Curvy 3D Forum

A couple actually

One, sending bump to PD. If I only want a certain part of the model to be bumped with a texture from PD, how do I define that on the bump before sending it waffle without making a bump edit to the model?

I was hoping to color in the specific area in base color and then mixing base and bump so I could see where that part was on the bump but no such luck.

Also, for PD enthusiasts, is there anyway to change cross hair color? As it is grey and my bump is grey, the cross hair gets lost when placed over the bump to paint.

I usually paint everything on the diffuse colour texture first so I can see where it is easily, then move it onto bump later - you can even use the same texture on colour and bump (or colour and curvy) too. Then if you swap it into PD and add details, when you come back to Curvy just select the bump texture in Object Properties before doing the swap back.

Also, you can swap between different textures on a model by holding down the mouse over the little texture image thumbnails and dragging to a different image. This way you can work on the colour a bit - then swap to a new texture to paint a mask for your bumps, before swapping back to the original colours again.

You can make bumpmaps in reds, yellows or oranges too - it only uses the Red value to create the bump.

It is an interesting area - might be good for a tutorial!

Ah, I see. So if I have a creature and want it's eyes a different bump from the rest of it, I can paint the eyes yellow, with bump selected, to define them on the bump (without affecting bump) so that I can work around them in waffle.

Also, if I understand what you're saying 'Base' can be chosen as 'Bump.'
Base would definitely be easier to see in Waffle. =D

Strictly speaking you should use a 50% red colour to not effect the bump, and any values for green and blue (if you have a 50% grey texture to start with).

In the beta you can also render ambient occlusion into the texture - this usually gives a good idea of where the features are on a model.

That's cool. For simple stuff as per suggestion by Phil, I'm leaving separate objects as Children and unmerged as in this picture.

That's a fair point - especially true for eyes and anything where you won't see the actual join in the final model.

Looks like that would benefit from increasing the resolution before doing the merge - otherwise you can see the original polies and have to smooth it to get rid of them.

Thanks, man. Forgot about res and smooth when I did it. Is there way to sort of 'texture bake' using the res and curvy map sliders?

For instance crank up the res, draw, overcompensate by extruding far out with curvy sliders and while lowering the res back down again?

Not quite sure what you mean, but you can change the resolution at any time if the model is still made of curves and curvy maps.

Yup, sometimes the resolution slider gets stuck at one res and can no longer be adjusted so it's probably something to do with the way that I'm formatting my models.

If you use mesh tools (warp, smooth, merge etc) the Curvy object turnes from being built on Curves to being built out of mesh. And meshes can't make easy resolution changes. It is a fair point that this should be represented by the resolution slider being greyed out or replaced by the text "mesh" to make that clear.

Ah, that's cool. So if I'm going to adjust res, do so before converting to mesh. =)

Yeah, the subdivision brush is planned for simetime after I get Curvy on Mac working

That's cool. I'm happy to see someone has taken this 'drawing 3D in 2D' idea and is keeping current with it. All the other developers and projects that I'm aware of have been left on the back burner with exception of Sculptris but that still isn't drawing, it's more like working with clay. =)

I love the precision you can describe with a single line, that would take loads of "sculpting" to match. I think there is a lot of potential in this area that is barely touched at the moment - sculptris is a clear example that there are still cool new features waiting to be developed so I keep experimenting with new ideas for tools.

My dream is to make sculpting as easy as sketching an object from a few angles. For rigid shapes Sketch-Up does a good job, but for organic shapes there is a lot of room for improvement, although it is often tricky to see beyond the cool stuff popping out of ZBrush etc.

Curvy only has 3 primitives at the moment, that is one area I could easily make some improvements to make some more drawn shapes possible. Mixing sketch tools back into the mesh end of Curvy modelling is also interesting - perhaps a curve driven deform, or better surface selection.

Anyways it is fun to be working in a different direction to the rest of the 3D apps.

I just had an idea. It's a bit of a cheap way of adding more primitives but you could offer a submenu that has preset's that call on scripts. Say, have a feature that would automatically/dynamically add a recorded script you just recorded, into the menu for ease of accessibility. You could theoretically pop out a rough figure with just a few clicks. Each time you add a "part", it puts it on its on layer. Perhaps have a GUI that shows a snapshot of the "part" you want to add. Instead of digging through the open dialog with names.