The big Blender Sculpt Mode thread (Part 2)

[joeedh (Joe Eagar)]

I like the way you think. No, there is no way to create UV from face sets. Yet.

[joeedh (Joe Eagar)]

Internally face sets live in the “.sculpt_face_set” attribute. Originally this was supposed to be visible to geometry nodes, but it doesn’t seem to work currently.

[Hadriscus]

Okay, I see. These were made before the advent of generic attributes, right ? I assume they’re not stored as such yet

[HooglyBoogly (Hans Goudey)]

They are a generic attribute in recent versions. But any attribute with a . at the front of the name isn’t accessible with geometry nodes. The point is to avoid relying on behavior for “UI attributes” where the behavior is more internal and coupled closely with interactive editing features. That conflicts with the goal of more permanent storage for procedural things.

The solution IMO is to have an operator that converts the current face sets to a regular integer attribute, and the other way around. That should be pretty simple, just another thing on the list, haha

[Hadriscus]

Thanks a bunch for going into this!

@HooglyBoogly

The point is to avoid relying on behavior for “UI attributes” where the behavior is more internal and coupled closely with interactive editing features. That conflicts with the goal of more permanent storage for procedural things.

I see, isn’t there a longterm plan for allowing direct attribute editing in edit mode? and aren’t face sets “just” an integer attribute on the face domain?

[razielhenzo (Raziel Herbert)]

Face set = Uv packing
My Workflow
face set > Transfer to material > Select material > select boundary loop > mark seam
↓↓↓

- YouTube

[razielhenzo (Raziel Herbert)]

Works great for automatic retopology with Quad remesher

[Poligonete (Isaac)]

“Transfer to material”? Wait… Is this a new operator? I use Quad Remesher a lot and this feature would be a godsend

[Tolkfan]

@gakgu made a “Transfer to Material” operator:

Quad Remesher auto-retopologizer

[Capture.PNG] https://gakgu.gumroad.com/l/qbdos Only the operator of transmitting from face set to material was extracted separately and rewritten as an add-on. Useful with quad remesher. Personally, I think this operator should be integrated into Blender 3.4 version.

I can’t verify if it still works, 3.5 changed some internal mesh… python… stuff…

[razielhenzo (Raziel Herbert)]

Hardsurface topology
Face set + Quad Remesher
My workflow

[Poligonete (Isaac)]

I’ll give it a try, thanks so much!!

[nickberckley (Nika Kutsniashvili)]

That is genius. I didn’t know about that script. Just looking at it what you’re doing seems easily scriptable, so I think entire process can be made into one “Face Sets to UV” operator in python. I’ll look into it when I have time

[nickberckley (Nika Kutsniashvili)]

So, I did it.

I used that script by @gakgu He invented a great hack. So here’s what was requested and more

1. Face Sets to UV
   Creates UV map from face sets, or just seams. There is an option to use custom-set seams with face set boundaries too.
   It is basically “Draw UV Islands” tool imho, could be marketed as such lol.

2. Face Sets to Vertex Groups,
   Just why not. Could be a quick way to batch paint-create vertex groups, because in weight paint mode you can only paint one at a time.

3. And before devs add face sets in Geometry Nodes we could use this hack, so here is Face Sets to Attribute.
   Creates integer named attribute that can be used in geometry nodes, but of course no real time updates. If you change face sets you have to recreate the attribute.
   Still, I’m interested to see what use you’ll find for this.

Face Set Operators

[nickberckley (Nika Kutsniashvili)]

You can uninstall python file that was creating materials and use the new one.

[julperado]

This looks so cool! Thank you for making this script!. I’ll give it a try tonight after work and let you know if I find any issues.

[razielhenzo (Raziel Herbert)]

Thank you very much
This will be very useful in my workflow

[canerasln (Caner Aslan)]

Works great with geonodes, thanks, I was waiting for something like this.

[melvi]

Recently found myself in a dilemma where multires and vertex paint would have been the perfect solution.

Created a number of meshes that are very high res in Blender so I can vertex paint them (can always be baked to uvs later, they are high res so I can export them into ue5 as nanite meshes). Finished vertex painting, uv mapping or further editing of the meshes has a lot of performance issues. I am using 3.5 because of the addons I use (some of them don’t have 4.0 support yet). With Multires, I would have easily gone to the lowest level to edit stuff and uvs for better performance while keeping the vertex paint looking crisp at highest level.

I don’t think we might be getting Multires support for vertex paint or face sets any time soon from the look of things. I gather performance in 4.0 sculpt build is way better now also with dynotopo but workflow wise Multires is still a better approach.

Maybe we can get a separate sculpting Blender software that supports Multires only with vertex paint and facets sets kinda like Normad Sculpt due to the difficulties/ issues devs are facing adding them.

Any one know what’s the latest on Vertex paint and face sets support for Multres?

[nickberckley (Nika Kutsniashvili)]

It’s been known for a while now that after Dyntopo refactor is down Multireis is the next target. I’d say we’re year away from getting new Multires since there is no other developer besides Joe and he has to finish Dyntopo first

[julperado]

Multires might take a while still since Joe is the only dev working on it, so this is a workaround for now but you could always keep the highres meshes just for dyntopo/vertex paint and another lowres mesh (with proper topology and UVs) for multires, and then just transfer the vertex paint from the highres mesh to the multires one, either baking to textures or transfering the attributes.