How to create strips?

[Myagi]

Man I feel dumb for having to spam the forum with another question, but the information on this subject appears to be more or less non-existent in manual/forums/google or very well hidden.

 

So I'm trying to make a new strip by importing a PSD with 4 layers (EraseMask, Specular, HeightMap, Color), just like the the PSD files you get when you export an existing strip. I couldn't get it working properly. When I use the line tool to (voxel) paint the strip, it only sporadically painted the pattern tile once or twice instead of tiling it nicely along the entire line like it does with the default strips.

 

Thinking I must be doing something wrong I then exported the default strip "Capsule_A87D", that comes with 3DC, to a PSD (right clicking "Save to PSD"). I then without modification imported that PSD again but this results in a strip not identical to the original. The original capsule strip has 4 vertical tiles per "unit" whereas the re-imported capsule strip has only 1. The re-imported one will still tile along the entire drawn line, unlike my own, but the fact that there seems to be some hidden data that affects the tiling might be the key.

 

I can't see any kind of other properties/options that one can set on strips so intuitively I would've expected that exporting and importing should result in identical results. Since that's not the case, does that mean that the mclp file format contains additional information not exposed to us mortals and needs some special conversion tool to create full-featured strips or what's going on?

 

[Carlosan]

hmmmm.... options > Use spacing ON ?

[Myagi]

Hmm, but the Options panel is related to the brush and not data associated with strips. (Turning on "Use spacing" doesn't make a difference for painting with the strip anyway.)

 

Here's a screenshot of what I mean.

 

"A" is the capsule strip that comes with 3DC.

"B" is A saved to PSD (by right clicking on A and selecting the save option from the popup menu) and then adding a new strip and selecting that exported PSD. I'd expect A and B to be identical.

 

Notice how the tiling in the thumbnail is completely different, which is also reflected when you actually paint with the strips. So there clearly is some kind of tiling/size information inside the strip data which gets lost and which doesn't seem to be accessible for configuration from within 3DC (?).

 

[Pix Jigsaw]

I was able to reproduce the problem you have when you saved the capsule strip to PSD and loaded it back in as a new strip.  The problem there seems to be saving it as PSD.  When you save it as a tif, you can reload it and everything works as expected.  My guess is that the strip was done originally as a tif and the conversion to psd isn't working as it should, but that is just a hunch. Some of the other strips have the same problem, but not all of them.  The chain strip can be saved out and reloaded as either tif or PSD.  Works fine either way.    

Edited August 11, 2013 by Pix Jigsaw

[Pix Jigsaw]

I don't think the problem was with creating the strip alpha.  The problem was using the line tool to draw with.  That tool seems to repeat the strip only once (at best) between the beginning and end points. 

 

A much better tool for the job is the spline line tool in the e-panel.  Make two points, and hit escape for a perfectly straight line.   Press Enter and the selected strip should draw correctly.  The size of  the strip depends on your brush size.  Brush depth will determine how tall the pattern is drawn (or pushed in if you have invert tool action on).

 

Here is an example.  I made the strip and applied it to a cube in the vox room.

 

 

I'm so glad you posted your question because this is a really powerful feature with a lot of potential for accuracy.  You can snap the end points of your line to the 2D grid.  Also rotate the line a specific number of degrees.  Great stuff.

 

Pix

 

This forum thread has a video with more about this tool:  http://3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=14953&hl=

Edited August 12, 2013 by Pix Jigsaw

[Myagi]

I was able to reproduce the problem you have when you saved the capsule strip to PSD and loaded it back in as a new strip.  The problem there seems to be saving it as PSD.  When you save it as a tif, you can reload it and everything works as expected.  My guess is that the strip was done originally as a tif and the conversion to psd isn't working as it should, but that is just a hunch.

 

Aha! Great catch. It definitely seems like a bug related to the PSD strip loader since the working import is not related to any metadata in the tiff. I created a tiff from scratch to make sure no metadata is preserved and that also tiled the capsule correctly like the original.

 

I'll try to do my custom strip as a TIFF instead and see if that fixes my original tiling problem or not. I just need some sleep first.

 

 

I don't think the problem was with creating the strip alpha.  The problem was using the line tool to draw with.  That tool seems to repeat the strip only once (at best) between the beginning and end points.

 

With the broken PSD strip both the line and the spline line tool produce the same (incorrect) results. The TIFF imported strip works fine with both line and spline line. I'd say it all points to a bug in the strip PSD loader/importer.

[Pix Jigsaw]

You are right about the line tool working with strips.  It works correctly in surface mode and in the paint room.  I'm not having much success in the vox room.

 

So far I think there are two bugs we are dealing with:  1.  The PSD strip bug.  2.  A bug in vox room extrude tool (when using "draw with line" or "draw with curve" setting in the e-panel).  The problem there seems to be the escape key is not clearing when you hit escape, so you can't draw separate lines.  It wants to connect everything.  Also, sometimes it doesn't start drawing the first line.  Very unreliable.

[Myagi]

I've only been testing in the vox room and nothing else. Yeah, I've noticed that it sometimes doesn't draw the line as one would expect and it was driving me nuts, until I randomly figured out a solution at some point yesterday. If you hold down shift when you make the first click for the line start, and then release shift before making the line end point, then it will always draw the line correctly.

 

Not having tried it in other rooms yet I thought it was by design that the light tool worked like that, but that it wasn't properly documented.

 

 

Edit: To follow up the post from yesterday. Using TIFF did indeed solve the sporadic tiling issues that my custom strip had.

Edited August 12, 2013 by Myagi

[Myagi]

While I'm at it. There's another bug in the whole TIFF vs. PSD thing. This time it's a bug with TIFFs. If you import a strip based on a TIFF it will copy the tif file to the C:\Users\MyUser\Documents\3D-CoatV4\textures\strips dir as well as create the mclp file. If you import a PSD it will only create the mclp file.

 

What this does is that you can't delete strips that you imported from TIFFs from within 3DC. They will get deleted from the current session and the mclp files will be deleted. But the tif files remain in the above mentioned directory and next time you start up 3DC they will be auto-imported.

Edited August 12, 2013 by Myagi