Hipoly vertexcolor -> lowpoly diffuse map?

KDR_11k

Anyone know a good way of doing that? Doom 3 doesn't seem to have the option to take the diffuse color from the VCs (the whole colormap parameter is undocumented...) and my LWOs (even after fixing with Deep Exploration) crash ORB. The ASE exporter for Blender seems to no longer exist and I'm not sure ORB would take those without crashing, anyway (OBJ with MTL crashes ORB, LWO crashes ORB... Awful program!).

Eric Chadwick

Probably could do that in max, with Render To Texture. Didn't Bobo have a tut about baking vert-color lighting into a bitmap? You might even be able to use CrazyButcher's new scripts.

CrazyButcher

the regular max texporter plugin (very commonly used to generate skinmaps) allows coloring with vertexcolors too

Eric Chadwick

Oops, now I'm thinking you probably want to go from high-poly-non-UVd to low-poly-UVd, in which case you probably need a projection solution, ala max7 or Kaldera.

Ryno

Work with Sub-Ds. Do your low-poly control mesh, UV it, add MeshSmooth, Vertex Paint it, then Texport or Render to Texture to a new map. Yank off the MeshSmooth, apply the rendered/texported texture.

Should work fine.

MoP

I like how everyone's suggesting he use 3dsmax. As far as I know, he doesn't have 3dsmax

KDR_11k

Ryno: That might work if the hipoly's cage was the model I was trying to render to. I'd have to give it UVs that exactly match the lowpoly model.

But yep, MoP's right, no 3dsmax here, I'm using Blender.

Eric Chadwick

What about using Melody?

KDR_11k

Link?

Eric Chadwick

link!

Ryno

Actually, the key is to UV it before you turn on the Sub-Ds. The UVs will interpolate, and the high poly UVs should pretty closely match the low poly UVs, with just a little more subdivision in the UV layout, but basically it would look the same.

But I wouldn't know how to go about this if you don't have Sub-D capabilities.

KDR_11k

You are assuming that my SubD cage is the lowpoly model I'm rendering to. I'm using normalmaps, the cage is a lot more detailled than the model I'`m trying to render it to. If I was just trying to get a radiosity solution on the cage I'd convert the SubD to mesh, radio, copy VCs and VC bake. Done that before. Doesn't help with two different models, though.
Of course Blender does SubD, hell, even Milkshape does!

Eric: Melody doesn't seem to support vertex colors.

Ryno

Ahhh. Sorry about that, didn't read your post thoroughly. My bad. Just my typical workflow.

Whargoul

1 .Convert the vertex colours on the high rez to a tex map (auto UV it or something if it doesn't have clean UVs).

2. Apply tex map to high rez.

3. Use raytracing normal mapping tool to grab colour off of high rez surface.

Not sure if Max can do all those things, but from what I gathered above, it seems like it can be done. I just put a few of the unrelated stuff above for this solution. Hope it works.

MoP

Whargoul: I think you just outlined the problem he's having... the problem is step 3...

Eric Chadwick

So is the issue that you want to extract lighting info that's been baked into high-poly verts, then convert that into a bitmap UV'd on a low-poly mesh?

So you absolutely need a ray-caster.

ORB crashes when you feed it files... have you tried contacting the authors? I often find that small software devs like these are quite responsive to requests. I've gotten all kinds of cool new features just by asking nicely.

That's how Kaldera got started, and now we use it almost exclusively for our normal maps & height maps.

Might be worth a shot.

Also you could contact NVIDIA about Melody, they have tool guys devoted almost exclusively to improving their tools, based on user feedback.

KDR_11k

Soclab no longer lists ORB on their site and the URL returns a 404, somehow I don't think they're going to work on it anymore...

I'll try to get some UVs on the model and see if I can convince Doom 3 to use texture colors (it can do material colors but I'm not sure about textures). Problem is the radio-baked mesh is really messy (radiosity does that) so I might need to do a radiosity transfer... Oh joy, 100k polies are going to take FOREVER...
If that fails I can still contact NVidia.