Interesting Thoughts to Share — OZONE Asylum, home of the Mad Scientists

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Interesting Thoughts to Share

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Your Text: Insert Slimies » Insert UBB Code » Close Last Tag \| All Tags UBB Help	So a little while ago I was playing with 3DS Max and mapping channels. A mapping channel is basically UV coords, which is how a given texture is applied to a mesh. You can have a whole bunch of these. Let's say that you unwrap a model and you are happy. But then you hit a snag with how you laid out the seams. Not a problem with mapping channels. Just create another one and re-map the parts that are giving you problems. An excellant example of this is a mesh of a head. Do one mapping channel as the master channel. Something like spherical mapping with some relaxing and tweaks and such. Do another mapping channel that is a front shot, and yet another that is a side shot. Doing something like this is sometimes much easier than trying to mix and blend in Photoshop. One cool trick with mapping channels in 3DS Max is that you can actually bake to different channels. You can take the side shot and bake it to the front if you really want. Mix all that together and then do a final bake to the master channel. Now, baking to different channels kind of got me thinking. All you are really doing is taking a triangle and moving to another spot. Something like P1(x1,y1,z1) --> P2(x2,y2,z2). Translate your rastor bits and tada. That struck me kind of hard. Sounds very much like Displace, doesn't it? So I fired it up and hacked it out. Using some specific things, I can actually chuck out D-Maps from 3DS Max and using then as pseudo mapping channels in Photoshop. Once you have various do-hickey renders, move all of it to Photoshop. That idea absolutely tickles me pink. But there is a problem with Displace. It's one of resolution or accuracy or whatever you want to call it. It's only pixel perfect out to 256 pixels (-128 to 127). When the HV percentages get muchly above 100%, bad things start to happen. It's really not much room to move when dealing with bigger textures for 3d work. A D-Map has 3 channels, but only 2 are used. Is it possible to hack the 3rd channel? It sure is. Let's consider RX for a moment. Normally the range is (0 to 255). But what if you threw in a kind of a switch in the B channel? if b=0 then RX = (0 to 255) if b=1 then RX = (256 to 511) That is the basic idea. Then it's just a matter of segmenting B for RX and GY at the same time. The first hack I did used the B series: 0 16 32 48 64 80 96 112 128 144 160 176 192 208 224 240 Can you see the pattern for RX and GY? I was muchly happy. I suddenly had a Displace hack that was pixel perfect accurate out to 1024 ( +/- 512 or so). So I took the B series down another step with multiplies of 4. 0 4 8 12 16 20 24 28 32 36 40 ... 64 ... ... and so on. My own displace hack out to 2048 pixels. But I've only tested out to 1024. It was mostly good. There is a bit of a problem with noise where the B series numbers border. But that's really not that big of deal. A few artifacts here and there really are nothing to deal with considering what I'm getting. And it's kind of nice being able to keep things in Photoshop instead of having to constantly switch back and forth, rearrange materials, and keeping track of the render dumps. Once the MC-Maps are rendered out and prepared, it's all about Photosop. OMGHax!! [img]http://cablespeed.com/~jlhalmich/ozone/koopaisgreater.gif[/img] Loading...
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