Deep Paint 3D - Baking Lighting?

Hello, I've been using Deep Paint 3D for texturing my sculpties and have found it to be extremely useful. One issue I have with it though is I have not found an option to bake the lighting to the texture and I'm curious if this is even possible. If anyone knows how to do this and is willing to share their secrets please do ^_^

From what I understand, you can export the Color, Bump, Shine, Glow or Opacity into other 3D applications that support the *.dp3 file format or work with plugins that do the transaltion into Lightwave or Maya. You can not bake all the lighting effects out to a single texture (i.e. out to Photoshop). Quoting from the DP3 help guide, it says "In 3D mode, changes to the lighting apply only to the Deep Paint 3D preview renderer and will not be exported to your 3D application. The lighting in Deep Paint 3D is only a preview and is not intended to accurately reproduce the complex lighting and shadows of 3D rendering applications." You can export your effects as separate layers into Photoshop, but the quality is not that great, and you are going to end up flattening those layers anyways if you have to work with compositing multiple projections.

Baking lighting into a texture that will ultimately get applied to an avatar or sculpty for SL is not as simple as baking out a single pass in true 3D mode. We don't have the luxury of sophisticated dynamic lighting effects in SL, so the lighting that gets baked out in Maya, for example, will need to accomodate at least a 4 point light source for front, back, and both sides to simulate just a single point light source inside SL. Even this is a rough estimate. What this ends up doing is dramatically flattening the over all 3D effect of bumps and shadows. Unfortunately, this is a neccessary compromise for SL if one is to view 3D objects and avatars from more than one vantage point.

I use ZBrush, which operates in a 2½D projection mode (much the same as DP3) with the capability of baking out complex lighting into a single texture. There are some advantages and drawbacks to this. You still need to bake out at least 4 separate light sources as the avatar is rotated. Those ultimately get composited in Photoshop, and that adds to the production time, but it also affords better control when choosing how and where different parts of the texture layers are composited.

One thing I will say DP3 is great for are the variety of textures that can be applied. It's great for painting texture onto an avatar or sculpty, but if you want quality lighting effects applied over that texture take it into Maya, ZBrush, Lightwave, or 3DS Max.

Yes and no. While the principle of what you're saying is absolutely sound, I'd be hesitant to imply that actually putting 4 or more light sources into the scene is the best way to go. There are much better solutions.

Instead of piling on the lights, which tends to yield unrealistic looking results, global illumination with final gather and/or ambient occlusion will almost always produce a better looking outcome. For the neutral lighting that SL so often requires, this is key.

It basically simulates how things look on an overcast day. Light is diffused, fairly non-directional, and shading is relatively gentle, not harsh. In RL, when the sky is covered in a white blanket of clouds, sunlight is scattered and spread out, so the entire sky becomes one uniform light source. As you look at objects on the ground, you can't quite tell where the light is coming from; everything is just lit up more or less evenly. Simulating that kind of effect is usually perfect for SL, since it's as non-combative with SL's ever-changing lighting conditions as any static texturing could be. It's not absolutely always the way to go, but in most cases it is.

Unfortunately, the two renderers that come with Maya (Maya software and Mental Ray) don't do this sort of thing all that well. You can get OK results with Mental Ray if you're patient enough, but it's kind of a pain. Better renderers like Turtle, on the other hand, do it extremely well. In many cases, with Turtle, you don't even need any actual lights in the scene at all. Global illumination, final gather and/or ambient occlusion, and Turtle's built-in "skylight" do the heavy lifting. You can then use Maya lights, purely for accent.

When you're using a renderer designed specifically for baking, it makes such a difference.

First off, thank you both very much for the information, it was very helpful.

Since I use Zbrush to create the sculpties I guess I'll be hitting the books on that.. A bit OT, can anyone point me to a guide that talks about getting more accurate results from sculpties?

I've noticed when I work in zbrush on the 64x63 sphere from wings3d, I get pretty inaccurate results during the conversion process. I've heard using a smaller size helps, but I haven't tested that theory out yet.

Just as a teaser.. my latest

http://img241.imageshack.us/my.php?image=axece4.jpg

Hehhe and one for fun...

http://img519.imageshack.us/my.php?image=bunnyaxeag8.jpg

I use Zbrush.
You can get a global illumination type of look by making a normal map in Zbrush. To get accurate results with this, sculpt your details in the 5th division, drop back down to the first division level, then make the normal map. Anything that can convert the normal map should work. There's a thing for Filter Forge that will do it. I've gotten great results by using normal maps for getting high details onto a low detail model. The results you get in Zbrush don't touch what you can get in Maya as far as I've seen. I've been playing with learning Maya though and can get no farther than deforming a shape just a small bit.
On a side note, can nurbs be opened in Zbrush? I like the feel of working with Nurbs, but I honestly don't like the feel of sculpting in Maya. I like the way Zbrush does its sculpts and deformations. I am assuming that I'm correct in assuming that Maya has no way to sculpt like Zbrush and that Zbrush can't open a nurb? I've looked all over Maya and can't figure it out anyway I noticed that by bringing up the click menu on the nurb, I can take it into a sculpting mode, but this sculpt menu feels really basic and not very useful.

First, there's no such thing as "a nurb". NURBS is not the plural of "nurb". It's an acronym. None of its letters can be removed without changing its meaning, especially the S. It stands for non-uniform rational Bezier splines. The only noun in there is the spline. All the other words are adjectives, describing what kind of spline we're talking about.

The logic, put simply is "Here's a spline. What kind of spline is it, you ask? Why, it's a Bezier spline, since the man who invented it was named Bezier. What kind of Bezier spline is it? It's the rational kind. And is it uniform or non-uniform? It's non-uniform. In summary, it's a non-uniform rational Bezier spline."

To remove the S is to remove the subject, leaving the adjectives with nothing to describe. It can't sensibly be done.

The correct phraseology would be "a NURBS surface" or "a NURBS model", not "a nurb".

Anyway, you're correct that Zbrush does not use NURBS modeling. It's polygon only.

You may or may not be correct about Maya's brush-sculpting abilities, depending on what you mean by "like Zbrush". Since one of Zbrush's primary functions is brush-sculpting, it has a lot of refinement in that particular area. In Maya, on the other hand, brush-sculpting is just one tool among thousands. Maya's sculpting brushes certainly exist, and they do work well for what they are, but they're not as developed along certain specialized lines as those in Zbrush.


On the shelf, take look at what's on the Polygons tab, the Surfaces tab, and the Subdivisions tab. On each of them, you'll find a tool called the Sculpt Geometry tool. As with all tools, click to select, and/or double-click to open its attributes. From there, you can adjust the brush's inherent parameters and functions, or add your own (literally everything in Maya is infinitely customizable).

Don't expect to find as many specialized functions by default as you would find in Zbrush. But also don't fall into the trap of thinking the tool is not useful. It's not intended to do some of the things that Zbrush does, sure, but I can promise you, it's still extremely useful. I use it all the time.



By the way, one thing worth keeping in mind is that Maya is completely open ended. If you want it to do something for which there is no current tool, or for which you don't like the manner in which the current tool operates, you can invent your own. You can make Maya do anything you can think of, if you know what you're doing with MEL scripting. Literally every single button you press, every menu command you click on, etc., are all just shortcuts to pre-existing MEL scripts. People write new scripts to create new tools all the time.

That's the genius and the real power of Maya. Because one unifying scripting language controls the whole thing, anyone can change or add functionality at any time. Often, Maya's development springs from people doing just that, adding new tools as needed. You'd be surprised just how many of its now standard features were once cutting edge add-ons that people dreamed up only when they were needed for a specific project. Hollywood films often contribute in this way.

I will just have to keep exploring Maya I suppose, I'm sure it will get easier the more I try. Thanks for the information on the nurbs models and how to talk about it. I obviously had no idea I was saying it wrong.
I guess what I meant by "like Zbrush" was the specialized brush sculpting. I use a wacom tablet with Zbrush and with the way Zbrush sculpts and using my pen, it's really fluid. I have only found one way to do anything like this with Maya, but I'm still learning, so I do not expect to have found everything or be able to use the tools that well yet. Thank you for answering so many Maya questions for all of us, it really helps.
The reason I would ask about taking a nurbs model into Zbrush is because in Maya, I can't find certain ways to sculpt the surface the way I do in Zbrush and thought it would be nice to be able to go back and forth on a couple of things, but I guess that idea will not work
This is the second thread I've derailed to the subject of Zbrush/Maya I think, so I better stop. Next time I have a question, I will be sure to make my own thread, sorry for the intrusion~