SOLVED: Creating a clean colour ID map?
polycounter lvl 8
Issue .. colour ID anti aliasing with Zbrush - xNormal - DDO pipeline
So I've been following some tutorial videos for using Zbrush, xNormal and DDO. Colour Id's being created in ZBrush and the maps exported with xNormal. The video suggests simply using a hard edged brush is enough. I've also tried solid coloured subtools.
One of the videos in Question
https://youtu.be/0A7Pq8bY3SM
1. Unless you're using incredibly high poly counts you won't get a sharp edge in zBrush via poly painting. You can use subtools which helps.
2. xNormal doesn't have a No Anti-Aliasing option (unless I'm missing it) and no matter what I do baking down the high res Colour ID'd mesh to a low poly UV always results in anti aliasing.
Since a lot of people seem to use this pipeline I assume I'm missing something because my colour ID maps are ALWAYS anti alaiased.
One sollution for me would actually be a fuzzy range slider for ID selection. Never do I use a colour thats almost indistiguishable from another so being able to say that this colour is x AND 3 points of R,G or B on either side of it should also be included. Overlaps would occur in the order you choose the colours.
A simpler one would be a way of creating a non anti aliased map from a highres to a low res UV.
Some context .. I've 100 plus characters and game assets to be created extremely quickly. Hand editing each colour ID map will be out of the question so I need as much automation as possible. And I don't always want sharp edges between materials.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
So I've been following some tutorial videos for using Zbrush, xNormal and DDO. Colour Id's being created in ZBrush and the maps exported with xNormal. The video suggests simply using a hard edged brush is enough. I've also tried solid coloured subtools.
One of the videos in Question
https://youtu.be/0A7Pq8bY3SM
1. Unless you're using incredibly high poly counts you won't get a sharp edge in zBrush via poly painting. You can use subtools which helps.
2. xNormal doesn't have a No Anti-Aliasing option (unless I'm missing it) and no matter what I do baking down the high res Colour ID'd mesh to a low poly UV always results in anti aliasing.
Since a lot of people seem to use this pipeline I assume I'm missing something because my colour ID maps are ALWAYS anti alaiased.
One sollution for me would actually be a fuzzy range slider for ID selection. Never do I use a colour thats almost indistiguishable from another so being able to say that this colour is x AND 3 points of R,G or B on either side of it should also be included. Overlaps would occur in the order you choose the colours.
A simpler one would be a way of creating a non anti aliased map from a highres to a low res UV.
Some context .. I've 100 plus characters and game assets to be created extremely quickly. Hand editing each colour ID map will be out of the question so I need as much automation as possible. And I don't always want sharp edges between materials.
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Replies
I've taken to painting fixes into the map on the base mask for the group of color involved... Could probably use some of the blur settings on certain parts and a dark base-layer also.
Since I can't change DDO, xNormal or zBrush my only option will be found in Photoshop.
So my first potential solution is to create a Photoshop Action to apply a threshold of 128 to each of the RGB channels one at a time. This removes all the anti aliasing but then limits me to 7 colours - R,G,B and C,M,Y and White.
Anything other than a value of 128 leaves gaps and creates extraneous colours.
It's a useful start however I've not tried it in the field yet and I need more than 7 since I've 15+ materials.
One benefit I noticed is that when painting in zBrush, its very easy to not always apply maximum pressure and so your colour might not always be pure. The above method fixes this.
Pat
Edit: To expand . .
I figured that if using 128 in Threshold was enough to give me a small range of colours, being able to use multiple increments of that at the same time would yeild more .. so effectively fixed values of 0, 64, 128, 192 and 255.
So I tried with the curves to create a set of steps .. basically following the grid .. and applied that to each channel.
It appears it MAY work but it was impossible for me to draw the curve accuratly enough to ensure the values were perfect so I ended up with a number of extra colours.
Not what I wanted to hear.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=2300957&postcount=62
I´m not that familiar with the Zbrush - xNormal - DDO pipeline myself, since I don´t do any sculpting. I can poke around and see if I can dig up something useful for this workflow.
http://www.artofnickmiller.com/nickstools.html
Pat