So I’m running into more artifacts and these ones I really have no clue. Looking at my sculpt there is absoultely no accounting for them as they don’t appear anywhere. I’ve done extensive testing with changing the subdivision level of my low poly target and playing with the search distance......yet these artifacts remain. One is a line running across the abdomen and the other is a set of lines running up the side of the pecs. These aren’t even where seams would be appearing based on my uv’s. In the screenshot, the left image is max where you see the two anomolies.....the right image is Mudbox without them. Any ideas?

Also, I ws wondering why the displacements don’t show up in my render when I choose the max fast skin shader + displacement. The UI for the displacement settings look the same as those found in Neil’s MR tutorial.....but setting everything up the same results in no displacements appearing in the render.

http://img354.imageshack.us/img354/1986/artifactsty1.jpg

I figured out what was causing this but I’m definitely not sure how I got it to happen. Basically, I got a single mesh in a state where two subdivisions could be visible at one time. I hadn’t noticed, but I moved the layer data to my harddrive and the highest layer and one other layer remained in memory. The result was that if I unhid all, the lower layer would be present with the highest one. I have no idea how I got this to happen, but the flat spots and ridges I circled were where the two meshes overlapped. Has anyone else seen this?

I would double check your base mesh in Max. It sounds to me like you have two meshes in a single object with coincident vertices. In sub-obj Element, click-select the mesh and try moving it or hiding in sub-obj mode. If you find another one under it, then you know you have two.

I’ve seen these things to happen during cloning, etc. It’s best to triple-check your mesh before exporting for sculpting.

E. K. Anna Hennequet [FA]

thanks for posting this damage. the double mesh is something that has happened to me and I wasn’t sure if it was maya or mudbox. but the few times it happened I never got to making a dismap because lately I’ve been very thoroughly checking my mesh and uv’s.

I’ve noticed that nearly every single mudbox problem comes down to uv’s or mesh problems. Just today I retopologized a mesh and it would crash mudbox every single time I subdivided past level 1. After double checking my mesh, I realized I had one poly that was a lamina face.

Interesting. Yeah I had gone back in late last week and found faces on the unwrap section of the arms that had overlapping poly’s (two to be exact). But I don’t think there are two versions of the mesh in max. But I will investigate this more this evening.

In the meantime, I worked around the issue by dropping down to the subD level that wasn’t getting hidden (in this case, level 1 of 4) and unfreezing and unlocking all from the drop down menu’s at the top of the application. I then stepped back up to level 4, moved all data back to the HD and unhid all......problem gone. I still need to render it out to see if the fix worked, but I think it did. I’ll let you guys know what I find. If I ever get this stuff working tip top I’m going to write the mother of all tuts *crosses fingers*

So the work around wasn’t a work around at all. Once I swap the memory, layer 0, 1, and 4 all remain in memory and layers 2 and 3 go to the harddrive. I went into max and checked several iterations of the model......no copies, no clones, and nothing super-imposed. I also backtracked several .mud files and in all of them, I can get this to happen. So my first question is this:

When using the “Move Levels Data” function, is it normal for the program to leave multiple levels aside from the active one in memory, thus allowing multiple levels to be shown visible at one time? And am I correct in assuming that my graphical issues are a result of the various levels being “superimposed” and affecting one another when creating my displacement?

Is it possible to collapse the levels as you do with layers? I tried exporting the level 4 mesh and it seemed to work just fine, but the flat spots in the stomach and ridges in the pecs are still very present.

Finally I set my units to meters (since my units in max are in meters). I was wondering; would that change the scale of the search distance? The UI in the bake rollout doesn’t have any units for the numbers to set the search distance so I wonder if I might be setting it too low. I set a search distance of 0.35 (what I thought was .35 meters). Is this incorrect to assume?

when you export for baking, are you using the “export level” or just export. I think that multiple mesh syndrome doesn’t happen when you use “export level” The idea is that it just exports that level and nothing else. That’s what I’ve been using when I want to bake a map and I haven’t had this problem in a while.

As for as the search distance is concerned, If your mesh is fairly even with relatively squared polys and more detail as needed. like in areas with deep crevices and areas with major turning off the forms, then the default search distance nearly always works. The more hills and mountains you have the denser your base mesh should be in those areas in comparison to flatter areas of the same mesh. if you have a mesh with lots of flat areas combined with areas that have lots of hills and valleys but your quads are evenly spaced and the same size, then mudbox gets confused and it becomes dificult to calculate the search distance because parts of the faces of the low-res mesh get too far away from the corresponding area of the hi-res mesh.

What I’ve noticed at least in my dealings with Mudbox is that if the default search distance that mudbox calculates doesn’t work, then it’s much better to take a look at my basemesh and make the necessary topological adjustments on that rather than try to calculate the search distance myself.

Since I’ve been doing this, I haven’t had any problem at all relating to search distance and I always let Mudbox calculate it.

I hope this makes sense.

Hey Mookie,

I’ll try the default. It usually sets it to about 1.67 for search distance. We’ll see what that does. The base mesh is really quite dense but the areas like the face have far more poly’s than the rest, so it should be good. Also most of the musculature was poly modeled (I think it’s around 30,000 polys as a base mesh).

As far as exporting a level....initally when I was only locally subdividing I tried exporting just the highest level and I only got chunks to appear when I re-opened the .bio file. It looked like about 2000 polygonal fragments from all over the mesh. As a result I completely subdivided the level 3 mesh so there was no more local subD’s at level 4. When I attempted to export the level again it show’d a little less than half the model. So I would only use the “Export Selected” feature and never mess with “Export Levels”.

I had that problem in version 1.05, but only when I exported levels as a .bio file. I would get half a mesh. It didn’t happen to me whne I exported the highest level as an .obj.  So now I always export the levels as .obj and when I bake a map I just create a new file and import the low res and the highres .obj’s instead of using the streaming that .bio gives you.

I noticed recently that it doesn’t happen with 1.06 but I still use .obj. instead of .bio

I guess you get finicky with old age :)

Let me try that real quick. And yeah we old timers find something that works and cling to it like a half inflated life raft in the middle of the atlantic.

Well.....I was able to export it as an obj just fine. Thanks for that mookie.....and the sculpt that appears in my viewport in Mudbox is fine and looks good. But trying to apply a baked displacement back in max results in what almost looks like a flat square of a section of the belly (kind of like the stencil is flattening it out). I’m almost certain that’s not what’s occuring.....but I’m getting tired of trying to get this right to be quite honest.

Not to judge unfairly or anything (I know there are learning curves for all 3d apps), but for being such an intuitive sculpting tool it’s been that user un-friendly and then some for creating displacements. I really think the documentation needs to get a little better so it isn’t so much of a trial and error and hunt and peck sort of ordeal… : P