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Paint Transparency option in Hex - how to use it ?

wargiswargis Posts: 142
edited December 1969 in Hexagon Discussion

Hello! Does anybody know how to paint transparent areas on a mesh in Hexagon 2.5? As far as I understood, there is a Paint Brush tool, that can paint in bump, texture and transparency too, but I've never used it before. For example, I have a mesh of a laced corset and want to paint transparent holes under its eyelets without affecting real geometry. Lacing was added to the main corset mesh independently and so I can't just paint holes in photoshop over the corset Uvs exactly under those 3d metal rings. How to make it in Hex - which brush should I take and how to see if it works? And how to export the texture transparency image? When I tried to paint on a textured mesh (it has Uvs), I saw just the blue circle of the brush and no visible effect at all.

Comments

  • RoygeeRoygee Posts: 2,247
    edited December 1969

    Once you have the UV mapping done, open the material editor - click on the little arrow halfway up the left side of the screen - and select the texture resolution you want. Select the paint tool, select transparency. There are two small squares - one with a pattern and the other plain.

    Select the plain one so that it is on top. Click it again and a colour swatch comes up. Move the slider down so that it is pure black, set the size of your brush to match the size of the hole you want to make, set opacity and hardness to 100%, cut-off to zero (I take it you want cleancut holes with no fade-off) and click where you want the hole. Repeat until done.

    When you export the .obj, it will automatically export a .png with the texture map to the same file location, with the same name as the .obj file - possibly with a number appended.

    Depending on the rendering application you import it to, you will either have to locate the .png and import it - Daz Studio - or it will load automatically - Carrara, among others that read the .mtl file correctly.

    A word of warning - be sure that your UV maps are laid out so that the texture painting will only affect the part you want to paint. For instance, it you do a cubic projection on a cube, the UV maps are layered by default, so that if they are not separated, if you paint a transparency in one place, it will paint on all six sides.

    Hope this helps you :)

  • wargiswargis Posts: 142
    edited August 2014

    Roygee said:

    When you export the .obj, it will automatically export a .png with the texture map to the same file location, with the same name as the .obj file - possibly with a number appended.
    Hope this helps you :)

    Something is wrong again - the brush makes spots transparent on the mesh, but when I try to export obj - it exports a blank white .png of the same size as the sample texture image (256*256), not the transparency map (the color of the brush is pure black).

    Post edited by wargis on
  • RoygeeRoygee Posts: 2,247
    edited August 2014

    Have you looked at the transmap in a 2D editing application, or only the thumbnail in Explorer? Do you have any other texture on your mesh?

    The hole will look white in the thumbnail, but if you open it in Photoshop or such it will look like the attached (except it will show the normal alpha checkerboard, not as is displayed in the forum). I just tested in Carrara and it works fine.

    I have no idea on how to bring in an alpha map into DS :)

    trans3.png
    1024 x 1024 - 38K
    Post edited by Roygee on
  • wargiswargis Posts: 142
    edited December 1969

    Thanks, Photoshop reveals the image with black spots of transparency, indeed. There is also Brush Tool with possibly similar options - what is the difference between Brush and Paint tools?

  • RoygeeRoygee Posts: 2,247
    edited December 1969

    Glad you got it to work:)

    By brush tool, I take it you mean the displacement brush?

    That is a totally different kettle of fish! You use that to "sculpt" detail into a mesh - the mesh needs to be pretty dense to get any real detail, but on lower poly meshes it is useful for making things like random rocks.

    You can also use it to make a bump map of detail for a low poly mesh. For this, you need to have the mesh UV mapped. You then up the smoothing level, with DG active, do your detail sculpting, export the bump map, take the smoothing level down to a lower level and collapse DG.

    You export the lower-poly mesh as .obj and apply the bump map in your rendering app. You can even use the bump map in a displacement channel, or convert it to a normal map.

    Not a very effective method and very outdated, now that we have apps like Sculptris and XNormal, which do a far better job :)

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