Help with Chainmail

Dim

Hey guys, Working on my entry for dom war, and I was wondering how you guys might recommend getting chainmail on my highpoly. So far I've tried a combo of Metaliandy's chain mail script to generate the mail, and MoPKnit to try to get it onto the mesh, but I've run into some issues. Basically, everything works until I try to add a wrap deformer between the chainmail and the mesh it's being deformed onto so that it will wrap back onto the mesh. I'm assuming it's an issue of polys (though it's not very high), but Maya tanks every time I try. Any other techniques you guys could recommend?

The actual mesh is the shirt on this character:



Thanks guys.

Stinger88

I gather you'll be baking the Chain mail after its modeled.

You could skip the modelling part all together and just create a texture using Crazybump or ndo. No need to sweat over the modeling.

Nice model btw.

chrisradsby

Honestly I'd just do it in the texture, seems like it's the easier more efficient way to do it. Nice work so far!

Ace-Angel

You can texture it, then clean up the seams if you want, or you can make a set of circle and overlap them, then use splines to set them around your model.

Max has a Obj2Spline script on Scriptspot which does just this, but since you use Blender and Maya, I have no idea on how you would go about stacking copies of the mesh on a spline in a realtime manner.

Dim

Thanks guys! I guess I'll do it in texture. Is there any decent way to overlay the normals of the chainmail so that it looks like it's deforming with the normals that I bake off the cloth shirt?

Stinger88

I'd bake the shirt and edit the chain texture to match in photoshop. Maybe using liquify

cryrid

With a nice pair of UVs, you might be able to apply a seamless chainmail texture to the mesh and then mask by texture intensity in zbrush.

Ace-Angel

ZBrushWorkshops has one such tutorial about chainmails that cryrid just said.

Neox

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1115091&postcount=156

my experience is, that you either create a good tilable normalmap from actual geometry und use that for texturing or do the described way in this link. It never really looked good to me when just doing it on textureside, like painting a displacement map and converting it to normals etc, the results are just not the same. Also one good thing on the real geometry solution is, that you can give certain parts a different rotations to affect the shading differently, or easily remove rings from the armor, which also adds quite a bit of believability

disanski

I was just looking for this thread that Neox made some time ago- I tried this and it is very easy. Removing some of the rings does make a big difference.

Will Faucher

I don't have any pictures right now, but basically, I made a chainmail displacement map. Actually modelled a tiling set of chainmail (in 3ds Max), rendered out a tiling displacement map, and used that as an alpha. The normal map bake came out GREAT. Then along with a cavity map, it will really bring out the detail. I think the advantage of sculpting the chainmail is basically seeing where the seams and the placement/orientation of the chain will be, directly on the model. Unless you use projection texturing, I think sculpting the chain with a nicely-done alpha can get the job done VERY well.

Edit: I used a technique very similar to Neox's link to make my tiling chainmail mesh.

Dim

I really appreciate the help guys. Neox, I'd seen that tutorial a while back, but couldn't find it again, and it looks fantastic!

Thanks!

CheeseOnToast

God damn, just grabbed Mop's script. Wish I'd picked it up first time round. Uber useful, now I'm just looking for excuses to use it.

Mark Dygert

Yep the method Neox outlined is what I would use. The TexTools UV>3D method requires a bit more work.

TexTools really isn't designed to do this and because of that it won't make a good morph target, you need to break the mesh along UV seams so you have the same number of verts/open edges on your mesh as the UV layout version will have. If this count doesn't match you can't make a morph target, if you can get them to match you have to use Morphix to re-order the vert index table so they match each other. THEN you can morph and skinwarp.

The slideknit script isn't available or supported anymore but I hung onto a copy of it here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2336353/3dsmax-modeling-3-slideknit.zip
I haven't tried it in any newer versions of max past 2008 so it may or may not work. I haven't found anything that works as well as Slideknit should or MoP's Maya script does... But there could be something out there.

You can also attempt to object paint the links onto a mesh, graphite modeling tools has an object paint feature since 2011. SoulBurn Scripts has a great object paint if you're on 2010 or lower.

Personally this has so many uses I don't understand why they bother screwing around with "charcol viewport shading" when they could be creating tools like this.