Max equivalent of modo's Geometry To Brush?

El Burritoh

Just wondering what Max's equivalent of modo's Geometry to Brush command is. I've been using it to create Alphas for use in Zbrush. Instead of sculpting small mechanical details, I've been modeling them and kicking out height fields (which make great alphas!)


Just wondering what Max's equivalent for creating height-field images of geometry is...

pior

One way is to grab a realtime shader that does just that : depth rendering. Then screengrab. I have that for Maya, but sadly cannot post it.

Another way doable in every program is more ghetto but also easier to control. Simply setup the UVs of that mesh to be perpendicular to the camera you want to use for rendering, and apply a white to black gradient as a texture.

Also, you could very well create a second camera and project that gradient texture from it. This way you wouldnt even need UVs.

3DCoat has this built in for alpha creation, with a little editor where you orient the mesh to capture. It's absolutely brillant.

Good luck!

Bal

This is also built into Zbrush, it's a tool called MRGBZGrabber, and is quite handy, especially if you're goal is to make ZB alphas (even though 3DCoat's version looks much more streamlined and powerful).

El Burritoh

Thanks!

@prior: Good to know about the realtime shader option. Sounds like you're limited to your screen resolution, but in most cases that's more than plenty.

@Bal: yes, but even MRGBZGrabber (seriously, could they rename that?) requires geometry in the first place. Personally, I have much easier time modeling things like this in traditional programs. It's just way faster for me to do that than try and model/sculpt it in Zbrush and use the Grabber. Now I could bring these in as Subtools, but imagine how many subtools I'd have on a ship or something!

It sounds like modo's method of creating these height-fields is competitive and efficient when compared to Max or Maya. I know XSI can't do it nearly as easily. Modo gives you some quick options for resolution and axis. And it works on a selection of polys rather than a whole mesh if you want. I added a button to my interface that fires the Geo2Brush command with 1k, 1000 iterations and Y axis as it's presets. It's literally instant.\

Anyway, no matter how you do it, this is definitely easier than trying to sculpt this junk from scratch! There's no way I could create these details that easily in Zbrush alone!

pior

Yup I agree El :P

On creating that kind of geometry straight in Zbrush : I agree that in general it's a pain, and obviously sculpting doesnt cut it. However it seems like there is a few original ways (read : backwards, convoluted, impossible to guess) to achieve that kind of stuff with stock Zbrush fonctions. You could find some examples of that if you look for Meats Meier work. Through selection tricks and shape modifiers he manages to build little geometry details like that straight in Z (he already did that with Zbrush 2 iirc). He then stacks them up to create Giger-esque structures.

Bal

Yeah obviously I meant importing your modeled objects into zbrush to grab them, which definitely (defiantly!) adds boring steps to your process. =\

Xenobond

you can also render a HeightMap of the object to a plane with Render To Texture.

MoP

Yeah Xenobond's route is what I usually do - no special material setup needed, just make a plane and do a render to texture with heightmap.

Hell, if you just want the image, turn on Render Elements, add the Z-depth element pass, and just do a standard render from the Top/Front/Right or whatever viewport. That'll give you the depth, quick and easy, no messing around required.

Protip: It'd probably be quite easy to script something that just renders the selection to a z-depth image based on the current camera.

achillesian

cool theres finally a use for modo

Farfarer

There are a lot of uses for modo

El Burritoh

Talon wrote: »

There are a lot of uses for modo

Amen to that.

onionhead_o

So i take that as a no for equivalent for max?

Mark Dygert

onionhead_o wrote: »

So i take that as a no for equivalent for max?

Ahem...

Xenobond wrote: »

you can also render a HeightMap of the object to a plane with Render To Texture.

And...

MoP wrote: »

Yeah Xenobond's route is what I usually do - no special material setup needed, just make a plane and do a render to texture with heightmap.

Hell, if you just want the image, turn on Render Elements, add the Z-depth element pass, and just do a standard render from the Top/Front/Right or whatever viewport. That'll give you the depth, quick and easy, no messing around required.

Protip: It'd probably be quite easy to script something that just renders the selection to a z-depth image based on the current camera.

Or where you checking in to see if someone had scripted it out yet?

El Burritoh

And by the way, I need to add that if you use modo to create these height maps, be sure to save them as a 16-bit file format. If you save them as a PSD directly out of modo, they will be 8-bit, and even if you convert that to 16-bit grayscale in photoshop to use in Zbrush, the resulting sculpt will be faceted. So be sure you save out a 16-bit version from the source and start with that to create your alphas.

renderhjs

one could write a script that stores the depth Buffer as greyscale images to either

• the FrameBuffer (like in the screen of Modo)
• clipboard using DotNet
• to a specified or asked location on the disc

of course one can catch the bounding box size of the Geometry and place an orthographic camera in front of it (centering stuff) and then just render the selected geometry through that generated camera.

Is there a way in Zbrush to paste clipboard images (windows in this case) in its panels or brush presets?

I could dig into some scripting stuff to get the code snippets ready

edit:
the core article to this in maxscript is the
How To ... Access the Z-Depth channel Tutorial

http://www.kxcad.net/autodesk/Autodesk_MAXScript_Reference_9/How_To_Access_the_Z_Depth_channel.htm
(or in the local 3dsmax maxscript reference)
it describes how you can access the z-Depth channel from any rendering,- of course that information can also be dumped into a 8bit grey scale image.

danr

dead quick way :

if you save as a .rla file, you can view the zdepth from the pulldown in the render output window

not sure in the slightest how to save this out properly into something that photoshop will open, but you can screengrab it