Hi guys, I’m looking for find the way to use Spotlight to do some Texture Painting (NO polypainting, Texture painting). But this time appears to be impossible even through Projection Master.
Someone has finded a way to do it?
Pixo, seriusly, WHY!? Why!?, I can’t understand it.
I can’t believe we can’t use Spotlight to paint textures
not sure if you saw this…
No, I’m talking about paint directly on to a texture, not in polygons.
Do you mean that you want to paint a texture onto an existing texture map?
Load the texture. In the Polypaint tool palette, click on Polypaint From Texture. You can now use Spotlight to paint on your texture. When you are ready to export, use the New from Polypaint in the Texture Map tool palette.
Yes, but this workflow need you subdivide your low poly object, and yes, we can leave uncheck the “uv smooth” option, but:
Imagine a table, with round borders, 8 corners at the table + another 8 for each table support, so we have 8x5 = 40 corners, that our low polygon model haves (and we doesn’t need more polygons, in reality).
Having present that the huge polygon that conforms the main place of the table, compared with this “little” 40 corners, when we start to subdivide (because we’re condemned to do polypainting), whats the resolution you think you gonna take till all the mesh detail gonna to this 40 corners?. Do you think you gonna take enough detail in the main place of the table?.
Do a test if you want, you’ll surprise how quick you can reach 20 million polygons and continue without the ability to paint the table correctly.
The guide say very clear:you can paint on to a texture, just press the icon Paint in the widget and also say that to achieve you have to load a polymesh3d or ztl…i cant test until now but you can;)
No andreseloy, you can’t paint on to a texture, you can paint “the front/back color”, or fill the “reference” texture, not the painting itself. From one way or another, painting never finishes over the texture, always over the polygons or over nothing.
With the “reference texture” I’m referring the texture we gonna use to project for painting, the image we need to take in reference to “deform, saturate, contrast…” and then make the painting.
Hi Reaversword.
I’m afraid you are right and Spotlight is only for Polypainting.
I’ve been trying all kind of tricks and wasn’t able of make it works.
I agree with you upon Polypaint is not a solution for quality; it’s based on mesh resolution and needs a high subdivision level for achieving good results.
If you are in Image Based painting the situation become worse. The pipeline of transferring the image to millions of polygons and then transferring it again to a texture is for crazies, and will never maintain the original picture quality.
At this moment I’m texturing a mesh with some big polygons (a guitar) from some photos taken from a real one, and I could need a giant computer for subdividing the mesh in order to be able of use Spotlight for painting the textures.
It seems that, for texture painting, we’ll need to still using the plugin “Image Plane”. As the author (marcus_civis) says in this thread, you can use the ZBrush 3.5 version of ImagePlane into ZBrush 4:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=92180
I’ve just re-installed ImagePlane and I’m testing its behavior in ZB 4.
I’d prefer to have this (yours) thread for discussing this subject, but, for you and other interested users, I’ll include here some links to other posts related to it (you mediated in some of them):
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=92826 (this thread)
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=92180
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=92555
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=92970
Some older ones:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=71829 (from page 23)
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=46396 (from page 20)
Latest instructions for ImagePlane:
http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Image_Plane
http://www.pixologic.com/docs/index.php/Tutorial:ZProject_and_Adjusting_Photo_Reference
I neither understand why Pixologic doesn’t care much with texture painting, but I’m still preferring the ImagePlane solution to others due to diverse reasons:
I’m too disappointed with ZBrush 4. I expected improvements in texturing workflows.
I think they should need to avail the smooth normals to work in a low poly texturing…
I sort of have to agree with this view of texturing.
Zbrush are pushing polypainting heavily - but my (games) workflow needs to accommodate texture work. And when it isn’t supported I have to look elsewhere. I find it a bit weird that so many packages seem to be getting this wrong - either trying to be too clever (zbrush), too simple (mudbox) or too rough (3dcoat).
I now have ZBrush4 in my hands and will take a look of your point of view…until now was from reading the guide:D…so this thread look very interesting though…
cheers
GREAT NEWS
MARCUS IS WORKING IN IMAGEPLANE AGAIN !!!
As Reaversword pointed out in this thread, there are projects that require Direct Texture Painting, for which polypainting is not an option.
Many users in the forum don’t understand why we need Direct Texture Painting.
Pixologic is boosting the planar (no organic, much more like in traditional 3D software) modeling. Commonly, this kind of projects don’t have a big number of polygons, neither these polygons do have an average size like the organic ones usually do. Like the example exposed by Reaversword (a simple kitchen table), it could have some small areas with high density of polygons (for example, the decorations in its legs) and some big areas with low density (even only with 6 polygons) as in the case of the main horizontal table.
In these kind of projects, the subdivision level you need for an acceptable resolution of the horizontal table (for polypainting it, furthermore for stamping areas of a photography over it while maintaining the original quality of the photo) could make the resolution of the detailed areas (the legs) to grow up to tens of millions of polygons.
Yes, I know there are many demonic tricks and workarounds to avoid that, but let’s imagine you are texturing a home scene with many pieces of furniture. Polypainting is not an option and is not developed for that.
Many other packages are totally based in Direct Texture Painting, even more, they don’t even need to freeze the 3D Mesh in order to project a photo onto it, but we all love ZBrush, don’t?
ZBrush is based in Polypainting and for doing Direct Texture Painting we must count on two Plug-ins: “Projection Master” and “Image Plane” (the last, from Marcus Civis, bring us the nearest thing to SpotLight). I think Pixologic must consider improving this mechanism if they want to boost Planar Modeling, but it seems that ZB4 doesn’t bring any innovation of this sort.
And here it comes the good news from Marcus:
“Yes Spotlight will only polypaint on a 3D mesh in Edit mode. Painting direct to a texture map, or to the 2.5D canvas is not possible.
I’m updating the Image Plane plugin to provide basic manipulation of images within Projection Master (so direct to texture maps or polypaint) as well as a simple ‘modelling from reference images’ set up.
Marcus.”
Will ImagePlane for ZB4 incorporate new features? By this way, the users who need Direct Texture Painting will not feel their hearts broken out of spite by ZB4. In any case, for sure, it’s a great new.
Thank you, Marcus.
In first, I’m sorry for post so late, I usually live in a non-internet connection place, and when I comes to it, I treat to resolve all issues that I have over the week.
In second, thanks to all for realize of what I was saying, and take a time to understand it.
In third, toniloCoyote, thanks for all links and information, and thanks for understand so well all I was saying.
Well, we should try Marcus plugin. And Thanks Marcus, for understand us and do it. If Zbrush would undertand python, myself I would offer help, but I don’t know any of Zscript… so I supposse is never late to learn!.
Finally, and old plugin of Eddy Loonstijn for take the ability to work with layers (yes, Texture Layers), but the shame is I’m afraid is outdate:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=55727
Well, maybe in a near future… I hope all goes well for Marcus.
Not at all, Reaversword, It seems we are both sailing in the same boat.
I was facing a similar challenge where I needed to generate a texture map from the polypainted data I generated with spotlight (amazing feature btw). After deciding to start over with something simple (a sphere), a realised that I hadn’t used UV Master (Godsend Plugin) to generate my UV map yet. Once I did that - working on a clone in order to protect my polypainted spotlight data, then pasting the UVs onto my original mesh - I was finally able to export my texture map via the <New from Polypaint> option under <Texture Map> in the <Tool> Panel.
I realize that your challenge goes a step further in that you need significantly more density in some parts of your texture then others, and while I haven’t done a mockup of your project, I recommend you look into the <density> features in UV master along with the <geometry HD> features in the <Tool> panel. Between the two of them I think you may find a solution.
Hope this is some help to you and/or anyone.
BlueEyedJester, yes, that’s the usual way to get a color texture map, first paint on polygons, and then extract it from polypaint to texture paint.
But if you divide non organic models, with very angular surfaces, you can choose two paths:
Subdivide with smooth, and polypainting of the angles will smudge/contracted when you apply this painting to your low model.
Subdivide without smooth, and do polypainting “imagining” the surface is smooth (for example, a contact lens with a stroked picture, where in Max/Maya/XSI… you can see it like “smooth”, perfectly smooth and in really with very few faces), because there isn’t any mode like smooth in zbrush for low poly previsualization.
Well, what can I say?. Zbrush is specialized in homogeneous organic sculpting… maybe, like ToniloCoyone says, now that pixo is deeping in non organic sculpting (hard surfaces), they realize that for a large planar area high polygonation is not required, and therefore, polypainting is not the perfect canvas till now has been.
Simply imagine a 1.5x4meters long table with the legs full of wood ornaments. When you decimate the model, from where did you think decimation master gonna clean polygons?. All we know it gonna leave the main surface with really few polygons in comparison with the legs, and if this is our final model, the model that gonna go directly to our 3dsoftware, this is the model we need to adapt our texture paint for.
Or simply we are a few ones that we’re wrong and we don’t know how use Zbrush to get well results on texture painting over our final low poly model. But still I haven’t seen a pixologic video that shows us that is not that hard to create a perfect texture thats adapts to the low poly model as a glove.