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3D coat's vesion of ZBrush's Geometry HD?


Dreamcube017
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I'm wondering what 3D Coat uses to do what Zbrush does with it's HD geometry thing for SUPER HIGH detail. As far as I know, you can't go SUUPPPPER detailed with Voxels, can you?

Zbrush's Geometry HD can get into the billions with polycounts for detail... it can't stay there, they just bake it out into a map.

I'm guessing 3DC does wiis with PTex... the only thing I'm wondering now though is that can the REALLY high detail be baked into an ordinary map taht I can use in a game engine or some other realtime graphics application.

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You are right, high details can be painted directly on a normal map (i recommend "per-pixel" for that). With Z-Brush you also have to bake the HD geometry into a normal map. In the end all depends on how big the normal map is. If you make HD geometry that is too tiny it does not show up in the normal map, with 3D-Coat you directly see the result, with Z-Brush you probably wasted time on lost details, the Z-Brush model may be very impressive tho. Therefore i believe 3D-Coat is better suited for general game workflow, plus the retopo, autotopo and uv toolset is the world's best.

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Yeah...there just isn't anything that rivals 3DC in 3D Painting right now. Mari may have it's own advantages, but with the recent multi-threading speedup, painting has gotten so fast that Mari is just an afterthought to me. In Mudbox 2011, you still have to paint Specularity, Color, and Depth/bump, on their own separate layers...one at a time. In 3DC you can paint all three channels at once or any combination of them at any time and on any layer. Also, the depth channel in the Paint room is what makes 3DC's painting so versatile. Instead of just painting bump maps, it's realtime Image-based (normal or displacement map) sculpting, and it works a treat when you use it in conjunction with Voxel sculpting.

You CAN get uber-fine details in Voxels (the Surface mode is there for that very purpose) if and when you need it. Much of that is predicated on how much RAM your system has. 8GB of RAM will let you get around 40 million polygons without having to cache layers and such. I cache anyway. But if you have more RAM, you can push that limit even higher. The multi-Res feature is something you're going to want to use all the time. It really speeds up some of the tasks immensely.

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Mari... didn't even think about that.

Ah I see.

Hm... I don't know how to do all of those thigns like caching layers and multi res... unless it does multi res by itself... I can make it go higher and lower... but... other than that... lol I put this post in the new users section for a reason.

I THINK I just figured out how voxel layers work... I think...

*tries something*

AH it DOES work how I thought.

Hmm, is there a way to keep the shaders when turning it into normal geometry?

I just smacked a bunch of those Tinker objects together from that library he provided and it looks great... now as how I'm going to get each piece into actual geometry... well... I have no idea... but since each piece is on its own layer, I'm hoping I can autotop each layer by itself and it'll just be a lot of objects arranged in the way I wanted it... I hope they stay in layers to... hmmm... and then exporting... That's a whole nother adventure... oh well, 'll make a post on that when it comes.

Thanks for all the help guys.

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I know this first hand since I just did it today, it create a new paint layer for each layer on the VoxTree.

As for the color, there's nothing else to keep. Like I said, there is no specularity in the voxel room. Of course it bakes the normal map as well, so that's 2 out of 3.

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Yeah...there just isn't anything that rivals 3DC in 3D Painting right now. Mari may have it's own advantages, but with the recent multi-threading speedup, painting has gotten so fast that Mari is just an afterthought to me. In Mudbox 2011, you still have to paint Specularity, Color, and Depth/bump, on their own separate layers...one at a time. In 3DC you can paint all three channels at once or any combination of them at any time and on any layer. Also, the depth channel in the Paint room is what makes 3DC's painting so versatile. Instead of just painting bump maps, it's realtime Image-based (normal or displacement map) sculpting, and it works a treat when you use it in conjunction with Voxel sculpting.

You CAN get uber-fine details in Voxels (the Surface mode is there for that very purpose) if and when you need it. Much of that is predicated on how much RAM your system has. 8GB of RAM will let you get around 40 million polygons without having to cache layers and such. I cache anyway. But if you have more RAM, you can push that limit even higher. The multi-Res feature is something you're going to want to use all the time. It really speeds up some of the tasks immensely.

I haven't tried Weta's Mari yet (I've got an ATI 4870X2 GPU ) but I tend to agree with you up to a point. I do wish Andrew would add some new channels. It would be nice to paint transparency real time...or maybe you can and I don't know about it...

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It would be nice to paint transparency real time...or maybe you can and I don't know about it...

You can, just use the eraser on Layer 0. When you export your textures one will be for transparency. I think there's another way too that someone mentioned, maybe erasing on any layer and then hiding Layer 0 or something.

Edit: yes I just tried it, that works too. though I didn't try exporting.

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Whoa well I guess when you have a freakin' 32K texture it would go a bit slow....

I think 3D coat can do just what Mari can do though... regarding you don't have the student version like I do and can go over 7 layers. :P

Hmm... Can it do projection painting though? I think it can and I think I even used it... wow I'm a new box.

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A 1-2 M poly model needs 2048x2048 normal map, A 4-10 M probably a 4096x4096 map else details are lost. To bake HD on a map is a waste of time. HD is a waste of time anyway. These for zbrush.

Voxels shaders can use bump textures too. I noticed that these are also baked on normal maps and its useful sometimes.

In PPP is it possible to paint depth close to seams area? Just a question.

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OK I can, Andrew has answered it on another topic.

Just a 15 min voxel less than 500k, just for fun >auto-topo with guides>UVs with lot of seams just for testing > painted details as depth on a 1024x1024 map. I avoided the seams areas or smoothed them. In blender render I don't see any seam.

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