Painting and UV

Oso3D

Any good tips about organizing UV maps and manipulating textures on Carrara objects? Specifically with a mind toward export -- Carrara has wonderful projected shaders and so on that don't work anywhere else, so that doesn't help me.

 

Jonstark

While I'm not an expert on that (and hopefully someone far more expert than I will answer the main thrust of your question), just so you know there is a Baker plugin so that any shaders you assemble in Carrara can be baked into a map too.

Oso3D

Is that an extra thing, or part of the core package?

 

Jonstark

It's an extra, on Inagoni's site, although it's also sold in a bundle here at daz too:  http://www.daz3d.com/advance-pack

Although to be fair, I don't own it myself, so while I know it exists I can't give any personal experience testimony of its use.

Dartanbeck

Right. And I'm going to be experimenting with Baker really soon. It's simple, powerful, and perfect for folks whom may want to export the results of procedural shaders into maps. In a single click, Baker can export different maps for different channels too, like color, bump, specular (Highlight channel), etc.,

Another method, as the title of your thread suggests, is to make sure that you have decent UV coordinates on your mesh and use the powerful 3D Paint features included in the Pro version of Carrara. Like photoshop, you can keep adding layers to whatever channel you're painting on, like color, bump, etc., and you can create new brushes if you need them. I've bought all of Ringo Monfort's and GKDantas' brushes, but even just those that come with C8.5 Pro give a lot of great possibilities. ;)

3D Painted textures result in image files that can then be used in other software with your exported object.

Oso3D

Aaaaah, Carrara can do that with 3D paint? Excellent, I'll try it.

 

Diomede

Inevitably, trying to use the 3D Paint tool in Carrara comes back to the quality of the uvmapping.

If you are interested in 3D Paint and uvmapping, then here are some great threads to look through.

Here is a free tutorial by 3DAge. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/7907045/Carrara_first_steps.zip

And here are more general threads that are related.

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/60319/painting-in-carrara#latest

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/52283/

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/6000/

http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/6318/

　

Oso3D

I'm strongly leaning toward buying that Baker plugin. I find Carrara's shading system to be a lot more robust than, say, Daz, but I like rendering in Daz. This would also, it seems, skip over a lot of the munging with UV mapping itself. Or am I mistaken?

 

evilproducer

As diomede mentioned, the quality of the UV mapping itself will come into play. I would think if you see distortions in the procedural shaders that you want to bake, those could crop up in the final output. Even DAZ 3D's figures sometimes aren't up to snuff. I've been playing off and on with converting my V4 procedural skin shader to other figures and I'm running into some issues with A3 and when changing body shapes on Genesis 1 and 2, such as going from the base G2 to something like Olympia where the UV mapping would be different. I had hoped procedurals would be a bit more forgiving, and it does look better than using image maps...

Oso3D

Sure, that's cool. Right now it's a total crap shoot whether I get anything useful.

Oso3D

Oh hey, playing around a little more with vertex modeler and shader, and managing to produce (relatively simple) shaders with sensible UV maps. Thanks... I'm not sure I'm even going to need Baker for my needs!

 

MarkBremmer

UV painting, especially with something with the ability to round-trip with Photoshop is fantastic. 

I have Baker and it is very useful for 'baking' the ambient light effects into textures - but it does take a fair amount of time to do it's thing and results can get a little iffy on complex objects. 

If the goal is simply to create custom textures on objects, then good UV mapping followed by texture painting is really all you need since you can also fake ambient shadowing in a paint program. 

BTW, if the goal is to export content into something like Unity, you'll need to rotate the entire object/scene 90 degrees on the X axis since Carrara's world space is different than the rest fo the CG world. 

Just the crazed ravings of a lunatic madman...

Oso3D

Well, the goal is that if I, say, make a pyramid in Carrara and port it over to Daz Studio, the UV mapping isn't underwear on head crazy. (Which it was the first time)

I've managed to tweak more reasonable uv mapping (and object modeling -- taking simple surfaces and breaking them down into extra facets seems to help the overall process) with Carrara and an occasional jaunt through Blender, so I think I'm set enough for now.

 

 

TangoAlpha

Get yourself a UV checker image too (loads on the web) - it's really great for seeing just how good your UVs are, if they're stretched, back to front etc.. Either create a separate shader, or just drop it into the Colour value of the default shader.

 

It's very quickly apparent that the UVs for the long walls on this model are stretched in the Z axis . . .

Design Acrobat

Here's an old tutorial of mine done quite awhile back that may be of some help.  Both files are located on ShareCG and free of charge for use and distribution.

It's a Jack-O-Lantern, so there may be some use of the end result after the tutorial is done. 

Jack-O-Lantern tutorial with introduction to UV mapping techniques
http://www.sharecg.com/v/55776/browse/3/PDF-Tutorial/Jack-O-Lantern-Tutorial

Three alpha masks
http://www.sharecg.com/v/55869/browse/5/3D-Model/Three-Alpha-Masks-for-JackOLantern-Project

Diomede

Thanks for the tutorial.