Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted March 19, 2016 Advanced Member Report Share Posted March 19, 2016 (edited) This thread is basically a continuation of an earlier thread I started in the Off Topic Forum. http://3dcoat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=19021 I finally established a workflow and understanding of layered effects in one shader that could be carried across to any render engine. Trust me this has been a real struggle that continues even now. There's a zillion vexing problems to overcome, at least there are for me. I decided to take what I learned there and apply it to a much more elaborate piece, in this case a late 1800's French place setting. The coloring and ornament of this place setting provided a lot of problems some of which I still haven't solved and I'll be asking the experts here to help me further down the thread The sculpt once again required radial symmetry but it was straightforward. The Make Shell Using Voxels was indispensible here for the delicate bone china. I chose to make it one voxel thick. It's best to have most of your shaping done on the solid mass before you extract the shell and also leave some extra on the top so that you can cut it off with the cutting tool exposing the new hollow vessel of the cup. There's not many tools you can use to manipulate such a delicate fabric; fill and smooth disintegrate it but the Airbrush Tool works just great on it and it doesn't even disturb or distort the inner surface of the mesh at all, just the side you want to work on despite being only one voxel thick. Setting up Autopo can be disconcerting but perseverance pays off now that Andrew has seriously upgraded Autopo to the point where it's almost as good as Zbrush Remesher. ALMOST! GO ANDREW GO! I used this setting which is close to one that digman sent me but in this case I clicked the Hardsurface Retopology box and that solved some problems on the extremely sharp edge of the cup I was having. Also before hitting Autopo, make sure you Fill Void and Resample and Uniform Space to remove any anomalies in your sculpt that could throw off the Autopo calculations. Trust me this makes a big difference. Edited March 19, 2016 by L'Ancien Regime 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted March 19, 2016 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted March 19, 2016 From the start the real intent of this project was in the Per Pixel Painting with depth turned on, something I really enjoy. The funny thing is that 3D Coat is so powerful now that it's almost a waste since you can sculpt such high detail into your mesh even at the voxel mode let along the surface mode that you could just do that and extract the normal maps and then do a straight up paint on that. 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted March 19, 2016 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted March 19, 2016 (edited) Now as you can see from the actual cup I'm modeling there's still a few problems to solve here, particularly when it comes to extracting maps. I'm going to have to figure out how to add that fine spray of pink brown to the edge in a gradient. This is not a straight forward problem due to the fact that I'm having trouble extracting maps the way I want. No matter what I do I always get this grey background that I have to remove in Photoshop. So I doctor the image up and get this which works fine in the render engine BUT now i want to get that fine airbrush gradient in there So I load up the .obj of the cup into the Per Pixel Paint room and then load in this map. Fine. But it's all weird. I paint on it and the color comes on like this weird dayglo color. And the colors I brought in are just outlines not the filled colors of the petals like they are in the render. So what am I doing wrong here? Edited March 19, 2016 by L'Ancien Regime Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted March 19, 2016 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted March 19, 2016 (edited) Well I sort of solved that problem by changing the settings from Standard Blend on the layer to Lightness..will take some experimenting... And it took some reworking of the color map in Photoshop directly. There may be a way to do it in 3d Coat but for now this works for me. Edited March 19, 2016 by L'Ancien Regime 6 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor Tony Nemo Posted March 19, 2016 Contributor Report Share Posted March 19, 2016 Gorgeous! But you always had a flair for classy stuff. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted March 19, 2016 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted March 19, 2016 (edited) I tried it with SSS turned on last night. The translucent delicacy of the porcelain and the softness of the shadows was like the perfect skin of a 16 year old girl, but it brought my 8 core Xeon to its knees, totally seized up my rig. I must have seized up my rig requiring reboot about 25 tiems in the last 36 hours. That Houdini Piano Laquer shader is a rig killer but I love it. Edited March 19, 2016 by L'Ancien Regime Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor ajz3d Posted March 19, 2016 Contributor Report Share Posted March 19, 2016 Beautiful cup, L'Ancient Regime. Great work man! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor Michaelgdrs Posted March 20, 2016 Contributor Report Share Posted March 20, 2016 Great work well executed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor TimmyZDesign Posted March 21, 2016 Contributor Report Share Posted March 21, 2016 Great! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reputable Contributor AbnRanger Posted March 21, 2016 Reputable Contributor Report Share Posted March 21, 2016 I tried it with SSS turned on last night. The translucent delicacy of the porcelain and the softness of the shadows was like the perfect skin of a 16 year old girl, but it brought my 8 core Xeon to its knees, totally seized up my rig. I must have seized up my rig requiring reboot about 25 tiems in the last 36 hours. That Houdini Piano Laquer shader is a rig killer but I love it. Nice work. BTW, when I use Auto-Retopo, I typically choose CAPTURE DETAILS = 70%. It seems to give a more accurate result. As for Houdini shaders bringing your system to it's knees...I find (in 3ds Max) that if you get the look you want with PBR Smart Materials in 3D Coat, you really don't need any special shaders in your host app. Maybe SSS on a character, but that's about it. No need for car paint shader with lots of tweaking needed. No rubber shader, etc. It comes out looking pretty darn close to what you see in 3D coat's viewport. This saves a lot of time in material/shader setup. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted March 21, 2016 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted March 21, 2016 Nice work. BTW, when I use Auto-Retopo, I typically choose CAPTURE DETAILS = 70%. It seems to give a more accurate result. As for Houdini shaders bringing your system to it's knees...I find (in 3ds Max) that if you get the look you want with PBR Smart Materials in 3D Coat, you really don't need any special shaders in your host app. Maybe SSS on a character, but that's about it. No need for car paint shader with lots of tweaking needed. No rubber shader, etc. It comes out looking pretty darn close to what you see in 3D coat's viewport. This saves a lot of time in material/shader setup. Thanks. I frankly confess to being 99% ignorant about this new PBR technology. It's a whole new area of study I'm going to have to master. I'll try out your setting on Capture Details. Digman has shown me some amazing results for Autopo on very complex scans. It's really entering into a whole new era of maturity since .28 at least. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor ajz3d Posted March 21, 2016 Contributor Report Share Posted March 21, 2016 If you're rendering this in Houdini, try using Disney's Principled Shader. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member L'Ancien Regime Posted March 21, 2016 Author Advanced Member Report Share Posted March 21, 2016 (edited) If you're rendering this in Houdini, try using Disney's Principled Shader. Actually I did try it but I found that the Mantra Surface Shader was a bit easier to use and set up the gold paint with simultaneous to setting up the porcelain color. And on a positive note, my finished cup got retweeted by @sidefx Edited March 21, 2016 by L'Ancien Regime 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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