Someone wished for real mesh painting instead of polygon vertex painting. Can some one explain the difference between these two and apps that use them? For example, what method does Bodypaint use?
real mesh painting is basically what you get in Zapplink when you’re actually working in photoshop. It looses this when you trasfer it to polypaint when you shift back into Zbrush. Bodypaint and DeepUV use real painting. It’s basically mesh resolution independant painting. So you’re painting on a texture rather than on a vertex. It would help a lot with people that have too little RAM to support high resolution meshes. Mudbox 2009 will have this ability, and i’m pretty sure Zbrush will have it in 4. I hope they have it for 3.5 as well, but we will see.
Thanks for that explanation. What I don’t understand is how you can paint on a vertex, which is just one point.
A vertex can hold a color value. That value is blended across the polygons that share that vertex.
ZBrush uses polypainting, which is basically a form of vertex painting. There are some big advantages to this, with the biggest being that textures require UV’s. That means that with “real painting” as described above you can’t do any painting until UV’s have been assigned. And if you need to change UV’s after you’ve already started painting – for example, if you realize that you’re getting unwanted stretching in some part of the mesh – then you lose everything you’ve painted to your texture. The texture won’t wrap right with the new UV’s.
What’s more, polypaint can be projected. That means you can polypaint one mesh and then project that paint onto another similar mesh.
You have a lot of choices.
Now in terms of the concern that you won’t have enough RAM to support high resolution meshes, let’s look at a texture. A texture is – pure and simple – a series of pixels. A texture can’t hold more data than it has pixels. In other words, a 1024 texture has approximately 1 million useful pixels (the rest is lost to space between UV’s and so doesn’t get paint). A 2048 texture is about 3-4 million useful pixels. A 4096 texture is about 12 million useful pixels. An 8192 texture is way too big for most practical applications.
Guess what? ZBrush easily handles 1 and 4 million poly meshes. Most systems aren’t having trouble with 12 million, either – especially not with version 3.12. In other words, just about every user out there can work with models that have as many points as a 1K or 2K texture has pixels. Most users can also work with models that match a 4K texture.
This means that polypaint is a viable method of working. And given the advantages listed above, the so-called “real painting” that some of these other apps talk about is actually quite restrictive compared to polypaint.
Whoa, thanks, I understand this explanation. Thanks again.
wow! lots o" info. Thanks! 