3DCoat Normal Map to Mesh

[webmaster]

3DCoat Normal Map to Mesh

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[L'Ancien Regime]

 I asked Copilot AI about this;

 

"3D-Coat introduced the feature to convert a normal map into a mesh in its 2021 release. Specifically, this functionality was added in version 4.9.06, where they updated the shaders editor to allow the use of a bump/depth texture for the normal map slot, which would then be converted to a normal map-like look automatically"

 

Any 3dCoat experts that can confirm this? I'm not sure if they're talking about the same thing that's being shown in OP's video.

And thank you webmaster for that link to the tutorial. That's excellent stuff. It's the solution to a lot of problems.

 

Edited July 10 by L'Ancien Regime

[Carlosan]

Searching date on Help > Update manager I found this release info

3DCoat-2024-15
Wed Mar 27 11:58:16 2024 +0200

- New unique possiblity of the 3DCoat! The PPP scene with the normalmap name be converted into the true sculpt geometry using the Painting room, `Bake->PaintMath to Sculpt`.

So, the reverse workflow is now possible, when you have normal map over the lowpoly mesh, you may get the highpoly source, deeply re-make it and then bake again.

For example, you have AI generated rough prototype, you may import into Coat for PPP, then convert to sculpt, re-make it, add details.
 

[L'Ancien Regime]

This supercharges texture painting by hand. That's awesome.

I struggled getting the texture depth I wanted with just the Normal Map extraction in the Paint Room and never got the the full depth I wanted of the texture in the renders.

This will be a very powerful new paint room tool I foresee, especially in adjunt with Vertex Painting and maybe even Volumetric painting.

 

 

Edited July 10 by L'Ancien Regime

[Carlosan]

Silas Merlin said:
Personally, the reason I wished for the ability to subdivide a surface before baking the textures to vertex painting was to store color data of a small 3D scan on the high poly.

There was then a workaround with a projection tool to transfer the depth data to sculpt layers so that you could use the 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 color for repairing scans, let alone the 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 also be to bake depth, but the 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 clones to repair bad areas).

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

[Carlosan]

I forgot to mention Meshy for this task