Please make the color picker more intuitive and faster.

Accessing the color picker temporarily from any tool is a good thing. It happens easily to deselect the current tool though, if you release “I” to soon. It feels very strange to pick the smooth shaded color as default anyway. Most of the time people will want the flat color, and not paint some shadow or highlight into their color maps. Pressing a button and waiting until the display switches to flat shaded is way too time consuming. Or is that just me and my graphics card? There’s always a short delay when switching between shading modes…

It would be nice to have the smootg key for sculpting also affect the paint layers. That’s what one would expect, and zBrush has it ;)

+1 for picking the flat color!

That’s what one would expect, and zBrush has it ;)

In vertex color paint or in screen paint modes. Both have quality and workflow issues.

Blur brush is planned as well as Clone.

skycastleMud 06 November 2008 02:49 PM

That’s what one would expect, and zBrush has it ;)

In vertex color paint or in screen paint modes. Both have quality and workflow issues.

Blur brush is planned as well as Clone.

yaay xD glad to hear that!

Yes, thank you, skycastleMud. That’s good news :) I meant vertex color paint. But I agree about quality and workflow being rather poor…

But I agree about quality and workflow being rather poor…

I guess include resolution and speed with quality. For example on a single mesh in Mudbox 2009 I can paint across 2 side by side 4096x4096 texture maps on my 32 bit OS using an 8800GTX graphics card. I can paint this in real time and rotate and view all colors while I paint.

If you are limited to painting `vertex colors`, to match this resolution, you would need to subdivide to 33,554,432 million points to equal the quality in Mudbox. This would present major issues for you on 32 bit OS if you could do it at all. Even if you could then in the end you need to bake the vertex color into a texture which this also introduces filtering issues where you again loose quality.

This is what I was referring to about the quality and workflow issue. Subdividing vertex points for 3d painting is just not the most efficient approach to painting high quality texture maps.

Subdividing vertex points for 3d painting is just not the most efficient approach to painting high quality texture maps.

Totally with you. I’m very convinced of the texturing quality and performance in Mudbox. I also like the nice window automatically asking for a new paint layer’s specifications. All I wish for now is the right tools to paint with.

I would also like to see a new interface for choosing colors, like the one in Corel Painter (or Zbrush, which is basically the same but more compressed) where you can pick hue and brightness/saturation seperately and without opening a new window. I guess that has long been planned for anyways.

As a suggestion for painting, I think it would be better not to set first the resolution size and choosing tif,jpeg or exr.  Just a default raw setting of Mudbox.  After you’ve finish your painting then you can choose whether to save the resolution as 512,1024,2048 or 4096 and tif,jpeg, or exr.
By doing this you are free from starting again your painting if in case you’ve made a mistake or you want to change the resolution size and tif,jpeg, or exr.

@ gandalf1774: I like the convenience of the menu coming to you, so to speak. You can just hit OK and accept those settings or you can specify what you want if you already know and not bother with it again. Of course being able to change resolution afterwards would be nice. And it would be cool to start painting without being prompted. But keep in mind this is not poly painting, as soon as you paint, what you do is stored in pixels (correct me if I’m wrong?). In order to enable you to store 4K maps every map would have to be that large and waste RAM. I guess that’s why you have to specify a size in advance. Downsampling or changing the image format should be no problem, though.

Maybe there could be an option like ‘don’t ask again’ or something. Because I agree that confirming texture settings every time you create a new layer is a bit tedious. On the other hand in production you have a pipeline that demands certain formats and sizes, so you will probably have an idea of what you are going to output.

I understand your perspective Pixeljunkmonster, but I think it still nice if Mudbox 2009 have something similar to Photoshop were in you can save as a native format like a psd file.  In that way you have a flexibility to choose later any type of format you like.  This will not be limited to a certain format.  If in case you decided to change the format then you don’t need to start again to paint from scratch..  :-)

True, that would be convenient and indeed nice to have.