3d Studio Max 4 and GhostPainter

HI all.. thanks for the great help ahead of time.

I am trying to use 3d studio max, and ghostpainter to work on skins. I have figured out how to get the Avatar model into MAX but cant for the life of me figure out how to get the Clothing or skins to appear on my Model. I also cant figure out how to get Ghostpainter to do anything..LOL it is in the list on PhotoShop cs2, and I can see it loading with the MAX plugins.. but cant figure this out.. any help would be great..
Kurstin

Max uses a much larger scene size than most 3d apps do so obj files tend to import as very tiny. When you import the mannequins there's a dialogue that comes up with settings for the obj import. You want to change the vertex scale to a higher percentage. I can't remember what I used but start with 150%. If that's still too small try it again at 200%.

When you get the model into max it'll be divided up in odd chunks. Xenon Linden split them up to make it easy to tell which vertices are assigned to which bones in Poser. You want it divided differently than that (one object for each texture map) so select one piece, go to the modify panel, and use "attach list" to attach all the pieces together.

Then you want go into vertex subobject mode, select all the verts, and weld them all to get rid of the extras. Zoom in close to an area of high detail like around the eyes when you do it. You want to use a small enough threshold value on the weld so you don't end up losing some you don't want to, since that will screw up the UV mapping. Try a value of .01 first. If you notice any vertices welding together that aren't supposed to, undo it and try again with a smaller value.

To get it ready for painting with ghostpainter you're going to need to split the model into three seperate objects, but along the UV seams instead of the way LL had it split up. You can assign my templates as texture maps to see where you need to split it. Start with the head template. Assign it as a texture map to the model. Make the texture visible in the viewport. If you're not sure how to do that, read up on the material editor in Max's help file.

Go into subobject polygon mode. Select all the head polygons down to the UV seam at the neck. Detach them to a seperate object. Repeat the process for the upper body using the upper body template as a texture. You'll then have three seperate objects divided according to the UV templates. At that point you're ready to start using Ghostpainter to paint on any of them. You can only do one at a time since Ghostpainter can only work on a single texture at a time.

Ghostpainter works by tracking your brushstrokes in the Max viewport and then recreating them in Photoshop. In order for it to work the document has to be visible in photoshop, not covered up by Max or other dialogue boxes. If you don't have a dual monitor desktop you can put PS into a max viewport (viewport menu/extended views/photoshop). It works best if you set max up to have two viewports instead of four. Make sure you read Ghostpainter's help file. It's a great plugin!

I'm half asleep so I hope that all made sense.

Thanks.. I will give it a go tonight.. you rock!!
Kurstin

Hey there,
I dont have Attach list in my modify panel.. any ideas?

I'm using max 7.5 so it's been a while since I've seen 4. If you don't have "attach list" you'll at least have "attach." It's been there since 1.0 You'll just have to attach the parts one at a time instead of all in one go.

If anyone wonders what the hell we're talking about, you can find info on Ghostpainter2 here: http://www.cebas.com/products/products.php?UD=10-7888-33-788&PID=5

I don't suppose you have some models ready for UV painting already eh chip? I actualy prepared a version of the female one a while back but some preprepared ones for people would probably help not just with max but with anyone planning to bake textures or other such things.

Mine have been heavily customized. I redid the UV mapping so that it's one long vertical strip of all three templates so I could paint across the neck and waist seams. I'd release it but I'm not quite that nice.

I have max currently tied up rendering a big animation job but when I get a chance I'll prepare some 3ds files of the mannequins split along the template seams and post them for people to use.

In some 3d paint programs (even tattoo) you can already pain across the seems like that while it is still seperate uv groups and images. Does ghost image not support that?

I think Chip has done the same thing I did with my customised UV mapping, namely 'normalising' the mapping across the neck, waist, and shoulder seams, so that the pixels on either side of the seams are the same size.

With the basic SL manaquin, using DeepPaint for example, painting across the seams is a time consuming job, as the resultant pixels at the neck seam on the upper template are larger than the pixels at the seam on the head template. It makes it hard to get clean lines and detail across the join. It just takes a little perseverance though.

I spent a long time remapping my manaquins to fix this, so I can understand you not releasing your models, Chip

Ive seen references to max, ghostpainter, lightwave and deep paint, I was lookinginto lightwave but before I make a coomitement what and why are peoples preferences?

OK, I understood everything up to the end.
The advice works, but one thing you didn't explain:

How doyou save an object so that you can load it into sl?

GhostPainter only allows you to work on one texture at a time so I modified the UV mapping to be a single image (basically a 512x1536 stack of the three templates). I just have to split it into three sections before uploading to SL, but I can do everything with a single PSD file.



I did the same thing. I made a few different sets of UV's to get better mapping in problem areas like the neck and waist seams. Using the render to texture feature I can convert back and forth among various UV setups. My customized mannequins would be hard to explain to others.

Still haven't had a chance to do the 3ds files but I'll try and remember to do it soon.

You can't save an object that can be loaded into SL... only texture maps.

I use 3ds max to make my living so I already had it on hand. I chose GhostPainter because of that. It's not something I'd recommend to someone who doesn't already own max, which is too expensive to buy just to use GhostPainter for SL. Lightwave is also a 3d animation app and would be overkill just for doing SL texturing. I'd check out Deep Paint 3D and Maxon's BodyPaint, both of which have demo versions.