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Multi-layer vertex color painting in Maya (open source)

Frand
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Frand polycounter lvl 6
Hi everyone,

I've spent the last couple of months building a toolbox in Maya with python. The point of the exercise has been to display the color sets in Maya as a Photoshop-style layer stack (with basic blend modes).

The tool consists of a window with tools, and some shaders that are custom-generated to the project under development.

Some cherry-picked features I'd like to point out are integrated curvature-based ramp coloring, occlusion baking automation (with mental ray), and the process to bake materials into UV-channels for exporting into game engines.

It's not high-tech by any means, but should make vertex colors way more convenient to play.

The tool works best on Maya 2018 / Windows. The custom shaderfx shaders fail on OSX (only one layer at a time is visible, not the composited end result).

Here's a link to the tool:
https://github.com/FrandSX/sxtools

The release is under MIT license, which means you're pretty much free to modify the tool as you please.

I'd love any feedback.



Replies

  • Speedy_Mastretta
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    This looks absolutely awesome, however i wasn't able to get it working as it freezes Maya for me. Throws me this Error: AttributeError: file C:/Users/MyUser/Documents/maya/scripts\sfx\__init__.py line 418: 'module' object has no attribute 'shaderfx'

    along with this:

    Error: TypeError: file C:/Users/MyUser/Documents/maya/scripts\sxtools.py line 5148: Invalid arguments for flag 'select'.  Expected int, got [ int ]

    Pretty much no idea what I did wrong, but i would really love to give this a try. Hope there is a way to get it working, 

    Cheers!
  • Frand
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    Frand polycounter lvl 6
    Hi, thanks for trying it out!
    Are you on Maya 2018.4?
    As a quick check, I run the script from /maya/2018/scripts -folder, in case there's a problem with the env/path variables. 
  • Frand
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    Frand polycounter lvl 6
    I've added support for skinning and blendshapes, also the UI has been reworked quite a bit. The documentation does lag behind right now.

    It occurred to me that if the tool fails to start, one thing is to check the shaderfx plugin is loaded.
  • Frand
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    Frand polycounter lvl 6
    Now that Mental Ray has gone away and Arnold does not bake to vertices, SX Tool has been updated with its own occlusion renderer.
    The quality is similar to Mental Ray, and speed is (multiple times!) faster with low-poly objects. Once the poly counts get higher, Mental Ray gains the lead thanks to its multi-threading.
  • Frand
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    Frand polycounter lvl 6
    Mac support added (might work on Linux as well). Viewport compositing of vertex colors is handled by a complex ShaderFX shader on Windows, and a CPU-assisted mode on Mac. Performance on both is good.
  • Frand
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    Frand polycounter lvl 6
    UI reworked, Unity materials added to package (LWRP and HDRP supported). Calling this v2.0.
  • Frand
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    Frand polycounter lvl 6
    The latest update switches the tool to a Metallic/Smoothness workflow for better compatibility with Unity’s PBR materials.
  • Frand
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    Frand polycounter lvl 6
  • Polynaught
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    Polynaught polycounter lvl 11
    Few years before I used vertex chameleon. Thanks for giving us this open source solution. Trying it on Maya 2018 right now since this is the version I own perpetually and am stuck with. Seems to work.
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