ZBrush alternatives?

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1

Let’s say we don’t have the money to afford Zbrush or MudBox. The best choice for multires modelling is Blender of course. But how do you bake the highres model displacement maps into the lowres model for animation??

I’ve tried Xnormal and the results for displacement maps aren’t good at all. NVidia Melody crashes qhen you bake displacement or height map, ATi normal mapper doesn’t do displacement maps, and I can’t make Denormgen script to work properly.
So far, ORB is giving the best results but it has a resolution limit of 1024x1024…

Any Ideas??

2

Blender developers will do this feature :):
http://www.blender.org/development/current-projects/changes-since-243/
‘baking: object-to-object ray normal baking (baking hires object into lowres)’

They didn’t do it yet, but I believe Blender 2.5 will have it :slight_smile:

Regards

3

There is also alternative - free
Sharpconstruct http://sharp3d.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page
CBmodel PRO http://www.cbmodelpro.com/about.html
Claymod 3D - 3D painting, modeling and sculpting http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/clay/

4

Denormgen works well for me for objects that don’t have details of sharp straight edges. For those I prefer to draw a bump map and use the normalmap plugin for Gimp.

If you get an error like “AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘tex’”, that means you have not assigned an image texture channel to the material of the low poly object.

5

Hi tolobán, I´m using denormgen 1.4, do you know if it is compatible with the latest blender releases?? Because the script gives me an error at the very begining.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<string>”, line 48, in <module>
ImportError: No module named struct

Any idea of what can be wrong??

6

Wait, I got it working, it was an issue with Python. Now it is giving some image error, I´ll see what I can do.

7

The Image had to be packed inside of the .blend file…Now it is working…

8

Well, I have to say that Denormgen does a great job with normal maps, but the displacement map is almost blank. Any suggestions on how to setup the program for getting better results with displacement maps??

9

For what I can see in the Readme file, displacement map generation is still experimental, even in the latest release…I think that´s why it is giving odd results…

10

at one time we had an application to paint in realtime 3d…
Tatoo 3D

I cant find it on google now :frowning: wish I had a backup copy.

11

Tattoo 3D painting program is here http://web.bethere.co.uk/terabit/index.htm

12

Blenders internal 3D painting should be quite a bit better than tattoos now, have you tried it recently?

LetterRip

13

Thanks Kic!!

Yes the paint tools are great.The pressure support for my tablet is very nice in blender.
I need more than 1 undo though. Hope we get some more undo’s in Blender soon.

14

If ClayModel 3d can use textures for brushes (like painting hand textures on a character for baking and normal mapping as an example) it just might be a nice alternative. Anybody try it?

15

I also tried the latest SharpConstruct release candidate but there is a corrupted file in it…so when I can find a decent EXE of the 2.11 version, could you send me a note?

16

Hey, SharpConstruct was developed by The Nicholas Bishop, the dev who brought Sculpt to Blender!! I wouldn’t keep up with SharpConstruct if he is only developing tools in Blender now… I haven’t touched it since he coded in… :slight_smile:
I mean, he even made the sculpt brush texture scalable and rotatable with short cut keys, man!!! :eek:

17

rotatable with short cut keys

please excue me for going off topic a bit, but what is the rotate key please ?

thanks

18

In Sculpt Mode, F is for scale of brush, Ctrl-F is to rotate the brush, and Shift -F is to adjust brush Strength. While in edit mode, you can find these listed on the header under sculpt.
It is a pretty sweet toolset that I want badly for texture paint mode and image editor. :slight_smile: