PDA

View Full Version : 3d paint development - rubbing

sharktacos
04-20-2005, 05:40 PM
In some of the larger studios I have worked in they had a nifty feature in their in house 3d paint programs - you would take and image and place it over the model and then "rub" the image onto the model, spin the model around, rub some more, and next thing you know you had a fully textured model! Pretty neat. So I was trying to implement something like this in Maya. Which I got to work pretty well, but I could use some ideas on how to further develop it.

1)make a sphere
2) In the 3D paint tool, choose the "paint effects" mode and open the visor.
3) In the visor pick a brush like paper/plaster.mel and under the texturing tab change the UV repeats to 1 and load in your own map (it does not need to be tiling, for my test I googled "elephant skin" and found some neat looking pictures)
4) back in the 3D Paint Tool, switch to "screen projection"
5) paint away

The only problem with this is I would like a way to see the screen projection so I can predict the results. For instance if I want to have an image of a cat, I want to see the image of the cat before I rub it so I can know where they eyes and nose are going to show up on my object. The first idea I had was to hook the image up to and image plane that is slightly transparent and between the camera and the model. Unfortunatly this did not work because the screen projection seems to not be locked to camera but to the object, it looks like the screen projection resizes and moves itself to follow the objects bounding box.

So my two questions are
1) does anyone have any creative ideas about how to visualize the "screen projection" from the 3D Paint Tool? and
2) a way to translate, rotate, and scale the screen projection's placement. (maybe my linking the offset and scale parameters of the paint effects brush to some locators, ala a character setup rig?

How about it science? If we could figure this out we would have a tool that even the highend 3d paint packages don't have. Wouldn't that be nifty?
Duncan
04-20-2005, 09:03 PM
The projection size for the paint tool is the minimum of the object bounds or the view bounds.
Thus by forcing the object bounds to be larger than the screen bounds you make the paint projection match the image plane one. One way to do this is to add a couple of dummy objects that are way out of the view and paint on them as well as the main object. Or one could temporarily add a couple of cvs or polys to the object to paint on. Note that the image plane needs to be sized to exactly fit the view (fit to size). Also make sure that the repeat uv is 1,1 and the offset 0,0 on the paint effects brush. You could simply set the file texture name on the plaster pfx brush and use the same texture on the image plane.

Perhaps you can come up with another more elegant method to force the paint object bounds to always be larger than the view.

Duncan
sharktacos
04-20-2005, 10:31 PM
Thanks Duncan, that works wonderfully :)

Any ideas on how I could connect the image plane up to the UV offsets and scale of the PaintFX brush so I can translate or rotate the screen projection and see that visualized in the image plane?
sharktacos
04-20-2005, 11:46 PM
Actually I can get the effect of scaling and translating by moving and zooming the camera. The only thing that is really missing is rotating the image, but I suppose I could use the camera roll tool for that.

Now I just need to figure out how to set this up so I can easily import it into a scene... I'm thinking probably I'll have to do some mel for that. Anyone out there want to help out?
jeremyengleman
06-15-2005, 07:30 PM
I've used said "rubbing" tool and it is truly useful. I've been looking for the same effect in an application I can use at home as well. There is a freeware (for non-commercial use) 3d paint tool called "Tattoo" http://www.terabit.nildram.co.uk/tattoo/ which does precicely this. The controls for manipulating the rubbing image are rough, and you can't actually rub selective portions of the image with a brush. You can only stamp the entire image, but it is a great start, and is actually a pretty capable 3d paint tool.

-J.
lazzhar
06-15-2005, 07:52 PM
I've used said "rubbing" tool and it is truly useful. I've been looking for the same effect in an application I can use at home as well. There is a freeware (for non-commercial use) 3d paint tool called "Tattoo" http://www.terabit.nildram.co.uk/tattoo/ which does precicely this. The controls for manipulating the rubbing image are rough, and you can't actually rub selective portions of the image with a brush. You can only stamp the entire image, but it is a great start, and is actually a pretty capable 3d paint tool.

-J.

Hi Jeremy, very nice to see here :) I was a fan of your works for years ..very inspiring. The DVD of Gnomom is great too.
jeremyengleman
07-26-2005, 12:15 AM
Thank you!

-J.
CGTalk Moderation
07-26-2005, 12:15 AM
This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.