clyde

3D Modeling

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As for vertex colours, as he mentioned they are a possibility. The thing about vertex colours is that you are colouring a vertex where as this guy is colouring a face. So when you colour a vertex it creates a gradient around that vertex which blends to whatever colour is on the next vertex, so you don't get clean lines (left in the image). 

 

This is kinda what I figured, re: getting a gradient, but I didn't know for certain.  I wondered if just having a different material ID for each color you want to use might also be a solution, but that still seems like it would be relatively inelegant compared to the tiny texture flat color method, with any difference in performance being negligible when weighed against the speed of the workflow.

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I was thinking about this and one other method would be projection, if you can make a planet that looks how you want (possibly with geometry for landmass or something) then you can get a normal UV mapped sphere and project onto that to create the texture map.

 

Sorry, can you explain this or link to a video or something? I don't really understand what you mean.

 

Also @root I'll check that tennis ball method out, that seems useful, thanks.

 

I've been messing with Blender's texture painting and that's working ok; I can at least use it to block out landmasses and such and then fiddle more in another program, but it still leave ugly seams that I need to fix if I go up to the edge of the UV. I also took a stab at a method where you uv a plane, then use weird blender magic to transform it into a sphere. That was a cool idea but ended up with some really weird pinched textures on the corners/edges. It made an ok gif though

 

PabDSKT.gif

 

The thing that's still really fucking me up is getting a consistently tiled pattern onto a sphere. I want a nice round bumpy green planet, but I can't get it to work and I'm starting to suspect the actual solution might be some shader magic.

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This is kinda what I figured, re: getting a gradient, but I didn't know for certain. I wondered if just having a different material ID for each color you want to use might also be a solution, but that still seems like it would be relatively inelegant compared to the tiny texture flat color method, with any difference in performance being negligible when weighed against the speed of the workflow.

There's positives and negatives to each solution. Vertex colour would be the cheapest in terms of efficiency I expect but as I said to get a clear line you'd need to add quite a few polys which might scupper that. Material IDs is a very good idea, I'm not totally sure how much of a performance hit you'd take with large multi-materials probably not much but maybe enough to make it no more efficient than the texture method?

Sorry, can you explain this or link to a video or something? I don't really understand what you mean.

Sorry I wasn't too clear there, also I apologise about the late reply I haven't been on the forums much the last week or two.

What I mean is this:

Poly_World_01.PNG

Geometry for landmass and sea, then you create another low poly sphere with standard UV mapping. You then bake the normals and albedo/diffuse/colours etc to texture maps, which is what I meant by projection. Blender has some baking options but I don't know what they're like, I used Xnormal which I'd recommend.

Baking uses raycasts to transfer information from one model to another, the best bit is that it accounts for the annoying warping in the UVs.

Texture:

Poly_World_Albedo.jpg

In hindsight it's not a great example because it's almost all land at the poles but I wasn't paying much attention to the UVs, I just created a standard sphere primitive and exported everything in Xnormal. I can assure you though that it'd be the same no matter where the seams and poles are.

My final result. (partially an excuse to try out marmoset viewer :)

If there's still anything unclear then I apologise but let me know and I'll try and clear it up, hopefully a little more promptly this time.

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This tutorial was useful to me.



I'm gearing up to binge on Blender for a bit. I just need to push myself for a while until I get familiar enough with it to bang something out when I need to.

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Sculptris is a free 3d sculpting application that's also available through Pixologic, and Sculptgl is a web-embedded thing that tries to ape Zbrush's core sculpting functionality, right down to having the same hotkeys for a lot of the commands, if you wanna try sculpting anyway!

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I've been fiddling with Sculptris again and I reached a point with this where it's not *Quite* where I want it to be but I'm mostly happy with it as a thing I did for three hours on a lark:

 

hwSHxS2.png

 

Never could get the ears right.

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