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Seamless Texturing using 3dsMax Render to Texture

polycounter lvl 17
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lildragn polycounter lvl 17
Hiya peeps, I recently did a video tutorials on how to paint out ugly seams using 3dsMax's render to texture and Photoshop "patch tool" Enjoy! And if you have any questions or requests I'll be happy to assist.

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-maHIFYhb0[/ame]

~t

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  • Neox
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    Neox veteran polycounter
    heya tito!

    interesting approach with the pushing and projection mapping, but you actually don't really need it, all you need to do is work with 2 mapping ids. You pelt it, set it to map ID2, setup your render to texture to bake map ID2, once the seam is fixed you can just load it and bake it back to map ID1, done :)
  • Mark Dygert
  • lildragn
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    lildragn polycounter lvl 17
    Ha cool Neox, I'll try that... I just found that using 2 map ID's a little confusing coming from a Maya background. Oh and this just popped up
    http://www.fxguide.com/article604.html

    All of this should be a thing of the past soon enough

    Ha!
  • yiannisk
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    yiannisk polycounter lvl 7
    3dsmax 2011 includes an advanced viewport canvas painting tool which works pretty much like photoshop, and even in 2010 it includes a much lesser but enough for seam removal version of it.

    There is also mudbox as mentioned and ofc bodypaint. zbrush... which are the most popular approaches so far.

    Mari seems to be a very specialized tool that most of the times nobody will really need.
    (30K textures? paint on GB of objects simultaneously???? technically it is very impressive but realistically kind of uninteresting) I can see its use in huge 3D matte environments. But not really in game production unless in few occasions and it sounds awesome painting on a huge 3D canvas but..

    One use that i can think of it is to actually tweak and add small details on an entire level unwrapped with flatiron on a megatexture but this is an exception :)

    but even that can be handled differently and in most cases textures and models are meant to be reused so i am not sure how generating various different large textures just for minor differences would be helpful. the animated object feature is indeed interesting but we will be fine by using the pose layers that mudbox offers for texture stretch tests.
  • Neox
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    Neox veteran polycounter
    yiannisk: you just talk from the view of a game artist, not everyone here is a game artist only and the cpabilities of Mari have been designed around the needs of movie artists, sure it won't help a lot of game artists, but i doubt its meant to be
  • lildragn
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    lildragn polycounter lvl 17
    yiannisk wrote: »
    and even in 2010 it includes a much lesser but enough for seam removal version of it. .

    Where about is this? And we use Zbrush in our pipeline, and it works descent enough... And I'll also look into Mudbox more.

    ~t
  • yiannisk
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    yiannisk polycounter lvl 7
    Tools> Viewport Canvas

    Beware it is only good enough for seams and base colour layout in 2010.
    very limited.

    zbrush is ok but Mudbox is clearly a much better option for texturing. Especially since there is no need for conversion at all and you can work on your texture in parallel with photoshop. There is no need to export any UVs or do any voodoo to get your textures. They are simply there in a folder waiting for you to pick them up like any 3d application and you can import any image as a layer with a simple right click straight on your model.
  • lildragn
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    lildragn polycounter lvl 17
    Cool thx yiannisk, I'll give the mudbox trial a shot tomorrow.
  • yiannisk
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    yiannisk polycounter lvl 7
    heh i just can't wait for 3dsmax 2011 :)
    If you have not seen the improved viewport canvas yet check it out on youtube!

    Hopefully unwrapping, seams and all that relevant crap is soon to come to an end :)
  • renderhjs
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    renderhjs sublime tool
    Besides being able to do all that complicated steps with just a few clicks in Max2010, Blender, zBrush or Mudbox there is also a script in TexTools that automates in a very similar way what you did in that video (uses a 2nd UV channel though).
    texTools_ani_cammap.gif
    it is in the ico_details_map.gif floater.

    [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEWqvrXaJE0&feature=PlayList&p=0D7878B0B79B344E&index=0[/ame]
  • lildragn
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    lildragn polycounter lvl 17
    Pretty cool script, I see you were at this for awhile, I'll try that today also. And yiannisk, I hear ya man! haha

    I think I need to spend more time in the community again, I'm losing touch! :)

    Cheers!
  • lildragn
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    lildragn polycounter lvl 17
    renderhjs, after trying a few times to copy my viewport to PS, I just realized it doesn't work in Orthographic views. However got over that and got the flow working, but this is my result in PS, any ideas why? Thx

    pixels.jpg
  • lildragn
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    lildragn polycounter lvl 17
    Hiya, yeah so I spent sometime trying to right some wrongs here and found out the above pixelation is caused by having the MR renderer enabled (I was trying out some other tools and forgot it was enabled) so set back scanline and now getting this... though it renders the area correctly, it tiles over the other uvs- gonna pause for now, unless you know what's up.

    pixels2.jpg
  • jam-i-am
  • lildragn
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    lildragn polycounter lvl 17
    jam-i-am wrote: »
    lildragn R U JAMAICAN?

    Haha uh no - Bajan (Barbadian) why?
  • jbrophy
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    jbrophy polycounter lvl 17
    renderhjs for some reason I can't get that last step to work. When I edit in PS and copy I click on the button to transfer in max and I get a no bitmap copied to clipboard error. It seems like it is not accepting the PS clipboard copy for some reason?
  • jam-i-am
    lildragn wrote: »
    Haha uh no - Bajan (Barbadian) why?

    haha...i heard an accent in there... sounded very island-ish...and apearantly i was close, you speak bajan patois, we(jamaicans) also speak patois.

    lol.. no worries just a random question as i dont see many other islanders on the forums:) nice to meet you....awk-wierd!!!:poly131::poly115:
  • dejawolf
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    dejawolf polycounter lvl 18
    the only problem i have with this method is that it seems faster to remove the seam manually.
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