Traditional texturing vs 3d Painting
polycounter lvl 11
Looking to see what this community thinks about traditional texturing tools like photoshop vs 3d painting such as zbursh polypaint or mudbox texal engine and which one people use most. Also the pros and cons about 3d painting vs photoshop traditional method.
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Now, that is not to say that 3d packages wont one day get there...
It's hard to get the same level of detail just by using something like zbrush to texture on its own. Most people I know use both zbrush and photoshop together.
The good thing about using a 3d program to texture is that it's easier to see what you're doing and match it up to features in the normalmap. It also makes up for a lot of difficulties you'd normally run into like texturing across UV seams.
I know in the film industry a program called mari is very popular (http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/mari/) as it can handle very large models and is a bit better than other programs in terms of painting features.
i use mudbox to feed my Ps...
3Dcoat also connects to 3dsmax and photoshop pretty seamlessly - I typically switch between 3d painting, editing the layers in photoshop [ctrl+p] and projection painting in photoshop [ctrl+alt+p].
(haven't used either 3dCoat or Mari, though)
it does baffle me though that you don't have the option to just paint on the UV layout in 2D in there.
anyway, the most time texturing by far is still spent in photoshop, there are tasks that are just so much more convenient in 2D and - assuming you can do a decent UV layout - you don't actually have a huge benefit from painting the surface in 3D most of the time.
mari i found disappointing. useful more as a texture patch management software for complex assets than a painter. not the best paint feel to begin with, clunky gearhead interface, annoying workflow requiring projecting constantly - i would not want to work like that. i also had it crash suddenly when dragging a brushsize slider and doing similarly simple stuff. nah.
I'm Jack Greasley, the product manager for Mari.
thomasp, sorry you found your trial disappointing. Just so we can watch out for the problem you described, could you tell me which version, OS and GPU were you using?
Although Mari originally came from the film world, we do have some people using it for high end games work. A couple of the standout demos from E3 had levels painted either entirely or partially in Mari (NDA prevent me from saying which ones alas)
We are just about to release Mari 1.5 which has some updates specifically for our games customers, including overlapping UV support, DDS texture support, live normal map painting and editing and real time shadows.
This is a really interesting discussion to us as we're always trying to improve Mari's support for different asset types.
Thanks
Ah but it does! I was thrilled when a colleague showed me, since I had been sorely missing such a feature as well.. its called "Flatten to UV Space" in the Mesh menu. Feel like an idiot for not noticing it earlier.
Mari - This program is pretty damn good. But it has basically zero tools for game development. It's obvious it's film oriented. Right off the bat, it doesn't have layers. You can do some layer-like process where you introduce another material on top, and can apply a mask to that one, so you get pseudo-blending. But it's nowhere close to Photoshop-like layers. This makes it useless on the spot unfortunately. But the rest of it, the actual painting engine, I thought was superb. They have a buffer canvas like Bodypaint which is excellent. The brush engine was decent too.
They say they're adding layers in v2. If they do, and if they have all the powerful layers that Photoshop has, including adjustment layers, then I can see myself even replacing Photoshop with Mari for character work.
Bodypaint - This is probably the best tool, but it's way outdated at this point, and expensive. It's still at $1k. Doesn't support normal maps. But it has a paint buffer, which is awesome, and pretty good layer support. It takes in PSDs, which is nice, and also supports Photoshop brushes. Of course, since it's outdated, it doesn't support adjustment layers or fill layers. That plus the price meant we didn't go for it.
3D Coat - Doesn't have a paint buffer exactly. But it does do projection painting by sending a screenshot into Photoshop. You can also send the layers over to Photoshop. Again, no support for adjustment/fill layers or layer groups, so that means it can't replace Photoshop (and besides you need PS for projection painting anyway), but the price tag was low enough that we went with this one.
Hi,
Thanks for the feedback. We are certainly introducing a PS style layers system in 2.0, which we believe should actually be a fair bit more powerful than the PS one (adjustments, groups, advanced masking etc.)
As I mentioned above, 1.5 (in beta at the moment) has a bunch of support in there for games people, and the combination of that and 2.0 layers should address most of the issues you raised.
We're working pretty hard at making Mari more accessible to more people, so please keep and eye on it and give it a test run every now and then.
Jack
BTW, how does one get on the Mari betas?
I was using Max, photoshop, and zbrush while making games.
I'm now using Maya, Zbrush, mari & photoshop.
For me replacing photoshop is just impossible ! Even if mari is cool and a great software.
I tried to do everything inside mari at first but immediately i found myself wasting tons of time for things that could be done inside photoshop in few seconds.
Mari is nice if you prepare a big library of textures and decals than have to create lot of assets with it. I think that if you just have 2 texture artist inside your team photoshop is still really good. But if the project you're working on need lot of assets and lot of persons than mari can be good.
My two cents ...
Ps : The problem with mari is that artist waste a lot of time zooming inside one part of the 3D object. While with photoshop you got a better vision of the entire texture.
hi jack,
nice to see you having these forums on the radar! hope you weren't deterred instantly by my comments
ultimately i didn't give it another run in recent months since the basic workflow struck me as not suitable for what we're doing mostly - blocking, enhance baked-in lighting and fixing up textureseams - everything that's not possible or painful in 2D. mudbox' layers and photoshop-compatible blendmodes, no-frills interface and ability to just doodle on the mesh without having to project/commit all the time were reasons we went with it.
i can imagine that when working on ultra-complex assets with hundreds of texture patches and the aim to keep it all in one app, mari will turn out to be the superior solution though.
btw: when you guys devised mari - was studiopaint 3D an influence by any chance? some interface bits and ways of operation seemed familiar.
cptSwing: i'll try that monday first thing but from the sound of things this means you can only paint on a flattenend version of your texture in the UV window?
I've wanted to get into it as part of my texture workflow along with photoshop, but so far I've found the tools a bit confusing sometimes.
I've seen some good stuff come out of it.
Does anyone know of good videos or articles detailing the painting tools of 3D coat and how best to use them? Tutorials are always a bit scarce it seems.