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I switch between Substance Painter, Mudbox, and C4D for painting. Mudbox is the more user friendly of the three and only $10 a month or $90 a year.
Could somebody, please show the work made in Mudbox and then applied to Daz Studio compatible items. Thanks.
It's still in development so listed as less than version 1.0 - I've found it to be perfectly stable but as with all these things, YMMV. I don't have a problem using .obj format since I export .obj from Blender to bring into DS - I use the .obj with Substance Painter too. You could export a .obj from Daz Studio for DS-native files you want to retexture.
Given the low price (and it's a perpetual license), it's worth trying out when you have the time. Check out the tutorials on YouTube.
"Could somebody, please show the work made in Mudbox and then applied to Daz Studio compatible items. Thanks."
The Natural Eyes products: the textures, sclera normals and lacrimal morphs were done in mudbox. Oshun's skins, tattoos etc were also done completely in Mudbox.
https://www.daz3d.com/natural-eyes-ii-for-genesis-81-females-and-males. ;
https://www.daz3d.com/oshun-for-genesis-8-female
Could you clear up a question I have about ArmorPaint as I have been looking at it quite a lot since I read your initial mention of it. I'm confused about UV maps. Does it create them on the fly or do they need to be imported along with the .obj model? What has always put me off about UV unwrapping is the seemingly tedious method of marking out the seams and figuring out where to put them. Are we now looking at applications that do all of that automatically?
There are several apps that do the mapping for you, but you will have to make some adjustment to them. A lot of us PA's use UV Layout. You just import the obj and start plotting out how you want it mapped and unwrap it. It has some auto mapping in it as well. If you have a bunch of pieces that are the same you can select the edge of 1 of them and then pick find similar and it will auto map all those pieces. Again though if you use the auto mapping feature you will have to make some adjustment. It maps the piece in the best way it think it should be but sometimes it doesn't attach the edges and you have to do it yourself. All of these apps that also do the mapping automatically are nice but you will have to do edits. If you don't you will have hard core stretching. With UV Layout it takes me about 1-2 days to do a full environment also with 1-2 dozen props.
Thanks for that information. So it seems that seams are still critical and that there's no easy way to avoid having to mark them manually. It's just that when I have looked at various ArmorPaint tutorials I have not seen a single mention of having to do anything with the UV map - in those tutorials the UV map just seems to be there. So I didn't know how it got there (and I still don't).
@marble
The uv map was created during the modeling process. There is really no way to generate the seams automatically (at least not yet) because aside from being chosen to avoid stretching, they are also chosen subjectively, i.e. expressly so that they are less noticeable, and this of course depends on how the object will be viewed in its scene.
This is the part that I don't know for a fact, but it seems to me that any painter program like the ones under discussion just needs to know the object's uv map so that it knows how to map what you've painted in the object's 3d space to the object's uv map's 2d space. The Wavefront OBJ format can carry uv information just fine, and is sufficient for this.
Thanks Donald. As usual you know a lot more than I do about these things and you seem to have answered my question in that you say that the UV maps come in with the imported model and are not created by ArmorPaint.
A major point of painting applications that wrk on 3D models is that they can paint on the surface as it is and translate that onto the UVs for the user, so they don't have to worry about seams. Bad UVs can still be an issue as areas that are stretched will in effect have a lower resolution than other areas, but good mapping should keep things as even as possible.
@marble I had the benefit of @padone helping me out a lot with this stuff while developing Sagan. His humility is wildly incongruous with how much he knows about this stuff :) I think he is really Edwin Catmull with a cool sounding Italian nom de plume.
But I don't even know enough to say for certain that the paint program can't create the uv map, only that the modeling program can, and it would seem odd to me not to do it during modeling because the uv map is so intimately coupled with the geometry, i.e. for each of an object's faces, it has to know how to map each of that face's 3d vertices to the 2d uv plane so the rendered knows how to stretch the texture image over the object. That's all a uv map is, but it is intimately connected to the object's geometry and is independent of any texture later applied. That's why we can pretty much apply an arbitrary texture to an arbitrary object: the two are independent of each other.
You may have caught from the above the (moderately) interesting fact that the same vertex can have more than one uv coordinate associated with it because the same vertex can participate in more that one face, i.e. faces are interconnected with other faces and share vertices. A uv coordinate is associated with the vertex as it belongs to a face, not to the vertex itself (divorced from the context of which face it is being considered for).
And here we have the reason why texture painting apps are so popular: don't think about any of that; just paint. :)
Ok, I think I get that. If I want to paint directly on to my 3D surface (and not mess around trying to paint on the UV texture map) then I still need to export the model with a good UV map. My original confusion was about where those maps came from and that was answered in that the Texture Paint app (such as ArmorPaint) does NOT create the UV map on the fly as I had thought (or, rather, hoped).
So now I am looking again at tutorials which have left me bamboozled in the past. Tutorials which describe how to unwrap the model surface and place seams in all the right places. My mind is reluctant to visualise these 2D projections though ... I think it is a mental blind spot for me. From what I can see, Blender will attempt an automatic unwrap but all the tutorials start by deleting that and showing how to do it manually. I find it hard enough to visualise a flattened ceral box so a complex (especially organic) model is so very daunting. I do admire the artists here who are skilled at texturing.
I think D|S can read Ptex though if a painting program uses that, then you don't need a UV
Well Substance Painter can now generate a UV map for you when you import your Obj. But like Blender, the automatic UV unwraps will probably be crappy. (Good enough for me though! I dont have all day...)
I've textured many things in Substance Painter, but mostly I have just textured Genesis Figures which come UV mapped, or Marvelous Designer garments, which basically come out UV mapped. So luckily never really had to worry about UV mapping.
Ultimately what's the worst that can happen if you make a bad UV map... you might have to remake your UV map! Surely not the end of the world.
Well, I was asking myself a very similar question: what is a bad UV map and why? There seems to be a lot of importance attached to having the minimum of space between "islands" and to having all those islands nicely arranged like some OCD organised desk. Nobody has yet explained why that care needs to be taken. Oddly, I am quite OCD myself so UV mapping should appeal to me but it doesn't - it looks like a chore.
New question, is there a tool like the GIMP/Photoshop healing tool in any of these programs? I see clone tools, but nothing that functions like a heal tool.
textures get uncompressed in render engines. if you have a 4k map it will need the same resources whether 99% of it is utilized or 1% of it is. So the more you can pack in an organized fashion the less resources you will need to render it
Simple explanation but I didn't know that so thank you. Now a follow-up question: how do UDIM tiles differ from UV maps (or is UDIM a different way of arranging UV maps)?
[EDIT]
Ahh, I was being lazy. A quick search found this little video which seems to explain all I need to know for now :
And this video goes into a lot more detail:
I ran Pilgway's new 3DCoatTexturer 2021 and it's marvellous. Can save out "large" textures or small ones. With or without buffer zones. One can paint all the desired levels at once [i.e. Diffuse, Normals, Bumps, etc.] It's designed to work on 4G VRAM monitors too [which is a big plus these days]. One can paint on the model itself and/or on the texture images, watching it apply to the model at the same time :-)
It paints across seams [if in the correct mode], and comes with free access to a library of PBR materials as well as the ability to load more. Lots of brushes and again, one can load more.
If the weather and all permit, I'm planning to get back into making some texturing tutorials for the Genesis figures and to be using this program. Since it's on an introductory sale atm figured it's as good a time as any to make mention of it. My tutorials aren't any where near as grandiose as the real Pros, but on a budget they tend to fit into their own little nitch. And for those who want/need to, the program can be used free indefinitely WITH limitations. I purchased it so I can make free skins with it that I can provide with commercial use allowed :-)
For those interested in some super scan detail textures, the famous skin site also has some 3D scanned figures on sale with their textures.
.......................
And I also discovered that the .obj exports of Genesis 8 F with gens attached can be exported out now as "one" mesh which is great for painting purposes!
And this time I'm going to say/ask that ... people keep their personal opinions about certain matters to themselves. Thank you.
I'm a bit confused about the 3DCoat 2021 version. There used to be two versions, a low texture and a high texture resolution version at different prices, but I only see one version now (Textura is a new and different type of app it seems) ?
Yes they've made some changes.
3DCoat 4.x will no longer be receiving updates but we can continue using it indefinitely. It has been replaced by 3DCoat 2021 - same program for all licenses. However if one wants to continue learning with it the 'free trial' will continue past the 30 days with limits, certain features being disabled.
Textura is new however if buying 3DCoat 2021 it is not required, it's also in 3DCoat 2021. They took the painting/texturing out of the main program for a more light weight program, supporting the 4G VRAM cards :-)
Purchasing Textura does not replace 3DCoat 4.x in our accounts.
Now some are trying for upgrades from 3DCoat 4.x to Textura and while that might be possible I certainly don't recommend it. Giving up a full modeller for a texture painting program doesn't make sense in my books.
While it's advertized in Euros, while making the purchase as you tell the form what country you're in, the currency changes so you know exactly how much it will cost before buying it. I'm in Canada, it switched to Canadian currency and added tax too.
pedantic people will always find a reason to cry because you didnt 100% minmax optimise every little inch of space on the UV tile. I dont think making a perfect UV layout shoud paralyse you from learning a 3D texture painting app.
Once you start applying materials in the 3d painting app, you will soon know if you need to make better UV layout or not.
Also who actually cares if you only roughly achieve a good layout? the only people you will offend with a bad island arrangment are obsessive.
Texel density is a valid concern/consideration though. So split your UV tiles over multiple UDIM tiles or something (if you need more quality on a part of the mesh) & i guess you should consider how even or uneven the texel density is for your mesh (i.e., how much of the map you are giving to different parts of the mesh). Any issues would become apparentl once you start painting anyway so it's not like you need to a priori think every little step through.
People will probably disagree with me...
I use this quite frequently: http://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/ I send this guy a few dollars a month as a tip as I want him to keep developing. Good FREE online app.
OK, for whatever reason the link doesn't work for me from here so just type in NormalMap-Online and that SHOULD bring up the page!
OK, thanks! I bought the low res version 4 a couple of years ago to check it out, paid $92.50 for it including 25% tax. Looks like an upgrade to 2021 will cost about $185 incl. tax with current discounts, that looks like a good deal. I agree, "upgrading" to Textura is not the way to go, the full version has some really cool features that you don't want to miss.
I've been keeping up with the developement for 3DCoat and from what I've read, I'll be holding back updating. There are some bad bugs that were overlooked and they released anyway so NOPE! Don't need that kind of hassle. I don't have a list, sorry!
Will give that a try, thanks!
As for the link, something is appending semicolons to links sometimes which breaks them, this is what happened to yours. Not sure what it is but it may be Firefox, it never happened to me before I shifted from IE to Firefox.
Yes and no... I haven't yet pinpointed the program that creates problems with the UV's it makes, but when only less than 5% of the space is actually used, it becomes a problem when the 5 texture maps (8192x8192x24bit each) use almost a gigabyte of RAM for a surface that would have had exactly the same level of detail with just 20MB's worth of texture maps if the UV mapping was done better - This is a real life example, although the most extreme I have found so far.
The program I have been trying to hunt down fills the unused space in texture files with streaks of colours from the edges of the used area.
I need a new computer before investing in the full program ;-)
I probably do too - currently only 8 GB RAM and 8 GB VRAM. :)
This would be substance painter doing this, but its not making the uv maps