Max 2010 Modeling tools - any early impressions?
I know Max 2010 just came out, but I'm wondering if anyone has had a change to play with the new graphite modeling tools (polyboost) that are included with Max. I'm an XSI guy because I love there modeling/selection tools, but I have been looking for a good retopology program and was thinking of giving Max a try. (Topogun is buggy, Zbrush crashes ![:\](https://polycount.com/plugins/emojiextender/emoji/twitter/confused.png ":\")
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Anyone tried them out yet?
)Anyone tried them out yet?
Replies
My current workflow is based on Max9 and Topogun and the only good reason to abandon it would be to get similar functionality in one package. So far the Graphite stuff doesn't flow as well for me, but I haven't been trying that hard.
The reason is that I prefer a top-down approach in Topogun as well, so instead of laying down strips or drawing on the surface I tend to continuously refine the geometry. Cut cut cut basicaly, with the occasional connect. This way I can retopo a full head with 3-4000 all quad polys in 1-2 days, where considerable time is spent on tweaking the final surface to keep al the details and characteristic features. Detailed facial animation needs to have control over these, can't keep them in the difference maps, gotta have all the mesh detail. Retopo tends to wash these forms out and I haven't found any automatic solution, so I go in and paint the details back manually and that takes time.
This workflow doesn't really fit the Graphite/Polyboost approach. I have to keep switching between panels and Cut is as unreliable as it's always been... and all the funky Flow Connect stuff doesn't matter when you're working on retopo tasks. And I do notice a speed hit as well, 2010 is just bogged down with these new UI things.
I'll probably give it another try though and try my best to reconfigure the UI and shortcuts to see how far I can take it. But it seems that Topogun is pretty hard to beat
No more crashes then Max9 though. The autosave in Max is a big relief that Topogun doesn't have so those crashes hurt more, hence the lots of saves.
Anyone else notice that?
B
also agree with perna 1-2 days seems quite a lot of time for the retopo of a head
Probably a misunderstanding. I'm talking about tracing all the major folds and wrinkles and building an animation oriented topology (and I include the ears
And I'm also talking about putting the highres sculpt and the rebuilt model on top of each other, setting a turbosmooth level 2 on the new mesh, and matching the result to the sculpt with a 1-2mm tolerance. There really aren't any other tools to work with the derived surface but your eyes.
If you guys can do that faster, then I'm open for workflow suggestions. But I also reserve the right to criticize your topology
Protip: Rub Per's belly to avoid him ripping your face off, if you go a little lower he might spill a few secrets while he sleeps...
As for the modeling tools, I'm a big fan of polyboost for 3dsmax2009. Unfortunately at work we're upgrading as soon as this project is over, 2-3mo from now. So its installed I've poked around and set up the UI so its ready but so far I'd rather stick to 2009 + vanilla polyboost.
The ribbon eats up too much space and when docked horizontally. When docked vertically only really works on the left side of the screen and still eats up too much space to leave out. I don't do too much modeling these days so I'll be leaving it off but if I was to model something it would come out in a heart beat.
hey, that stuff looks very useful, but i thought i'd see new retopo tools like it was at crashy polyboost plugin.
There are so many useful tools and features in it, just wouldnt like having it perma-locked to the UI. Should give them a go before just shutting it off because they're "new and different" (like new underwear)!
We switched to 2010 here at work, and i fucking hate it right now. Just am having all sorts of wierd issues and crashes and shit.
I'm using 2009 up to export so I can save time.
graphite modeling GUI = unuseable
in general its the GUI that made everything bad,- the scripts itself are very good but autodesk failed somehow with their new GUI attempt. Its clunky - very hard to adjust and lags to often. Apart from that are like 100 different small icons pretty difficult to learn and understand if the tooltips take forever to come up and are to big so that they rather annoy in many cases.
It would be nice if someone would either create a maxscript ´panel with the former Polyboost layout or autodesk release as a xtra the classic Polyboost interface.
Btw. regarding retopology, I use this lately alot:
http://scriptspot.com/3ds-max/max-retopo
it beats any other solution if you love the max modeling interface and perhaps rely on other scripts such as polyboost to model.
I just used max 2009 like I said, and all was good
I'm sorry if I've appeared to be arrogant. The entire point here is not to simply "get it done", but to get it done right. I can get it done in a day, too, but that hasn't been good enough for our purposes as it didn't keep all the characteristic features. That's where it gets complicated...
All the retopo tools work with the control mesh and have tools to fit that to the reference model. The trouble is that we're interested in the derived surface and there are no methods to automaticaly fit that to the reference. After a single subdivision the vertices of the control mesh are smoothed out and sink under the reference surface. Details get washed out.
Now for facial animation you want to be able to smooth out a lot of folds and dimples and such when you stretch the tissue. The only way to do that without animated displacement maps (which is what I'm experimenting with right now) is to keep these details in the mesh and out of the displ/normal maps. So you need a very, very accurate model from retopo. Without proper tools we have to eyeball it, and that's the part that takes time, in fact a lot of time.
It doesn't help if you just push every vertex out along its normal... The only reliable method I've found was to lay the derived surface on top of the original, make it transparent, grab your Wacom and sculpt until it's close enough. Oh and you need to sculpt the control mesh while viewing your derived surface - fortunately it's now possible in Maya 2009 too.
I realize I've got a little sidetracked from 3ds max 2010 though
this is something that is not easy to achieve and part of ongoing research
http://www.mathematik.tu-darmstadt.de/fbereiche/geometrie/events/rhartmann/Interactive%20surface%20reconstruction%20on%20triangle%20meshes.pdf
Yup we are indeed more used to talk about a few hours when it comes to facial retopo here, but like you mentioned this is mostly for game material.
I think we were surprised by the 2 days mark because what you describe is still a very similar process to the one used in games - and its usually not taking too long.
Could you post some screenshots? It might clarify things, and also maybe someone might have some workflow or tool that might speed you up when it comes to that close matching.
Also - you mention that details tends to sink under the ref's surface when smoothed. Indeed, and there might be a trick you could use. In Zbrush IIRC there is an interesting option that lets you 'extrapolate' your lower levels of subdivision to match the current, higher level once they are subdivided themselves. (in a sculpting app, when importing say a cube, divinding it, sculpting a little and then stepping down, the low cube is not a cube anymore. This option takes care of that)
I've known about the Zbrush option and used it before, but in my experience it isn't reliable at all. Creates messy stuff al the time... Although I haven't tested it with reasonably high res meshes, so I'll look into it the next time we work on a head. Thanks for the tip
As for screenshots, unfortunately I'd have to run everything through the client's legal people and I'm afraid they wouldn't bother with reasoning like "need to show it on polycount".
The last time we've had these issues was with the Assassin 2 trailer. Both of the nobles had all kinds of small characteristic features around the mouth and lips and because of the short production schedule we haven't been thorough enough with the retopo so some of these facial features are permanent regardless of their expressions... still bothers the hell out of me.
CrazyButcher, that's some pretty interesting stuff, I've seen another research paper some years ago that had the David statue, but I guess you're kinda right that it's not easy to replace the human factor here...
Okay. This is insane. It may make me drop Topogun altogether... Amazing stuff. How reliable is it in the long term?
P.S Update your damn website already though!
Actual retopo is going fast enough already, even with 4000 faces I usually get that part done in a day... but I've just got very excited about this 3ds max script on renderhjs's link.
You can also bind a key to toggle it on/off too as well as dock it vertically.
To change its orientation they have a button in the customizeUI menu >Toolbars tab, drag it out, click it once and it changes. You can get rid of the button after that. There might be a button to toggle it on/off, already in the UI if not I'm pretty sure its in the customizeUI menu.
The script render posted is a good one, works pretty well. It will sometimes shrink inside the reference mesh so using a push modifier or dragging verts out can help it conform. It works best if you start the mesh on the outside and allow it to shrink. I think its based on Paul Hormis's shrink wrap script?
You can also try:
WrapIt (currently in beta testing, if you ask he'll probably let you test. Same idea, only more features and a little less hacked together)
http://www.thepixelhive.com/spe.php?o=163
3DCoat Retopo Tool (not a script but looks amazing)
http://3dcoat.com/tutorials/Retopo/retopology.htm
Polyboost has has some features that helps but I've found shift dragging while snapping to a frozen high poly mesh to be just as fast. This is probably the slowest method of them all. WrapIt is probably the fastest most tweakable way to get it done quickly while still working in 3dsmax.
You shouldn't have to eyeball every vert, just every other =P
Hope that helps! Good luck!
3dsmax:
- In the bump slot put a composite map. (hopefully you are using 2008+)
- Create your base bump with no wrinkles plug it into the left map slot of layer 1 (rename it to base, icon right above the layer setting)
- Now create your wrinkle bumps for various regions and plug them into new layers. Setting the blend method to overlay (we use b/w bumps, so they overlay on the base fine, could be trickier with other methods).
- Create a mask for each region and plug those into the right map slot. Try not to overlap regions as the one highest in the list will blend over the top of the lower, just like photoshop.
- Set 1 key for the opacity of each layer, it will now show up in track view, reaction manager and wire parameters. You can then wire the opacity to whatever control method you use. We use a control board that is driving morphs and bones at the same time as the wrinkle maps.
Example.
You can also blend in other wrinkle maps like, diffuse(add a little AO), spec, gloss, whatever maps you want. Use the exact same method for those slots Then wire it to the same controls so they're driven at the same time.
Maya:
Get the book Stop Starring by Jason Opsa. Same thing slightly different workflow.
I hope this helps your research!
The most reliable method I've found is in a presentation from Naughty Dog, basically a default map and two extremes, with various masks blending between them. Here's the doc, it's quite straight:
http://www.naughtydog.com/corporate/press/GDC%202008/Mudbox%20GDC%202008.pps
They're using three maps because of the realtime budget, I think it's possible to use more but you have to set up more and more complex rules for them. For example one extreme pose has the brows raised and the other has them squeezed, but what about the often used browMidRaise + squeeze combo? With this method you'd need a third map that overridesthe previous ones... I feel lots and lots of math nodes coming up
So you blend between the maps using masks, mine are 512*512 at the moment and I have about 15 of them; although it's possible that you can use vertex colors or such as well.
Also, we're using both displacement and normal maps, and Zbrush, so it's a bit more complicated to get the sculpts and then to extract the maps. The tricky part is that you ahve to wrap both the Zbrush level 1 geometry and the Zbrush morph target (that you use for the map extraction) to the animated model when you set the extreme poses. Then import these back into your original Zbrush sculpt and you have the same head in the new pose, fully working.
But yeah it resembles alot the other commercial version except its a bit more stripped down to to core and is free.
That is quite a bit more complicated, we're just painting them in, for our purposes we don't need to get that percise. The camera stays a set distance away from the characters too so that removes a lot of the headaches. If we did start using sculpts we would probably end up wrangling the morphs and baking in 3dsmax, we use mudbox and baking maps is a bit of a pain.
We started out using vertex paint for the blends but ran into display issues. We also found masks pretty easy to carry over from character to character with very little tweaking.
I don't know what Wrapit will be priced (not sure he knows yet) but considering there are a few ways to do the same thing and probably more popping up as time goes on, hopefully he won't go crazy, but I do think its worth paying for.
http://podblanc.com/idiocracy-hospital-scene
Can I expect something like this in max 2015?
If they rolled it into Edit Poly, they would probably have to reorder everything for it to make sense and that would slow down a lot of people making it more disorganized than editable spline.
So rather then create a 3rd modifier and have to juggle 5 total (editable mesh, edit mesh, editable poly, edit poly, edit polyboost) they went this route. I think they went with the ribbon because they already had it in other apps and those users more or less liked it. And they wouldn't be directly slapping a AD sticker on polyboost calling it good like they've done with a lot of other stuff.
I've also tried a quick test: subdivide the control mesh once and keep it snapped to the sculpt using the Retopo script; then export to Zbrush, reconstruct the level 1 subdiv and use the Cage button.
It actually worked reasonably well, the first thing however is that your edges won't always line up with the intended surface details and there's still some manual tweaking to do. But it is still far beyond the completely manual approach so I'll probably use it for the final model tomorrow.
So Retopo is pretty cool, and as usual Zbrush can also be used for some more tricky magical thing...
and its not easy to create a UI that offers all the tools in a intuitive and quick/ responsive system. But personally the reason why I prefer the older Polyboost GUI over the Graphite GUI is:
- responds like 1000x faster, there is simply no delay or hick up due to fancy effects and transparency effects.
- easier to remember by label because it uses the Initial Characters of each functionality like CL = corner loop, LS = loop select. If you know what you are looking for its so much easier to spot the Character buttons instead of autodesk icons that even need to be unhidden by some stacks and rollers.
- comes with tabs (or something close to it); in graphite tools its often all cluttered together making it even harder to catch the right tiny icon.
all in all Graphite tools GUI mostly is:
- hard to read
- slow in performance
- hard to configure and bloated default configuration (like a 1000px x 300px horizontal bar that eats almost 1/5th of the total screen!!!
- not consistent with the rest of the GUI. Just like the ugly WIndows XP it has almost like 3 different Icon design types and now even more GUI handler types - its a super uber mess, they should look more often at Silo and Modo.
- comes with annoying screen anti-aliasing (or screen blur to some people) which cant be disabled.
but I am happy in a way for autodesk because they do want to change 3dsmax and the Graphite GUI was a first step. Sure they failed but I am very confident that they will respond with the next release on all this complaints and improve it alot compared to this version.
Its a bit like Vista that was so bad that the next windows version can only get better and first impressions reflect that very well. Likewise I think autodesk almost has to react to this issue.
The ribbon has miles of horizontal dead space when you're not using it. It also impacts heavily the command panels vertical space, with its dead zone. Which means more lame command panel scrolling, even if you expand it 1 or 2 columns.
"But Graphite has a collapsed mode! It's giving you back some of that space!"
Now the tools are not one click away but, click tab, mouse over, click button, fail.
I get that its hard to pack so much into a useful interface and I think they might be moving in the right direction it just needs to not reserve so much space when its not in use and stay out when it can be used. Until its able to figure it out on its own, I'll just manually toggle it using the customizeUI > Modeling Tools > Launch Graphite Tools button.
You can tear off parts of the ribbon and if you drag and drop the pieces on top of each other then they stick together.
You can edit the 3dsmax.ini file so that the ribbon doesn't cut into the command tab, add the text under the [WindowState] part.
Also, if you open the Customize UI window you'll find somewhere under the main commands something like Toggle Modeling Ribbon Orientation, although I couldn't get it to work with a keyboard shortcut - but a simple toolbar button worked fine.
Using these you can tweak the layout a bit. It is still slow though... But I kinda think that it's no more cluttered or confusing then the original PolyBoost UI
The first time I dragged out the vert/horiz toggle, it only worked when graphite was active. I never really settled on one way or the other, so I left it out. After restarting 3dsmax it was available every time, active or not.
I think they note in the help files that the hot key won't work for some odd reason... maybe it was a blog post... can't remember.
The Vertical alignment "works" in the loosest sense. The tabs spill out to the right over the command panel when docked on the right, kind of annoying if you click something in the command panel by accident. It also runs off the bottom of the screen (yea more scrolling). If they worked on removing the wasted space in and around the buttons in the vertical alignment, there wouldn't be any reason to scroll.
So I lean toward Horiz alignment with the new window order and only call it out when needed.
Has anyone found a solution to this problem? I didn't see anyone else mention this again in the thread (if I missed it my bad).
That little pause gets really annoying.