General questions I haven't found answers for...

BradMyers82

Hey here are some questions I have that I haven't been able to figure out on my own yet.

-Is there a way to work on just one texture? For example, gloss usually has a lot of details you don't want in other maps. Therefore it would be nice if you could just work on detailing the gloss map and not effect other maps.

-I have noticed if I plug in lower res textures like 1k ddo runs way faster.
I'm wondering if its possible to run like a testing phase where you figure out your smart material settings at low res and then save the project, then load your high res textures say 4k and everything will look the same just way more detail and crisper? The only thing I'm afraid of is would the scale settings screw up the results?


- can you name your id colors in the ui? I know you can assign a material type, but I can't seem to edit the name without assigning a material type.

-I read you can edit the mask directly, but to be careful because its destructive and if you try and go back you will loose your edits. Is this stable? will it potentially crash ddo?

That's all I have for now, if anyone knows the answer to these questions I would greatly appreciate it. I'm having a lot of fun with ddo so far. The most difficult thing so far is wrapping my head around the layering system in terms of blending layers in dynamask. A lot of guess and check right now because I don't understand how every blending layer works outside of overlay, multiply, and add.

BradMyers82

Just ran a test to try and answer my second question about loading lower res maps. It appears you can get the scale and things to look pretty similar by increasing the scale by 1 for every res you move up (power of 2 increase, 1k-2k, 2k-4k etc.).
For example, if you work in 1k and want to end up with 4k then you move the slider from 0 to 2 for scale, on each individual material.

If you don't do this, then the scale is indeed totally jacked up and no where near the same. This seems like one valid way to work, because you can do all the time consuming major stuff, then load your 4k maps adjust the scale and tweak as needed. With my computer at least if I'm working with 4k and even if I lower the working res and all that stuff, its still pretty slow and since I'm new to this I need to do a lot of guess and check work which ends up taking longer then just doing stuff by hand at this stage with the waiting thats involved. Or maybe I'm just not lower the res properly in ddo?



It seems like the default intended scale for most of these materials is like 1 or 2k. I'm not sure though.

leleuxart

1. Yes, you can work on one map at a time. When you add a Smart Material/Material, it adds it's textures to each map, but your changes in the Albedo don't affect the Gloss, Normal, etc. If you add a Clean Layer, the same thing happens, but you would have to copy over whatever changes you make in the mask to the other maps. If you copy/paste something into Photoshop(like a label, something you've created outside of DDO...), it is only pasted into whatever map you have selected. You can then copy it to whatever maps you want.

2. I know you can create preset smart materials and apply them to pretty much anything, although I'm not sure about the scale. Each texture and texture used in a mask has it's own scale setting, so worse case scenario you'd just have to go through and adjust them manually. You can however work in a lower resolution overall, then export the full-res when you're done.

3. Not sure. The UI for adding colors and renaming in general has been pretty buggy for me since the start.

4. It's stable, I haven't had a crash happen from that yet. Actually, DDO has rarely crashed for me and as long as your Photoshop documents are still up, DDO will start right at the same place. But when you hand-edit a mask, you're only editing the mask for whatever map you have selected. You have to remember to copy the mask to the other maps as well. It's destructive because when you try to edit the DynaMask, you lose all the hand-painted changes. That's all really. Also if you're using 3DO, make sure you save and get 3DO to refresh, because last time I used it, it didn't refresh after a hand-edited mask change.

BradMyers82

Thanks a lot for the reply leleuxart.

When you said in 1. you can work on each map at a time, did you mean in photoshop? That's one thing I'm confused about, like I don't know what I can do in photoshop, because some stuff you do will really mess ddo up. I guess I just don't know the "rules" of what you can do in phtoshop in general.

Good info on the hand editing masks too, thanks a lot bud!

BradMyers82

one more thing, if you baked your object space normals in max, do you have to invert something for it to work properly? I tick invert y for the normals, but not sure if it does anything for the object space normals or if its even an issue.

leleuxart

I mean in DDO. If you look at the DDO UI, there's multiple tabs for each map. So when you're in the Gloss tab within DDO, you're working on the Gloss.psd in Photoshop. Adjusting colors and texture intensity in one map doesn't affect anything in the other maps, however the DynaMask and texture scale generally updates for all of the maps.

As far as what you can do in Photoshop, I think there's pretty much no boundary. For my last project, I used DDO exclusively, but there were some labels I had to create outside of DDO. I copied and pasted those into DDO like a regular Photoshop layer and it updates in DDO just fine. The only issue is you lose DynaMask and the DDO options. Anything you add yourself has to be masked, tweaked, copied, etc. by hand, but you can still use the blend modes, filters, layer effects...

BradMyers82

Thanks again man. Been playing around with stuff, and I understand what you mean now.

I just need to be careful if I do any photoshop stuff directly because I noticed that if you don't have the material setup for each map type in photoshop then you can't save it as a smart material (it gives errors when it looks for the info in the other maps and can't find it).

However I have a few more questions...

My work computer runs ddo much slower than my home computer, the main difference is at home I am running a ssd. That's the only logical reason I can come up with for the speed difference. I'm talking about 4 to 5 times as fast on the ssd pc.

So, I have been working at home as well so I can have the speed there.

- Is there a way to save smart materials and transfer them from one pc to the next? I saved the .xml file the smart material reads, but when I pasted it into the correct folder, my materials are no where to be found.

- Also, is there a way to offset a material/texture inside dynamask? The scale sometimes helps with this, but when you want to play around with random placement of details it would really help to mix things up just by offsetting.

lordsme

BradMyers82 wrote: »

- Is there a way to save smart materials and transfer them from one pc to the next? I saved the .xml file the smart material reads, but when I pasted it into the correct folder, my materials are no where to be found.

We have more or less the same problem, transferring material presets from one document to another one, like we did with the good old DDO.... we're discussing it here:
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=137918

BradMyers82

cool man, thanks for the info.