Seamless texture painting possible?

[popwfx]

Not sure if this forum section is only for bugs or also for general support, so sorry I posted it in the wrong spot.

Can I specify UV seams that make painting wrap around seams to be seamless?

Let's say I have a square flat block as an object and I want to make the textures seem like they are seamless when multiple versions of them are layed out in the render or game. What I would like is a way to specify which uv seams connect to which ones so that say in this case if I start painting off the left side the stroke would wrap around to the right side. Is this possible in 3D Coat? I know how to do it in Photoshop, but i kind of need to do it based on geometry and uv maps so that I can have the color, spec and depth maps appear seamless like a terrain.

Can this be done in 3DC and if so how so I get strokes to wrap around non-contiguous UVs? thanks!

[Psmith]

Why not try the Ptex method - and 3DC can turn the Ptex UVMap into something readable in all apps? (3DC can generate a standard UV Map with no seams from a Ptex file).

Greg Smith

[popwfx]

Why not try the Ptex method - and 3DC can turn the Ptex UVMap into something readable in all apps? (3DC can generate a standard UV Map with no seams from a Ptex file).

Thanks, I'm using Lightwave and the ultimate output is for a game engine - I actually haven't used Ptex before, and was under the impression it is for high-end rendering movies and stuff. Plus I want the ability to edit my textures if I have to tweak them slightly in Photoshop, with PTex my understanding is there won't be discernable islands to paint on?

This is what I need, something like this that lets me specify which UV map seams conneect to which for "wrapped painting" with strokes. Something like this which works for color, spec & depth would let me create a seamless texture for UVmaps on blocks of 3D objects that would eventually get placed in my scene and that means that the texture would appear to be seamless. Surely I'm not the only one who needs this sort of thing? It can be done by hand in Photoshop, but I thought 3DCoat would have something like this built in?

[Psmith]

This kind of overlap of UV islands is actually kind of "old school" and characteristic of simpler UV Mapping schemes (like the one now current in Cheetah3D). Not conducive to real time texture painting (the wave of the now and the future).

If you need this kind of repeating pattern, why not just make a "Material" that repeats in the way you have illustrated and paint this in an orthographic view on to the face you have designated? Any tiling image will do this when precisely aligned to the face to be painted.

Greg Smith

[popwfx]

Yes you are quite right, except creating procedural scenery pieces in game development is also the wave of the future, and having programmatically generated land or buildings or pipes or roads or whatever that have seamless connections requires textures to be seamless when being placed on the game grid by code. So artists making assets for that sort of thing (not just the characters that run around in that scenery) need seamless stuff. Also, odd shaped "puzzle pieces" or shapes that are not perfectly square and don't have a square UV map that fills the map space won't work like that. Let's say I was building a track with curved corners or wedges, then in those cases this wouldn't work unless I had severe stretching. I know there are workarounds, but having some kind of edge wrap painting would be really nice.

To do it the way you indicate, I would have to paint the textures in 3DC with a UV map that happens to be square and fills the UV space and then in Photoshop load the separate textures, color, depth & spec and one by one use Filter > Offset (50% of the pixel size), then select the non-seamless area and Content Aware Fill or something to feather the wrapped portion - and do this for the spec and depth maps too -- this is especially tricky and time consuming if I have a non square area or have the sides of the blocks as well that I need to make seamless.

I appreciate your hints, and perhaps my requirement here is edge-case, but I would think many people who create re-usable components for games would need some kind of method for creating seamless textures that include depth and spec - I don't think Luxology still sells ImageSynth anymore and I'm not sure what is the definitive app for seamless creation -- it would just be nice to do it in 3DCoat (and I hoped there was something in there) - so that all the cool tools that I've come to depend on in 3DC when I paint would be available to make wrapping surfaces. Does this make sense? thanks

[Carlosan]

This request was asked time ago, and Andrew like the idea

http://3d-coat.com/f...l=seamless&st=0

And about procedural implementation.

Farsthary -Raul- do a paper time ago

http://farsthary.wordpress.com/2010/11/24/new-planet-procedural-texture/

[popwfx]

Thanks I added my +1 to this too!