Ephere Ornatrix 6.2.0.19732 For 3ds Max Win X64
Tommye Hope
Hey there! So I am pretty excited to work with Ornatrix in Maya and impliment it into our work flow here at work. I am currently working on making feathers and I had a few questions about them since I cant seem to find much documentation about this anywhere in regards to some of the questions I have. So here it goes, hopefully someone can help me with some of them.
Firstly When I Select faces on my object and click on the Add Hair from selection it creates a single plane that is at the center point and does not generate anything else. If I just select the whole object and press the button it generates feathers everywhere on the object. This seems to work in the Max version. Is it broken in the Maya version? I could easily make a "scalp" object as a work around if I need to.
Great to see you giving Ornatrix Maya a try! I just tried the steps you mentioned and I do get the correct behavior with planting Ornatrix grooms on selected faces. Which build are you using? We fixed this problem recently so maybe an update to latest build released today could solve the problem?
So for what I have done here so far is created flat planes from the add feather tool and then once the size of the planes was what I wanted I selected the whole set of feathers and edit UVs and adjust them to fit my Alpha planes that I have painted.
Without clicking on Add hair selection tool Is there away to create multiple random selections inside the hair systel so that I can use two textures with the one hair system to add maybe a second colored feather to give it even more randomness and realism?
I would most likely select the whole scalp I created the system on and create an entire new hair system and I feel like that would potentially give you feathers on top of feathers which would not be desired.
My next question is in your Max videos you used the system you created to project onto the asset you were using (the Bat Tutorial). However you had made meshes of the hairs so they were solid objects. With Feathers I tried using the Bake option with the alpha cards so that I could project a row of feathers onto an even larger card. And then when that didnt work I tried Baking the feathers onto the character as well using the envelope and the results were not good at all. Is there any way your team would recommend using these cards that I have created to apply them to a game asset similar to the bat tutorial?
If we can figure this out I will be able to use the results on our latest asset which we can display results on our dev blog giving credit to the ornatrix system and its use in maya which I would be pretty exited about.
I suppose with your first question you are referring to the ability to output more than one texture channel for the feathers? This is how it's done in 3dsmax: you can output one channel with one type of coordinates and another channel with another type. Also on 3dsmax you can set face material ids to apply different materials to different feathers. I don't know the equivalent of this on Maya, but I will research this.
Yes that the tutorial that I was using. I would gladly make a tutorial on my process when Im done if that would help you guys and anyone else if I am able to figure this out. I think this plugin is extremely powerful and can be very useful to many people who are attempting to make realistic feather textures on their characters.
In Maya the process I attempted was to create my Low res plane that went around the Main of feathers that I would project all my detail onto. I unwrapped the UVs and then went into the baking options. In the Rendering Menues Lighting/Shading>Transfer Maps. I then selected normal displacement diffused alpha and used PSD as my file type so I could clean up with PS. For Target Mesh I selected the Plane I had created and for the Source meshes I selected the Feather system. I tried adjusting the search envelope to get better results but this didnt help either.
First are the base planes onto which you project the textures. Second are the dense feather hairs which you project on the first base planes. Doesn't this mean, however, that you need to have unique UVs for each of the base planes? Or maybe I didn't understand correctly?
So here is an image of my process. I dont think I was explaining it clearly, my apologies. First you can see the two objects in my scene 1 the Low Res planes which I have shaped around the featehrs and prepped for baking. And 2 feather system that I have created with ornatrix. The second shot is the settings of my envelope and the maps that I am baking. The last is the results that I got. I tried applying the alpha in photoshop but still did not work propperly.
Is this more clear? I may be going about this all wrong. I was hoping that it would bake the information from inside of the envelope down onto the plane so I could remove the feathers and just use the plane. I understand its a bit crude but I am just using this as a test currently.
I understand now, thank you for the explanation. So it looks like the actual baking process is not working properly. Is it possible that the envelope is too small? Or maybe the normals of the feather geometry are facing the wrong way (looking aray from the plane) and thus the feathers are not rendered because they're being occluded? Flipping the normals could help in that case.
So I talked to the guys at work and they are cool with you showing off the work, as long as you're ok giving them credit and mentioning us with a link to our site. Forged Chaos. And the game is Exile: trials of Ascension.
So I flipped the normals and got somewhat of a better result but I think the problem is that the planes all have alphas that the alpha map is generating all together . So in spots where just one feather is there its fine but if overlapping planes exist its not working properly. Im not sure how to reslove this.
Have you thought of using the Render Settings operator to actually make the billboard hairs look like feathers? You should still be able to apply the same texture map to them as the UVs adjust to the shape. You would need to match the shape in the render thickness curve to the texture manually though.
I created a character using a scalp mesh and attempted to tweak the mesh to shape the hairline and if I move a vertex, a random selection of roughly half the guide hairs all change direction messing up the groom. I just looked at another one of my characters in progress and had the same result.
Changing that option doesn't seem to change anything. In my case, if I delete the edit guides node and create a new one (keeping all the rest of my stack in place) then it works fine without changing anything else so its seems there is some issue with the edit guides node (perhaps something changed from one of the latest updates that casuse this?)
This problem occured before when I switched from the beta to the first full release...my guide hairs all moved and messed the whole style so I had to start again. So I have experience the issue of updates messing up the edit guides node.
Sounds like a bug indeed. Can you guys readily reproduce this in a new scene or does it only happen in specific scenarios? If the former is true, can you please specify the steps here or maybe send me a video of it?
Well since it seems to be an issue with scenes coming from previous installs of Ornatrix and doesn't happen with newly created systems thus far, recreating it for me doesn't seem possible except in my old/ongoing scenes. I also noticed other wierd bugs such as exra points appearing in the render node radius ramp. I remove it and it comes back later on by itself. Deleting this node and remaking it seems to have fixed it. I am also now experiencing some issues wuth the edit guide node such as:
Plant hair tool will not toggle off. I have to save and reload my scene to be able to use the brush othertherwise every click adds another guide as the plant button is stuck on (sometimes it is still showing grey not blue so seems off but is actually still active until I reload the scene.
It seems deleting and remaking a node fixes the issues hence the idea its something to do with the updating process as a wierd guide issue happened prior. I can remake all nodes easily except edit guides as then I have to redo a lot of combing work which is not an option unless there is a way to copy this data across? I just have one groom I cannott redo again and do not have the option to touch the scalp mesh without the issue. I can translate and rotate it but not deform.
I cannot predictably use an edit guides node at all without it at some point going haywire. It's not dependable at all in any production scene. This is an important node to have and it can take some considerable time to groom an animal for example and then inadvertanly it all goes kaput even while following Marsel's suggestions. Sorry this needs some dev love. I don't have these issues with yeti.
Jesse, Edit Guides depends on the incoming guides. If something about mesh (like starting frame) changes which causes guides to be regenerated on scene open it could change the guides. Do you use the "Remember Root Positions" button in GuidesFromMeshNode?
Starting frame should not cause something like this, otherwise it's impossible to use in an animation pipeline. The guides should not be resetting or scrambling themselves. This should be bulletproof, until then it's completely unusable in production even when following your docs and forum instructions.
Are you using the "Remember Root Positions" option too? Problem could also be in the distribution map for guides which, if changes can change the generated guides. "Remember Root Positions" option "cements" the generated guides and avoids any distribution changes down the line.
The guieds move if I slightly move any face or vertex. Though this also happened before as I opened the scene randomly and also when I updated from the beta to v1. in case it makes a difference, map attached...
In my case both as my head mesh has had a round trip via zbrush, wrapx and others but the seperate scalp mesh i created for one character was in maya with quad draw and still had same issue. Though not immediately as it did initialyl work for a while...and then it didn't anymore...probably after an update.
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