be used as a Curve:

I don't remember the exact rules for making Curve objects so there was a lot of trial and error to get the scale of it right.

[Ghostdog]

Nice idea Phil. When you say you dug a trench for the zipper did you just eyeball it?

[philnolan3d]

Well I used the normal cylindrical curve to actually dig it, then used it again to make slightly higher "humps" on either side (with symmetry on) and smoothed those out.

Also I probably don't have to say this, but any time you carve into a copy like I'm doing here, you will of course need to also carve into the original, though with the original it's OK to be sloppy since the copy will cover it up.

Like so:

[Rich_Art]

Nice looking. Thanks for sharing.

How do you do the retopology of the added meshes? (eg body Armour en smaller parts like the bullets)

Peace,

Rich_Art.

[Grandmaster B]

Wow, thanks a lot!!!

[philnolan3d]

How do you do the retopology of the added meshes? (eg body Armour en smaller parts like the bullets)

Same as the retopo for any other parts. It took me about 2 days to retopo the whole character.

[Rich_Art]

wow a lot of work.

Peace,

Rich_Art.

[Digital777]

Thanks for the tutorials philnolan3d

[philnolan3d]

Duplicating retopo mesh

This one's pretty simple. Suppose you've created this funny dog-creature-thing and you've finished the retopo for the front legs, but now you'd like to copy those to the back because they're very similar, it would be silly to do the work all over.

Select the polys you want to duplicate and hit Retopo > Export Selected or if that's the only mesh you've made just hit Retopo > Export. Save the file as LWO or OBJ, then load it right back in from the same menu. It will appear as a temporary object with a Transform gizmo.

Move it into position and press Enter. It may help if it is made slightly larger than the sculpture. When asked if you'd like to snap to the sculpture say yes.

That's it, if you need to do any additional snapping just make sure Auto Snap is turned on in the upper left of the screen and touch at it with the Brush tool.

[philnolan3d]

Baking normal maps to multiple UVs

One problem 3DC has is that you can not create multiple UV maps from the retopo room. Hopefully this will be fixed soon but for now here's a work-around I figured out.

Sculpt your model and retopo it. Mark the seems and unwrap. You don't have to do that but it can be helpful. Now export the retopo mesh from Retopo > Export.

From here you can work on the UVs in any application you choose, I used LightWave with the free PLG plugins. You can also bring it back into 3DC in the painting room as per-pixel and use 3DCs UV room to do your editing, then export it again.

Once you have you have your low-poly model saved out with the UVs the way you like them you can now bake your normal maps (color too). Make sure your high res voxel model is open in the voxel room. In the Painting room go to Texture > Texture Baking Tool.

In the tool Select your low poly model in the first box on top, pick the size for the textures, then set the file names for the tangent space normal map and color map if you like (no spec). You can leave the rest at the defaults. Then click OK. It will bake maps from the voxel model and save them out.

If you want to continue working with those maps in 3DC you can load the model into the painting room and go to Textures > Import > [map type].

[Greg]

Nice tips Phil! Thanks,

Greg

[philnolan3d]

Lightwave to 3D-Coat and Back

This is an older tutorial I had posted here a couple of years ago but the info is still good, so i thought I'd add it to the mini-tutorials. Of course things may be different once the official LightWave AppLink is released.

I started with this simple shape in LightWave Modeler. I made two surfaces, Green and Blue for the sake of simplicity.

Then I UV mapped them. Two maps, one for each surface.

After saving the LWO model I went into 3DC and chose to Import for Per Pixel Painting, using the following settings.

Once inside of 3DC I started with a blank white model and painted it with a material I had made earlier. That's Color, Normal, and Spec.

After I was done painting I was ready to export back out to LightWave. So I hit File > Export Model (obj, lwo), making sure to choose LWO as the file type, and entered these settings:

Now in LightWave Layout I loaded up the model and you can see the nodes and other surface settings are already applied. The only thing I did do was clean up the nodes a little because they come in stack on top of each other. I also reduced the normal map amplitude to 50% because it was a little too strong.

And here's the render:

I hope that was helpful, please feel free to ask any questions.

[Redfisher]

Lightwave to 3D-Coat and Back

This is an older tutorial I had posted here a couple of years ago but the info is still good, so i thought I'd add it to the mini-tutorials. Of course things may be different once the official LightWave AppLink is released.

I started with this simple shape in LightWave Modeler. I made two surfaces, Green and Blue for the sake of simplicity.

Then I UV mapped them. Two maps, one for each surface.

After saving the LWO model I went into 3DC and chose to Import for Per Pixel Painting, using the following settings.

Once inside of 3DC I started with a blank white model and painted it with a material I had made earlier. That's Color, Normal, and Spec.

After I was done painting I was ready to export back out to LightWave. So I hit File > Export Model (obj, lwo), making sure to choose LWO as the file type, and entered these settings:

Now in LightWave Layout I loaded up the model and you can see the nodes and other surface settings are already applied. The only thing I did do was clean up the nodes a little because they come in stack on top of each other. I also reduced the normal map amplitude to 50% because it was a little too strong.

And here's the render:

I hope that was helpful, please feel free to ask any questions.

It sure was helpful!! I had just read this particular tutorial this morning in another thread.

[ekunzendorf]

Great stuff, Phil!

Excelsior!

Eric Kunzendorf

Jacksonville University

[Steve C]

Nice work.

I will have to experiment with this.

Steve

[moiglory]

It's more awesome of the pictures than the texts.

[philnolan3d]

Reducing Retopo Geometry

This one is really quick but very helpful. Frequently when modeling or doing retopo you need to transition from a dense area to a more open part, like the forehead to the top of the head or the ear to the cheek.. I've found this way of doing it works much better than the 4-point triangle method and it's pretty easy to do. On my current model I've used it on a number of places around the nose, ear, and more.

2. Use the Add / Split tool to draw a diagonal line across adjacent polygons, making sure there is at least one untouched one in between. Symmetry helps but of ocurse you don't need it.

3. Use Split Rings to draw a line between the two triangles.

4. Use Collapse on the horizontal lines above the triangles. If you like you can then use the Brush tool with Shift to smooth out this area even more.

See Attachment: