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Paint to Surface mode?


ooky
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Hi

I've imported an object with UVs and about 10 sub-objects. I've taken it into the paint room, which works great, and is very fast and responsive.

I was wondering if there's a way to access the "surface" tools? The paint room tools are a little wanting. I really miss crease edges, and the scrape/flatten tool works in a much more interesting way.

By the way I reported a bug that I might as well mention here. It seems like the flatten tool works very differently on different areas of my model. The UV's a pretty even. It seems related to the colours of the normal map. Red and blue directions paint fine, but green directions result in massive depth when painting flatten. Very strange

Also, for some reason my object was imported off center, so there's no symmetry which is a bit of a problem (I imported it as an .lwo).

thanks

Olly

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hmm. So is tweak mode the answer? It's operating on a confusing level. It's tweaking the subdivided mesh. The result of which will be baked out in the displacement map? So it's destructive painting? Is it impossible to get these tools into the painting layers?

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Tweak just offers some basic sculpting and transform tools...about what you'd find in Maya or 3ds Max, for sculpting. Basically, you have 2 main entry points into the app. The Paint Room (the Tweak Room and UV room are companion workspaces to the Paint Room) and then the Voxel Room (Retopo room is a companion workspace to the Voxel Room).

You can import the mesh into the Retopo room and then step into the Voxel Room > Merge tool > select "Pick from Retopo" (room) in the tool options panel. You now can sculpt as you wish and bake the details down to the Retopo Mesh. Now you can paint and do some image-based sculpting on that low poly mesh.

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OK. thanks AbnRanger.

So can I clarify. Do the tweak room adjustments appear in the final normal maps that get exported? Or are they simply for modelling the mesh, which you could export (although that's not useful if the model was subdivided).

I just need a bit more detail really to understand the processes.

So the mesh I've imported into the paint room consists of 10 sub-objects. I subdivided them on import. All are UV'd.

I've done some painting I'd like not to lose if possible.

If I move to the Retopo room I can see this painted mesh. If I select "use current low-poly mesh" in comes my original un-subdivided mesh.

But all merged into one layer, which is kinda uselesswhen I merge it into the voxel room. Any way to preserve the object layers? Or do I have to import into Retopo then Voxels from the start and forget the painting I've already done?

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When you work on the object in the Tweak room, you are moving the vertices of the low poly mesh....it's a WYSIWYG prospect. There is no camera trickery with maps. That's in PPP mode...but in MicroVertex mode, supposedly you could sculpt in the Tweak Room and 3D Coat will generate a vector displacement map from those changes. To be honest, I never use Microvertex, as most all my attempts to merge from the Retopo room to the Paint room, in that mode, have come out problematic.

 

Maybe someone who works in MV mode regularly can answer this with a bit more clarity.

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