Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Imago,
I am only getting acquainted with Blender's painting tools. I watch many tuts on Youtube on the subject. I hope this video will be helpful.
Lol, I got you, personally, I have no need for that feature (much), I model my own stuff, seems that only DAZ and Poser models have this issue, I can see the need if I had to paint huge terrain with multiple separate UV maps (feature we discussed at SP forums, which, as you already know, is in works) ...
It is a very hard to implement feature though, if real time PBR non-destructive painting is a requirement, that is what SP is all about
I never knew it existed
Very cool. I may just have to try it!
Thanks for all of your infectious enthusiasm! This character looks wonderful! Nice job!
Well... Carrara doesn't do that specific thing either
Will :)
Using the built in option to Exoprt an OBJ with "textures" will NOT give you what you want for a figure.
It'll export an Square image with the procedural converted to a texture map
You'd get the same image, by applying your shader to a plane and exporting it to get the texture map
Not in idealised UV version (like a perfect skin texture map).
These images can be useful if you're using an image editor,.
at some point,. if you want to do this to make money,. or expand what you can do,.. then you'll need to make a small investment in the tools to do it properly
"Baker" isn't very expensive in comparison to the cost of other 3D software plugins.
but if you're not intending to export/convert procedurals as part of a production workflow,. i'd suggest exporting a plane with your shader, to get the converted texture
then using the clone, stamp, and paint tools in an image editor to create a "Skin" texture map, based on the originals UV template for that figure.
Dartanback: What, painting across material seams? Carrara absolutely does. What I really wish it had was a smooth or blot or smudge tool in 3D paint to quickly 'heal across' the barrier. mmph
Mind you, it lacks the bells and whistles of all the other apps, but... still, it's something. (And I might use it in conjunction with SP, still debating. I might go with SP simply because it's the only option I'm likely to be able to afford right now)
The lack of paint across mats in SP is really frustrating because it makes a lot of the cool brush effects much less useful. I mean, on a human figure, trying to not paint across the shoulders or throat looks really obviously weird unless you work hard at it.
Yup... it paints across seams just fine. So does SP (according to FifthElement and MDO at least). But if we select two or more material zones which occupy the same space in UVW, when we paint on one zone, we're also painting (not properly) onto any other zone we have selected, which is the possibility Vyusur was looking for, and discovered that she CAN do in Blender.
Example: If we select that we're going to paint on the torso, the face, and the limbs, all at once in Carrara's 3D Paint, if we paint on the face, whatever we painted will also show up on the torso and limbs, because they all occupy the same region of the UVW grid.
What Vyusur is doing in Blender is the same thing, except that it's automatically swapping to a separate map space when crossing material zone changes. I think.
I have the demo of SP and unless it has an option I'm missing or an undocumented limitation in demo, it doesn't do this.
But this has inspired me to take a harder look at Carrara shading. While it lacks some of the cool elements of other apps, I already own it and the surfaces offer some interesting possibilities.
Just that stupid export 2048 limitation. Ugh
As 3DAGE pointed out above the plugin 'Baker' is very inexpensive and you can export maps of any size, even though the interface buttons max out at 4096x4096 you type in any width and height dimensions to suit your needs. Plus, it does much more. I like to squeeze as much out of the box as possible for any software, but sometimes you need a plugin or two. Just my worthless 2 cents.
It's a lot cheaper than all the other stuff I was looking at, so... yeah, I might do that.
I was initially excited about Zbrush Core because I've been playing around with sculpting in Blender, and while there are some great videos to introduce you to the tools, there are not as many advanced concept videos and books as Zbrush has. Unfortunately Core lacks the features I most want from Zbrush. Core only goes up to 20 million polys (which is admittedly about 10 million more than my poor old machine can handle in Blender, but I'd like to try some really high detail sculpting), it doesn't have the full 3D painting tool set of the full Zbrush, doesn't work with any ofthe GoZ bridges, doesn't have fibermesh and lacks the cool retopology tools of Zbrush. Without those things I may as well stick with Blender.
My new creature is ready...
Carrara render
Impressive character and render!
VERY nice.
I often wish I liked CAD style UI, because folks' experiences with Blender really look cool.
My experiments with Carrara are promising. Right now I'm struggling to integrate using 3D paint with mucking with shaders, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. I can see long clunky ways to do what I want, and I suspect there are shorter ways. Baker helps a lot, though it seems weird about Bump channel (I can get really nice Normal maps, but the Bump always looks black... might not be Bumpy enough)
Fantastic, Vyusur!!!
So I was hoping Carrara's parametric projection would allow me to tile stuff across material zones, but... no, it doesn't do so very well at all.
Is there a solution to this or am I just out of luck?
According to your vague discription of your problem, just tile an image in the shader. Whatever zone that shader is texturing, the tiling in the shader will tile accurately across your zone.
Awesome! Just (finally) watched this. Most excellent, thanks for the share!
Wow... impressive UV editor too!
I really enjoy how it (Blender's Paint Utilities) lets us paint both on the 3d model as well as in the 2d map... very cool! I think 3D Coat is like that too... it could be something else though... been seeing so many videos and reading so many features lately that I'm beginning to confuse myself. Time to settle down! LOL
Dartanbeck: The problem is separate texture zones.
Like on a Genesis figure, I can group the UV maps into Face/Torso/Limbs. I can tile a texture within each of those zones adequately.
But the tiles do not match up where the torso and limbs meet (for example) with parametric tiling. Sure, I can use spherical or planar projection, but... those generally look terrible for organic forms.
Now, if I stick to JUST using procedural stuff (noise/fractal/cellular/etc), then fine. And I can use stamp brushes to set down cool designs that cross over these borders.
Buuut... I cannot grab a cool texture and have it tile across the entire figure (which is what I'd really like).
Phil, Dartanbeck, Will, thank you! During several last days I tried both Substance Painter and 3d coat. Substance painter hangs up my machine. 3d coat does the work but it spoils some areas on my textures, some times it simply stops painting on the areas where it painted before. Even Carrara does texture painting more smooth, but it can't take sample right on the place where you paint on. I must try some more painting in Carrara. It's cool enough to paint in Carrara, and I've got invisible seams between different UV areas in my short practice.
If all your shading domains will fit on a single UV map with no overlap, then it's a simple matter of merging all your domains before you export for Substance Painter. (don't save that version in Carrara, unless you actually like recreating all your domains over again!). It's when you get overlaps that the problems occur, and face it, that's probably why we went to multiple texture sheets in the first place. Possibly some of the big league tools, like Mari, could handle that, but I don't know for sure (although Mari Indie probably won't).
The most practical solution I think, is to remap your model so it all fits on a single sheet. Substance painter will output maps up to 8K x 8K (which is four 4K x 4K sheets), should be enough resolution for most things?
I think the only way you will be able to do that is to redo the UV maps into a single contiguous map. But then you might face distortions as it is difficult to produce a single map like that for a complex organic shape.
Will,. I think, the problem is that you're treating a precedural shader like it's a texture map,. and that won't work
if it were possible to accurately apply a procedural shader to a figure and have seams magically match together,. nobody would ever use texture maps.
that's why you would convert procedural shaders to Image texture map,. then use an image editor to blend the seam areas.
or make a really bland procedural shader so that there were no visible seams (no strong repeating pattern)
in an image you have the ability to place texture where it's needed
in a procedural shader you don't.
TangoAlpha/PhilW: doing that would render my textures unusable to anyone but myself.
And it's weird that Carrara, an older program, manages to paint across domains JUST FINE, but more recent stuff like Substance Painter devs go 'but that's so hard!'
3DAGE: Um, what?
First, procedural shaders usually work fine across domains because it's procedural. Fractal noise, cellular, that all works great.
Tiling is something completely different. And while I'm having a problem with tiling in Carrara, other programs, like Substance Painter, have the ability to tile across an entire figure without seams (or with very very very minimal disjoints)
And as for blending seams, that's, again, not possible when the texture maps overlap (like with Genesis figures).
Each approach has different strengths and weaknesses. I have a pack of procedural shaders for Iray (in my sig), and they are better than texture maps at covering large areas, weird mapping, lack of UV mapping entirely, and good at short and long range. But they lack some of the heterogeneous detail that you can get with a texture map.
The ideal is to layer different types of things and play on different strengths.
I was just hoping there was some tiling option in Carrara that I was missing, but it seems not.
One possibility is buying SP and then just using it to tile stuff and import into Carrara.
Which seems stupid, but hey, whatever works.
There is a product for DAZ Studio that does what Will wants - http://www.daz3d.com/shades-of-life-nature. I have this back from before I switched from DS to Carrara and I think it does exactly what he wants - it allows tiling an image texture across an object regardless of how the UV/zones are laid out. It only works for static images though - for moving characters, the texture would seem to be moving across the character. I wonder if there is something in DCG's various plug-ins that would allow something similar in Carrara?
Mdo: huh, I actually HAVE that product. I'll test it and see if shader baker actually behaves (I have yet to have a single success with it)
Oh, that's right, it's camera angle based. Sigh, that doesn't work.
Actually, looking at SP more closely... the tiling thing doesn't look quite as amazing as I thought and I think I can replicate it, somewhat.
Basically, it's doing three planar projection shaders and then blending them based on surface normal. Hmm.
At the very least I can do that by painting masks, but I suspect I can do it more algorithmically.
And hey, would you look at that. Figured out a way to do something like what SP has in Carrara. Heh.
(Basically, flat projection from X, Y, Z, and two nested mixers with formula based on Normal. Woot)