simmsimaging

+1

I installed the newest one today and I can't say I saw any difference to speak of with the larger brushes. I was trying to paint a 4K map and even moderately large brushes just fell apart. They stop working at all, start jittering around, or just act very laggy. Same problem as always for me. I was only painting the diffuse btw, no depth, no spec. There is still a major need to improve brush performance for hi-res work, but at least 3DC is kick-ass for detail stuff. Small brushes and sharp detail are way better than Mudbox IMO /b

Yes, I did. It seemed to send the UV's to the paint room version okay, but the sculpt was different.

I'm messing with the sculpt room for one of the first times, but having some issues with the sculpting jumping around in weird ways. I think it's a UV related issue, so I tried to re-UV the mesh and start again. However, it seems like the UV's are not updating in the sculpt room. It doesn't seem to change and I get a weird looking depth effect in the paint room even when I deleted the only paint layer that had sculpting on it. So - is there possibly a UV issue with sculpt room, or is it likely to be something else at play? b

+1

I am not really sure what you are saying, but it doesn't really matter - let's just leave it be as it is wasted time for both of us. I posted my comments primarily so that Andrew has feedback from his customer base and adding a data point about our priorities, not to convince other users in particular

I think you basically just said the same thing in more words I agree that VP has a lot of use and potential, but agree with ABN that it's limited at this stage for hi-res work. It is neither impudence or nonsense to say that development is likely to be slower - it's just logical given: (a) limited resources and multiplied tasks, and ( the history of development thus far with 3DC and other software. Sure, sales could go up and so could development, but that is *less likely* to be the case. In any event, it's not a criticism of anyone - it is just how things are. Only time will tell though /b

While I again finding myself disagreeing with the adversarial tone, I do agree with Abnranger that vertex painting is of limited value for high res textures. 16 million poly's is about on par with a 4K map, but that's not that much really. Depends on the kind of work you do - that's entry level for many textures that I require. That said, vertex/poly paint is a *great* system for low to medium res texture work. PTEX or PP painting works well for higher res work (to a point - it is pretty laggy with high res and high res brushes for now). The only downside of having both is the split focus in development will likely mean that neither gets fully sorted out anywhere near as fast as if there were only the one. /b

Congrats Herve! Best of luck with it. /b

That looks pretty good. I tested it and it worked okay here too. Seems like it does the same thing as merging the object while in Surface mode, but this way the subdivision control actually worked for me. I was able to go to 15m polys without it crashing. Still not enough for really hi-res, but it's in there anyway Once the resampling is functional then it would be easier to raise the res at that time. Anyway, thanks for the help testing it and figuring this out. b

I was asking about even detail for sure, but only in whatever capacity was needed for even texture res. I understand your point about the value of low detail areas, but that's not the problem I'm looking to solve just yet! Thanks for confirming that issue. I do realize that it is a beta still, but at this phase I need to ask the questions because there is no way for me to tell which problems are just user error, which are beta limits and which are limits of the process. I also see value in pointing out what might be a big limit on the process because it may save me and a lot of other people a bunch of wasted time trying to use the wrong tool for the job. Anyway, I'm not trying to hack on it, just figure out what it can do Thanks. I did try that but it was failing to merge after subdividing so I gave up on that approach. It only worked when in voxel mode, not surface.

Just to be clear: resampling also evens out the polygon size as well as just increasing the res? I didn't realize that, or it hadn't sunk in. In any case, I don't think that is the root of the issue. I just tried it again, going from the base size and resampling to 10m polys in one go - which is certainly enough to hold the detail - and it looked pretty much exactly the same. The eyes were mangled and the body was chunky and rough looking. Pretty much the exact same as going to only 200K /b EDIT: here is the wire view to see the mesh distribution

Just on the subject of res as well - see the attached image. It's just a rough paint of a material onto the model. THe left side shows the material in the viewport, the right is the painted result. This is with a voxel mesh showing nearly 16million polys. I think the degradation in the image is too much for hi-res work, but would be fine for medium distance etc. Is this something others are experiencing, or is it maybe just this mesh? My testing shows that I probably need 30-50million polys to get a solid clean texture, and I"m a bit concerned that there is yet another stage of baking that has to happen so more quality may be lost. Is it a limitation of the process maybe? /b

Thanks for the help Phil. I'm not sure you are following me, or I grossly misunderstand the resampling dialog: the left side is the base mesh imported. It's maybe 125,000 polys as reported in the resample dialog. The actual mesh is considerably less and still appears ok. Resampling it *up* to 250K (again, as reported in that resampling dialog) gave me the result on the right. What doesn't make sense is that I gave it *more* poly's than it had, but it shows less detail? What am I missing here? Also: I don't want selective increase in poly count, because for texture painting like this that means some parts of the texture are going to look crappy and some fine - for polypainting you want it all to be evenly high res. For that reason the selective LC thing is counter productive, at least to me.

That's not the case for me. See the screen cap - this is what happens when I used resample. Why is this one so much worse?

Thanks 3DArtist and Phil - I really appreciate the time you are taking to help me out here. Re: local res with the brush: that's a good trick I tried this approach and it works, but it's difficult to get a smooth and consistent subdivision around the whole model (and I think it needs a lot of subdivision to get reasonable resolution out of direct painting.) I tried using the marquee tool to do it more globally but that didn't seem to work at all with the LC brush. I found an option to subdivide on merging the object (in the pop-up that has the merging options in the voxel room) but if I subdivide more than once (in surface mode) it tends to fail so it's not really useable either - although it worked okay if merging to regular voxel mode from what I could see. I did try going into regular voxel mode to increase the res with the res+ button, but the geo gets voxelized as well as losing any painting. Losing the painting at that stage is no big deal - this is a step that would happen before painting anyway, but I also get a lot of artifacts and loss of detail in the resulting mesh. I guess this might be okay if I retopologize back to the original mesh and bake the texture for that. However, I'm not so sure about the direct painting approach for reasonably hi-res work. In order to get a decent level of detail in the texture I had to increase the voxel res to 32million poly's (2400mb object) before going into the paint room. This gave me pretty good res in the texture - say about on par with a 3-4K map, but it is still a bit chunky looking and at that stage the performance of the brushes is about the same as the normal paint room tools (e.g large brushes are laggy or don't work at all until I scale them down, things like that). I had similar experiences with polypainting in Zbrush: it's pretty good for low to medium res stuff, but for really hi-res detail it just doesn't cut it without a super hi-poly mesh, which gets cumbersome to work on. Anyone else playing with high res and finding different results? /b

Is there a basic "subdivide" function in surface mode? I was directed to LC tools to increase res, but I cannot find any way to do it aside from 'resample' which seems to do something totally different. Is there a way to do it without actually changing the topology with one of the mesh? Thanks /b

Cool - thanks! /b

Thanks Phil. So another question then: rather than bake to a retopo model, is it possible to bring the original geometry back in and bake from voxel to that? Then I won't have to rebake it yet again to get the maps back onto the original mesh, which would be the plan in most cases. /b

Yes, I was asking for some clarification because "using LC tools" to increase the res didn't get me too far. Perhaps I should have been more clear on the other question: even if you merge geometry in using surface mode, thus maintaining the geometry, it's *still* necessary to go through voxels and retopologize and UV etc to get the direct painting out?

Just bumping this. Anyone able to let me know? I didn't have much luck and ended up going back to just using PTEX. tks/b

So getting a model into the surface mode and painting on it is pretty easy, but how do I get that painting out? I tried baking but it only baked out the base shader colour, not the painting. Any tips? Also: it was mentioned that you can increase the res of the model in surface mode (using LC tools I believe) but I cannot find a way to just bump up the res. Where is that tool located? I tried the resampling thing, but that seems to do something quite different. tks /b

I actually never did that before either. I have only really tried voxels without painting and did not have much luck with retopo so just exported the decimated meshes automatically. I'll see if I can figure it out. I didn't know about that - thanks. I suppose that it would still entail the same export/retopo process Phil mentioned above - or does this method retain the geo and UV's of the original mesh? If so is there a guide somewhere on how to bake the polypainted texture back? You have a tendency to make your point a bit forcefully and it's rubbing people the wrong way, but I don't disagree with the basic idea that fundamental tools should be fully functional before adding new stuff. I also actually agree with the premise behind your point that CUDA acceleration could be improved. Andrew said that he could get 20% improvement but didn't seem too keen, but I actually think that is a very significant improvement and would be well worth the investment. For regular users that can add up to a massive difference in production time. Now, CUDA is less interesting to me as I am a paint user, not a voxel user, but the point that such large improvements could be made, but aren't seen as a priority, is a problem in my view as well. Regarding PTEX, I agree with the others who posted on the subject. The problem isn't that PTEX isn't useful, it's the lack of render support that holds it back in my workflow. Better support is coming and with that I would happily switch over to PTEX and forget about PP and MV painting (well, assuming the performance in the paint room was improved to make it more useable in hi-res). /b

No worries Had a quick play and it does seem very promising. It seems more responsive with high res brushes and large brush sizes than the other paint methods, and the lack of UV hassles is nice for sure. I'm a bit iffy on always having to voxelize models to paint though - as that process always seems lossy to me (in terms of sharp details). Perhaps that's just a matter of learning the process better, but the docs are not very extensive and it's not clear to me how to really tweak that process. Anyway, it's cool, but had a few questions if someone wouldn't mind explaining a couple of things: 1) how do I increase the res of the painting - by increasing the voxel res *before* going to surface mode? 2) how do you get the painting out of there and into a texture map and model you can render in, say, Max and Vray? Thanks in advance /b

Yeah, I didnt ask if it would replace the paint room, but rather if this is intended to be the 'fix' for the other methods within it, or not. It's not clear to me how this is intended to slot into the current workflows, or slot into the path of development for painting in 3DC. It's an interesting function, and I will certainly check it out, but my concern is that we end up with a 3rd semi-finished paint system rather than 1 finished one. I'm all for whichever works, as long as there is one that fully works, if you know what I mean. /b