First Jedidiah Painting Tutorial

[ekunzendorf]

Hello!

I ended the last retopo tutorial by merging for Per Pixel Painting. Please find the first painting tutorial at:

Enjoy!

Excelsior!

Eric Kunzendorf

Jacksonville University

users.ju.edu/ekunzen

[AbnRanger]

Thanks for sharing...again, it not only helps new users get up to speed, but it's nice to watch other artist's techniques. If I may make one quick suggestion, that is to use/show the UV texture editor (from the Texture menu). It is like having Photoshop in the viewport. Greg's little Ghost tutorials really turned me on to using it more often. I knew it was there, but almost never tried it. You can view the wireframe overlay, inspect the normal maps, paint your spec maps in 2d and such, just as you would in PS. And the real magic of it all, is that when you paint in the texture editor, you can see the changes happen on the model in the viewport. It's also really helpful if you want to select just a portion of the model and bucket fill that part only.

One can use a program for years and still discover new techniques from other artists, of all levels of experience. BTW, how are your students faring with their modeling/texturing projects (one was a Star Wars vehicle/scooter, I think)?

[michalis]

Thanks for the tutorial, always interesting.

It flows slowly though, you could make it faster in some parts.

Now I could make one, I've done some tuts for blender in the past. The reason I don't is that there're parts of 3dc that I don't know much or are a little 'dark' for me.

A good reason is , of course, that this way someone could suggest me better ways to achieve good results faster and cleaner.

Now watching your tut I noticed that you don't have much experience using retopo tools. The 'quads' for example is one of my favorites with its four modes.

There're some great tuts about how to subdivide and do loops on a head, you should have a look first.

I watched another of your tuts, the one for baking displ_maps. Using the mac-build. Its completely wrong, maps don't work, they have visible seams and the worst is that they aren't displacement maps. The mac build has a broken tex-bake tool. A well known issue, we found it with digman. I suggest you to delete it or edit it. Practically, a mac user can't bake and export displacements from voxels, maybe in next builds.

[ekunzendorf]

Hello!

AbnRanger, thanks for the input! You are right, the Texture UV editor rocks! I didn't know about it, but now that I do, I will talk about it in my next tutorial, when I can get to it. I was going to ask if anything like it existed! My students are finishing up their work for this semester, they decided to each retopo and paint their particular part of the bike, but they also have a final project due as well as redoing any of the other three projects in the semester. I will try top post the results when they come in.

Michalis, I appreciate the critique. You are right, painting is a slow process. The next one I may accelerate it and do a voice over. Don't let not knowing everything about the program deter you from making a tutorial. I didn't , and obviously, I don't know everything! ) I've only been seriously using the program since August, and there is PLENTY about the program that is new to me, or that I haven't used much. The Quad tool is a great example, although I do know it, I just prefer to work point by point. And for heaven's sake, if you know a better way, by all means create it, write it, post it! That is how we all learn.

Now, as far as the exporting displacement maps to Maya. You say it is wrong, but I don't know what you mean. Yes, there are some seams in the displaced model, but it did work and did displace the surface of my model. Combined with the normal map, the seams were very hard to see. When you say it isn't a displacement map, what do you mean? It creates a 16 bit .exr file that displaces the model. In fact, I found I had to hide my normal map, or it wrote that to the displacement too. That is why at the beginning of movie, I deleted all the maps before creating the displacement. Is it perfect? No, but it is the best method I know that works with Maya and Mental Ray. If you know a better way PLEASE let me know. And of course, I hope later builds will be able to export seamless displacement maps.

Thanks again for the critiques!

Excelsior!

Eric Kunzendorf

Jacksonville University

[michalis]

@ekunzendorf, of course you used a 16 bit b&w image for displacement, of course the mentalray tool displaced the surface, but you work on a mac (like me). It wasn't a displacement map, it was something like a AO map. It hadn't any adopted details from voxels. See the discussion, see the difference of the maps created on pc and mac builds. Its an old problem for me and other mac users. You don't need to delete normal and other maps first as you mentioned, you don't even need to create them, as the baking tool works directly from retopo room menu. So there will be a voxel volume and the retopo mesh only. You have to export import (to be a target) the retopo with different name first. But it simply not working on mac builds.

If you have zbrush too, do the following. Bake the voxel as MV, export a hidef mesh. Import it in zb, reconstruct subdivisions. Now go to the lower level (the retopo one) and bake the displacement map. Compare (and use) the two maps. See the link

http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=7054

If these are wrong, apologies then. This is a major bug in mac build IMO, stays there from the first time I tried 3dc (almost 10 months ago). Philnolan was the first who tried to show me how to bake disp_maps. Some other friends as well. I came to a conclusion (some other mac users) that 3dc can't bake displacements.I watched your tutorial and remembered the problem, thats all.

Nobody else noticed the problem on your tutorial? I'm wondering. (trolling now)

Better post our artwork and discuss the issues there. The best method IMO.

[Tom K]

Don't let not knowing everything about the program deter you from making a tutorial. I didn't , and obviously, I don't know everything! )

I agree. You don't have to be a master to make a useful tutorial. As long as it presents some useful information for someone to learn from.

Tom

[ekunzendorf]

@michalis,

With all respect, you should go back and watch the whole tutorial. I don't use the texture baking tool, I exported from the Textures menu. This creates a hi rez mesh that shrink wraps the voxels. Then from that, I export the 32 bit displacement as an .exr. I use the Export command from the Texture menu. My understanding is that from here, 3DC compares the hi rez mesh to the low rez and generates a displacement.

And it is a displacement, not an AO. I know what those look like.

Are there seams? Yes, but I say that in the video

Does it pull details from the voxel? Yes, the MV mesh does. I am working on a laptop, so I didn't push the rez of the MV mesh by subdividing my low rez mesh.

I don't have the most recent version of ZBrush. 3.x or whatever I used last didn't export working displacements on the Mac, ironically, so I didn't work with later versions.

The images below are jpgs of the exr files generated by 3DC. They are a bit blow out, but do these look like AO to you? The one on the left contains all the normal maps I painted. The other one came from the MV mesh generated from the voxels.

Hope this sheds some light here!

Excelsior!

Eric Kunzendorf

Jacksonville University

[michalis]

I think these don't look like good displacement maps. They don't transfer the vox details, they probably transfer the hi res MV mesh to a lower one. With a wrong way, after seeing this kind of grey scale.

I can't use disp maps like these in blender. Zbrush bakes Excellent maps though. Use the v4 and just export a 16 bit tif. Neutral grey is zero and so... I posted results, seen them?

Similar good maps to zb? I saw them from 3dc PC build. Not from the mac build though. I informed Andrew for this.

Not a defense ekunzendorf, you have posted some great artwork, indeed, you like tutorials (I like this and thanks for this) but displacement issue still exists.

[ekunzendorf]

michalis,

I can only submit that maybe the displacements don't look good to you because they are exported for Maya, not Blender. Mental Ray for Maya uses black for zero not gray. 16 bit tifs don't displace the surface for some reason. EXRs do. BTW, when I output to 16 bit gray 0, the maps looked similar to what you had. The tutorial is to go from 3DC to Maya, not Blender. As I show in the video, it works. Not perfectly, but it works.

One thing I would like to be able to do is specify a higher polygon MV mesh. Right now, my original model can only be subdivided 3-4 time to 300k. I'd like to go at least one higher.

I would also like to be able to extract displacements directly from Voxels; but after asking the question here (http://www.3d-coat.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=6816) I found that merging to MV first seems to be the only way to do it. If you know a different way, PLEASE post it. I would be extremely interested.

Excelsior!

Eric Kunzendorf

Jacksonville University

[digman]

I know I will tell you some things you already know so bear with me and I hope this helps

For creating a displacement map from the retopo room without first merging into the paint room do the following.

Retopo your voxel mesh, which you have of course already done

Uv map and unwrap, you done that already.

Export the retopo mesh from the retopo room (Retopo menu). Uv map saved also.

Now under the Retopo Menu in the Retopo Room choose Bake Texture. (it's the same texture baking tool from the paint room)

Select the mesh you just exported for the "mesh to receive projected textures" (Very important to do!!)

Check smooth mesh

Uncheck preserve positions of vertices while smoothing

Scan settings, I've rarely changed the default settings but test different settings if needed

From your other post, displacement map type you already know for your application.

Make sure create padding is selected

I do not know your padding settings(for seam hiding) but I set mine at 4 pixels (works for my applications) with auto padding set for always creating the padding in all the maps I create. It's under the preferences menu...

The 512 texture map size, I just left at default for the screen grab

Done...

Also watch this tutorial on how to "Bake Ptex textures on to a mesh with existing UVs" by

Javis Jones. That is another way to get your maps baked other than MV... but it does go through the paint room. The only thing I changed in his tutorial is, I select the mesh (one with uvs) that I exported instead of using the default temp mesh. Keeps things nice and orderly that way. Now you have some more baking techniques for your students...