Answered: dDo, smart materials and UV seams
polycounter lvl 10
I´m currently creating my first art with dDo incorporated into the workflow. I bought the suite thinking that this might speed up the workflow but so far it´s only been slowed down - mostly due to stability issues in 14.2.1 x64 - but also due to the fact that I´ve had to rebake my normal and AO map multiple times.
Now I´m onto another problem: UV texture seams due to separated islands.
I´m curious to hear how other people solve this. Right now I´m considering backtracking and just redo my UV so that more shells are sewn together - which in itself can be a big problem when baking normal maps (too big wrap-arounds and you can get gradients). So does anyone have some general advice on this? Should I be even more careful when doing the UV-work, or should I just ignore the seams for now and tweak the masks manually afterwards? (the latter seams like an awful lot of work considering there are so many individual texture maps).
Now I´m onto another problem: UV texture seams due to separated islands.
I´m curious to hear how other people solve this. Right now I´m considering backtracking and just redo my UV so that more shells are sewn together - which in itself can be a big problem when baking normal maps (too big wrap-arounds and you can get gradients). So does anyone have some general advice on this? Should I be even more careful when doing the UV-work, or should I just ignore the seams for now and tweak the masks manually afterwards? (the latter seams like an awful lot of work considering there are so many individual texture maps).
Replies
Sorry to hear that. In general I would say that the way you create your UV layout is extremely crucial for which ever workflow you use. I try to always place my seams where there would be a natural break in the object: So for cloth I break them in a seam, For hard-surface where two surfaces are joint together by a weld or similar. there are usually places to hide seams.
You can of course tweak your texture afterwards to get rid of seams but I would suggest to do it properly from the start. Otherwise you will have to redo all your seam-paintover every time you want to change your texture, and that usually happens quite a few times. (for me at least)
The suite does have a seam-termination feature, It does not magically remove uv-seams but it creates your masks in such a way that they don´t overlap your seams. You need to tick this box when creating your project in the base creator, and then you can adjust this value through a slider in the Dynamask editor, but still, this can´t be used to cover up poorly planned Uv-seams, gotta do it properly from the start
Also, is it possible to edit the texel density on an already existing project?
I think the 'official' response is "no, it must be checked at the time of creation" but I'm pretty sure you can enable it just by editing the project's xml file and adding SeamTermination="true" to the end of the first line inside the closing bracket >. (You should maybe make a backup before following my crazy advice.)
So something like this:
would become this:
and then you would want to do a rebuild or reimport (making sure that your color ID map has black for the areas between UV shells/islands).
Texel density can be changed at any time by using the "Reimporter"!
My model and UV:
My material:
And my result (Marmoset Toolbag 2). ID, Mask and Bump maps remained unused.
Why did not Quixel creates a curvature map and where to insert? I try different models, but it does not work.
If you use a high poly mesh without tangent space normals you need to input a curvature map for DDO to find edges. In the next major release the 3DO GPU baker will be released which should help when generating a curvature map.