SOLVED: Prefer the old free DDO version
polycounter
The new one hangs all the time. Plus to be honest I don't understand the new one absolutely . After a few useless tutorials on you tube I still have no idea how to set weathering details/masks and can't get anything looking realistic. While the free one, even working somewhat slow and unresponsive, didn't make me any essential problems.
Do somebody know a good tutorial of how to make/adjust all the dirt and weathering effects?
Do somebody know a good tutorial of how to make/adjust all the dirt and weathering effects?
Replies
Did you mean tutorials on dirt and weathering effects for the old or new suite?
As of new DDO what I found by now is mask tweaks. Looks like olf DDO has more possibilities. I can't find old streaks direction dial for example.
Also it hangs in every few minutes and tells me I have not supported PS version . I have CS5 one. Not sure if it's really so or just an error.
One more thing that bother me is that when I try to recalculate in bigger resolution mask details don't change its scale accordingly
@Eric: great to see you guys being so active around here!
Could you please point me to where I can find the mesh from the material preset browser so that I can do some testing? Thanks a lot in advance.
Also the wiki is filled with some great information!
http://quixel.se/usermanual/quixelsuite/doku.php
We are working on more tutorials and learning materials at the moment!
What kind of errors do you get when it hangs?
When you recalculate to bigger resolution make sure that your texeldensity is relative to the new resolution as it was to the old!
Martin_H - Sorry to hear that, but maybe watching a few videos on the quixel youtube channel can change your mind, its a very powerful tool once you get in to it
Unfortunately the mesh for the material preset browser is not available to the public as of now. Hope you mange anyways!
As of errors I have mostly two kind of errors. The preview window stops updating without any notice.
Another one just shows me a message that the suite stops responding because of incompatible PS version
Oh I know what the new DDO can do, hence my frustration why I couldn't get it to do that ^^. I did a few dozen tests yesterday and I think I finally start to get usable results:
I should mention that I always wanted to use DDO to texture highpoly meshes, so instead of tangentspace normals and ambient occlusion I was feeding it object space normals, ambient occlusion and curvature map bakes from xnormal. It seems that the curvature map you feed into it has an incredible influence on the end result when using smart materials. If you don't have a curvature map that does look pretty much exactly as what you were using to create the material previews, then applying the smart material to your mesh will look totally different than in the material browser.
That's the hunch I had before I did my testing and also the reason I asked for your mesh. Checking the bakes I found for your preset I see ambient occlusion, height map and tangentspace normals. Two of which I didn't know how to bake for my highpoly. I was speculating that you didn't bake a curvature map for it and let it generate the curvature map automatically from the tangentspace normals. Reading some more on the forum I got the impression, that that is what many people do, that don't struggle the way I do.
While searching I have found some info on curvature maps in Teddy's posts and in the manual. One suggestion was to create it from a highpass filter on the ambient occlusion bake. Another approach was to bake an objectspace normal map from the highpoly, blur it with smart blur in photoshop and use xnormal to calculate a tangentspace map from it. I don't really understand the details of how this works, especially why it should be smart blur instead of gaussian blur. I need to do some more testing on that and especially compare it to using handplane with highpoly mesh and blurred objectspace normals.
The way I went with was to use the curvature map from xnormal and highpass filter it so that the bigger shading differences go away and the neutral zones are 50% grey. I've also tried some variations on dilation and bit depth and it seems to work best when I go for 8 bit maps with a lot of dilation/padding on the curvature map. I still havent figured out what the best treatment for the ao map is.
Also I found out that using xnormal with the same highpoly mesh for high- and lowpoly slot allows you to bake out a tangentspace map with information in it. I don't understand why it does that. If I try the same in blender it turns out solid blue color, which is what I'd expect it to do. I have yet to find out which kind of tangentspace "faked" normal map works best for highpoly meshes.
Could you please point me towards documentation or videos that go in depth on what DDO expects its input maps exactly to look like? I believe that could be key to get users like gnoop and me on the right track: a trouble-shooting guide with an example mesh and example bakes including pictures of screwed DDO output caused by feeding it the wrong maps and how to fix them.
@gnoop: did anything of the above help you in your use-cases?
Does anyone have an idea how to fake a usable heightmap from only a highpoly mesh? Maybe also something with blurred normals and Photoshop/NDO? Maybe use NDO to convert the fake tangentspace normal map to a heightmap, did anyone try that? Or is that what DDO does anyway if you provide it with tangentspace normals but not a height map?
I understand your frustration, we´ve had some troubles with that ourselves actually, finding the best way to get a good curvature. That is one of the main reasons that the new baking tool is being made, it will make it much easier to work with high poly meshes. The project I am currently working on is all high-poly, and it works great, but I agree that we need more documentation!
The curvatures I am currently using are baked from the mesh in X-normal and they seem to do the trick quite well, have you tried this already?
But my problem that I rarely do anything "painted metal with scratches" all DDO looks like focused on. I do environment textures mostly and still can't find streaks mask details and such I use extensively in free DDO.
But my problem that I rarely do anything "painted metal with scratches" all DDO looks like focused on. I do environment textures mostly and still can't find streaks mask details and such I use extensively in free DDO.
@Eric: I noticed the mouseover popup for the ID map has example pictures of good and bad input maps. I think that is something that would be beneficial for all the map types.
I'm looking forward to see your highpoly project when it's done! And a Quixel baketool also sounds like a gread addition to the suite. Will it be named BDO? ^^
I did try x-normal bakes for the curvature, but straight from the bake tool I never got good results. I made a new lowpoly mesh for my model, unwrapped it better and did new bakes. I found out, that the curvature bake result depends heavily on the size of the mesh. Those are both default settings (except for the monochrome output) with the mesh scale set from 1 (first) to 30 in the second one.
I work in blender and that seems to output rather small models at the size I like to work on them. So I have to adjust the bake settings which I found out just now, noob mistake I guess.
Now here are the 2k maps that I tried to use in the following DDO tests.
Normals:
Curvature:
I started with work resolution 25%, texel density set to 4k and fed normals and curvature map to DDO:
Quite underwhelming. I use the Military Metal preset for all my tests by the way.
So I rerendered at full resolution with the same maps:
Looks a lot more useful, but also tells me that the low working resolution feature does not work at all with that kind of map input.
So I tried the highpass trick (8px radius) on the curvature again:
Now this is something I can use!
This is how the highpassed curvature map looks:
But lets keep trying stuff out. This is what I get when I only feed the tangentspace normals to DDO:
Also quite good and I see why someone wouldn't want to go through the trouble of baking a curvature map if he can get so far with only tangentspace normals.
I haven't tested using an additional AO bake yet, mainly because I screwed up the bake. Also I had to use Marmoset via cross-app mode (Awesome feature! A pitty that I have to reclick the link button every time I want an update after reimporting the maps *hint*
Which is weird, because I didn't have many problems with it in the past.
I never managed to create useful curvature map... Maybe because I operate on low poly
was made with these xnormal settings:
rays: 128
spread angle: 162
bias: 0.0001
algorithm: average
distribution: cosine
search distance: 0,05
tone mapping: monochrome
smoothing: yes
background color: black
Except for search distance and monochrome tonemapping those are the default values of my xnormal version.
The search distance is the important one and you have to experiment with that value to match your meshes. If the map looks too much like an AO map try decreasing the distance, if it looks too flat and grey try increasing it.
Then apply a highpass filter in Photoshop. Again you will have to try different values for the highpass radius. DDO is very sensitive about the curvature maps you feed into it. The radius should match the size of your model and size of your texture. I chose 8px for my 2k bakes. You could start with that and then go up or down with the radius and try reimporting the maps.
Hope that helps.
It's quite sure new baker will bake textures with high poly and low poly, what about only high poly and medium poly models? Most renderers i tried was baking only vertex data (not pixel) to curvature and that was the biggest problem i had. I'm really excited about new baker's features. If you can give more information i'll stop trying to improve my current workflow and wait for the new baker
It was not especially procedural, just has a bit more weathering effects that makes it suitable for wider appliance imo.
A kind of painted metal with worn edges could be easily done in 3d soft itself with edge/dirt/curvature/ctl_occlusion shaders/maps whatever they call it. I see one even for Blender. And with real time previews that works generally quicker then Quicksel/Photoshop it's easier to setup, works without UVs and don't turn into a mess of layers and masks thanks to modern node editors.
The realistic weathering. rust with streaks, cracked paint etc. are the whole different story and old free DDO can do a few pretty nice ones
Baked that with 0.03 search distance:
Ran a 6px High pass on a 2k map:
and the result is satisfying - first time I've made a useful curv map
If there is anything i also can help with, just ask me and i will answer quickly, i probably have like 100 hours in the Suite now haha.
Feel free to request video tutorials as well, i do those from time to time.