Enzo is good when it works, but too often it garbles areas on my texture I haven't touched or spent time polishing, pixelating and smearing them. Inelegant UI too, and Ryan Clark is a UI god. Puny humans!
Looks like we'll be picking up 20 or so licenses, as soon as IT gets around to placing the order. After the free betas, it's just too ingrained in our pipeline at this point, shame on me for introducing it to the art directors :-)
Yeah the projection paint thing is probably too big of a commitment - plus Ryan could work on that for a year and then Adobe could release the exact same functionality. . .
The tiling canvas view, on the other hand, would be universally useful to texture artists, and is a much smaller project. . .
One thing I see a big failure in over and over again in game art is in setting up good extremes for facial expressions. We never seem to get strong enough creasing or dramatic enough face changes. Most face systems have some kind of normal map blending to get creases, whether they are combined with skeletal systems or morph systems. I think both Gears of War and Mass Effect used this approach. I think maybe Heavenly Sword did as well. Some kind of tool that could be used for getting really strong expressions would be very useful. You could import a head mesh and base expressions, and then use crazy bump style texture generation and tweaking to get modified normal, diffuse, spec, etc maps that accentuate the expression. . . It's not a fully baked idea, but it could be very cool and is sort of an extrapolation of crazy bump.
Much Congrats to you Ryan, I've found your software invaluable to my daily work flow and will be purchasing a copy a.s.a.p! Good luck to you and keep on rocking.^_^
Hey, that might be pretty cool. I'm thinking something along the lines of Mudbox combined with blend shapes and bones. Rig your face, move the bones to get close to what you want, then start editing a new blend shape from that, painting creases and the like. That is, if your game supports bones and blend shapes together. Or maybe just use blend shapes or just bones and paint on those. You can already do this, extracting OBJ shapes from your rig, and painting those in ZB or Mud. But it requires the export middleman.
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Looks like we'll be picking up 20 or so licenses, as soon as IT gets around to placing the order. After the free betas, it's just too ingrained in our pipeline at this point, shame on me for introducing it to the art directors :-)
The tiling canvas view, on the other hand, would be universally useful to texture artists, and is a much smaller project. . .
One thing I see a big failure in over and over again in game art is in setting up good extremes for facial expressions. We never seem to get strong enough creasing or dramatic enough face changes. Most face systems have some kind of normal map blending to get creases, whether they are combined with skeletal systems or morph systems. I think both Gears of War and Mass Effect used this approach. I think maybe Heavenly Sword did as well. Some kind of tool that could be used for getting really strong expressions would be very useful. You could import a head mesh and base expressions, and then use crazy bump style texture generation and tweaking to get modified normal, diffuse, spec, etc maps that accentuate the expression. . . It's not a fully baked idea, but it could be very cool and is sort of an extrapolation of crazy bump.
http://www.lbrush.com/max.htm