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[Feature] Brush Alpha Color-space Requirements (Linear sRGB)


AlienMinefield
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Hi!

I recently downloaded a pack of rock/cliff brush alphas and I'm trying to use them in 3D-Coat but I'm running into a peculiar issue with how the alphas are applied to the geometry. All of the alphas appear to bulge out towards their highest points leading all of them to have very dome-like shapes. The edge of the alphas was also very harsh usually with an easily recognizable cutoff towards the edge of the form. I imported the same alphas into Blender for use with its sculpt mode and neither of these problems were present leading to a much more desirable result.

These were done in 3D-Coat and Blender using the same brush alpha:

3DCoat_BrushResult_Profile.thumb.jpg.1ee03249223863a4a82b302d52b4062e.jpg3DCoat_BrushResult_StraightOn.thumb.jpg.d839f8a903e19aa71bd690f5cca1895d.jpg

I'm not an expert on color-spaces but this seems like potentially a color space issue where 3D-Coat is giving more weight to higher alpha values leading to most of the detail being pushed to the highest point in the brush stroke. Is there a setting in 3D-Coat/the Brushes panel that might be able to fix this or is there something specific I need to do with the brush alpha textures themselves to more properly prepare them for use in 3D-Coat?

Thanks!

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Hi 

It is important to take into account the tool used, in this example you can compare the same brush applied as Clay in the upper part and in the lower part applied as LiveClay.

Could you test your alpha using live clay and check if the problem is solved ?

Thanks

LiveClay.jpg

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I tried it with a few different tools in surface mode. Here's the result:

3DCoat_BrushComparison.thumb.jpg.a38c5eb50cf93a40f7cae18d3dff67fc.jpg

The Live Clay result is better. The shape of the form created by the alpha looks a bit more natural but the border between the alpha and the rest of the surface is still fairly harsh. I think if I combine it with the Falloff setting, I can get it to work.

Thanks for the suggestion!

Interestingly, (and this might be interesting for anyone else reading this thread) as an experiment, I took the alpha into Substance Designer and connected it to the normal and height output nodes to see what result I would get. The default result with no processing looks almost exactly like the 'Clay' result I showed above. But after I ran the alpha through Substance Designer's "sRGB to Linear sRGB" node, the result is almost exactly what I got with the Blender sculpt brush. So I may just process some of the alphas this way and save them as alternate versions.

3DCoat_ColorSpace_Conversion.thumb.jpg.92464d29fd841453e42c70da1bfce75c.jpg

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  • Carlosan changed the title to [Feature] Brush Alpha Color-space Requirements (Linear sRGB)
  • 1 year later...

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