Which 3D program would be best?

I'm a little unsure which program to download which will do what i want, at the moment i currently have Daz3d and Maya.

What i basically want to do is learn how to bake textures so they look more realistic on prims for when i upload into SL.

I'm going to be making Fantasy type clothing i.e Victorian, Gorean, Gypsy as well so i need to learn to make the lighting correct on the textures to make them more realistic and stand out. I've seen a few items that have had this done but i don't know which program to use.

So please if anyone can tell me what i need and if there is any good guides to read to help me get started.

Thanks

I've never used Daz3d, but I can assure you Maya is better. It's unfortunate that Maya isn't as streamlined for simplicity as other programs are...but if you're serious about CGI, then Maya is the best choice...Max coming in close second.

I've heard that Blender is a nice (free) app to use for baking textures. Perhaps you can try that out. I used Blender, but found Max to be much more user-friendly in almost all aspects (it's the industry standard for games).

I have been having a whirlwind love affair with Zbrush, which isn't inexpensive, but cheaper than Maya (if price is a consideration). It has some terrific 3D texturing capabilities with modifiable brushes as well as a clone tool type thingee called Zproject. Using Projection Master allows one to use the 2.5D tools (essentially by "freezing" the object in a temporary 2D state), as well as bake shading and materials. There is also a free plugin called ZAppLink which works similarly with Photoshop.

Again, not inexpensive, but you could try the free 30 day trial.

Which DAZ 3D program do you have? DAZ 3D is the name of a company, not of a program. Saying "I have DAZ 3D" is like saying "I have Adobe" or "I have Microsoft". Adobe what? Microsoft what? DAZ what?

DAZ currently makes around a half dozen 3D applications, as well as some of the best human figure content available on the open market.

As for Maya, as Michael said, it is far more powerful than any program from DAZ (or anyone else). There's almost nothing Maya can't do. It's not just a program; it's a platform.

So if you've got Maya, learn to use it. Not only will learning the basics of Maya help you with Maya itself, it will also put you in a good position to learn a lot of other 3D applications. So you've got nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

Go through all the Getting Started tutorials in the help file (in order), and you'll be a (beginner level) whiz with it before you know it. You'll still have more to learn, obviously, and you'll need a lot of practice to get good at it, but you'll know your way around the program perfectly well.

The tutorials are excellent, and the help file itself is hands down the best included documentation for any program I've ever seen. As I often say, unlike with most other programs, Maya's help file is actually helpful.

I'd strongly encourage you not to approach Maya (or any other program) with "I want to do ______" in mind, whether that ______ be baking textures or anything else. To do so is almost always a formula for disaster in the long term. Learn the basics of the program itself, from start to finish, just like everybody else does, and that the little piece you were looking for will be there. But try to hunt for just that little piece while ignoring the rest, and you're bound to have trouble. Don't put the cart before the horse.


All that said, be aware that if you have the Personal Learning Edition of Maya, it will be useless for baking textures. PLE is a wonderful tool for teaching you how to use Maya (almost all features enabled, no time limits, full access to Help, etc.), but it's deliberately crippled when it comes to output. For output, you need a licensed copy. PLE places a watermark on all renderings, including texture bakes.

If you've got a full version of Maya, you can do insanely high quality bakes with it, particularly if you use it in conjunction with the Turtle renderer (see illuminatelabs.com). It's just a matter of first learning how the program works, and then practice, practice, practice. As with most things 3D, texture baking is half art, half science, and it takes time and experience to get good at it. Don't expect success to come overnight, but do expect it to come, as long you're willing to put in the required effort.

As for whatever DAZ program you have, some are capable of texture baking, and some are not. Assuming yours is, then the answer is basically the same. Learn the ins and outs of the program itself, and texture baking will be part of that knowledge. I can't speak to whatever quality levels might or might not be achievable with any DAZ software because I've never used their stuff for that purpose.

Well i have Daz Studio at the moment because it was free, Maya is the personal learning edition so i won't be using that then.

What about Lightwave, my friend is getting rid of there copy so if that's good i might get that.

I just wanted to know if the programs i can get, can achieve what i want from them.

DAZ|Studio cannot bake textures, as far as I know. It does have some rendering capability, but its primary function is character animation. It's intended as an alternative to Poser.

Lightwave would be a good choice. It's a full featured 3D platform. You'll certainly be able to bake textures with it. I've never used it myself, so I can't offer any first hand knowledge, other than to say I know it's a good program. From what I've seen, its default renderer appears to be excellent.

There are several tutorials for baking the Lightwave website, but be warned, you probably won't be able to understand them yet. You'll need to learn the program itself first, and rack up some good experience. I can barely follow those tutorials as written, myself, since even though I'm pretty well versed in 3D in general, I have no experience with Lightwave in particular. As I said earlier, trying to put the cart before the horse usually doesn't work out too well, no matter what your background. But if you want to take a look, the tutorials are at http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/tutorials/

Robin Sojourner is literally one of the world's foremost experts on Lightwave, so you'd do well to try to catch her the next time she pops her head in to the forums. You might also want to check out her tutorials on her website. http://www.robinwood.com


Another program you'll probably want to take a look at Blender. If you can stomach its interface (a lot of people can't), it's a fantastic program, one of the most powerful available. I'm sure you'll like the price. It's free. http://www.blender.org.

Hexagon does have some baking capability with ambient occlusion and plugs into Photoshop. It also has a bridge to Daz Studio for animating. It is no longer $75 USD, though.

Lightwave is a beast. It's powerful alright, but I wouldn't recommend it when someone has the choice of Maya or Max. LW is more of a...clique kind of community. LW (Video Toaster) pretty much started the true 3D production world. And although I like the program (I've used it off and on, here and there) I think the user-interface (UI) is oddly confusing, even to a 3d app veteran. LW has a different kind of learning curve.

Stick with Maya. That program almost makes me cry it's so beautifully crafted.

I couldn't agree more, Michael! But there's one snag. Since the OP has PLE, not a full version, texture baking won't be a realistic possibility for him. I'd like to think he'd so fall in love with Maya after using PLE that he'd have no problem coughing up the $2000 to buy a copy of the real thing, but the reality is most people aren't going to do that. I don't blame him for wanting to explore alternatives.

That said, Kagome, if you can afford Maya, by all means go for it. Michael's description of it couldn't be more spot on.

Thirded. If it's a realistic option, it's just about the best choice you can make, I think.

If you can't afford it, and are willing to learn it, as Chosen said earlier, Blender is extremely powerful. It's probably the best one you'll find after Maya (Maybe Max too, but haven't used that so iono), once you get past the odd learning curve.

Well i would not be able to afford to purchase the full edition of Maya, it's a little bit out of my price range. I will have a look at blender and i'll try to learn LightWave.

I have to admit though when using something for the first time i pretty much need a step by step guide, so i'll look around for something along those lines for LightWave and Blender.

I'm also going to ask a question here now, i recently found a tutorial for Lightwave to bake textures and in this tutorial it tells you to use a bump map, now when i first learned of bump maps it was from playing around with Sims 2 clothing. So how would i go about creating a bump map for Second Life clothing?

Here's a great one for blender:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro

Thanks Keira, i'll check it out

Good question. The specifics of how to create and apply a bump map will depend on what program you're using, but I'll give you the basic concept.

Bump maps behave very similarly to alpha channels. You know all those posts in which I've semi-scolded people for finding ways to avoid learning how to make and use alpha channels, in which I said they're used for all sorts of things besides just transparency, and that people who don't learn them will come to regret it sooner or later? This is an example of why I made such a big deal of that.

Note, I have no idea if you are or aren't one of those people, Kagome. I don't remember if we ever had a discussion on the subject or not. I'm just taking the opportunity for a quick "I told you so" to anybody who might have been one of those people, and who now might be looking to do anything similar to what you're about to do.

Anyway, here's the theory. On a data map, white equals maximum, black equals minimum, and all shades of gray are in between. When the data in question is bumpiness, then any white areas of the map will cause the corresponding areas of the surface to be rendered as if they are raised above the rest of the surface (bumped outward or upward). Black areas will be rendered as if they are below the rest of the surface (bumped inward or downward). Anything 50% gray won't be raised or lowered at all (neutral). Lighter grays will be raised a little, but not all the way, and darker grays will be lowered a little, but not all the way. The end result of all this is you get to fake the appearance of complex geometry on a simple surface.

For some easy examples of how they work, take a look at the bump map images that are in your Second Life\Characters folder. The upper body is a pretty good example. Notice the nippes are very lightly colored, and the area under the breasts/pectoral muscles is very dark. This causes the nipples to be raised above the rest of the body, so they appear to stick out, while the area under the breasts is pushed into the body, so it ends up darkly shaded. The abdominal muscles are another very obvious area. The middle of each muscle is very light gray, so that area of the surface appears to stick out from the rest of the body, and the edges of each muscle are fairly dark gray, so those areas will appear to recess into the body. In this way, the avatar mesh gets rendered to look more detailed than it actually is, geometrically.

When it comes to baking, bump maps can be invaluable. For clothing, you can replicate the look of all kinds of fabrics without having to model every last fiber. The bump map will tell the renderer to highlight and shade the texture as if all those raises, recesses, nooks, and crannies are there, even though they're not. The results can be incredibly convincing.

You can create your maps in Photoshop or any other image editor, or directly in your full-featured 3D modeling program of choice. I'm not sure what tools Lightwave does or doesn't have for creating textures internally. Maybe someone more knowledgeable can chime in.

Wow, I just learned a load of stuff. Thanks Chosen!

I think you can texture bake with Carerra, a Daz product thats available pretty cheaply. They have a strange pricing scale depending on if you buy into their subscription service or not, but its worth checking out. If you do buy into their subscription, they almost give their software away.

You're welcome, Cristalle. Here's a followup.

I just created this very simple bump map in Photoshop:



It's nothing special, just kind of a sample platter of some different kinds of bumps. It took all of about 30 seconds to make. We've got white dots, black dots, some veiny looking lines, a bit of noise in the lower left, a simple weave pattern in the lower right, and a radial gradient in the middle.

Now here's the object we'll be applying it to, a simple flat plane. I've rotated it a bit to allow light to reflect off it in a more interesting way than if it were perfectly horizontal or perfectly vertical, and I've placed a larger flat horizontal plane underneath it, just to keep some of the light rays from getting lost. For additional accent, I've also put four incandescent planes off in the distance (outside the frame; you can't see them here), to give the surface something to reflect, for the kind of shine you might get from fluorescent lighting in an office.



Note that there's absolutely nothing special, geometrically about this plane at all. It's perfectly flat, no details at all.

Now take a look at it, rendered, with the bump map applied:



True to the theory I explained in my last post, all the white areas are raised, and all the black areas are indented. The white dots are now button-like protrusions. The black dots are now dimples. Those gray ghostly looking lines are now full fledged veins (imagine that on a skin texture instead of this boring white material). The noise is now reminiscent of concrete or cast iron. The radial gradient in the middle is now a conical protrusion. The weave is too big to be believable as fabric, but imagine that same pattern scaled down and repeated a few dozen times.

Consider, this is was all achieved without any of what SL users call "texturing". I didn't have to paint any of those shadows or highlights into place. The bump map simply served to change the way light bounces off the surface, and the renderer took care of the rest. If I had to paint all that by hand, it might have taken me all day. And if I were to model it all, forget it. The poly count would be off the charts just for the noise area alone.

But this way, it was just 30 seconds or so to make the bump map, and then maybe another 30 to plug it into a shader network, apply the shader to the surface, and render it.

And here's the baked texture:



Apply that to a flattened cube in SL, and it will look almost like the plane in the picture.

Realistically, if I were baking this for an actual project, not just for this quick forum post, I'd have used much higher quality render settings, and I would have been far more careful with the lighting, so it would have taken a lot longer than just a few seconds for it to render. A good bake can take up to several hours or more, depending on the speed of your computer, the software you're using, the complexity of your surface geometry, the type of materials you're using, the kind of lighting you're employing, the size of the textures you're outputting, etc. But if you do it well, the results are usually well worth the rendering time.

Erm, I hate to be the one in the class who still doesn't get it, but are you saying you can import a bump map into secondlife? I thought we could only use the default ones in the texture tab.

I'm under the same impression.

I think what Chosen is showing is that you can bake the bump map to a texture in an application, then apply hat baked texture in SL to get a nice effect. I could be wrong, but that's what I'm assuming.

Nope, not what we're saying. Sorry if it was at all confusing. You're absolutely right that you can't use custom bump maps inside SL.

What we're talking about is applying bump maps in other 3D programs, and then baking textures with them. The resulting textures are just flat images, like any others. They're not bumped. They're just shaded as if they were, in the same way that a photograph of your face is shaded to look like your actual 3-dimensional face, or an image of a brick wall is shaded to look like the bricks stick out further than the mortar.

Essentially, all we're talking about is one method by which to apply the illusion of light and shadow to an image. You could paint the same highlights and shadows by hand in Photoshop if you wanted to. This is just another way to go about it.


ETA: Keira's got it.

Oooooooh.....

/me puts hand back down

yay I got somethin' right!

I would SO kill for the ability to bring my own Bump maps into SL!!!

You CAN bring your own bump maps into SL. Sort of.
You cannot apply a bump map independent of the prim texture, that's true, but the "brightness" and "darkness" bumpmap types in the texture tab will create a bump map based on the dark/bright areas of the prim's texture.
It's not real bump mapping in the sense that there are no gradients and the limit for what is considered a dark or bright area seem to be somewhat arbitrary, but it works well enough to add some nice detail.
Getting satisfactory results from a non-greyscale texture takes some experimenting though XD


That said, my preferred way of going about custom bump maps would be to add a dropdown menu where people can choose to use the alpha channel for either transparency or bump mapping (and possibly shiny as a 3rd option ;D).

You're right about that Blake.

I've used it a few times. Works ok in some instances.

I'd trade in Windlight & Voice for the ability to import our own Bump maps. Even if they were limited in size!