Question regarding painting in Hex2

[artaq]

I'm unfortunately not too familiar with Z-brush's color/texture painting scheme, but as far as I can tell you are able to construct a model, and immediately start painting on it without having to "unwrap" the UV's. I've noticed with Hex2, you are required to do this prior to painting or assigning a texture to the mesh. Is this capability of automatic unwrapping something that is inherant in Zbrush2 only, or am I missing something and Hex2 does this as well? Please correct me if I am mistaken about any of this! Thanks!

[bwtr]

I am still waiting to see a texture brush painting (WITH the UV) in Hex2 that remotely resembles the sales pitch videos. But Tony will do a Tute for me I am sure ???

[tonytrout]

LOL Havent really got to that part yet bwtr, but when I do will do a tute for you I expect with 2.1 when everything goes well -fingers crossed.

Z brush sorry dont own it, but theres plenty of people here who use it and can answer your question

[pnoland]

Zbrush has it's own 'GUV' and 'AUV' tiling for UV's. It basically takes every face and spreads them out like a grid so by looking at the UV map you wouldn't know what's what. Now, for use with a 3d painter it's absolutely awesome but if you paint on UV's in Photoshop then you'd be SOL. If I know I'm just doing some quick painting in zbrush I'll GUV tile my models so it will spread out the faces by polygroup. Very very easy to get on with your work by using that. Hexagon does not have GUV tiling but will make life easier with it's unwrapping. That will unfold your model to get the best possible UV layout without as much effort as it would take by just cylindrical mapping a model and then doing post UV cleanup. I hope that shed a little light on the subject.

[bwtr]

For Tony.

[Teyon]

Actually, you can pick up a model that has poor or no UV info and paint displacement on it in Hexagon. You can NOT however, paint textured displacement from what I can see. This is most likely due to the fact that for texture displacement, you need UV info. So if you just want to displace a model, you can do this no problemo. I've done it several times ...much to my chagrin, as those tended to be pretty good models I would have loved to paint textures on when finished. That's one of the downsides I can see to not UVMapping them before hand: should you decide to texture your model, you'll most likely lose the displacement when creating UV's. Another downside is that it'd be impossible to export the displacement info as an image file, since there's no UV info for the program to place the displacement information on. Thus, your only option when displacing without a UV map is to click the lightning bolt and export the displaced object in all it's glory.

[Patrick210]

I believe that after the 2.1 patch you will be able to unwrap without losing displacement info. But, it seems to me that if you're going to export using displacement maps you might as well go ahead and unwrap anyway.

[Teyon]

I'd have to agree with ya on that one.

[artaq]

Thanks for all the responses guys. Yeah, the ability to retain displacement after assigning UV's would be a huge gain IMO. I wasn't aware that you could just paint color without assigning some sort of unwrap (planar/cyllindrical/whatever) in Hex2, I was unable to do this. If I load a model, and go and try to use the paint tools, nothing happens unless I apply an unwrap first.

[Teyon]

Originally Posted by artaq

I wasn't aware that you could just paint color without assigning some sort of unwrap (planar/cyllindrical/whatever) in Hex2...

Color? No. Displacement...yes.

[artaq]

Ah... perhaps I should have read your reply a few more times before posting. *Maybe* we might see a similar painting method in Hex2 (GUV/AUV) if it's still being developed at some point down the road? One can only hope.