L'Ancien Regime

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You know, it's pretty sad that if I write "rendering ptex in mantra" into Google, this is the first hit I get. I've got 5 videos in my collection that I've gleaned here and there on this rather important subject and THREE OF THEM DON'T HAVE SOUND AND ARE OF DEPLORABLE QUALITY. Of the other two one is only a tacked on segment of two or three minutes to a Houdini Master Class and the other is Peter Bomar where he works with texture maps to Houdini from 3d Coat BUT IT DOESN'T DEAL WITH PTEX. This is the kind of support that Houdini gives to PTex; http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini11.0/shade/ptex Big help eh? Please, will someone make a proper comprehensive guide, written or video on how to implement PTEX between 3d Coat and Houdini??

yeah documentation is sparse and frankly few of the Kurv videos are very good. L J Bamforth's are the exception to that rule. His videos are outstanding. This should lay out the workflow for you on the Merge tool in 3d coat;

Turning off the Additive Drawing tool from the Depth Painting tool. I had no idea of the existence of this switch. I was really getting frustrated trying to deal with the seams being formed between painted areas. Falloff wasn't solving my problem. This does.. If you didn't know, now you do...

That's nice to know. Thanks a lot.

OK, I modeled a femur in Maya then took it over to 3d Coat and used Merge Tool to turn it into voxels and rework it at a higher level of refinement. All went well after a bit of buggering around to reteach myself this arcane skill. So then I finished working on the modeling with voxels level and did an Autopo For Per Pixel. What I got from this was a retopoed mesh in the Retopo UI, A UV map of my work in the UV UI, and in the Paint UI I have what appears to be the Voxel version of my original sculpt in it's Old Bone Sans Ambient Occlusion material. Apparently though I'm not sure. In the Layers menu I'm looking at four things; -Baked Occlusion (map) -Normal Map -Voxel (of my sculpt) That is the one selected and if I click on the eye next to it it disappears. -Layer 0 Now as you can see I'm texturing away but I'm a bit worried about where this is all going since I'm sailing off into a bit of mer incognita here. 1.When I'm finished texturing what next? How do I extract all this to a mesh with maps (8096x8096) that I can take over to Maya/Mental Ray for rendering? 2.When I do bake all this information out somehow or other how do I select the folder where I want these newly baked maps and .obj mesh to end up? Will I be able to get a displacement map out of this as well as a normal map? This is my first venture in painting directly onto the voxels and I like it a lot so far...here's hoping the entire episode doesn't end in disappointment. Also I've got one other question about texturing, which in my opinion is really the selling point of 3d coat. It's amazing and a real rival to Weta Mari; if you look at the smooth bulb of the ball that fits into the hip socket you'll see I wanted to make it smooth, but on the borders of each setup of the texture map to a new angle the overrun of my texturing brush creates an unpleasant seam or indentation that ruins the effect. I've got falloff on the brush over 50% but it's still doing this. Is there any solution so I can have seamless borders between texture patches?

Great stuff. Thanks a lot. You've got an attentive and appreciative audience over here..

Yeah I'm having problems with this myself. I'm trying smooth tool and fill tool cranked up to a depth of over 4280% and nothing doing...still bumpy... Wow, I just downloaded and installed the 3.5.18 beta and smooth and fill and carve tool are working 1000x better than the updated version I was running before...

Thanks, just relabeled it, put the old manual in a holder file and stuck it into my Program/3D Coat installation folder for easy access. Very nicely done. Thank you.

That is a very good question; http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6162&st=20&p=52128&hl=+ptex%20+mantra&fromsearch=1entry52128 There is a video out on rendering in Mantra that touches on rendering PTex in Mantra but it doesn't go directly into how to turn this into a slick pipeline between 3d Coat and Houdini/Mantra. http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1412&Itemid=305 The PTex rendering part is near the end of this video..

That's what I do in maya and it works great...

That's pretty interesting. I've been working in Solidworks lately and thinking about how its Freeform functions and native booleans make it far superior to the kind of NURBS modeling we find in Maya etc. You can join objects together and alter them in unison without having to worry about topological consequences. That kind of functionality partly exists in 3d coat's voxels...at least as far as the additive booleans goes but I really like the ideas you're proposing here..and it brings us that much closer to the ideal of effortless intuitive 3d drawing...

I've often thought that it would be cool if Andrew added a whole subD modeling toolkit to 3d Coat. But this might be a mistake. After I saw the Modo in Paris video last week it's evident that subD poly modeling is going in a whole new direction...Renderman shaders that handle the heavy lifting of sub D modeling in Modo is coming in 501...this is closely analogous to the bevel shaders in Mental Ray I suppose. I think it would be wiser for Andrew to go toe to toe with Mari. This is an area where he can win because 3d Coat's painting tools are the best in the business so far, better than Maxon's or anybody's save perhaps for Mari in certain areas. We shall see. I haven't tried Mari yet. I think Andrew can beat the crap out of them if he wants to. There's plenty of good modeling programs around...but really top notch 3d painting programs is another matter. They're all relatively weak compared to the modeling programs out there. What we need is really intuitive artists tools for painting textures in 3d real time, not the old Photoshop Maya UV map shuffle.

An interesting conversation here. I'm currently doing the Houdini tutorial "Mantra Masterclass that came out early this October. It's a good tutorial but there's a few bugs in it. The biggest bug comes at the end where Andrew Clinton touches briefly on a PTEX lesson. http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1412&Itemid=305 Here's the exercise files; http://www.sidefx.com/images/stories/tutorials/h11_mantra/h11_mantra_sample_files.zip Here's the video tutorial; http://www.sidefx.com/images/stories/tutorials/h11_mantra/mantra_h11_720p.mov The PTEX segment starts at 57:20 of the video... I can load the entire lesson but the renders aren't working at all like they do in the tutorial. Blank screen. But then this is the warning I'm getting when I load the exercise into Houdini 11. I suppose it's going to take some time to iron out all the bugs and get some documentation out there so I can figure all this out, but it's encouraging to see other render engines besides Pixar Renderman accepting PTEX files. Oh wait, I figured it out. There's two files labeled PTEX in teh exercise folder. One is PTEX.hip file ( the main Houdini file) and the other is PTEX.color which has to be attached to the main .hip file...

I haven't tried Weta's Mari yet (I've got an ATI 4870X2 GPU ) but I tend to agree with you up to a point. I do wish Andrew would add some new channels. It would be nice to paint transparency real time...or maybe you can and I don't know about it...

My friend who owns his own architecture house is deep into all of this and he's always at the forefront of what is coming next, and he seems to think that with the coming of PTEX, we will see the end of Normal Maps and even Displacement Maps for something far superior. Basically his thesis is that the gaming industry has been dragging down the entire CG world to its rather limited level, retarding the development of the entire industry much to the chagrin of the movie industry, but with the coming of PTEX and other related developments we are on the cusp of a real revolution in CG that's going to totally rearrange the way we do what we do..

Let me guess; Autodesk bought Turtle...so it'll be in Turtle.. http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/pc/item?siteID=123112&id=15404962 RV has been working closely with Disney lately too; http://www.tweaksoftware.com/products/rv

Let me tell you about PTEX and Andrew; I was at a Maya promotion day at a local theatre last March. Duncan himself was there. My friend asked one of the Maya demo guys after the day long presentation when Autodesk was going to enable PTEX in Maya and Mudbox. His reply was that he doubted that they'd get around to it in 5 years. Then I came here and read last December's posts by Andrew where Disney/Pixar released the mere protocols for PTEX and within ten days he had implemented and tested it fully and distributed it to all his users. OUT STAND ING. That was one of the biggest sale points for me...on a level that transcendeds mere PTEX itself. It showed where Andrew is taking this thing. Within 2 years if this keeps up Mudbox and Zbrush will be left far behind in 3d Coat's dust. Next step; find the nerve to spend $3500 on Renderman Pro Server 15 and then embark upon the long road to mastery over it. Unless you can think of an alternative render engine that will handle PTEX that is...

Yeah, I started trying to use my Nikon 8megapixel 8800 Coolpix to harvest textures and it looked like ass, then I went over to my little Exilim Casio 10 megapixel and it was a bit better (especially at the close ups but it still wasn't enough. So then I went out and bought the texture harvesting camera from heaven; my Canon Power Shot SD1400 IS 14 megapixel minicamera for $200 on sale at Future Shop and then I blew my mind on the close up details I was hauling in effortlessly. I can't recommend that camera strongly enough. Price point/detail means it reigns supreme right now for all texture artists. And it comes in a beautiful leather pouch too. Can't beat that. And the leather holder has a belt loop so you can take it with you everywhere all the time without even thinking about it so you can grab beautiful textures on impulse wherever you stumble across them. I'm planning on eventually releasing my entire texture library of the human skelton here... Here's part one the vertebra... I'm doing big maps of each vertebra...the entire skeleton eventually. They're all reworked in PS to remove shadows, and then dodge tooled etc to remove the colour artifacts from removing the shadows and highlights. 3d Coat is amazing for simultaneously painting diffuse, bump and specularity. Far superior to any other 3d paint program I've tried, though I've yet to use Weta Mari...I'm really hoping Andrew takes on Mari and beats them at their own game. He's in a position to do it... http://www.megaupload.com/?d=G9XRAO10 This is the fairly random vertebra texture collection I made from the 10mpl EXILIM camera http://www.megaupload.com/?d=6XHSMB80 This is the final texture made from the lowest lumbar vertebra alone ( I'm in the process of mapping each bone in the body to the highest detail possible) 80 mb or so on one texture sheet made with the Canon 14 mpl. When I was using that 80 mb map in 3d Coat texture it ran perfectly smoothly..

Hi, I'm a 2D realist painter discovering the 3d cybernetic world of art and my quest has led me to the pinnacle of 3d sculpting; 3dCoat. I've been studying Zbrush, Mudbox and 3d Coat and after much serious thought I've concluded that Andrew's little program is by far and away the best of all the sculpture programs now available. Andrew has a characteristic that I admire the most in men; he's terrifically industrious but he's also an advanced thinker who isn't afraid to do things in a brand new way, with a revolutionary approach to creativity, that you can find in men like Burt Rutan or Seymour Cray, or Bucky Fuller. This has thrust him to the front of the computer graphics world, even if many don't know it yet. But I know it, and I think you all do too. Here's some of my work in 3d Coat; Wouldn't it be nice if 3dCoat was able to seriously rival Weta Mari as a texture painting program? It wouldn't take much... I'm glad to be here.