How do I paint a high res model without retopo?

[parel]

Attached is a render of a hard surface voxel model. Dont want to animate it, but want to do a turntable within 3dcoat with textures. Can I extract the high res mesh without retopo and take it to the paint room? I have not had too much success with retaining detail with auto-retopo.

[AbnRanger]

Attached is a render of a hard surface voxel model. Dont want to animate it, but want to do a turntable within 3dcoat with textures. Can I extract the high res mesh without retopo and take it to the paint room? I have not had too much success with retaining detail with auto-retopo.

That model is not that high in degree of difficulty retopologizing. You could manually retopo it fairly quickly using the strokes tool on all the cylindrical and rectangular shapes. Auto Retopo will work fairly well, but I would try to use the split tool in the Voxel Room to separate the major shapes into their own layer and auto-topo each one separately. Lay down guides along areas where you want to maintain hard edges or you want the edgeflow to follow a certain contour. Then the next part of the wizard is to paint the areas that you might want higher concentrations of polygonal detail. I find that auto topo works especially well for primitive shaped objects. It's the complex shapes that can throw it off a bit.

I would also try a similar approach if you decide to manually retopo the model. Just separate all the major shapes into their own layer and retopo them separately instead of trying to make it all work in one retopo layer. That way...yes, you have more layers and more objects to handle, but they are more easily done individually.

[staazfaind]

is there a tutorial how to seperate a voxel object into layers, retopo, paint and export them ?

or did i miss that part in one of the tutorials ?

sry & thx

[philnolan3d]

You might like Greg's game character tutorial.

[polyxo]

Hi Parel,

to answer your question:

Yes you can do this for applications which don't require a Low-Poly mesh.

Just export your Voxel-Model per Right-Click from the Voxel-Tree and re-import it to the Paint-Room

for Per-Pixel Painting. Let 3DC automatically assign Uv's and you are ready to paint.

That's much faster than any sort of Retopo.

[Rich_Art]

Yeah indeed. Works good I've tried this with C4D and I did not encounter any problems.

Yes the viewport is a bit slower with that amount of polygons. But if you're not planning to animate it is no problem.

(for me it is not)

Peace,

Rich_Art.

[parel]

Thanks for the great tips guys. Polyxo- I will have to try that export when I work on this some more. AbnRanger- I split up the parts and dis some retopo on the handle and triggers. The rest I split and edited shaders within 3dcoat. I want to add some graphics. But here is what I submitted to the contest.

(And I learned After Effects to boot. )

[AbnRanger]

Looks good, but yeah...if you could retopo everything, and texture it with a little wear/aging, it would be even better. That would give you a chance to try out the new boost in Painting speed (3.5.1)

[parel]

Roger that- Wow Andrew is fast...

[spacepainter]

Always thought I had to do the retopo stuff to paint my complex models!! Then they always end up missing little things.