Bumpmap painting in Sculptris

Showing off a new feature I've been working on. The model is automatically UV-mapped at the user's request, then you can go ahead and paint the bumpmap directly using various patterned brushes. It feels like sculpting, and looks "real" even for relatively large bumps. The actual surface is still flat though, so it won't look right if you make a huge spike and then look at it from the side.
I have also changed the material/lighting from last time, now using an image lightmap instead of real 3D lights.
Music is Arvo Pärt.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• sculptris
• mesh
• model
• surface
• sculpting
• bumpmap
• bumpmapping
• normalmap
• cracks
• texture
• mapping
• painting

[katerson]

where can i get this?? :D

[drpetter]

@katerson This is the bumpmap painting you can use in Sculptris 1.0x. Just go to paint mode, select the bumpmap tool and paint using the default brush or textured brushes.

[drpetter]

Dan: The big holes in the beginning are mesh, the rest (after 20 seconds, when you see the textured cursor) is all bumpmap.

Analdin: Yeah, I will probably add textured brushes for the sculpt tools, to allow something similar when sculpting real geometry.

[zenboy3000]

This is excellent. I often see modelers pushing micropolys to make details that would be much better suited for perpixel bump. Such details are usually lost because the level of tessellation required to define them make rendering very long. N-maps are great for this but that brings the problematic of tangent space, tan smoothing, no uv symmetry. I'd love an app where i could paint like in this vid but export a BW scalar map for use with traditional bump in software rendering (ie mental ray).

[drpetter]

Hmm. You may be right that uv symmetry is a problem when exporting with normal maps. I use normal maps for accurate rendering in the editor, but ended up having two slightly different vertex shaders for the two symmetry halves. Due to flipping the geometry, I had to also change winding for the tangent matrices when these are calculated in the vertex shader. Not sure if this applies to a joined mesh, or conventional normal mapping implementations.

[zenboy3000]

In Realtime CG, if the runtime shader does not support uv symmetries (binormal flipping), unique uv's must be used. This is the same in software rendering. However i imagine you are using a scalar value to create a Nmap in realtime, i guess it would be easy to keep this perpixel scalar value to export as a BW scalar map? I think Zbrush does this already. Its a big advantage to avoid a back-and-forth photoshop/renderer workflow. Difficult to elaborate in 500 chars sorry :)

[drpetter]

The bumpmap is scalar height per texel, but I'm translating that into normal map in software, updated where you paint. The shader/rendering uses only normal map. I guess worst case I'd have to double/flip the normal map on export. Saving the heightmap shouldn't be a problem at all since it's readily accessible in memory, but most people would have more use for the normal map. I can't see why I wouldn't do both. Thanks for your input.

[gev2323]

I really can't figure out how to make my own bump maps. Everytime I do nothing happens, my textures/brushes don't look good either, they just make these blurry masses in my sculpture. Do you know of any place I can download these things?

[alienjoe123]

i love this.

[calmoth20]

where did you get those brushes? really cool

[calmoth20]

where did you get those brushes? really cool

[bfrhys]

Music + Program = Pure epicness

Going to test out some meshes :D

[Guilherme2239]

When I Click Paint, My Sculpture Stay WHITE!!!

WHAT I CAN DO???

Sorry for bad english. IM BRAZILIAN

[WCIIINoob]

that's great - this tool is wonderful

Now I have to find some tutorials to export the bumpmapping to blender.

Thanks for the video, it satisfied me of Sculptris.

[KeithRonaldssen]

kudos for your work mate.. i have one question, tho.. when i sculpt a mesh and i press "paint" (shaders enabled in the config.txt) my model turns white like cellshaded and untextured.. and paint colors nor bump painting are visible if i try to use them.. if i turn off shaders i can paint but no bumps :( i have ATI mobility x1700 and supports pixel shaders until 2.0.. you use more advanced shaders? there's a fix somewhere or my videocard is unsupported? :( cheers