Animal anatomy texture painting

[L'Ancien Regime]

I've tended in the past to not take advantage of all the tools in 3D Coat, just jumping in and going for results. Too many tools to learn can sort of lead to an overload when you stack it on top of a project. But this time I've gone about trying to master the paint room. I've learned a lot in the last week or two but I'm only scratching the surface of the available tools. I'm going to have to figure out the freeze tools for example. Any of you have any favorite tools in your workflow you'd care to recommend?

 

 

When you're doing complex textures 360 on an object it's important to have each angle shot assigned a matching layer to keep track of your work so you can go back and make adjustments and corrections without going crazy.  I inserted separate tool bars on the interface for depth gloss and color; dealing with them on the top bar menu was driving me crazy. In particular the depth seems to want to set itself to 100 with each new texture or alteration.  Keeping layers locked down was an important part of my new organized work regimen.

About half the work is in photoshop, just making the photographic texture materials useable in the paint room.

You have to get rid of shadows, and color bleeds from various sources,  paint out the specular reflections to turn your source photo into an even texture. 

And I used to be critical of the amount of time Andrew invested in his own render engine but now I'm finding it indespensible. It's incredibly fast and gives very forgiving results.  I'm just flicking back and forth constantly. Stuff that looks grotesque in the paint room can turn out surprisingly nice in the render room.

 

 

Edited November 24, 2020 by L'Ancien Regime

[thinkinmonkey]

Very interesting project and great results.
When I worked on a project of paiting ancient vases, 3DCoat saved my tasks because I was able to project photos of vases when photogrammetry failed, well, we had little experience with that and a very thight window time, but we did.
What I found useful was using masks in order to have a non destructive workflow, so I could have two adjecent photos and mask (and deforming) one until they looked like one continuos texture. Masks were really important and I think they could be a little improved.
Anyway, painting in 3DCoat was really nice experience.
You can have an idea here, insects and vases painted in 3DC: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GXDk8d

 

Edited November 25, 2020 by thinkinmonkey

[L'Ancien Regime]

On 11/25/2020 at 6:02 AM, thinkinmonkey said:

Very interesting project and great results.
When I worked on a project of paiting ancient vases, 3DCoat saved my tasks because I was able to project photos of vases when photogrammetry failed, well, we had little experience with that and a very thight window time, but we did.
What I found useful was using masks in order to have a non destructive workflow, so I could have two adjecent photos and mask (and deforming) one until they looked like one continuos texture. Masks were really important and I think they could be a little improved.
Anyway, painting in 3DCoat was really nice experience.
You can have an idea here, insects and vases painted in 3DC: https://www.artstation.com/artwork/GXDk8d

 

Thanks for this. I particularly liked your vase; it's seamless alright and that's what I'm struggling with always in these kinds of projects because if the original photos aren't all lit identically with at least a 2 point softbox setup and maybe a third point reflective card to even the light out so there's no shadows or color bleeds from the surroundings, creating that seamless continuous texture. You definitely don't want a key light for this kind of project.  The need for authentic scientific validity in this far outweighs any artistic fun so it's a bit stressful to try to get it right.

 

 In 3D Coat there's masks but essentially the layer system in the paint room works as freeze layers or masks so that as you said you can produce one continuous texture. 

But you're right about one thing; 3D coat is the best program for this kind of work. 

Edited November 27, 2020 by L'Ancien Regime

[L'Ancien Regime]

So I've been using Per Pixel and it's really difficult to work with. The colors and textures between the different angled photos are very hard to match. 
I took a  break from it to think this through and I just tried the micro vertex painting system instead and it just goes on a lot faster and easier. The Per Pixel seems to create a dryer more porous looking bone while the first one seems to have more of a living bone look and when I get into painting muscles attached to bones I think they'll work much better with the micro vertex approach

 

[thinkinmonkey]

Thank you for the compliment.
I remember that, despite being lit inside a box by photographer, I had still trouble from time to time where photos had different colors, strong speculars and/or tinted photos. So I had to fix them in advance before using them in 3DC.
With micro vertex you apply color to the vertices, this is why is faster, because 3DCoat skips calculations about paiting projections when you do normal polypainting.
The nice thing is color will be with your mesh, the not nice thing, if I'm not wrong, you should use fbx file format to export object to other 3d softwares and sometimes it creates problems, of course, if you want to export that.

[L'Ancien Regime]

The micro vertex techique requires a lot more delicacy to lay down, and attention to layering but in many ways it gives superior results. The lowest layers should be hand painted for broad color effects then the displacement no more than 13% at the very most while the simultaneous color layers should be around 56% or so depending on the base photographic stencils you're using.  With the Per Pixel approach you' almost need to go double that, particularly in the displacement.

This is just a crude test but sort of a valid example

 

[L'Ancien Regime]

Mantra render of the per pixel paint on the left and the microvertex paint on the  right. 

Aside from their sloppiness as just test paint jobs (it's going to take a while to tie down the finer points of the technique) I think I'm prefering the results from per pixel painting.  It's more subtle in its effects.

 

Edited December 4, 2020 by L'Ancien Regime

[co3Darts]

Yep, per pixel.