Any one got a tool to paint across 2 models in 3d space?

malcolm

I want to do a couple touch ups on some lightmap seams between 2 seperate terrain meshes, the uv's are not shared. Maya's 3d paint tool can't blur across multiple meshes. Sorry the title is wrong I want to blur across multiple meshes not paint.

cryrid

I'm not sure what tools are available to you in Maya, but I imagine you should be able to render off a camera's view of the seam, paint/blur your corrections over that in photoshop, project it back onto multiple models as a camera projection, and then bake that projection onto your maps / uvs.

Wheel

Sorry I can't stop myself saying it "doh". You couldn't combine them, blur then separate.

glib

Why not just line up the lightmaps in photoshop and blur/paint/clone it out, then save each one out again?

malcolm

Wheel, no can do combining doesn't help since their uv's aren't stitched.

glib, the lightmaps are different resolutions so it would be quite tricky to line them up but I'll give that a try.

Michael Knubben

If you've got photoshop cs3 extended or cs4 (regular), then you could paint it in there (and yes, blurring should work, although I don't like what it does to seams a lot of the time)

Neox

also mudboy, deeppaint and bodypaint are able to do that with projections, i guess zbrush too somehow

Mark Dygert

I too summon mudboy to fix my seams, the ritual is kind of freaky and he makes a mess of my keyboard but he does good work.

Being a max guy I wonder if you could adopt peterk's method of using 2 UV channels?

In theory, you would combine the meshes, create a new UV channel and specifically map the seam area, render out UV2, paint your fix apply it to the meshes and render the fixed seam into UV1 of each mesh. Making sure to turn off aliasing and other misc "blur the crap out of things filters".

But honestly I think Pea and Neox have good suggestions.

renderhjs

I was about to write a script sometime soon for TexTools that transfers camera maps back and forth between max and photoshop - so you could take a snapshot from any view and it would render or capture the viewport in the clipboard. Back in PS one could then paint over that perspective view.
In max then finally the script would mix in some camera map UV in a different channel and RTT the texture bake back to the clipboard.

Someone here at PC mentioned that Ubisoft has exactly something like that in their studios- it would be a nice way to fix texture seams and other stuff without the need of bodypaint or mudbox.
Not sure when I will start with it though as I have some busy matters to deal with right now.

Slum

RenderHJS: that sounds awesome, pretty much just ZAppLink for Zbrush in max.

I'd love you forever.

Michael Knubben

Polyboost has that. I haven't used it with 2010's Graphite tools yet, but I imagine it's in there too.
Can anyone chime in on that?
If it's in there, it's fairly good. It made my texture's slightly noisier every time I used it (so more for final tweaks than back-and-forth texturing), so that's something to keep in mind.
Is there a way to reliably create a mask/selection based on the difference between a layer and everything underneath it? somewhat related, as I find myself wanting this when 3d-painting and copying a flattened layer back into my psd.

renderhjs

poyboost comes with its own extreme primitive paint brush system and there is no swapping between PS itself. I can be ok sometimes for using the clone tool in it but the quality is usually not so good- all muddy and often creates additional noise because it caches the viewport results and not some rendering with crisp and highly aliased and filtered maps.

Cebas once had a plugin called ghostPainter

which embedded the PS tools and palettes into max - quite nice but also old - not sure if it works any good with recent version booth of max and PS. Plus its not free or cheap, anyway readup yourself if it interests you:
http://cebas.com/products/products.php?PID=5&UD=10-7888-35-788
edit: damn tiny eeePc keyboard- makes me write garbage

malcolm

Found a solution directly in maya. Turn on screen space projection in the tool settings of the 3d paint then you can blur across multiple meshes textures and objects.

Michael Knubben

renderhjs: it does export projection to Photoshop, though. I'm sure because I used it all the time before the 3dcoat beta!

"Viewport Canvas:
A set of easy to use tools for painting and cloning on an objects texture directly in the 3ds max viewport! It turns the active viewport into a 2d canvas that you can use to paint on and then apply the result to the objects texture. There is also an option to export the current view, so you can take it into Photoshop and use all the tools that Photoshop offers, and then save the file and update the texture in 3ds max. User-defineable brushes, Photoshop blendingmodes."

edit: but ofcourse, we're still talking about software that malcolm doesn't use, heh. Apologies for that, I just wanted to make sure people knew Polyboost did have that option. Glad to hear you figured it out!