Paint Room Bake Menu - Take subdivided paint mesh into the sculpt room

[Carlosan]

Take subdivided paint mesh into the sculpt room:

There are several options for merging - subdivision, flat, patches.

  . Catmull-Clark subdivision:
  . Flat patches: The resulting surface consists of flat (or almost flat in the case of quads) patches.
  . Patches: The original vertices positions will be kept, the surface will be covered with the Bezier patches. Pay attention, if the surface is not smooth enough the patches may be rough.

  

14 hours ago, Silas Merlin said:

Personally, the reason I wished for the ability to subdivide a surface before baking the textures to vertex painting was for storing colour data of a small 3d-scan on the high poly. there was then a workaround with projection tool to transfer the depth data to sculpt layers, so that you could use clone tool to repair bad areas.
(you need only 12 million vertices to store the pixels from a 4k texture with 70% coverage).
However, I have never managed to convince anyone of the usefulness of vertex colour for repairing scans, let alone voxelization of a copy for repairs. (I think people are horrified at the loss of detail). (an improvement to the tool "bake color from visible volumes" could be to also bake depth but reprojection tool can already do that).

Now if your scan has a normal map, and even if not you can use albedo as depth, then when you do this ppp>sculpt, the depth is already on sculpt layers. (the reason to have depth on sculpt layers is so that you can use clone to repair bad areas)

However, I think that the most important use case for this new tool is 3d printing !
People can now buy a lowpoly and print it with all the normal map detail !
I think this is the use case that should be advertised for this feature.

* Thanks Silas !

[Silas Merlin]

I tried flat patches and it was not as satifactory as the default subdivision.
Granted, there are issues with subdividing a triangular mesh. However, when you use that option, 3d-Coat smoothes the mesh nicely, making the result quite useable "out of the box", say, if you were to 3d-print. (I don't have a 3d-printer, so it is just a theory).

When using the flat subdivision, there was no or little visible smoothing. resulting in a mesh that needs some work.
The issue is that if you smooth the mesh, you will lose all the depth data that was baked from paint layers, unless maybe if you take care to first hide all the paint layers that have depth data before doing the smoothing (not tested, just theory)

[Carlosan]

Using this settings, no data lost