Tiling baked meshes with arbitrary toplogy?

AlecMoody

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to achieve a tiling mesh based on a sculpt where the model has undercuts and overhangs? Basically, I am looking to do tiling cliff faces and cave walls with surfaces much more intricate than what you could represent in a heightmap. I am also looking to be able to sculpt freely and not resort to jamming shapes together like this:

https://osart3d.wordpress.com/home-page/tutorial-creating-perfectly-tiling-meshes-in-zbrush-for-use-in-videogame-environments/

Hoping to use Zbrush and 3dsmax. Suggestions? The best I can think right now is to try and separate contiguous surfaces from mesh elemnent details. That is still somewhat limiting.

remotecrab131

I'm mind blown about what you are trying to do. :P

heyeye

Might be misunderstanding the question, but can this be solved with snapshotting features from your sculpt in zbrush then tiling those textures and just vertex blending them based on the areas of the cliff?



Like in this picture, there's defined areas where the textures change, and you can just vertex blend between them.The base mesh would still be your zbrush sculpt, and the tiling textures are now just tiling swatches pulled from each type of form change.

AlecMoody

To clarify, I would like the lowpoly mesh elements to be tiling and have more complex geometry than what can be represented in a height map.

sprunghunt

sculpt onto a torus with symmetry turned on.

PrimePriest

If I understand correctly Vector Displacement maps are what you're looking for.
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/vector-displacements

AlecMoody

ooh, I like sprunghuts idea. Has anyone actually done this?

goatytimes

I've been meaning to ask this question as well. I believe what we're looking for here is a way to tile a piece of seamless square geometry along a mesh in a similar sense to how you would tile a texture. I know this can somewhat be achieved with vector displacement, but that creates drastically more polys than needed and sucks for anything remotely hard surface.

I'd simply like to be able to take a tiling mesh and tile it in an array that conforms to the quads of another mesh while welding the verts on each side. To me this seems like it would be a much more clean and intuitive way to model enviroments compared to the standard modularity method. I'd imagine there must be some program or plugin out there that would accomplish this but the closest thing I've seen is micromesh in Zbrush, which does not weld verts.

CheeseOnToast

I take it you're after something more than a sculpted plane with wrap mode on in Zbrush? No reason it can't have overhangs and undercuts.

Making the low poly topology shouldn't be too bad. Just a bit of matching points at the border edges?