Applink Developer haikalle Posted April 11, 2010 Applink Developer Report Share Posted April 11, 2010 Hi! The meaning of this tutorial is to help other 3d-coat users to get their Ptex texture into regular or normal uv-set. There is a couple points why this is good thing: 1)You don't have to worry UV before starting to paint. 2) You can paint with Ptex as detail textures you want. Because in the end you can choose resolution for normal uv-set almost all detail will transfer if you want. 3) Sometimes PTex will create 2 or more UV-sets. This is the way how you can bring them together again. So these are the good points. But let's begin our journey together. This is going to be fun. I promise. 1) I'm using the biggest default sphere. It's simple enough for this tutorial. You may choose to use any of your scuplt if you want. 2) I choose to use auto quadrangulate, but if you want you can create your own polymesh. When you are ready. Goto to menu and press -> Retopo -> Merge model into scene with Ptex. You see this menu. Carcass resolution is important to remember, because later we have to subdivide the polymesh accordingly. If you have basic default sphere then you should see 54 on the top of carcass resolution. Let's choose 3584. That should be the fourth on the list. 3) Now we should see our sphere inside of paint room. Now you can paint some details. Take you time.... Here is mine. Now you have to hide this object which is in paint room. If you don't you don't get the result you want. 4) Let's go back to retopo room. Now you can choose your seams and build UV set. Next we need to sudivide our base mesh. We took 4th option from carcass menu so it means that we need to subdivide three times. You can do it right now. You can see how it is snapping according our voxel model. Leaving your model unhide in paint room would mean that when subdiving it would snap according that model and that's why gives wrong result. 5) We are almost done here. Now you can go to menu and choose. Retopo -> Bake texture. It opens property window. Uncheck "preserve positions of vertices while smoothing".In some situation it's better to leave on. Test which one is better for your model. Choose the textures you want to bake. With displacement map if you are using "Black is zero" use .exr format. Other formats dosen't work at the moment. Also Create padding works only with .tif format. When you are ready hit OK. If you see black spots in your texture it means that you have to adjust scan values. In/Out scan depth means that how far 3d-coat leaves from surface to measure depth. So higher mountains you have, the higher scan number too. And that's it. Now you should have a nice textures baked from Ptex. In this tutorial are many errors. So if you know some tips or better ways give some feedback and learn together. I'm sure that there is also many spelling errors so if any admin person finds it, you can edit this topic to fix them. I also hope that Andrew could take look at this. Is this the fastest way to copy Ptex maps into new UV set. Hope you liked it 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member 3DArtist Posted April 11, 2010 Advanced Member Report Share Posted April 11, 2010 Thanks for the tutorial! I'm going to give this a try. I've always thought one big advantage of PTex is, similar to voxel's "sculpt now retopo later" idea, "paint hi-res now uv later". Even though PTex isn't widely supported for rendering, I see it as being really valuable for texture painting. Now you have a high-res source to bake out UV textures from that will hopefully prevent the "I wish I had adjusted the UV before I started painting to get more resolution in this area". But then again, I'm not an experienced texture artist. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor artman Posted April 11, 2010 Contributor Report Share Posted April 11, 2010 Now you have a high-res source to bake out UV textures from that will hopefully prevent the "I wish I had adjusted the UV before I started painting to get more resolution in this area". To me,this is the true use of Ptex. Its exactly like Zbrush polypainting which can hardly be be used outside ZB and nobody says its useless: because you transfer to your UVed mesh once you are finished. Ptex gives you the same exact thing but its much more efficient because you get local resolution and also all of 3DC painting tools avaible + layers. Once your PTEX work is finished you know which areas will require bigger texture allocation space then you can make your UVS in consequence. This is something you cannot know until you've actually done your texturing, unless of course you know 100% of what you are gonna do as far as texture details, which is rarely the case. I think the incredible amount of posts here stating that Ptex is useless or unusable in a production environment leaves me wondering if some people know actually how strong 3DC baking tools is. Saying Ptex is useless is exactly like saying ZB polypainting is useless really. If you use same mesh Ptex transfer to UVS is flawless. Big Thanks to haikalle for showing the steps. I hope people will start seeing the value of that "paint hi-res now, uv later" approach. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member polyxo Posted April 11, 2010 Advanced Member Report Share Posted April 11, 2010 Hi All, so what - if I may ask this stupid question is the underlying wish to transfer the PTEX paint and depth-information to a UV-Set again? Is that because some Render-Engines can not deal with it, because one wants to have a human readable flat texture to further tweak in an Image editor or...? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Contributor artman Posted April 11, 2010 Contributor Report Share Posted April 11, 2010 Hi All, so what - if I may ask this stupid question is the underlying wish to transfer the PTEX paint and depth-information to a UV-Set again? Is that because some Render-Engines can not deal with it, because one wants to have a human readable flat texture to further tweak in an Image editor or...? EDIT:ok I misread... Yeah,exactly handmade uvs are more game engine-friendly than the automatic tiled uvs that Andrew implemented for Ptex export, LOD doesnt like tiling very much. But for render engines it works already great because Andrew added a special filtering between tiles that makes the texture seamless,but again it produces multiple texture files which is not always wanted.So using baking tool you can transfer result to 1 texture and also as you pointed out, it creates a texture that is readable in PS. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Applink Developer haikalle Posted April 11, 2010 Author Applink Developer Report Share Posted April 11, 2010 Thanks 3dArtist and Artman. You can explain so much better than I can. How I look at this feature is that I'm always able to start with Ptex model. It dosen't matter where does my model goes after 3d-coat. If it goes to games. I just create UV-map and bake the texture from Ptex. If model goes to program that dosen't understand Ptex files or multiply UV-sets it works there too. This way might change a bit later when Ptex gets more stable in 3d-coat but for now this works quite well. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member polyxo Posted April 11, 2010 Advanced Member Report Share Posted April 11, 2010 EDIT:ok I misread... Yeah,exactly handmade uvs are more game engine-friendly than the automatic tiled uvs that Andrew implemented for Ptex export, LOD doesnt like tiling very much. But for render engines it works already great because Andrew added a special filtering between tiles that makes the texture seamless,but again it produces multiple texture files which is not always wanted.So using baking tool you can transfer result to 1 texture and also as you pointed out, it creates a texture that is readable in PS. Thanks Artman! So this is a workflow which is basically mostly useful when planing to use 3DC-Geometry in Games. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philnolan3d Posted April 12, 2010 Report Share Posted April 12, 2010 Thanks for the tutorial I was actually just about to ask how to do this because of problems with Ptex's multiple UV maps in LightWave on my Bruce Willis model. It would be really helpful if there was a way to make Ptex's different subdivision areas different colors so you can easily see where you need to mark seams and enlarge or decrease those areas. To anyone who's tried this, is there any reduction in texture quality when baking to a new UV map? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Applink Developer haikalle Posted April 12, 2010 Author Applink Developer Report Share Posted April 12, 2010 Phil, you can get very nice textures by using this method. Like Artman said, 3d-coat has very good baking engine. In some tests I have seen that if you are using Black is Zero option it will create some lights area into unwanted areas. But after redone my scan settings it went away. So there is maybe some adjustment you have to done. But overall if you bake colors,normals, displacements(grey is zero) this gives a good results. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philnolan3d Posted April 12, 2010 Report Share Posted April 12, 2010 Thanks, LightWave uses Grey is Zero so that shouldn't be a problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Applink Developer haikalle Posted April 13, 2010 Author Applink Developer Report Share Posted April 13, 2010 Small update into tutorial. It seems that it's better to uncheck "preserve positions of vertices while smoothing". It gives a nicer result. There is something odd still. I did some testing with diffrent resolution and it seems that the bigger the resolution, white areas start to look more grey. They are still there but they are more grey. I don't know yet why the resolution size would change the colors. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew Shpagin Posted April 13, 2010 Report Share Posted April 13, 2010 Thanks for interesting workflow. I can offer improvement for it: - instead of baking use merge for perpixel painting to be able to fix possible artifacts manually. - don't forget to delete Ptex object after merging. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philnolan3d Posted April 13, 2010 Report Share Posted April 13, 2010 interesting, I'll try that too. Luckily I haven't had time to try any of this yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Applink Developer haikalle Posted April 13, 2010 Author Applink Developer Report Share Posted April 13, 2010 Thanks Andrew. This really opens so many diffrent ways to go. I like it Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
philnolan3d Posted April 14, 2010 Report Share Posted April 14, 2010 Is there any specific reason to use Per-pixel? When I do that the normal map comes out all faceted. In fact the normal maps don't have any depth information baked to them, just these facets. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Applink Developer haikalle Posted April 15, 2010 Author Applink Developer Report Share Posted April 15, 2010 I haven't figured it out yet. For now the baking gives the best results. With baking there can be some errors but I found out that if your subdivide your base mesh enough (5-6 times) it can give results that are excelent. When I have tested it with Grey is Zero. So it means that areas where is no displacement should be 0.5. In my tests I get 0.501 or 0.499 so that is pretty good. So you are able to use these textures with low or high poly meshes. I also tried to use this method with Merge with scene(Microverts) and it actually gives nice results too. Only problem is that when I press Export ->Displacement from all layers. Areas without displacement maps are 0.6 or something like that. But I think that this should work too if you your render engine support water level for displacement maps. But Andrew really opened my eyes. Because you can really bake or merge anything you want. And it is pure freedom what you can do with it. You can even Merge Ptex from Ptex...but that would be silly I have one question. If someone could help me to understand what does PreverOuterDetails means in Texture Baking Tool. switching between on/off I can see something changed in my texture but I really don't know how it should work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member simmsimaging Posted March 10, 2011 Advanced Member Report Share Posted March 10, 2011 I'm just getting around to trying this out again - kinda gave up on Ptex at first I can't seem to get the Texture Bake options to allow me to bake a map larger than 4K. Is that a built-in limit or am I missing something? b Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member jacobo Posted March 12, 2011 Advanced Member Report Share Posted March 12, 2011 There's a bug with this Bake Textures tool. It won't overwrite existing textures upon re-baking. Can anyone confirm this? Thanx AJ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member simmsimaging Posted March 15, 2011 Advanced Member Report Share Posted March 15, 2011 I'm just getting around to trying this out again - kinda gave up on Ptex at first I can't seem to get the Texture Bake options to allow me to bake a map larger than 4K. Is that a built-in limit or am I missing something? b bump. Any takers? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew Shpagin Posted March 15, 2011 Report Share Posted March 15, 2011 There's a bug with this Bake Textures tool. It won't overwrite existing textures upon re-baking. Can anyone confirm this? Thanx AJ Probably there is problem with permissions on your PC. Try to save file to unprotected place like MyDocuments or so. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Andrew Shpagin Posted March 16, 2011 Report Share Posted March 16, 2011 I'm just getting around to trying this out again - kinda gave up on Ptex at first I can't seem to get the Texture Bake options to allow me to bake a map larger than 4K. Is that a built-in limit or am I missing something? b I trid all - - bake to 8K texture - use Ptex with basic 8K texture Everyting works but one issue that was not related to texture size. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Advanced Member simmsimaging Posted March 17, 2011 Advanced Member Report Share Posted March 17, 2011 I trid all - - bake to 8K texture - use Ptex with basic 8K texture Everyting works but one issue that was not related to texture size. I made a new scene and tried again and I was able to do 8K as well. Not sure what happened, but previously there was no 8K option - the list just ended at 4K. Anyway, if it happens again I will save the file for you. b Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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