|
|
Gilles Tran wrote:
> Real-time 3D painting and automatic unwrapping are two different features.
Okay fair enough, I really wasn't confused about that but as I try to
explain myself further, I see that my question was more complex than it
seemed at first.
In the whole uvmapping process, is about relating 2d information, a
pattern of colors, to 3d information, a surface which carves through
space, via the use of intermediary 2d uv coordinates. In this way the
3d surface can be colored with a specific pattern. Techniques and the
interfaces which support them, traditionally try to picture the 3d
surface flattened onto a 2d uv register in the form of a pattern or
template. But doing this by simply collapsing one of the 3 dimensions
usually leads to a tangled pattern of mappings, between vertices and uv
coordinates, which then corresponds awkwardly to any coherent pattern of
colors.
So instead, the 3d surface is "unwrapped" by splitting edges
systematically along well chosen lines, so that the surface being
colored can be spread out, so to speak, onto the 2d register in the most
coherent way. Now the pattern of color can be more easily corresponded
to the pattern of uv coordinates, and hence mapped to the 3d surface.
This unwrapping process is supported by tools native to modellers or
independently such as uvmapper, and can support processes that are
'manual' and 'automated' to varying degrees. Some strategies for
splitting up the 3d surface and unwrapping it onto the 2d uv register
are so complex as to be only possibly in an automated way. This is what
I understand by the term "auto unwrap". Other strategies involve an
automated first guess at what the flattened pattern might be, and then
the tool supports further 'unwrapping' of the surface, by allowing the
adjustment of the positions of the 3d vertices on the uv register,
'manually'. Either way this whole approach might viewed as bringing the
3d information to the 2d information.
> In 3D painting, one paints the model through a 3D interactive view, just
> like one would do in real life.
Which, as I picture it, is like unwrapping in reverse. Again you are
mapping from a 2d space to a 3d space but in this case the "2d"
information, the pattern of the colours, is corresponded to the 3d
information, the pattern of the vertices in space, through automated
support of a manual process (painting).
So my question was, since I have never had any experience with such a
tool first hand, does it indeed obviate any need for manually
rearranging vertex mappings on a uv template, such as we get involved in
when using uvmapper? If so, it would seem to be a real productivity
boost. Basically I was just ooing and aweing.
-Jim
Post a reply to this message
|
|