Ungoliant's mapping questions

[Nosslak]

Damn, is it that bad??

I don't know how you made this but if you do end up remaking it in Blender make sure to apply a little subsurf before you use the multi-res as that will supposedly give you better performance.

 

well, I looked into sculptris, and it sounds like this app solves my problem automatically.

Haven't used Sculptris since forever but it's a really great app. Do keep in mind that you won't be able to bring back the models to subdivide and sculpt them (for whatever reason) in Blender or ZBrush (without major retopologising) as Sculptris really destroys all your topology.

[ungoliant]

Haven't used Sculptris since forever but it's a really great app. Do keep in mind that you won't be able to bring back the models to subdivide and sculpt them (for whatever reason) in Blender or ZBrush (without major retopologising) as Sculptris really destroys all your topology.

Sculptris has been designed to work effortlessly with ZBrush, which in turn will enable you to import your mesh to other sculpting applications. When selecting the "GoZ" button in Sculptris, your entire mesh will be transferred to ZBrush.

saw a video on this, guy literally hit the button it opened up zbrush and instantly the whole model was transferred perfectly to zbrush, and then back to sculptris when he was done modifying.

[Nosslak]

saw a video on this, guy literally hit the button it opened up zbrush and instantly the whole model was transferred perfectly to zbrush, and then back to sculptris when he was done modifying.

I used Sculptris back before Pixologic bought it so that functionality wasn't there when I used it. I suppose I stand corrected.

[Baddcog]

No I'm not saying it's bad.

 

It's just you say you have stretching you don't want and whatnot. You didn't have the same uv's on both (so hard to bake down the fine details), etc..

 

I just think if you started over with all the knowledge you have gain it would go much smoother start to finish and you'd probably be much happier with the end result. It's not like you are completely redoing a whole map, it's just one model. And if you are planning on doing more pieces to fit the set you'd get more even results across the board doing them all in the same fashion.

[ungoliant]

anyone else ever get frequent crashes in sculptris after pushing past 1M tris? rebooting is not helping.

[Arcturus]

If you have 64bit system you can patch the Sculptris's exe to use more memory. More info: http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?165144-More-Polys-in-Sculptris-YES-DOUBLE!&p=919666&viewfull=1#post919666

[ungoliant]

is that the same 4GB patch that has made the rounds around here? It's supposed to work on 32bit systems as well, isn't it?

[Arcturus]

I'm not sure. I tried it on win7 and it worked. But it didn't improve performance, only stopped crashing.

[ungoliant]

I keep seeing articles and videos saying to keep your meshes in quads while you're working on them, "or else". I still haven't figured out why, but I'd hazard a guess that it has to do with compatibility with subdivision levels, and possibly performance issues(?). Can anyone roll out a little detail as to why i shouldn't just shred the hell out of my mesh with whatever tools are handy? or work in sculptris, for that matter.

[rich_is_bored]

It depends on the density of the mesh and your intentions.

 

If it's a high poly model and the intent is to bake that detail into a texture, go nuts. The topology isn't important.

 

For every other model you'll want to keep the mesh clean by directing edge loops around features. It helps with subdivision. It helps with smoothing. It helps keep the polycount low. And it helps with deformation during animation.

 

The reason people prefer quads is because it's easier to visualize the edge loops. For instance, which of these two meshes make it easier to identify the edge loops?

 

[Baddcog]

You can also get weird pinching with tris when you sculpt.

[ungoliant]

Thanks, that helps paint a clearer picture.

You can also get weird pinching with tris when you sculpt.

Encountered quite a lot of this in sculptris because of the dynamic tesselation. Smoothing won't fix it, but the "reduce brush" can totally demolish areas like that really easily, and add resolution manually when required. It's so damn good.

 

I'm almost done reforming the basic mesh in sculptris, but I haven't decided if I'm going to polypaint a bumpmap on the highpoly directly in sculptris, or import it over to Zbrush and run some noise filters over it. The sculptris tutorial video series I found outlines that it should be possible to translate bumpmap onto the lowpoly uvs using xnormal, so I'll probably explore that, considering I'm already working with 800K-1M polys just with the basic mesh, and I'm not entirely convinced that working the geometry won't end up with really grainy crunchy effects. A basic 1024x1024 bumpmap can easily add 1 million pixels of details without the software batting an eyelash. Of course, it will eventually be merged into the final normalmap, so the bumpmap is really just for extra detail before the final bakes.

Edited May 14, 2012 by ungoliant

[ungoliant]

 

This thing is almost done. The top and bottom tiers still need a little work, and then it's on to noise filtering / bumpmapping. It's still the same step-down tier style stalag as the original, but the flexibility of sculptris really let me go crazy with this thing, even with little water run-off areas where parts are eroded (not sure if that is realistic, but I like the effect). This material is NOT going to be used, but it brings out the detail really well in sculptris for screenshots.

[Baddcog]

Yeah, that's looking really sweet.

 

I don't think they actually erode, they are made from the water depositing the limestone, but w/e Looks fine to me.

[RPGista]

Looks very nice indeed, awesome work.

[ungoliant]

ungoliant is officially employed as a pc tech today after 6 months of unemployment! so now i can finally break my DR silence and get back to mapping again (told myself i wouldn't touch DR until i got a job)

[nbohr1more]

Congrats!

[ungoliant]

I took some time off, its back to business now. wanting to clear something up, it is possible to combine 2 normal maps together via d3 material shader, yes? i know you can add a heightmap, but what about 2x normals?

 

edit: of course, the answer is already in my own thread

You can add a heightmap to your normalmap using addnormals.

 

tried it, works great. now if i can just find a way to replace one of the parameters of addnormals via skinning.....

re-edit: hrmm, i dont think this skinning thing is going to do what i want... was hoping to avoid needing a new material shader for each skin iteration, but that seems doubtful. i suppose i could make the stalagmite an entity and pass in desired texture choices to a single matierial shader via spawnarg, but that seems overkill for a static model.

Edited September 3, 2012 by ungoliant

[ungoliant]

wow, I've forgotten a lot of stuff in the past couple months.

So, I have a problem. I want to align the bottom edge of this sculptris model to the xy grid in blender, its like 650K tris, and i have no idea how to go about this without buckling down for a 6 hour blender session. any ideas?

 

edit: also, the bottom edge cannot be selected as 1 edge loop, although bits and pieces of it can be selected this way. it seems sculptris made some really weird edges in places that are almost doubled up against eachother in the space of like .000001 inch, and these weird areas seem to be where the edgeloops start and stop.

Edited September 3, 2012 by ungoliant

[Arcturus]

Try Select -> Non Manifold

[Nosslak]

Select the bottom vertices in edit mode (just Box select them, doesn't need to be exact), hit O for proportional editing, choose falloff type and then you can just scale or translate the vertices downwards.

[ungoliant]

Try Select -> Non Manifold

read up on this, very nice trick. I deleted all the offending verts that were mucking up my bottom edge loop manually, but this tool is still good for checking the model over for inconsistencies. Now that using this tool only selects all the edges/verts of the proper bottom edge loop, i assume my work is done in that regard.

 

Now to use the proportional editing noss mentioned to get everything ~roughly in place, before finding a way to snap all the verts in the loop to the xy plane. (hopefully proportional editing works with snapping as well)

 

thx guys

[ungoliant]

blender's snapping system is too much for me. all i want to do is snap the entire selected edgeloop straight up/down the z axis, so that each vert in the loop rests on the xy plane directly beneath (or above) its original placement. (with proportional editing so that their neighbors come along for the ride). the snapping page on the blender wiki is over my head, and i'm not even sure any part of it is describing what i want to do.

 

edit: I think i got it.. set pivot to cursor, set cursor to center, scale the edge loop to 0 constrained on z axis, with proportional editing set to a very low value. looks right... Its just the highpoly though, i'm willing to call it good, as long as meshlab is capable of decimating the borders to stay on the xy plane where i put the damn things.

Edited September 4, 2012 by ungoliant

[ungoliant]

 

stalagmites, old vs new. you be the judge

[RPGista]

Very nice, it looks much more detailed, and the texture, more subtle. Did you reduce the tris in sculptris or retopo one by hand for the low poly mesh?