Maya Vertex Chameleon

AndrewRH

Hi polycounters

http://www.renderheads.com/portfolio/VertexChameleon/

That's where you'll see videos and be able to download the beta of this new vertex colour plugin I've been making for Maya.

The idea with this tool is to make much more powerful vertex colour tools than what Maya currently has. We made these tools with good workflow and fast feedback in mind, and tried to create tools that vertex colour artists desperately need in Maya.

It has a few neat technical features as well, which is why I posted this in this forum. Real-time sliders that give dynamic feedback on colour adjustments. 3D texture sampling, blend modes, and coming in a few days will be proper support for LAYERS (think colorset editor but with realtime compositing and each colorset having a blend mode and blend opacity etc).

Looking forward to your comments

Andrew

Farfarer

Sweet, I'll be playing with this tomorrow

We've just started using the vertex colour stuff in Maya at work and the existing toolset's been driving us insane. Looks like this might have popped up just in the nick of time.

bugo

nice thing man! very! I would have a test for this today. I hope you guys make a texture blending with vertex some day.

pior

Oh man I've been asking around for something like this for ages!!!
Thanks!

sama.van

wow perfect!!

Thanks a lot!

AndrewRH

Cool I'm glad you guys like it

Hugo - could you explain more about this "texture blending with vertex" feature you mentioned?

AndrewRH

As promised the new layers feature is in! (as well as a bunch of bug fixes and other enhancements)

You can see it in action in the video or try it yourself using the download on the website. It's still in beta so there might still be some bugs. If you find any please let me know so I can fix them

Downloads and videos here:

http://www.renderheads.com/portfolio/VertexChameleon/

If you like the tool please tell your friends

bugo

Hi Andrew, I sent you a PM about the "texture blending with vertex" thing. Thanks man!
I see you´re new at the forum so im going to post here as well.

You asked me about the vertex texture blending feature i was wondering if you can add.

So, as for Gamebryo engine or whatever engine you may think there´s always a feature you paint an alpha or different color that can blend textures into vertex, like this:

input 0 = mud
input 1 = grass
input 0.5 = 50% of mud, 50% of grass.

or

input 0 = mud
input 1 = grass
input 2 = etc
input 3 = etc

It´s a simple blending of textures by vertex paiting, and not by mask texture.
This is very useful when trying to bring terrains to life, and we game devs always needed that. I know there´s a node for mentalray that does that but not for realtime viewport and that sucks.

Wish you guys do something like that, I would love to see that in Maya viewport working with High Quality rendering.

If you didnt understand me, take a look at this picture
http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/3571/seamlessshadergroundsu9.jpg

As for 2 textures would be very great, because you can do more materials in top of that and blend even more textures in, but if you guys think you can blend more 3 or 4 textures, thats great!

Thanks for your attention.
Looking forward to see some updates.

Brice Vandemoortele

Great tool, very easy to use and complete

I don't think blending texture is a good idea, I would rather keep focus on a cool and intuitive vertex color tool. It is very easy afterward to build a shader that use the vertex color info to do the blend.

Illusions

Brice Vandemoortele wrote: »

It is very easy afterward to build a shader that use the vertex color info to do the blend.

http://www.alexkam.com/tutorials/paint_vertex_color/

I was wondering what Brice meant by this as I couldn't find anything to do it with in the standard Maya nodes, but Mental Ray is apparently the answer again after doing some internet digging!

Brice Vandemoortele

Well as these boards are about game art I always think in terms of realtime rendering, but it's good to know that mentalray can do this

Illusions

Brice Vandemoortele wrote: »

Well as these boards are about game art I always think in terms of realtime rendering, but it's good to know that mentalray can do this

Wait, whats the realtime solution for blending between two file textures using vertex color in Maya?

Brice Vandemoortele

I think there is no solution out of the box, you have to write a cgfx shader

bugo

So, i was asking to add a feature, and not to take out what Chameleon Vertex tool have. But anyway, yes, we are trying to achieve the effect in realtime, not rendering. I don´t understand Brice why wouldnt you want to have vertex texture blending as a good feature. Whatever is new would be great to have.

Brice Vandemoortele

I don't think that 'Whatever is new would be great to have'. I prefer a clean UI for a good tool that do a good job in a precise area (vertex color edition). In my opinion blending textures is just one of the many usage we can do with vertex info. Maya was lacking a good vertex color tool, not a proper shading system. In a real production environment programmers would write a custom shader anyway.
Imagine now that AndrewRH integrates texture blending. Are we expecting the ability to have normal maps? to have specular? Where will you link those maps? Where do we fix a limit to how big this feature is? I think it should be limited to vertex color edition since a very versatile tool already exist to do the rest

bugo

simple, just set enable to alpha on the blending, this will grant us to have each material to each input. I dont want to have simple vertex texture blending, but vertex material blending too. And by alpha i think Maya can achieve that, it depends if it has to be by plugin or creating a new material node. I´m not sure if just by Mel maya can have that. Also, i´m not asking to add this feature to the chameleon, whatever they want to do, and IF they want to do that would be great.

Steve Schulze

I dip my hat to you sir, this will save me and my team a lot of time while doing hand-held games on DS and PSP. Thanks a lot for this.

If you're looking for more features to add, you could look at improving on the way that vertex faces works. Its a bit problematic as it currently stands - it tends to be very slow, selection is a pain in the arse and the whole setup feels like it could work much beter with some thought put in.

AndrewRH

Bugo, Brice & Illusions:
I like your idea of the vertex texture blending, I think it would be very useful, and quite fun actually to see this in realtime as you paint! I have added it to the wish list And you guys are right - I think cgFX/HLSL would be the way to go. You could create a shader material which displayed the results in realtime much more easily than writing more plugin code (takes very long time . Maybe I'll get around to playing with this if nobody else does it first.

Jackablade:
Glad you like it! Could you explain a bit more what you mean about the vertex-face mode not working that well? Have you seen the "force component" option in the settings tab?

Currently the plugin is at version 0.9. I think it's pretty much feature-complete for moving forward to version 1.0, just a bunch of bugs that still need fixing and some documentation to do. I have some really cool ideas for version 1.1 though, but until then I'll just try to tie up all the loose ends. Thanks for your feedback and please show your friends and work mates and send me any more bugs and requests

Andrew

AndrewRH

Ok, I had some ideas on how to do the texture-blending idea and I actually couldn't wait to test it out.

Here's a video of the result:

http://www.vimeo.com/1337717

I'll add it to the next release

DInusty

awesome. well done great tool indeed.

Illusions

That video is awesome Andrew!

bugo

thats great to see the blending working! Thanks alooot for the add. Quick question, is normal map, specularmap working with it, or just diffuse?

AndrewRH

Just diffuse so far. Would be useful to also have normal and specular maps? You have example of this? Maybe I can add it.

bugo

Yeah, for sure, all terrains today have specular and normal maps for their games, as I shown in this picture, this has nmap and specular maps.
http://img135.imageshack.us/img135/3...rgroundsu9.jpg

AndrewRH

Very interesting! I will try to add normal map and specular support.

bugo

Andrew is this a base node from Maya you made? Or its a cgfx shader?

AndrewRH

bugo, it's a cgfx shader

bugo

aah, cool, ok, thanks for the info man, looks great!

Brice Vandemoortele

awesome

AndrewRH

Ok just a quick update..
I'm busy working on the Chameleon plugin.. getting it ready for version 1.0. Fixing the last of the bugs, writing the documentation, fixing the website etc..

So you can expect a final version soon

I've also been working on the vertex-texture blending that we've been talking about here.. Here's a screenshot of the progress today. I'm no artist, but basically I think you can see what it is showing.. 3 diffuse textures, each with normal map phong lighting blending together based on vertex alpha, and then finally multiplied by the vertex RGB.

Larger version here:
http://www.renderheads.com/temp/terrain_progress1.jpg

bugo

yeah, thats it man! Amazing job!

Allert

Hi,

You guys have made an awesome tool, I had two questions:

1. could someone post a link to the cgFX shader that allows for textureBlending?
2. Will there be support for animated vertexColors someday?

keep up the good work!

- Allert

AndrewRH

yes I'll post it here soon Allert.. just fixing it up a bit

Animated vertex colours? How do you mean? I know Maya has some vertex colour keyframing thing.. but I've never used it.

Also - new version of the Vertex Chameleon tool is out:
http://www.renderheads.com/portfolio/VertexChameleon/

Allert

Ah good news! I'm looking forward to the shader. Also, forgive me for being so pushy, but I thought of something else that would be really cool to have: is there a plan to have 2d texture->vertexColors? next to the possibility to convert 3D textures to vertexColors, which is embedded already (I don't use these kind of textures much, so I was just wondering)..

As for the vertexColor animations, yeah, the reason I was asking this, is because, if you have like an animation of a bouncing ball, inside a small room, and you occlusionBake the object's vertices, say at frame 1, thats cool. But on all the other frames, the animated object's shading looks weird obviously, since the baking only worked for that frame in space and time..

so, I would bake the object, let's say, every 5 frames or so, and made a keyframe for that with Maya's built in vertexColor keyframe thingy (which blended the colors quite nicely), but this doesn't work anymore as it should in Maya 2008, so I thought, maybe you guys could make a more advanced version of this, which actually would work

Anyhow, I know this is a big wishlist, but keep up the awesome job, vertexColors have never been this much fun in a LONG time.

- Allert

limeforce

Hm, wonder if anyone uses this anymore? I found out about it, got curious, found no prebuilt plugin for Maya 2016 but found the code on Github. Then I got compiling. Now I have a binary that can be loaded through Plugin Manager, but none of the functions in the compiled code work More info here: http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?5265-Compiling-Vertex-Chameleon-for-Maya-2015

This is 8 years old though, better solutions must have surfaced by now...? Enlighten me folks. Is it that nobody uses vertex colors anymore or is there some way cooler tool on the market?

m4dcow

I used it quite a bit 2 years ago when there was the mini golf challenge, I think they had recently made it free at the time.
http://polycount.com/discussion/130450/golf-reef/p2

Vertex colour stuff is still used a lot for mobile and I haven't come across anything better than this at manipulating vertex colours.

GrandéBlondé

Hey there! If anyone still reads this, I have questions about the installation of vertex chameleon.

I'm trying to install it to Maya 2014 on macbook OS X version 10.8.5, and I don't quite understand the installation instructions. It says to "Open VertexChameleonPluginModule.txt, and edit it's path to be the folder where you've installed VertexChameleon."

I've looked up what it means to edit paths, and it looks like you're modifying the code? It also says you "must edit the path to point to where UVAutoRatio is installed." I've searched through my computer and can't find any files that match that description.

So firstly, I'm not sure what it means or how to edit a path, and I can't find UVAutoRatio, though I would probably default to Applications/Maya/Maya2014. 

However, it also says to copy the txt file under maya.app, which is not displayed in my maya 2014 folder. When I search for it in finder I get several results but they all have other extensions, like "maya.app.analytics" for example.

So there's several things that I'm having a hard time reconciling, because I can't find the files that the instructions are referring to. I read that there were issues getting it to work with 2015-16, but I am using 2014 so that shouldn't be the problem. Do I need to know how to code in order to install this plugin?