[Confusion with displacement maps]

Hi!

That's bad it didn't work. how Does your displacement looks like? Is grey zero level and Can you see dark and light grey? There is a bug in 3.1.24 that you

can't merge object into scene. If you have ealier version use that for now, until Andrew is making a update. I can make some video tutorials (not spoken, english bad)

if you want. But it should be relative easy to make those maps. Just merge your object and then choose from menu Texture -> Export and choose the map you want. That's the

most easiest way.

The map does have black/white values - I think the issue might be related to gamma. Not sure which way to set the gamma on the map yet, might be 2.2, might be 1.0, have to figure that out.

In terms of exporting the maps, I can see that the process can be simple, but it's the choice of options that make it complex.

Let's say that I imported a medium res mesh and just did per-pixel-painting to sculpt some fine/super-fine details in the shape: these things are still confusing for me, hopefully you can shed some light on it :

1) export "Displacement Map Current Layers" (or visible if I want to leave some painted bits out) or "Export Depth Layers"? It looked to me like each of these options produced a different result.

2) When I do that how do I determine if I need a normal map as well? I assume like Zbrush that 3DC puts the finer details in a normal map, so how do I know whether or not I need one, or do you always have to generate both?

3) Assuming I need a normal map, which would be a good choice - low poly, mid-poly, or layer-0 based? Not even sure what layer-0 based means?

For now I think I will have to go back to Zbrush for this stuff, but I'd really like to consolidate the workflow to 3DC if possible.

Thanks again for the help.

b

[Confusion with displacement maps]

Hi!

I'm not quite sure if I understood the problem but I have blender + Vray and I had to play with Water Level parameter. I can see from your screenshot that your water level is 0.

If your displacement amount is 1 and shift is -0.5 then your water level should be -1.

Should you create only displacement map or both disp + normal it's up to you. There is a way that you can put all layers together and create one nice displacement map.

It's depends what is your worflow. Hope this helps...

I gave the water level thing a try - it didn't work. Just made the problem a bit different. I think that adjusting the displacement amount up more helped, but the negative displacement went really deep before the positive showed up properely. Something is not right with the greyscale values I think, but I guess further experimentation with a simpler shape is in order.

You mention that there are options for making either disp and normal, or just one depending on workflow: what I'm trying to do is figure out what the workflow should be for best and simplest result. Can you, or someone, suggest a clear workflow that I can try? I don't really care which way I do it, I just want some way of getting the results back to Max/Vray

Thanks again.

b

[Confusion with displacement maps]

Hi!

I'm not quite sure if I understood the problem but I have blender + Vray and I had to play with Water Level parameter. I can see from your screenshot that your water level is 0.

If your displacement amount is 1 and shift is -0.5 then your water level should be -1. Hope this helps.

That seems a bit odd: the water level should be zero unless you want non-displaced areas clipped out. I've never had to adjust it from zero in any other case. I'll try it though - you never know.

b

[Confusion with displacement maps]

I am struggling with figuring out a workflow to paint displacement and fine detail bump maps using 3DC. I imported my model for per-pixel painting, painted with relief active, and got a reasonable result in the viewport in 3DC (reasonable for this test anyway ). From there I'm getting a bit lost though: it is very confusing trying to figure out which of the many ways is the correct one for exporting the map.

I have tried exporting displacement maps, and also exporting Depth layers. Each gives a slightly different result - which should it be? Also: do I also need to export a normal map for the finer/finest details, or will 3DC put all the detail into the displacement map?

I'm trying to figure this out by testing in Max/Vray but for some reason the maps I export only seem to create negative (downward)displacement, even though the Vray settings should allow for both directions. Anyone have some direction for me?

Thanks in advance,

Brett

Screen Grab in 3DC:

http://www.screencast.com/users/simmsimaging/folders/Jing/media/536df5c4-8b70-459c-9220-9dc35a8b2c47

Screen grab from Max/Vray:

http://www.screencast.com/users/simmsimaging/folders/Jing/media/18208c5c-80dd-477e-9c28-bc2fa49b3868

[Brett Simms Imaging - a few 3DC pieces]

Thanks very much Oliver and Digital777 - much appreciated.

b

[Brett Simms Imaging - a few 3DC pieces]

ok, I hope you don't mind if I post it here... pretty much the base mesh.. but I am really almost finished... I am doing my first Maxwell tests...

Looks really good. That is about as detailed as anything we could get out of voxels so far. More than that and we were ending up going to Zbrush (so far anyway). It looks like you managed to avoid a lot of the smoothing problems we were having with voxels though - finding it hard to get nice smooth edges. Well done.

b

[Custom brushes do not work as erasers?]

I haven't said it in a while - but thanks Andrew, 3DC is really coming along well and is an amazing program. Great job.

I'm wondering how to get custom brushes to work as an eraser. So far only the default brushes seem to erase. Is it just me? I tried various options of the "erasemask" layer of the psd file for the brushes, but it seems to have some other purpose that I'm not really clear on (yes, read the manual on it, but still not sure what it means )

It would also be more useful (in my opinion) if the individual tools could have their own brush setting (like Photoshop) instead of always using the same one. It would make for a much faster/smoother workflow. I know this has been requested before, so just a bump for it.

Thanks /b

Just bumping this thread.

[Brett Simms Imaging - a few 3DC pieces]

well, I have "some" success with voxels... so fun to work with.. after 2 hours, I was feeling good with it..

I have modeled a realistic lobster with it... all went good.. but I had to do the uv's in Modo... making uv's for it in 3D coat was a no go (too many base polys.. but I had to do it that way, otherwise, too much displacement would have been necessary..)

anyway, I will post the result here soon... after I post it at Maxwell forum.. off course... hehe..

I should give it a go at Zbrush one day...

Thanks Brett..

Looking forward to seeing what you have done with voxels. Your work is always top notch, so I'm sure it will be great.

b

[Brett Simms Imaging - a few 3DC pieces]

hey Brett... well yes... I work with depth channel in 3DCoat, but as you say... no tight details.... there might be a secret somewhere.... I use 4096 x 4096 pix maps.. but it's no enough apparently... 8000 x 8000 crashes... not enough mem.. it goes skyrocket to eat my 8gb... then bye bye.. how does Z-brush works in that respect.. better..?

Thanks Brett... I am a great fan of your work..

I have been experimenting lately and with a lot of help from the people on this forum was able to get somewhere with Voxels and a bit of detail, but in the end I went to Zbrush for the finer work. I am not sure yet if 3DC can get that same level of detail without artifacts, but for sure I find it a lot easier to do in Zbrush. However, if you are just painting for displacement, and not actually sculpting it in, then 3DC is the way to go because the painting tools are much better than in Zbrush (althought ZB is much faster/more responsive in the viewport so it can be faster for laying in base-coats).

Just my POV, but I have not had a ton of time to spend figuring out how to use all of 3DC's various ways of sculpting

b

[Brett Simms Imaging - a few 3DC pieces]

Great work and your renders are outstanding...

Thanks Digman.

b

[Brett Simms Imaging - a few 3DC pieces]

I should have mentioned: that frog model is not ours, it came from a 3DWorld magazine. The rest are built by Jim Dunk who works with me here.

b

[Brett Simms Imaging - a few 3DC pieces]

hello Brett... Great renders.. great models...

if you don't mind, I'd like to ask you a question... how do you achieve such precision with the disp map..? lately I tried working on a model with1/2 m. polys... 4096x4096 pix map... but it is VERY far from what you have here... I mean a small brush from preset (small hair like) gives me only blobby stuff.. even if I load a high precision disp map.. all fine setails are gone....

anyway... very cool...

Hervé

Thanks Hervé. I have not had any problems with the displacement maps I made in 3DC, but I don't actually use the depth channels for it - haven't really figured out how to make the right maps that way. I just paint black and white Diffuse maps, tweak them in Photoshop to get them 16bit, and use those. Are you using the depth channel of 3DC? I gave up trying to get tight detail, although I'm sure it can be done it's not easy to figure out.

These are excelent images. Your modelling and texturing...and rendering skills are top notch. I have been learning Vray as well and it's truly amazing renderer.

Which 3d program you used? Are these pure render pictures or did you use 2d program like photoshop too? Just Wau!

Thanks Haikalle. We use Max, and all the renders have some post work in Photoshop - some quite a bit. That's our primary job here, so hard not to get some retouching in there

Very nice results. I like the materials and textures. Well made!

Official gallery candidate!

Thanks Taros, much appreciated!

[Brett Simms Imaging - a few 3DC pieces]

I use 3DC almost totally for texture painting, just starting to mess with sculpting with it lately. Here are a few pieces we have done using 3DC. Rendered in Vray.

b

[Custom brushes do not work as erasers?]

I haven't said it in a while - but thanks Andrew, 3DC is really coming along well and is an amazing program. Great job.

I'm wondering how to get custom brushes to work as an eraser. So far only the default brushes seem to erase. Is it just me? I tried various options of the "erasemask" layer of the psd file for the brushes, but it seems to have some other purpose that I'm not really clear on (yes, read the manual on it, but still not sure what it means )

It would also be more useful (in my opinion) if the individual tools could have their own brush setting (like Photoshop) instead of always using the same one. It would make for a much faster/smoother workflow. I know this has been requested before, so just a bump for it.

Thanks /b

[Free Transform image layers?]

It would also be great if we could paste image into 3DCoat and maintain transparency. If I paste a cut-out layer from Photoshop it comes in with a solid white background behind it, even though I can import the same layer directly and it works fine that way.

b

[Free Transform image layers?]

I'm trying to do some "sort of precise" positioning of label art on a bottle. I have the art in pieces on layers in a psd, and have brought that psd into 3DC to better line up the elements on the bottle.

The problem is that the tranform tool is a bit cumbersome: you have to marquee a section of the layer (done in the UV Editor window so it's on a 2D plane) but it's not easy to move around because the preview in the viewport does not update "live". I get a lot of weird errors with piece of image missing or getting distorted as well.

Is it possible to just add a simple "move tool" like in Photoshop to just move the existing layers around in 2D and not transform them each time, which seems to re-interpolate them even for a simple move and is degrading the quality from what I can see. That and a live update as you move the layers around would be a huge improvement for texturing.

Am I missing a way to do this that is already built in?

Thanks /b

[Problem converting voxels to mesh]

BTW you have a pretty good understanding of 3DCoat for someone who havent looked into the manual.

There is nothing you did wrong that would have come from your non-understanding.

I still dont know the true use of Increase and Decrease Density but I noticed it have a big impact on quadrangulation

and I asked Andrew about that relation a few times but I think he must not have noticed my questions.

The leftovers I was taking about were not in the voxel room(I looked inside the voxels and there was no duplicated smaller object)

But in Paintroom while there was no objects, there was like 4 "layer 0" and if I used Windows--popups--Sub-objects :there was 2 objects there.

3DCoat seems to accumulate stuff sometimes but I havent investigated that phenomenon much yet.

Anyway to get a cleaned file: I just exported the voxel sculpt with full resolution,then I used merge from the voxel left panel tools

to reimport the sculpt in voxels in the new empty file.Very Easy.

I have gone through the manual several times, but it's not always the best for figuring out how to actually use the stuff. The tools are generally well described, but in some cases not really in much depth (i.e the density parameter in voxels) and it's not very clear how you actually use many of them (what the workflow might actually be) - at least not well enough for me to figure it out

I appreciate all the help though - I'm making some progress now for sure.

b

[Problem converting voxels to mesh]

Fully baked is just what you get in Paint Room when successfully doing the merge for perpixel or merge for microvertex.

Ah - I see. Thanks.

Its not distortion ,its the lowpoly underneath that we see(I subdivided it in the 100k range but its still lowpoly).

To avoid that you need to use Microvertex but...you need to make nice clean manual UVS on your quadrangulated mesh,

MV does not like automatic UVS.

I did try the MV export so I could increase the mesh size, but at lower settings I had the same issue, and when I raised the settings up higher it just hung (or I gave up after 15min). I clearly need to spend a bit more time with it.

Thanks.

[Problem converting voxels to mesh]

Here is your file:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/agcjo3

I included 2 files one is only cleaned up file + quadrangulated model.

Second one is full baked model in per-pixel painting.

(Microvertex gives you better highres exports but you need manual Uvs to get perfect baking with it)

Per-pixel painting endure auto-mapping much better.

There is not a single artifact and the splash is pretty clean but the edges of the plane are kinda lowres..

maybe you dont intent to show the border of the plane anyway...

Good news is that poly reduction tool works fine on the cleaned file so you can also go that way!

Thanks very much for taking the time to do this. I am currently working on quadrangulating the new mesh to see how it works out for me here. (I am choosing to quadrangulate the object from the VoxTree, and then in the retopo window choosing 'merge to scene for MV'. The process is quite slow.)

I am not really clear on what it means to have a fully baked model in 3DC. I know there is a texture baking tool that is for baking normal/displacement maps but it's not at all clear to me at what stage you do that, or what a workflow would be. I'm hoping to have more time to dig into the docs and clarify that.

One thing I did notice in your quadrangluated, and in the texture baked versions, is that the distortion of the box shape is still there, but much reduced. I'm gathering the improvement is due to the change in density(?) However, while much better, the problem is still kinda there. Is it possible to get a more perfect shape or is this a limitation of 3DC at the moment?

I will also try the straight voxel export with reduction on the 1X mesh to see if that still crashes my computer.

Thanks again.

b

[Problem converting voxels to mesh]

When you get your exporting and quadragulation problems fixed...

Direct paint ( per-pixel) has no smoothing routine {except for how a game would smooth a model) That is why no sub-division is your first choice in the dialog menu. Per-pixel is great for painting Low polygon game models (with normal map if you made one) . It's intended use. It was a much requested feature to be included in version 3 of 3DC. The reason you get the bad looking depth is because of the above reason.

Choose mircovertex painting. Select a high carcass mesh. plus choose somewhere around 6 millon polygones or more as this is used for your normal map or displacement making(depth painting map). Now you can use depth painting which is really creating a normal map (on the fly) on the surface. For true polygon vertex sculpting use the scuplting room. It still a fav of mine even with voxel sculpting included in 3DC. It great for fast sculpting or just getting ideas... for your voxel sculpt. If you use the sculpting room, use the texture baking tool to get the correct normal and displacment maps.

Most of your problems (not all of course) are from just not understanding how 3DC works. Now does 3DC have some bugs yes but which Andrew is fast to fix... He has now fixed the reduction crashing bug. :}

Edit: You can though import up to a 1 million polygon model into per-pixel painting.

Thanks for that explanation. I originally shifted to the DP method because I found I was having resolution/detail problems with MV painting that DP helped me avoid, but I gather I'm better to do surface sculpting in MV either way.

I fully understand that the problems are mainly due to my lack of understanding 3DC, but you have to admit it gets pretty hairy with all the various ways of doing things and the esoteric values involved. Thanks again for helping out.

b

[Problem converting voxels to mesh]

I found solution to your problem.

You need to use Increase Object 2x(Decrease Density) from voxtree rmb menu 3 TIMES

(until you get 1X space density instead of 8X)

Now the objects quadrangulate properly.

Also I degraded your sculpt to 2mil and there was not a noticable difference...there really isnt 10million worth of topology here.

The only mystery problem I add to solve is why you would get a smaller duplicate of the quadrangualted model inside.

For solving this I exported the sculpt and remerged it in voxels to a new file (I suspect it was some invisible junk leftovers from previous quadrangulation attempts because there was alot of layers in paint room)

I will post your corrected file in a half an hour.

Thanks very much for looking into this. I am not clear on what the density increase/decrease actually does - and could not find an answer in the manual. I arrived at 8X by increasing the resolution, but noticed the density increase/decrease seems to say the same thing (i.e x2, x4 etc.) but without increasing the sculpting resolution. What is that for then?

I definitely tried these operations many times though, so it is very possible there are bits and pieces hiding in there somewhere, but I could not find them to get rid of them, but was not really sure how to move the voxels to a new file - thanks.

b

[Problem converting voxels to mesh]

No problem ; ) Just keep experimenting with different approaches and you'll find what works best for you. I would continue to try different settings in quadrangulation as well. I've only used it a few times, but I've never had a mesh blow up like that. Aside from n gons and random edgeflow, it's generally worked really good. Maybe it's the nature of the beast, dunno. Haven't tried it on a mesh like yours, only a couple heads.

Good luck and keep at it! You'll figure it out ; )

The problem with experimenting with the quadrangulation methods is that it takes a really, really long time to run each one on this mesh (like 10-15 minutes sometimes) and I just don't have enough spare time to test many options In any case, I found your gallery thread on modo for the image above, and I tried this method and it worked great! Zbrush decimation got my 10 million poly mesh down to something like 500K and it looks great. This is probably the way to go for now - much appreciated!

I think the 3DC poly reduction may be a good route later, but for now it just crashes out. I'll try it again when that bug is ironed out a bit more.

b

[Problem converting voxels to mesh]

Thanks for the input James. I gave it a try for a couple of hours last night, and I guess it will come easier with time I'm not a modeler so the tools are probably more comfortable/fast for someone who can poly model, but my hope with 3DC was to avoid poly modeling. Perhaps one of the commercially available vids would help clarify the process, but I'm not really into paying for that until I have a better sense that it will get me the results I'm looking for.

In any case, I have to agree with Polyxo that auto-topology would be better for cases like this, where I don't need a "perfect" mesh for manipulating later. I'm sure there is a very good reason why it behaves as it does (works well on complex shapes, but kinda rough on simple shapes) and hopefully it is something that can be remedied.

b

[Problem converting voxels to mesh]

Still getting a messed up mesh but by exporting the voxel model for MV painting I was able to get the best case (much like the first pic posted in this thread, but the outer edges that are chewed up don't really show and I can fix them later if necessary). However, trying to get some decent detail in the depth map via painting and/or sculpting is just not happening very easily.

In the end I exported the mesh and reimported it for DP painting and then made a much higher res map (8K) so I could get some even moderate detail in the depth map. It's still not great IMO, but it's okay for this model. However, now I'm getting this weird faceting happening along the edges of the mesh whenever I try and paint with depth. See the pics below - one shows the wire so you can see how the flow is. There are a couple of 5 point poly's in there, but this problem happens wherever I paint on this model. Any idea what this problem is?

Right now I'm feeling pretty disappointed with the modeling/sculpting aspects of 3DC. Painting is awesome, but this is getting a bit crazy trying to build anything with any kind of detail and get it back out again in one piece. Maybe it's just me?

b

New smoothing (?) problem when painting with depth only, DP mode:

[Problem converting voxels to mesh]

So I tried to increase the res, but it just resulted in a much slower process and arrived at the same problem. I also tried the newest build and exporting with poly reduction, but it crashes instantly everytime I tried so I may have to wait for another build for that ??

In the interim, I just created a voxel primitive cube, upped the res once (to 35mb - not sure how to really gauge the res using MB, but that's what it said) and hit quadrangulate. The result is below - Polyxo is right, there is an issue with retopology and regular shapes. This seems to be way off IMO, and if this is what happens to a simple cube isn't it reasonable to expect some pretty wild results with more complex shapes?

This one was done quadrangulated with the options at 4,5,and 3 million polys and smoothing at 1,10,and 15. They all produced various versions of this problem. Is there a better way to get a clean mesh or do you have to manually retopologize to get it?

Thanks /b