Answered: High poly Workflow?

NAIMA

Hello , SO I have a really Big spaceship and I wanted to texture with DDO , I installed and Its my first time with it so I am not really expert in the procedures yet . But I wanted to start with that project as I need it .

My spaceship is high poly opensubdivided , in the stack the different pieces have like Editpoly already uvmapped , above the shell , edit poly to delete inner faces and then opensubd, then a simmetry .

Now there are also other pieces that I have not uvmapped at all , like the engines, the several pipes and some details of the cockpit canopy ... I would like to combine both procedural and mapped texturing if possible .

I might or not use vray or mental ray for rendering not decided yet, but in any case, how do you sugest me to proceed in a correct workflow?



I have like 8-9 macro pieces of the Hull , wich is the one I wanted to texture the most , divided in black and white materials , those pieces have a space of a square distribution for all the uvmapped elements .

I read I have to use xnormal , but then should I collect all uvpieces into one single squared map or I can work with several ? shoudl I make one by one in xnormal or how else?

How should I setup the max scene to work with high poly workflow for ddo ? I checked the tutorial but I yet did not find it specific on how actually work .

Synaesthesia

You'll need UVs to work with NDO or DDO, as they're both Photoshop-based applications, and anything you're planning to process through Photoshop will require a UV layout to apply to.

The high-poly workflow would be to add your UVs to this project, create any normal details if needed with a bake or with NDO, and then process your model through DDO. Each 0-1 UV set needs to be its own object, be sure to combine meshes per UV set before exporting to DDO. Each object within an exported model requires its own set of input textures to begin a project.

NAIMA

SO I can texture only one object at time ? I can preview all objects together?
Is may be i nfuture considered to add a blend boc mapping to use simply box mapping for hd things?

Synaesthesia

Object in this context refers to mesh groups, Quixel's corporate terminology for objects within an exported model. The model itself is a file that you load, such as *.OBJ or *.FBX. The mesh groups or objects are contained within this file. Every mesh group must be combined per UV set, basically anything that shares the same UV set should be a single object. You can paint multiple objects in DDO so long as they're multiple mesh groups in your exported model.

I don't believe that "blended box mapping" will work - IIRC, that specifically refers to procedural content inside of Max or Maya, not proper UVs as we understand them.

NAIMA

Ok so to resume, I have a huge ship model http://polycount.com/discussion/169587/spaceship-hardsurface-subdivision-polymodeling-learning-and-help#latest my objective is to find a proper way of texturing it and render , I am exploring solutions ranging from procedural to uvmapping , I actually uvmapped the whole ship but not the engine pipes and other stuff that are a little too complex to do . My problem is that I can't group all the uvs into one single object file because they crash my pc , so I split into groups mostly based per object material type .
So each object composing the ship is now an editable poly with a specific material , but i ncase I can change that redetaching and so on .

Whats your sugestion for proceding to texture this ship ? My worry is about the texture size and consistence , for example I have one uvmap just for the small thrusters on the wings ( the rest are istances ) but then another uvmap covers the whole cross section of the side fuselage from front to back .

My other fear is that painting separated objects might make me loose the important object transitions like the AO parts that are near each other and that because in XNormal I can load only one object at time to get AO maps or else and I cannot get maps split into several ones from a single multicomposed object .
Also how could I to to keep a texture resolution in check between the differemt model parts? So that one piece has the same texture resolution of the next one? and also have enough pixel density for the details to not look blurred or piexellated ?

Synaesthesia

This is delving into territory that I think Technical Talk would be better suited to answer - but I would say that you'll absolutely require UVs to do any texturing work using Quixel DDO. This means you'll need to find a method to lay out UVs for your components that currently have none.

You can use the Rescale Clusters feature of Max to make all UV shells the same texel density.

NAIMA

Synaesthesia said:
Each 0-1 UV set needs to be its own object, be sure to combine meshes per UV set before exporting to DDO. Each object within an exported model requires its own set of input textures to begin a project.

Sorry can you be a little more clear on what you mean by the above sentence?

If I have split my spaceship into several parts , mostly by material actually but anyway , wings, wingtips, fuselage , under belly , engines and so on ... Do I have to export and load each piece separately with one single uv or I can export all pieces together? but in case then how I do load the different texture AO maps for each uv island?

Synaesthesia

Everything that belongs on one texture must be one object in DDO or NDO, essentially.

NAIMA

But I saw that I can load objects with detached meshes, those create different textures in same time?  So if I have one model made of 10 chunks with 10 different uv map textures, I can load the whole model and treat them separately in the same session or is better I load each piece separately ? Couse I am worried about preserving texture consistency between pieces, like if I split my spaceship into hull , wing , tail etc, and all use the same similar material , how I can be sure to preserve the same texture consistency among a piece and the other ? I know a material is always the same , but there might be several variations I might do to one that may be will not blend well with the other neightboruing chunks .

Synaesthesia

Each separated object will require its own set of input maps and will export individual textures per object. It's not an efficient way to work - you'll end up at least doubling the project files needed to work, and you'll have to combine everything together manually afterward. If you want texture consistency, ensure that all objects sharing the same 0-1 UV space are combined before export.

NAIMA

I understand but the maps I am trying to output to not loose details are around 8 k each , and to oput all together I woudl have to make at least one big 16 k map wich I think its not supported and I am already struggling to make a 8 k AO for just the wings .