3D max texture projection technique

steelman90

Hello, i saw a post a while ago:
https://polycount.com/discussion/182135/usp-s-phobos   about a 3D max texture projection, it is very interesting but i was wondering if anyone can explain or video demonstrate this technique, taking a screenshot in Photoshop and do your art there, then go back to max and project it, basically if anyone can explain the whole workflow will be very helpful. the model used is a public model given by Valve, and it's already UV'ed so no need to UV anything. here is the mesh:
 https://gofile.io/?c=fxLq1t

also, if anyone can explain how did the author manage to select accurate polygons without doing it manually? same as this photo   https://gyazo.com/5ba86b60ca485425be89e63e9cd19962

Eric Chadwick

This is a very old technique, very outdated and tedious.

If you have Substance Painter or 3D Coat, those will let you paint directly on the model, no need for Photoshop.

If you absolutely have to stay in 3ds Max, you could use Viewport Canvas, the built-in 3d paint tool. 

Mark Dygert

Yep. 3dsmax is pretty janky for projecting decals. There are some scripts that attempt to do it in different ways but it's all pretty messy.

Decals with out of the box tools: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/screencast/Main/Details/f5ba584e-a450-4165-a08f-26069850c2c7.html

TurboTools script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge59E3n7gwo

DecalProjector script: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/decal-projector

Decal Projection (if you have vray): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V7L2t0ekTc

Blender has a pretty slick workflow for decals: https://cgcookie.com/tutorial/adding-decals-to-3d-models-with-blender

Substance Painter is pretty much made for that kind of workflow . Most of what he's doing in that thread is easier and faster to do in Painter.

Finding the edges of materials to place wear you just use a "metal edge wear generator".
https://youtu.be/bgjZX9EC7UQ?t=169

If you need to project a texture it has a very easy way to do that too.
https://youtu.be/rsDVc9WzUY0?t=92

I do most of my material work in Substance Painter. Drag wood, Drag metal, add wear, paint some details, export packed maps, done.

musashidan

Yes, this is very old school. I used to do this years ago in Max long before S Painter. I would use blended box mapping for a tiling material and project planar uvw mapping modifiers to be painted in PS over a UV snapshot to different uvw channels for unique texturing detail.....thank you Allegorithmic. 

steelman90

Eric Chadwick said:

This is a very old technique, very outdated and tedious.

If you have Substance Painter or 3D Coat, those will let you paint directly on the model, no need for Photoshop.

If you absolutely have to stay in 3ds Max, you could use Viewport Canvas, the built-in 3d paint tool. 

Thank you for the response! 
Well i wanted to know the technique in max not 3dcoat or painter, this can be helpful for artists who dont have other tools is it possible if you could explain and go through it, also, the polygon selection of the image that i chose, how did he manage to choose such selection without doing it manually? 

Eric Chadwick

F1

steelman90

musashidan said:

Yes, this is very old school. I used to do this years ago in Max long before S Painter. I would use blended box mapping for a tiling material and project planar uvw mapping modifiers to be painted in PS over a UV snapshot to different uvw channels for unique texturing detail.....thank you Allegorithmic. 

If you could go though it real quick and explain that post workflow in max not painter or 3dcoat that will be really helpful for max users who dont have other texturing software 

steelman90

Mark Dygert said:

Yep. 3dsmax is pretty janky for projecting decals. There are some scripts that attempt to do it in different ways but it's all pretty messy.

Decals with out of the box tools: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/3ds-max/learn-explore/caas/screencast/Main/Details/f5ba584e-a450-4165-a08f-26069850c2c7.html

TurboTools script: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge59E3n7gwo

DecalProjector script: http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/decal-projector

Decal Projection (if you have vray): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1V7L2t0ekTc

Blender has a pretty slick workflow for decals: https://cgcookie.com/tutorial/adding-decals-to-3d-models-with-blender

Substance Painter is pretty much made for that kind of workflow . Most of what he's doing in that thread is easier and faster to do in Painter.

Finding the edges of materials to place wear you just use a "metal edge wear generator".
https://youtu.be/bgjZX9EC7UQ?t=169

If you need to project a texture it has a very easy way to do that too.
https://youtu.be/rsDVc9WzUY0?t=92

I do most of my material work in Substance Painter. Drag wood, Drag metal, add wear, paint some details, export packed maps, done.

i'm pretty sure the technique is done without using external plugins, perhaps some UVW mapping.  

steelman90

Eric Chadwick said:

F1

f1 just opened a new tab with a lot of text    
i meant this https://gyazo.com/5ba86b60ca485425be89e63e9cd19962

Eric Chadwick

I meant, press that button inside of 3ds Max.

If you're not going to do your homework, why should we?

steelman90

Eric Chadwick said:

I meant, press that button inside of 3ds Max.

If you're not going to do your homework, why should we?

i am not saying you should, i was just asking for advice

Eric Chadwick

My advice is to read the info in my link, do the steps there, then come back and show us what you've studied.

You want to learn these techniques? They all require you know the tools. 

steelman90

Eric Chadwick said:

My advice is to read the info in my link, do the steps there, then come back and show us what you've studied.

You want to learn these techniques? They all require you know the tools. 

well i absolutely have no idea why your'e having an attitude about it.  your "advice" is literally just saying go read the 3ds max guide and read of all it. i simply asked if there is a way to choose polygons ( NOT in UV mode) around specific edges or seams to make polygon selection easier. so if anyone asks for any advice i'll just tell them to hit F1 and read the entire 3dmax guide.

Eric Chadwick

I'm not being snotty. You're asking basic-level questions, which can be found easily by searching, and that link shows you exactly how and where to search, as well as why it's important to do so.

Relevant:

• The Death of Curiosity
• Forum that encourages new modellers

steelman90

Eric Chadwick said:

I'm not being snotty. You're asking basic-level questions, which can be found easily by searching, and that link shows you exactly how and where to search, as well as why it's important to do so.

Relevant:

• The Death of Curiosity
• Forum that encourages new modellers

Well you're absolutely being completely snotty. maybe if you see the model and see the polygons on the mesh you'll see that it's not very "basic" question. the polygon distribution on the mesh is not very "clean" it is not my model, it's a USP-S model provided by Valve publicly for the steam workshop artists to make textures. 

PolyHertz

Not what you're asking for, but this reminded me of that old technique for fixing texture seams (might give you some ideas about how to do what you want): https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130217/completely_eliminate_texture_seams_.php

steelman90

PolyHertz said:

Not what you're asking for, but this reminded me of that old technique for fixing texture seams (might give you some ideas about how to do what you want): https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/130217/completely_eliminate_texture_seams_.php

for this model, workshop artists are not allowed to change anything on the UV's, as i said it's a model by Valve, for CS:GO. the only thing workshop artists can do is just edit the final diffuse texture. this is the link of the model.  https://gofile.io/?c=fxLq1t   and here is what i want to achieve without manually having to select and deselect small polygons    https://gyazo.com/5ba86b60ca485425be89e63e9cd19962

musashidan

steelman90 said:

musashidan said:

Yes, this is very old school. I used to do this years ago in Max long before S Painter. I would use blended box mapping for a tiling material and project planar uvw mapping modifiers to be painted in PS over a UV snapshot to different uvw channels for unique texturing detail.....thank you Allegorithmic. 

If you could go though it real quick and explain that post workflow in max not painter or 3dcoat that will be really helpful for max users who dont have other texturing software 

That workflow is ancient and completely superceded by 3D texturing.

Basically you have a tiling texture on 1 uvw channel and then you align the orthographic viewport to 6 sides of the model, taking a snapshot/screenshot each time and painting over that in Photoshop. Then you project each of the 6 sides(detail layers you painted as textures in PS) using 6 uvw planar mapping modifiers set to different channels.

Note that when I used this workflow it was for offline rendering, not game engines.

Eric Chadwick

Well, RTFM, but you don't want to do this. 
http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2020/ENU/?guid=GUID-4525C148-7DC9-4FE4-8C34-0B174CD8E0D6

steelman90

musashidan said:

steelman90 said:

musashidan said:

Yes, this is very old school. I used to do this years ago in Max long before S Painter. I would use blended box mapping for a tiling material and project planar uvw mapping modifiers to be painted in PS over a UV snapshot to different uvw channels for unique texturing detail.....thank you Allegorithmic. 

If you could go though it real quick and explain that post workflow in max not painter or 3dcoat that will be really helpful for max users who dont have other texturing software 

That workflow is ancient and completely superceded by 3D texturing.

Basically you have a tiling texture on 1 uvw channel and then you align the orthographic viewport to 6 sides of the model, taking a snapshot/screenshot each time and painting over that in Photoshop. Then you project each of the 6 sides(detail layers you painted as textures in PS) using 6 uvw planar mapping modifiers set to different channels.

Note that when I used this workflow it was for offline rendering, not game engines.

Thank you! Tried it and it worked just fine, i was wondering if you could take a look on these polygon selection and if there is a way where you can select the polygons https://gyazo.com/5ba86b60ca485425be89e63e9cd19962  without having to select and deselect them manually? here is the model if you want to take a look into it (just detach the top part) https://gofile.io/?c=fxLq1t 

steelman90

i guess what i was looking for is when i select the faces i see on left view, it selects polygons around it (NOTE : i had ignore backface on) but still it didn't do  the job.  is there a way i can select polygons only on the side i see without selecting the ones around it?

Eric Chadwick

http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2020/ENU/?guid=GUID-694580CD-2CEA-49B6-A5EE-278C50390616

steelman90

So I've asked the original author about this method, he replied with this, (i am a bit noob using the software) 

1. Render angle to a picture and bake it into a planar mesh as a texture;
2. Overpaint rendered picture;
3. Replace planar texture picture;
4. Bake back planar picture into a saved angle, use a camera for that. 

You'll have to work with a 2048x2048 badly unwrapped meshes, with a lot of issues
You will have stretchings and a quality loss, you have to understand how UV mapping and resampling works.

if anyone can help me out with this maybe some photos or examples that would be helpful

Eric Chadwick

No, that's a terrible method. You can try it if you want, but it's really messy.

Can you post a screenshot of the UV layout?

Since  you don't want to use other tools except 3ds Max, I would still recommend using Viewport Canvas. 
http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2020/ENU/?guid=GUID-F5518487-A253-44F0-A8D9-9CB537A8F392

musashidan

I really have no idea why you are so persistent on using this outdated, deprecated, and truly legacy texturing approach.

PolyHertz

Textools has a button labeled "Camera Map" which I think is basically the same thing as what you're looking for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEWqvrXaJE0&feature=PlayList&p=0D7878B0B79B344E&index=0

steelman90

musashidan said:

I really have no idea why you are so persistent on using this outdated, deprecated, and truly legacy texturing approach.

all i have is 3dsmax (no substance painter yet ) and it would be really helpful if you could post some screenshots about the steps he was referring to. i know it's outdated, but it will reallyyy help.

steelman90

Eric Chadwick said:

No, that's a terrible method. You can try it if you want, but it's really messy.

Can you post a screenshot of the UV layout?

Since  you don't want to use other tools except 3ds Max, I would still recommend using Viewport Canvas. 
http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2020/ENU/?guid=GUID-F5518487-A253-44F0-A8D9-9CB537A8F392

here is the mesh   https://gofile.io/?c=fxLq1t  (provided by Valve)

steelman90

PolyHertz said:

Textools has a button labeled "Camera Map" which I think is basically the same thing as what you're looking for:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEWqvrXaJE0&feature=PlayList&p=0D7878B0B79B344E&index=0

So no need to bake it into a planar mesh and all of that stuff? i'll look into Textools, Thank you very much!

steelman90

Here is some photos from an old post he posted as well  https://polycount.com/discussion/170719/pc-csgo-awp-phobos-shipping-in-a-weapon-case

Eric Chadwick

In the first screenshot he shows the Render UVs tool. The help file explains how to use the tool. To paint those kinds of textures, you'll have to go old-school, see http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/TexturingTutorials, specifically the Hard Surface Texture Painting (2006) one.

steelman90

Eric Chadwick said:

In the first screenshot he shows the Render UVs tool. The help file explains how to use the tool. To paint those kinds of textures, you'll have to go old-school, see http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/TexturingTutorials, specifically the Hard Surface Texture Painting (2006) one.

He mentioned that he didn't paint over 2d UV, rather took a screenshot, put it photoshop, masked it, then did his art there, then used some kind of projection

Eric Chadwick

Render UVs is a screenshot, of the UVs, optionally with a mask. Except you don't use Windows to make the screenshot, the tool saves a bitmap of the screenshot for you.

I don't love having to repeat this, but if you read the help file link, it explains this process pretty clearly.

Obscura

I dont get this whole thing. Wouldn't it be so much easier to simply unwrap the mesh properly and texture it? It would give the same result, a textured asset. Why is projection needed at all?

steelman90

Obscura said:

I dont get this whole thing. Wouldn't it be so much easier to simply unwrap the mesh properly and texture it? It would give the same result, a textured asset. Why is projection needed at all?

if you have a concept or a sketch done on a side view of a gun model, sometimes its very helpful to sketch a design on side view, then use projection  to project your designs or sketch on a model and then later on do some illustrations or model highpoly parts based on the sketches you have done.

steelman90

Obscura said:

I dont get this whole thing. Wouldn't it be so much easier to simply unwrap the mesh properly and texture it? It would give the same result, a textured asset. Why is projection needed at all?

And in the Steam workshop for CS:GO, you cannot unwrap it, (it's already unwrapped) or change anything on the model what so ever. you can only just make a new diffuse (color) texture and a normal map (sometimes). but you can't change anything on the lowpoly model given 

Obscura

Then just paint on the existing unwrap?

steelman90

Obscura said:

Then just paint on the existing unwrap?

if you paint it in 3D, it becomes hard to do any kind of illustrations, rather you do it in 2D, then use projection to apply it on the gun. or the model. 

PolyHertz

If you'd said you want to do illustrative (aka. 'hand painted') texturing work right from the beginning I think you would have got a more favorable response. For realistic texturing no one does things that way anymore, BUT for painterly styled textures it is still very useful. There are basically three kinds of methods to doing 3D paint:

1. Direct Projection. This is where the brush is aligned to the underlying normals and paint is projected to the model automatically at the end of each brush stroke (Substance Painter, 3D-Coat, Blender).
2. Screen Buffer Projection. This is where the brush works in 2D and you paint on to the viewport like a canvas, only projecting the paint when you tell it to (Mari or C4D BodyPaint)
3. External Projection. This is where a screenshot is taken and then loaded into an external painting app like Photoshop, then when saved is loaded back into the 3D program and projected to the model (3D-Coat, Blender, C4D Bodypaint, ZBrush, and Textools can all do this)

The third method, which is what you're looking for, is actually still very common for illustrative (aka. 'hand painted') textures, especially in China.

As a side note, if you're working on very low resolution textures I'd avoid 3DSMax completely due to its viewport not supporting unfiltered textures. Autodesk broke that feature back when they introduced Nitrous and never gave enough of a shit to fix it (Viewport Canvas somehow works around this, but otherwise I've never found a way to turn filtering off since Nitrous was introduced).

steelman90

PolyHertz said:

If you'd said you want to do illustrative (aka. 'hand painted') texturing work right from the beginning I think you would have got a more favorable response. For realistic texturing no one does things that way anymore, BUT for painterly styled textures it is still very useful. There are basically three kinds of methods to doing 3D paint:

1. Direct Projection. This is where the brush is aligned to the underlying normals and paint is projected to the model automatically at the end of each brush stroke (Substance Painter, 3D-Coat, Blender).
2. Screen Buffer Projection. This is where the brush works in 2D and you paint on to the viewport like a canvas, only projecting the paint when you tell it to (Mari or C4D BodyPaint)
3. External Projection. This is where a screenshot is taken and then loaded into an external painting app like Photoshop, then when saved is loaded back into the 3D program and projected to the model (Blender, C4D Bodypaint, ZBrush, and Textools can all do this)

The third method, which is what you're looking for, is actually still very common for illustrative (aka. 'hand painted') textures, especially in China.

As a side note, if you're working on very low resolution textures I'd avoid 3DSMax completely due to its viewport not supporting unfiltered textures. Autodesk broke that feature back when they introduced Nitrous and never gave enough of a shit to fix it.

Yes, the third method is definitely what i was looking for. when browsing about it, i didn't find any videos about this method using 3ds max, i know that 3dcoat does that since there are a lot of them in youtube about it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Q0vckYeKPE&t=951s
but i was just looking for a way to do it in 3dsmax, and no the res is pretty high 2048x2048 textures is the limit.  most illustrated skins for csgo are done this way, they take a side view screenshot of a gun, put it in a 2d program like photoshop or Krita or whatever, apply a quick mask, do their illustrations. then use a 3d program to project their illustrations to a gun. since i saw that this is possible to do in 3dsmax i was just looking if someone know the method in max.  i was just wondering if someone could further explain in screenshots examples or anything that could help further understanding what the original author mean by:  

1. Render angle to a picture and bake it into a planar mesh as a texture;
2. Overpaint rendered picture;
3. Replace planar texture picture;
4. Bake back planar picture into a saved angle, use a camera for that. 

Eric Chadwick

Camera mapping
http://help.autodesk.com/view/3DSMAX/2020/ENU/?guid=GUID-DBA6ABCC-86FC-47F9-841D-29D8A84086A6

Be aware though, this is a really backward way of doing it, slow and error prone. But, you might like it. 

Eric Chadwick

Viewport Canvas can do it similar to the 3D Coat method, more "live" because you're cloning from an image, directly onto your mesh.

A lot faster than camera mapping, but... Photoshop painting tools are better than what's in Viewport Canvas. 

steelman90

I was wondering if someone could please explain or provide some screenshots on these methods :  

"1. Render angle to a picture and bake it into a planar mesh as a texture;
2. Overpaint rendered picture;
3. Replace planar texture picture;
4. Bake back planar picture into a saved angle, use a camera for that. "

Camera per pixel and Viewport canvas are not the approach i was looking for

Eric Chadwick

What precisely is it about Camera Mapping that doesn't do what you want?

steelman90

Camera Mapping doesn't project very well if the mesh has cylindrical shape to it, I've tried both the Viewport Canvas and the Camera Map Per Pixel Map method, and not getting the result i want. that's why i want to know if someone could explain this: 

"1. Render angle to a picture and bake it into a planar mesh as a texture;
2. Overpaint rendered picture;
3. Replace planar texture picture;
4. Bake back planar picture into a saved angle, use a camera for that. "

Eric Chadwick

To avoid that, don't paint on oblique areas. Move the camera, paint, reproject, repeat.