L'Ancien Regime
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Posts posted by L'Ancien Regime
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That's what I do in maya and it works great...
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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...
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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.
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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...
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Yeah...there just isn't anything that rivals 3DC in 3D Painting right now. Mari may have it's own advantages, but with the recent multi-threading speedup, painting has gotten so fast that Mari is just an afterthought to me. In Mudbox 2011, you still have to paint Specularity, Color, and Depth/bump, on their own separate layers...one at a time. In 3DC you can paint all three channels at once or any combination of them at any time and on any layer. Also, the depth channel in the Paint room is what makes 3DC's painting so versatile. Instead of just painting bump maps, it's realtime Image-based (normal or displacement map) sculpting, and it works a treat when you use it in conjunction with Voxel sculpting.
You CAN get uber-fine details in Voxels (the Surface mode is there for that very purpose) if and when you need it. Much of that is predicated on how much RAM your system has. 8GB of RAM will let you get around 40 million polygons without having to cache layers and such. I cache anyway. But if you have more RAM, you can push that limit even higher. The multi-Res feature is something you're going to want to use all the time. It really speeds up some of the tasks immensely.
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...
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We may have to move this to it's own thread since its pretty news worthy. Anyhow geothefaust has helped narrow down the list of possibilities a bit with his last post. Since Ptex is open source then its just a matter of time before everyone's using it. If were talking about solutions that won't cost us an arm and a leg then Blender sounds about right. Heck the discussions over on the forums regarding Ptek support is pretty clear to me. According to this site there is a list of programs out there currently supporting Ptek other then 3D Coat. http://ptex.us/ There are also other software packages that would benefit from this too and won't break the bank either such as DAZ 3D and Bryce. Vue also comes to mind too.
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..
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Welcome aboard!!
I don't want to derail this topic, but... I do want to point out that there is another render engine out there that will very soon support PTEX. I can't say what program yet (NDA of sorts), but I will mention it as soon as it is available.
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;
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L'Ancien:
Very nice bones you've got there. I'll bet you'll love Andrew's implementation of Ptex. It generates a regular UV map from whatever is hyper-textured - and can be read by many apps.
Greg Smith
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...
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Hi and welcome aboard.
Nice images, I like the material. Very realistic. :)I presume you painted this with an image of a bone?
Peace,
Rich_Art.
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..
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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.
Ptex and Houdini
in General 3DCoat
Posted
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..