It's a great article, but I find it strange people are still using such an ancient technique. If you can afford Max and PS, why not afford some decent 3D Paint software too? BodyPaint, DeepPaint, AmazonPaint and the like are so much faster and easier, the cost is well worth the investment.
ahah nice one peter , realy will come in handy for future work thanks a bunch mate !
Eric : Well, for those that cant afford more than these two eheh..why install another program etc when you can do it with the programs you already know and have ? It might be slower yeah but still
My point is that time is money. The software pays for itself in one or two projects.
Before I made the switch to 3D paint, I used this method, or I used the hunt-n-peck save-n-reload. What a waste, like the old way of UVing your mesh by splitting and flattening the model, fitting it to a flat projection, then morphing it back.
I have been doing just the same... Cross UV channel bake is super handy! And not only for seams.
Yet for seam elimination I personnaly like Tattoo better. You can even printscreen what you see in tattoo, make a 'stamp' out of a problematic area in photoshop and project it where seems need to be hidden - and it even supports tga gradients in transparency. And it's free!
right now i am at work but i have a few questions for those who have used tattoo. does ti work with 3ds max 7? is it a seperate app? does it work well? and how does it work exactly?
lol, i know those are ambiguous questions but it would be appreciated, if it will fit my needs i'll be sure to check it out. i've been looking for a program like that for a while (that doesn't cost much or anything).
p.s. i tried reading the faq and it didn't help me much.
edit: also, those buttons with sounds are annoying!
I've been using the Polyboost plugin for max to clone away seams right in the viewport or make a stamp for photoshop. It was the best $75 I've ever spent.
But this technique is cool too, it's nice to know that I can do the same with just max and photoshop (with a few extra steps). Thanks for the link!
Bodypaint seems cool, but it seems like a lot of people just use it to get rid of seams, and it's way too expensive for that, plus I'd have to learn a new interface.
i tried this and am not getting the proper results. right after i render from the render to dialogue box. the render looks nothing like the poly selected area. anyone else try this from the tutorial and have it work?
Then again, not the most stable app, fot okay for seem fixing. For texturing a whole character deeppaint is still far superior, but that's another subject...
Hyru! I have been trying the polyboost demo rencently but saw nothing related to seam painting in there. Could you elaborate a little?
Hyru! I have been trying the polyboost demo rencently but saw nothing related to seam painting in there. Could you elaborate a little?
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The seam painting feature is called "viewport canvas". Check out demo video number 2 here: Polyboost Demo Video . It's actually pretty full featured for such a little app, you can paint, clone, and use layer blending modes, all within max's viewport.
For tougher jobs, you can also make a "stamp" to bring into photoshop and the changes will update automatically in max, but so far I've just been cloning out seams right in the viewport.
Anybody get this shit to actually work? Maybe I'm retarded or something but tatoo seems totally worthless, and using this Max technique it seems I don't have access to any useful UV tools. I hope I am just missing something and there is something obvious I don't know about because I would really like to be able to fix my seams.
I don't understand what the problem is. Tattoo is super-simple. Can't remember if Tattoo only does projection paint or not, but make sure that's the method, otherwise the brush size will change as you paint across the seam. Anyhow, you get what you pay for. Body Paint is awesome, no need to create UV2/bake/paint/rebake, just WYSIWYG.
The problem I am having with Tattoo is that I can't figure out how to get the model to display with a texture since there is no "load model texture" option. I can select between worthless black textures or project my screencap onto the model but that shit is worthless to me.
I can load a "guide texture" as if I gave a shit about some totally non-interactive thing for color picking...
i gave up on tattoo. just seems ultra slow. i tried the article above...got it to work on a test. but when i tried it on my current char...the UV's rendered out all weird, even after reseting x-form. i paid the 100$ for polyboost. that video of the 3d paint thingy plus all the crazy poly features sold me.
Can't figure out the problem. I'm using short names and the right format. I figured out a work around though... "saved altered texture" and then replaced the contents of the file with my texture and then refreshed.
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Having tried Tattoo now I certainly dont think I'll be able to work with it. Maybe I should just spend the cash and get something non-crappy.
I wonder when Poopinmymouth is going to finish that Body Paint vid he's working on...? Should give you a sense of what its worth. There's also a demo of the latest version 3. Just make sure to get the whole R10 demo, it's in there.
Okay, I ended up doing something a lot like the tutorial, but instead of using Edit Mesh or Edit Poly, I just copied out the model and deleted faces so that I had one model with all the seams and the other model with none. Then I pretty much did what I did before but:
I had no problem with my UV tools and,
I had no problem using mental ray for the bakes (before it was hanging when it went to render)
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I use zbrush with Zapplink for seams plus some tricks of uvw mapping.
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Same here - it's just a shame that it seems to pixelate everything so much when you come out of projection mode.
I've been using it for hair, positioning the model so that I can see the join, Zapping it and photopainting in photoshop. I've tried setting my zbrush document size to 4 times the default (so around 2000x2000) but when I come out of projection mode I get a lot of artifacts.
Replies
Eric : Well, for those that cant afford more than these two eheh..why install another program etc when you can do it with the programs you already know and have ? It might be slower yeah but still
Before I made the switch to 3D paint, I used this method, or I used the hunt-n-peck save-n-reload. What a waste, like the old way of UVing your mesh by splitting and flattening the model, fitting it to a flat projection, then morphing it back.
If you have ZBrush, it's also a 3D painter. Tattoo is free, or at least it was, site seems to be gone. Found a list of 3D paint proggies here.
http://mediawiki.blender.org/index.php/Competitive_Analysis/Texturing
Good to know about alternate techniques, but also good to know when they're obsolete IMHO.
Yet for seam elimination I personnaly like Tattoo better. You can even printscreen what you see in tattoo, make a 'stamp' out of a problematic area in photoshop and project it where seems need to be hidden - and it even supports tga gradients in transparency. And it's free!
Yet for seam elimination I personnaly like Tattoo better.
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Have a stable link? The one in the article Eric posted, as he mentioned, doesn't work anymore.
lol, i know those are ambiguous questions but it would be appreciated, if it will fit my needs i'll be sure to check it out. i've been looking for a program like that for a while (that doesn't cost much or anything).
p.s. i tried reading the faq and it didn't help me much.
edit: also, those buttons with sounds are annoying!
But this technique is cool too, it's nice to know that I can do the same with just max and photoshop (with a few extra steps). Thanks for the link!
Bodypaint seems cool, but it seems like a lot of people just use it to get rid of seams, and it's way too expensive for that, plus I'd have to learn a new interface.
http://www.terabit-software.co.uk/
Then again, not the most stable app, fot okay for seem fixing. For texturing a whole character deeppaint is still far superior, but that's another subject...
Hyru! I have been trying the polyboost demo rencently but saw nothing related to seam painting in there. Could you elaborate a little?
Hyru! I have been trying the polyboost demo rencently but saw nothing related to seam painting in there. Could you elaborate a little?
[/ QUOTE ]
The seam painting feature is called "viewport canvas". Check out demo video number 2 here: Polyboost Demo Video . It's actually pretty full featured for such a little app, you can paint, clone, and use layer blending modes, all within max's viewport.
For tougher jobs, you can also make a "stamp" to bring into photoshop and the changes will update automatically in max, but so far I've just been cloning out seams right in the viewport.
cheers
I can load a "guide texture" as if I gave a shit about some totally non-interactive thing for color picking...
So anyway, what button am I missing here?
I tried .Obj format also. In that case it doesn't load anything that I can tell.
Thanks though... maybe I can figure it out now
Could this be it?
[Edit]
Having tried Tattoo now I certainly dont think I'll be able to work with it. Maybe I should just spend the cash and get something non-crappy.
I had no problem with my UV tools and,
I had no problem using mental ray for the bakes (before it was hanging when it went to render)
I use zbrush with Zapplink for seams plus some tricks of uvw mapping.
[/ QUOTE ]
Same here - it's just a shame that it seems to pixelate everything so much when you come out of projection mode.
I've been using it for hair, positioning the model so that I can see the join, Zapping it and photopainting in photoshop. I've tried setting my zbrush document size to 4 times the default (so around 2000x2000) but when I come out of projection mode I get a lot of artifacts.