import mesh with texture into voxels ...possible?

[manticor]

Hi just wondering if it is possible to import a poly mesh into the voxel room with a texture applied and then the derived voxels obtain their colour from the used texture?

any ideas how to do this?

[Grandmaster B]

Not possible! What would happend to the colors if you modify the voxels? I mean when you subtract oder add voxels what colors should they have? Even if there is a reasonable answer to that, the equation would be too expensive to use that feature in real-time editing.

However, you can import a mesh into voxel room, edit it a bit, retopo the voxels to a mesh again, export that mesh and bake the original texture onto it. Meaning, if you have a textured model you can edit it and reapply the texture - even if it has a whole different UV-set.

What do you need that for anyway?

[philnolan3d]

There has been much discussion for a long time about having textures or painting in he voxel room and it just isn't plausible to even bother trying. The mesh surrounding the voxels is constantly being rebuilt as you sculpt, you can see this if you hold W for wireframe while you sculpt the mesh.

[manticor]

There has been much discussion for a long time about having textures or painting in he voxel room and it just isn't plausible to even bother trying. The mesh surrounding the voxels is constantly being rebuilt as you sculpt, you can see this if you hold W for wireframe while you sculpt the mesh.

Yes but the overall form stays the same doesn't it? so a x,y,z position weight is stored internally in the engine.So it should be plausible to store a vector 3 colour value at the same xyz coordinate as long as that area of the model isn't altered .if the model is altered then the colour information would be lost but the unchanged area should stay the same.

Maybe a hybrid system could accomodate this.

An idea could be like this.

Create voxel model

retopo to derive polymesh ,layout uvs.Paint mesh ,create texture

Link lowppolymesh to voxel counterpart with unidirectional relationship .Changes to polymesh affect voxel model but not the reverse.

voxel surface can obation colour information from tangent of polysurface.Any changes to local areas of voxel model will result in loss of link to polymesh.which would need to be fixed in the retopo room

save model to a a library

Model can then be used as a tool to create other models but has the benefit of having colour information AND a lowpoly cage.Merging voxels together would result in colour information being lost at intersection and deleting corresponding polys on cage which could then be autofixed by bridging the holes created on both cages.Uvs would have to be recalculated and the texture rebaked.

Its just an idea but I think the zbrush alpha + texture in projection master or dragrectangle mode wins over 3dcoat in this regard as you are painting while you sculpt.

Kitbashing in 3dcoat is really really great and is a big game changer in terms of speed for creating models but the advantage is partially lost as the whole model has to be textured from scratch which ,if you have a model with a lot of repetitive details derived from the using the same tool can cost a lot of time.

its just an idea but I think it would be quite processor intensive but could be feasible.

[philnolan3d]

Yes but the overall form stays the same doesn't it?

It may, it may not, depending on what you're doing with it. The Wrap or even Pose tools can cause major changes for example. You can probably search this forum and see long threads on this topic.

[michalis]

Meaning, if you have a textured model you can edit it and reapply the texture - even if it has a whole different UV-set.

Impossible?!

Are we talking about a texture pattern? A seamless sort of think? Is this the case? If it is you can create a textured material for voxels room. After retopo and UVs you can bake this texture, even the bumps. This actually could be a perfect background texture for more painting.

But its completely wrong to use a UV texture with different UV set. A complete mess. What else?

[AbnRanger]

I think what you want can be done without textures being brought into Voxels...you import your mesh into the Retopo room and it will snap to the one your merged in the Voxel Room. From there, you can re-snap the mesh whenever you make some changes in the Voxel Room. However, you will want to keep the changes relatively subtle, as major changes such as re-posing, would make the job to resnap nearly impossible without some manual relocation of the displaced geometry (to fit the changes in the Voxel model).

From there you can export to PPP or MVP or use the texture baking to to just export displacement and/or Normal maps to reflect the changes.