Polypaint in Blender! Its happening :D

Hello as you may all know there is interesting project in this year GSOC and im happy to announce that there is some serious work done by Nathan Vollmer with really great feature that might be added to blender.

More info here
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Bitinat2/GSoC_2016/UserDocs

You can test it by downloading special version of blender from here
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0ByCYJhoHIWlOeVVyN3JpZGFic28/view

It was designed to be used for weight/vertex paint. But for me its zbrush polypaint finaly in blender.
I think its very promissing. Finally mirror and no painting bugs! So here is my test from today. Inspired by Jonathan Fletcher work.


Regards, Paweł.

Ps. In this thread you can post all your ideas, feature requests too! and problems with this build. Thanks.

1 Like

Hi.
Which branch is it? soc-2016-pbvh-painting or vertex_paint_pbvh?

I guess soc-2016-pbvh-painting, but I’m not sure.

Remarkable development. Very exciting. Thank you for your contribution.

This looks awesome! Is there a way to bake the vertex paint into a texture?

Isn’t baking ‘textures’ going to pick up the vertex colors? I thought it did, as it was what I did before to get the vertex dirt for cavity purposes.

Yes you can bake your vertex paint to textures

@edit, you can set your vertex paint with nodes or bake it straight from baking menu

holy moly!
I missed this one!

This is really great. Can’t wait to try it out.

Can you elaborate on this? I’m very curious what you mean! :slight_smile:

In Cycles, add an Attribute Node and name the Vertex Color layer there (default is Col) and plug into your shader color input - voila, vertex color to render.

To use this as you would use polypaint in zbrush you need to setup Skin matcap with blender node system and multiply it with vertex paint output in geometry node.

In short, you can recreate this zbrush workflow in blender.


WOW, so these are just colored vertices??

OK, thanks for the reply. I thought maybe this meant it would do it the other way around (so texture to vertex color without the need to bake) with nodes (which would be super cool).

This is fantastic! I´m trying to get it to work as pachupp suggested.
The multiply node however changes my output to greyscale, what am I doing wrong?






You need to use a color mix node set to multiply. The multiply node crushes the color content.

@PixelPete, yes math node converts to black and white. YOu need Color Mix set to multiply as SterlingRoth said. But you can go even further. You can create another vertex paint “layer” and bake some stuff. Like for example ambient occlusion, Dirty vertex colors, gradient or some specific light setups and combine everything in node editor.

Thanks a lot for the quick help SterlingRoth! That did the trick :evilgrin:

I find that I get the best results using Overlay or Soft Light as blend type and if I want to just give a little volume to the shadeless color, I choose a bright greyscale matcap in Dodge mode. Multiply has a rather strong darkening effect by design. I´ll experiment some more and post some comparison pics as refernce for everyone who is interested in this wonderful workflow.

@pachupp: That sounds great, I´ll try that, thanks for the tip!

overlay and soft light requires to add gamma correction before and after those nodes (and some other too). if you want to have same results as in photoshop. Not many people know that so another tip :slight_smile:

This looks amazing, finally vertex painting gets usabel =)
Any chance we could get OSX build for this?

Here are my favourite shading setups so far and a quick guide on how to make this beauty work for those who might wonder.