L'Ancien Regime

that's a nice clean sculpt. I take it all those limb segments are separate layers... What scupt tools did you mostly use to do that with ?

It's a bit too technical for me too but I was curious about it and hoped to trigger a discussion on it...

Thanks digman..

http://www-graphics....ftware/volpack/ The Volume Rendering Pipeline The input to the volume renderer is a three-dimensional array of data. Each element of the array is a C structure containing any number of fields of data, such as tissue density or temperature. Each element is called a "voxel." The first stage in the volume rendering pipeline is to classify the volume data, which means to assign an opacity to each voxel. Opacity is the inverse of transparency: an opacity of 0.0 indicates a fully-transparent voxel, while an opacity of 1.0 indicates a voxel which completely occludes anything behind it. Intermediate values between 0.0 and 1.0 indicate semi-transparent voxels. The purpose of classification is to assign low opacities to regions of the data set which are uninteresting or distracting and high opacities to regions of the data set which should be visible in the rendering. Intermediate opacity values are used for smooth transitions from transparent to opaque regions, and for effects such as semi-transparent voxels which should not completely occlude objects behind them. VolPack provides a classification method based on lookup tables. To use this method you specify a transfer function which maps the scalar data in a particular array element into the opacity for that element. Alternatively you can implement other classification techniques such as context-sensitive segmentation and then provide VolPack with a pre-classified volume. The second rendering stage is to assign a color to each voxel, an operation which is called shading (or more precisely, lighting). VolPack includes support for the standard Phong shading equation. To use this shading technique, the volume data is preprocessed before rendering in order to compute a gradient vector for each voxel. The gradient vector can then be used as a pseudo surface normal to compute how light reflects off of each voxel. The user specifies the position and color of one or more light sources, and the reflective properties of the volume data. See Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice (Chapter 16, 2nd ed.), by Foley, van Dam, Feiner and Hughes, for a detailed discussion of the Phong shading equation. Alternative shading models can be implemented through a callback function. The third rendering stage is to specify a view transformation and to transform the volume accordingly. This step can be as simple as choosing the position from which to look at the volume, or it can include an arbitrary affine transformation of the volume including non-uniform scaling and shearing. The view transformation also specifies how the volume is projected onto a 2D image plane. The fourth and final rendering stage is to composite the voxels into an image. Digital compositing is analogous to the compositing process used in the film industry: several layers of semi-transparent film are merged together into a final image. VolPack provides several rendering algorithms that use different techniques to accelerate the compositing stage. The next subsection briefly describes the available algorithms.

I went back and tried just painting on map for extra detail without the edge flow splines and frankly even that screwed up the mesh. The best mesh is apparently just straight up autopo according to Andrew's algorithms..

Catia V6 2012 Natural Drawing

Thank you so much for solving my problem.

Cloth is looking really good.

http://youtu.be/250YLHyb7lY

I was surprised to find that even 3000 for what seemed to be a simple mesh like the Femur would still be inadequate but there's definitely some crude jaggies in the mesh particularly around some of the smaller protruberances.. But I learned a lot on it and it was a great platform for study. When I go back to it I'll have a lot more experience. But now on to the Tibia/Fibia for some voxel sculpting. It's going to be interesting having two bones each in their layer to texture. My initial experiments were not promising but I had the Fibia hidden and neglected while I autopo'd the Tibia. When it came time to UV map (just the visible Tibia) there were definitely some problems getting a proper fitting of the islands on the 2d map. We shall see.

Very cool love the anatomy in the feet. Needs to be rigged and posed and have fur with some bright little beady eyes..

Nice skin on the first one..

I wasn't happy with the cellular porous patches of the exposed inner bone on the trochanter and just using the material mask wasn't giving me what I wanted so i just took a hand paint brush with my Wacom Bamboo and with a very fine tip and a boosted displacement I went in and tweaked out the cellular mesh by hand. That and some touch ups with the clone stamp tool just seemed to give it that extra pop I was looking for

Thanks for all your help. I'll be bugging you for more of it when I take on PTEX painting..

Thank you 3DArtist. Once you get into the learning curve 3d Coat is fun fun fun.

OK it's been a while but now I'm back into it...

Works well, thanks.

Thank you. so maybe the solution is to just paint the separate patches as separate layers then blend them using the Blending Panel controls.

Hey great minds think alike. I was sort of thinking of this solution yesterday. And you could take your diffuse map into Photoshop for some really detailed blending

Well part of it has to do with the depth setting...If you're using a material Targa and the depth is set to say 52 and then you change to another very similar Targa material but it's not quite the same setting it's like you're forced to test back and forth to get it to the same depth setting (that may be completely different as a numerical parameter, say 32 or 75) Specifically though I'd really like complete documentation on that Blending Tab. Obviously someone put a few days of work into designing it and inserted it there. It'd be nice to see what it was fully intended to do and how its parameters work.

I'm busy trying to get patches of texture, made from Normal Map relief and Diffuse Color to blend smoothly. I've done some searches on this and I'm playing with falloff settings and using the Paint tool with Shift so smooth out the edges of each patch of painted texture. I'm also experimenting with painting individual patches on their own layers with varying settings like Overlay or Multiply and then merging them later. All these tactics are yielding varying degrees of success. I do wish there was more manual documentation on them. One potential asset in the Paint Room particularly piqued my interest; the Blending Tab. If anyone has any info, documentation or instructions on how to utilize this tab could you please share it with us? The manual passage is very brief and doesn't really say much.

Wow digman what did you do on that painted savage one to get those oily smeary textures? Was that finishing done in PS or something? It almost looks like Corel Painter oils.

There's a good amount on Ptex for Pixar Renderman in the Escape Studio full tutorial that comes with it. And Renderman is now only $1300 for the Renderman Studio/maya combo.. That course alone would cost you that much. it is sad though that if I google "PTEX Houdini Mantra" this is the first link that pops up....

Thanks a lot Grandmaster B

thanks a lot.