Normal and Occlusion Maps

Works in progress and technical screen shots.

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Re: Normal and Occlusion Maps

Postby punkduck » Wed May 02, 2018 1:30 pm

o4saken wrote:*** Also a BIG thank you to Punkduck for help on the hair texturing, and uploading to the REPO.


That is, because I want to backup my textures in the internet ... :lol:

Uploading the hair was the minor problem, but finding out the error of the exporter was much harder ... (the mhx2 json file is about 54 mByte with hair and 8 mByte without) :)

I just added the blonde material. Maybe I've to retry this after I'm ready with the other hairdos and use more transparency ... as you can see I added a few fully transparent sections to the texture. But I still think it looks a bit dense. It is hard to say if I'm accustomed to use strand hair and therefore I'm not completely satisfied :?

I took my blonde character to test it.

o4saken_blond_curly1.jpg
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Re: Normal and Occlusion Maps

Postby o4saken » Wed May 02, 2018 1:41 pm

punkduck wrote:
I just added the blonde material. Maybe I've to retry this after I'm ready with the other hairdos and use more transparency ... as you can see I added a few fully transparent sections to the texture. But I still think it looks a bit dense. It is hard to say if I'm accustomed to use strand hair and therefore I'm not completely satisfied :?


Im also not a huge fan of the way this hair style came out, the issue for me is with shorter hair styles you can make it look fuzzy on the edges, giving it that somewhat strand hair look, but when its long hair i have yet to find a way to do the texture or model to hide the fact that its just a bunch of long ribbons..
My guess is its modeling - i am thinking that one should start with long hair underneath and get shorter as you get to the top of the scalp, this way the softer hair ends will be covering the very long ribbons making it look softer.

Another thought which i intend to try out - is perhaps the long edges of the hair need to fade from semi translucent to solid in the centre, to sort of get each ribbon to blend into the next, hopefully hiding the hard edge ribbon effect that i hate.
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Re: Normal and Occlusion Maps

Postby punkduck » Thu May 03, 2018 12:19 pm

o4saken wrote:
Im also not a huge fan of the way this hair style came out, the issue for me is with shorter hair styles you can make it look fuzzy on the edges, giving it that somewhat strand hair look, but when its long hair i have yet to find a way to do the texture or model to hide the fact that its just a bunch of long ribbons..
My guess is its modeling - i am thinking that one should start with long hair underneath and get shorter as you get to the top of the scalp, this way the softer hair ends will be covering the very long ribbons making it look softer.

Another thought which i intend to try out - is perhaps the long edges of the hair need to fade from semi translucent to solid in the centre, to sort of get each ribbon to blend into the next, hopefully hiding the hard edge ribbon effect that i hate.


Before you throw away your work: I uploaded a better blonde texture in between. It now seems to work much better. ;)

o4saken_curly01_blond_demo.jpg


You need a lot of transparency (and I also forgot about the light path problem you mentioned). So I rendered new strand hair (about 200 strands) and edited the texture with GIMP. This time I used an alpha treshold (about 240 instead of 127) to delete pixels of the semi-transparent parts. This helps to make the texture more transparent in Blender.

The problem with the ribbons is, that they are really 2-dimensional. Best to use a V-form (two rows instead of one). Subdivision surface algorithm does the rest and you never look at an edge of the texture because there is no real edge visible. In this case you also need a lower number of vertices ...
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Re: Normal and Occlusion Maps

Postby o4saken » Thu May 03, 2018 12:34 pm

punkduck wrote:[

Before you throw away your work: I uploaded a better blonde texture in between. It now seems to work much better. ;)


Wow ok this one does look much better.
Ok i have to try the V form thing - i honestly never even though of that. Thanks!
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Re: Normal and Occlusion Maps

Postby punkduck » Thu May 03, 2018 3:21 pm

The V-method I saw first in a tutorial also used for petals, flowers etc. So this is no rocket science ;)

Funny enough for the smooth hairdos it works fine without the V-method. On the next picture is your long hair in a first test using only MakeHuman and the identical(!) hair textures ... of the curly hair.

It looks really cool now, I just started to sing along this text: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CnXeIepbfw :mrgreen:

(the original band from the film btw.)

woohoo.jpg


I'm really impressed. Upload will be tomorrow, I guess, I have to do the test-renders etc. :D
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Re: Normal and Occlusion Maps

Postby RobBaer » Thu May 03, 2018 11:26 pm

Very Hot!

Am I the only one that thinks the MakeHuman teeth are set a little too far back in the mouth to be natural?
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Re: Normal and Occlusion Maps

Postby o4saken » Fri May 04, 2018 6:30 am

punkduck wrote:The V-method I saw first in a tutorial also used for petals, flowers etc. So this is no rocket science ;)

Funny enough for the smooth hairdos it works fine without the V-method. On the next picture is your long hair in a first test using only MakeHuman and the identical(!) hair textures ... of the curly hair.

It looks really cool now, I just started to sing along this text: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CnXeIepbfw :mrgreen:

(the original band from the film btw.)

woohoo.jpg


I'm really impressed. Upload will be tomorrow, I guess, I have to do the test-renders etc. :D



Oh that does look really good, yes the smooth hair models always seemed to work better till a certain length - but now i have to try the V form :)
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Re: Normal and Occlusion Maps

Postby punkduck » Fri May 04, 2018 7:08 pm

Okay. Number 3 is uploaded (and fits to my Chinese model, see demo picture in the assets). I used the same textures again. This might be a good idea for the future. I also used the same scalp three times. I simply changed the geometry a bit when parts of the forehead must be covered (rotation of one edge-loop in proportional editing is sufficient).

The scalp goes a bit into the head at the edges, but the texture is designed to support this. This kind of scalp works better than my old own polygon-hair versions. To used only the scalp, you can import the .obj file (or append the other hairdo), then go into the UV-editor, select all the strands and throw them away. Then pin the coordinates of the scalp and join it with every new style you are doing (that was my method).

Maybe this kind of texture could be enhanced to a standard version, it should work, as long as you are using some kind of polygon strands (also V form). I also thought of a more professionel way. When I create a texture with different densities, "inner" strands should use the rendered strands with more density on the texture. The outer ones should use a very "thin" layer. Of course I was too lazy to sort all your strands in this way ... :lol:

There is space left on the texture, maybe for additional strands of short length.

One of the most important things is the size of your quads on the UV map. I changed that totally, because a long strand should use long hair. Also be careful, when hair disappears in the cheeks etc. I just made a few fixes. But when I see the amount of strands I'm still impressed. This must have been a lot of work.

RobBaer wrote:Am I the only one that thinks the MakeHuman teeth are set a little too far back in the mouth to be natural?


No, some users allready mentioned it. Often you don't see it that clear. When you add teeth in MakeHuman, they are phong-shaded (they are grey in a way because of the shadow). I changed it for the quick demonstration to "none" or litsphere, so it was of the same style. I don't also know if the pose really is identically, I created it with Evi (for the Wonder Woman fashion render) and used it on Dani. Just another example: I have a small face-pose library in Blender, it was created with Evi, when she "laughts" it might look silly on another girl, the bone lengths are not identical!

I also didn't use a target, but normally I change the position of teeth slightly, after the girls where imported into Blender ...
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Re: Normal and Occlusion Maps

Postby o4saken » Tue May 08, 2018 10:05 am

Slight off beat from usual topics - Wanted to try make a lightsaber where it looks like its glowing, without having to add the actual glow using post processing - so kind of plug and play. In order to achieve this i used 3 cylindrical tubes for the blade, the two outer ones becoming more transparent further out on the texture. It works to an extent - the Saber has two vertex groups, one is *Blade - so in blender you need to select this vertex group, duplicate the original colour material and swap the diffuse node for an emmission, assign this vertex group to the new emmission material- and up the strength. this way the handle is still set to diffuse but the blade and lights shine.

saber2.png

saber.png
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lightsaber.zip
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Re: Normal and Occlusion Maps

Postby ivmeneze » Tue May 08, 2018 3:06 pm

My lightsabers setup
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Return of Jedi'.png
Darth Vader3D.png
Lightsabers2.png
Lightsaber Setup.png
Last edited by ivmeneze on Tue May 08, 2018 6:51 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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