Texture Previews

[RMS]

You may have noticed that the rapid pace of releases has ground to a halt. There is a good reason...I am building in texture support and everything is broken! So even putting out bugfix releases is difficult.

I am hoping to have a beta that is reasonably stable in the near future, for you to try out. In the meantime, here are some screenshots of things that are kind of working: rendering w/ textures in meshmixer, and UV+texture generation in the hole-filler  (note that the texture color in the hole filler is preliminary...I can do a better job of blending the boundary colors than that!)

Anyway, if you have ideas for how textures should work in meshmixer - ie texture management, UV generation, etc - please post them in this thread. I'm looking for wishlists here - forget about what you have seen in other programs, I want to know how you imagined that texturing would work before you actually had to do it! =)

[hieveryone]

Hi RMS, so you're working on the creation of UVs? Cool.

How should it work... well, I think that the first problem is the even distribution of the UVs and the visible positions of the seams. Considering that models done in meshmixer can't be used on any kind of production as they are (they should be retopologized anyway) I don't think that having a UV editor could be of any use, a fully automated or a guided solution could be better.

If you want to maintain the vertex painting, it could be useful to be able to transfer those informations to the UVs (and vice versa) if necessary.

Also, having the chance to use different kind of shaders on the same model or at least on different elements could be useful as well.

[AzDesertRat]

Excellent news!  Been waiting with fingers crossed for this feature as it will be tremendously helpful for my terrain sculpting/refinement projects.  Hope you can knock out the bugs. 

A basic planar map would be wonderful .


Rat

[jim]

Aww yes, this looks very cool already!
Thank you ever so much for your efforts.
i can't hardly waite to start playing with this sweetness. 

i dont got any revolutionary ideas for texturing sadly ...
One awesome thing would be layers for painting though.
Its so difficult in SC when you want to create several textures for one model like color, spec, subdermis ect.
Since you only got one texture per model you have to save several models and start painting from scratch each time.
If one could create a new texture layer and flip back and forth to see the changes that would be a huge benefit.

[Patrick3D]

I know you said to forget other programs, but I am thinking of Photoshop and it's Content Aware fill tool, and in the new Photoshop CS6 the new Content Aware Move/Extend tool. I haven't seen that used in 3D programs or I am blind and have just missed it. It would be nice to select a patch when you combine to meshes together, say the arm and the body, and it leaves an imperfection where the textures meet, could auto generate the texture using the pixels from both textures to blend and fill the gap or allow a selection around it and use a tool like Content Aware which does an amazing job of fixing a horrible texture job.

A site I googled quickly of what Content aware is.
http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/cs5/new-features/fill-content-aware/

If you do not want to go to the site, here are 2 images from it showing what it does.
http://www.photoshopessentials.com/images/photo-editing/cs5/content-aware-fill/select-object-bottom-right.jpg
http://www.photoshopessentials.com/images/photo-editing/cs5/content-aware-fill/object-bottom-right-removed.jpg



Here is the perfect example of the new Content Aware Move Tool, which would be an amazing texture tool in MeshMixer for correcting a texture of an Eye if the eye was off, or the mouth and so on.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UrlsnQ32YhY

[HolyEnigma74]

while im happy about uv's, like someone else already said..
triangles are problematic for animating etc.. and must be re-toplolgized for that..

so.. while its nice to have textures.. for maybe stills.. it seems,
that your time would be better spent on a quad algorithm(or autopo)
 then later uvs..
also ptex style uv like what 3d-coat cant do would cool
(but if you can optimize it so that used face texture uvs scale better to the image size.
see below, see how much wasted space is in the "uv" map?
the only thing being use is the tiny strip at the bottom, i resized that texture from 4096x4094px)

just for reference here is a ptex style uv from 3d-coat(this can rendered in blender set a uv)
give ptex and 3d-coat a try to see what im talking about.

[RMS]

I am familiar with ptex. It is great but it is meant for low-res quad SubD cages. I have talked to ptex developers and basically it is not meant for dynamic meshes having tens of millions of triangles.

Auto-retopo is not really interesting because once you applied it, you wouldn't be able to use any of the other tools. Many of the operations in meshmixer just don't work with quads. So that makes texturing a "second step", which I am not interested in - there are already quadmesh painting tools that have stellar painting (like MudBox, which supports ptex also). I want texturing and modeling to be intermingled, and for that it has to be triangles. And people need to import and export textures based on the standard UV-island-with-images formats.

hieveryone: not planning on a UV editor...I do want it to basically be automatic. For example the UVs for the fill surface in the example image are completely automatic, the UV generation and texture-image layout just happens in the background. Possibly I will have to add some 'advanced' modes where you can do a bit of uv-island management directly on the model (ie merge adjoining islands, cut into pieces, re-generate UVs with different algorithms, etc). But the goal is that it will do a good job by default, and any advanced mode will really only be for the pros.

And yea being able to go between texture and vertex painting is something that would be awesome to do. I can bake either way, just not sure how to handle having both of them at the same time...

patrick3d: the content-aware operations are pretty awesome. It would be interesting to try to do something like that in 3D...not trivial though =)

[jim]

Uhm ... WOW, i dont think any of us ever dreamed that you would integrate UV-maps into the dynamic meshing refinement.
Co-existence actually NEVER crossed my mind and so i OF COURSE assumed texturing to be a second step.

That actually sounds INCREDIBLY awesome! i cant remember when i last been so excited about a technique of design in 3D.
Sincere congratulations!   

i find it very hard to put my head into it though, id guess something unprecedented like that needs to be experienced to give proper feedback.
Sure would be epic if you would have something farely stabile for us to test soon, i wouldnt mind to test a crashing beta either though 

[hieveryone]

Yeah, I think that many of us wouldn't mind to use a crashing beta, but I understand that releasing a beta depends on how much the code is broken right now, and besides at this early stage I think there's no need to rush. I'm crossing my fingers though...

About the automated process, yeah I imagined that much and, as I said, you could go either ways (easy automated / pro with tweakable values) but considering that if you want to work on a complete model for any kind of production you will probably have to retopologize it anyway, and in that case the UV unwrapping becomes easier to deal with (at least if you know what you're doing), I think that for now an automated solution could be enough.
After all, usually the real purpose in having UVs in the first place is to have textures usable with other painting programs like photoshop, but I think that in this case you just want to export the texture maps done in meshmixer and import them in any other rendering program so I wouldn't waste much time in tools for fine tuning of UV-islands for now.

But how will the texturing process work? Will meshmixer create automatically unwrapped UV's like UVmaster in zbrush (that is basically a pelting process where the UVs are open on a plane and relaxed using tresholds)? Will it accept photograps, maybe via planar projection (it could be the case looking at the buddha image)? Or we will just be able to paint like before but with the chance to bake the texture without the need to go to meshlab to do so?

Will meshmixer regenerate the UVs just when asked to? In that case it could be useful to remesh the model in order to have an even distribution of the UVs before painting.
On the other hand, that could lead to another problem: unless you can store informations from one format to the other (vertex/UVs), you could loose all the previous work because an automatic process of UVs regeneration could recreate UVs in a completely different disposition, same thing if I want to separate or stitch/boolean parts and I want/need to regenerate the UVs. You need to save the color informations so that you don't lose them after a topology tranformation of any kind (at least to a certain degree).

About vertex and UV painting I think that you have two solutions

• you could have both of them at the same time, like on two layers that you can merge when you feel like it, or
• you could just have one at a time, bake the informations from one method and discard them after those informations are transferred to the other, be it UVs or vertex.

In meshlab you need to import two objects (one as origin and the other with UVs as target); it would be great to have an automated process that does all that for you with a single click (unless you can find a method that doesn't involve the creation of a copy of the same object to transfer the informations from one to the other).
This is going to be fun, thanks and keep up the good work.