multiple ptex maps

[mackshiva]

Hi,

I've painted an object in 3d-coat using ptex. It produced more than one texture map for the color. How do I combine and/or apply these maps so that they appear properly in my external renderer? When I've used ptex painting before it only produced one color map which worked fine in my renderer, but with 2 maps, I don't know how to apply them.

Thank you,

Kevin

[philnolan3d]

The thing ios that 3DC can only export a Ptex UV image as 2048 size, so if you increase the detail of your polys enough times they will get so big that they will not fit in a 2048 image so some of the spilol over into a 2nd or even 3rd image. I'm not sure what you're rendering with but for LightWave the Ptex export creates a surface (material) for each set of texture images so all you have to do is apply the images to their correct surface. Actually in a LWO file 3DC automatically applies them for you.

of course the other option is just to lower the detail on some of your polys until all of the little textures fit onto one 2048 image.

[mackshiva]

The thing ios that 3DC can only export a Ptex UV image as 2048 size, so if you increase the detail of your polys enough times they will get so big that they will not fit in a 2048 image so some of the spilol over into a 2nd or even 3rd image. I'm not sure what you're rendering with but for LightWave the Ptex export creates a surface (material) for each set of texture images so all you have to do is apply the images to their correct surface. Actually in a LWO file 3DC automatically applies them for you.

of course the other option is just to lower the detail on some of your polys until all of the little textures fit onto one 2048 image.

Thanks for your response. I should have said I'm using Maxwell Render which doesn't support the .mtl file. Is there some way to join or manually assign the multiple maps to my object? I should be able to duplicate anything that's happening in the.mtl file if I knew what that was.

Thanks again!

Kevin

[philnolan3d]

I'm not entirely familiar with OBJ as I almost never use them. Does OBJ by itself not store materials at all? Not even the names of them?

[mackshiva]

I'm not entirely familiar with OBJ as I almost never use them. Does OBJ by itself not store materials at all? Not even the names of them?

Everything but the uvs is in the .mtl file that is written out with the .obj.

[philnolan3d]

hmm strange, I don't understand why they do it like that. I don't know if there's anything that be done. Perhaps if you loaded the OBJ and MTL into another program and saved out as something like LWO that your renderer might understand. Or heck if maxwell understands .LWO you could just export in .LWO format instead of OBJ.

[Taros]

Where do the two maps come from?

I am using Version 3.3.01 and all works fine here. Have painted on two layers and increased the resolution in some areas.

3DC offers me just one texture for export.

Best wishes

Chris

[mackshiva]

Where do the two maps come from?

I am using Version 3.3.01 and all works fine here. Have painted on two layers and increased the resolution in some areas.

3DC offers me just one texture for export.

Best wishes

Chris

The extra ptex maps are generated automatically by 3d-coat when you have increased resolution beyond what can be contained in a 2k map.

[Polygoon]

Yes, I also get a PtexPlane colour and a material colour. Same for specular and normal map. I guess the material files are the shader and the Ptex plane are the actual textures you have painted in Ptex. I don''t know I could be mistaken.

[digman]

One other choice you have is to bake the ptex image maps to an existing model with a uv map. In that way you will have all the ptex textures (normal,color etc) on each individual type of map. You do lose a little image quality as the ptex textures get put on one map for each type of map but I found the detail lost is very little unless you have a lot of ptex texture maps that need to be put on one map and of course if you mannually retopo you can make some uv islands take up more texture space in your higher detail areas of your model. Also you can choose a higher map resolution other than just the 2048k map to help capture the ptex textures. All in all I found this an very effective way of using ptex to get higher detail and then baking to an existing uv which gives me the higher detail with very little lost of said detail.

You will need to auto uv your ptex object or manually retopo and then export that model with the uv map from the retopo room.

Here is a link to a tutorial by Javis Jones that shows you how...

One thing in the video that is somewhat not clear is that in the texturing baking tool just be sure to select your exported uv mapped model under the input mesh section..

[philnolan3d]

Oh right, I did this with my Bruce Willis model. I actually used Ptex's selection options to select each level of detail, then make note of those polys and scale them in my other UV map accordingly.

For example you can see here my models lips and the area around them are different sizes because in Ptex I had more detail there.