New equalize island option
As you can see from the title, BodyPaint 3D is now at version 3.5. That doesn't mean there is a whole heap of enhancements as sadly there isn't. However what there are, are quite useful. Before we look at what is new in BodyPaint let me mention that the really bad bug where Colour, Brush and gradient presets couldn't be loaded from the Content Browser has now been fixed. Users of BodyPaint may recall the presets were messed up in R10 and you had to do the orgainising in the Content Browser but load the presets from the old Preset Managers. To use these presets it's just a matter of double clicking them or right clicking and selecting Open. Anyway, let's have a look at what MAXON have done with BodyPaint.
2 new commands allow users to import brush and colour presets from BodyPaint 2.5 or earlier. To load your presets you head into either the old Colour Preset Manager and select Import Old BodyPaint 3D Color Presets or head into the old Brush Preset Manager and select Import Old BodyPaint 3D Brush Presets. This means people who bought 3DKiwi's BodyPaint DVD can load the colour presets for the Spitfire again as BodyPaint version 3 wouldn't load them.
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New equalize island option |
The Equalize Island Size is a new option in the UV Mapping Manager on the Mapping tab. It only works in Realign mode. What the new option does is to resize UV polygons on separate islands of UV so that their area matches the equivalent area on the real polygons on the model. Often when you are UV mapping you end up with scaling problems that become apparent when you do a checker board test. If all this makes no sense to you let's have a look at a real model and its UV map. Here is a model of cartoon rocket. I have done the UV mapping with interactive mapping using various projects and relaxed the UV's. You can see in 3D view the squares (Checker board test) aren't all the same size (I've deliberately made it bad). What happens when you apply paint and particularly when painting with images is that the images will be scaled because of the different scaling of the UV's. Of course you can use Projection Painting Mode in the 3D viewport but it still pays to try and get your UV's scaled consistently the best that you can. This then of course means you can now paint in both the 2D view and the 3D view quite happily.
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UV mapped spaceship model with scaling problems |
Let's just click the apply button on the Realign mapping tool as shown above. Things are much better and we can now paint in both the 2D and 3D views without too many scaling problems of our paint. So even if you have UV mapped your model with one of the many methods in BodyPaint you can now make your UV map even better by quickly running it through the realign mapping tool / mode with the equalize option enabled.
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UV mapped spaceship model fixed with equalize island option |
The reason by the way that this option is only in the Realign Mapping Mode is this mode preserves islands of UV polygons. Other mapping modes can change them around.
These 2 new commands take the selected polygons and maximize their size to fill either the texture map in the case of the Boundary to Quad command and in a circluar shape in the case of the Boundary to Circle command (Elliptical if the texture map is rectangular in shape). The reason for wanting to do this is that game developers in particular work with smaller UV maps so getting the UV's to occupy as much space of the texture as possible means more detail is possible within the given texture map size. Here is a short video by 3DKiwi showing these 2 new commands in action.
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ABF (Angle Based Flattening) is a new UV unwrapping mode. The documentation describes the ABF mode "as an improved, but much slower, LSCM algorithm that produces fewer distorted UV polygons." I have to say that yes it is slower but it's still pretty darn quick. Both LSCM unwrapping that came in BodyPaint 3.0 last year and now ABF unwrapping are best suited to organic objects especially characters. The way they work is the user decides where the seams are going to be by selecting edges. You can optionally also select points that will get pinned down. A preliminary flat or frontal projection is normally done and then finally the unwrap. The new ABF mode is on the Relax tab and there is a dropdown box for you to select either LSCM or ABF. After doing the unwrapping you would then normally disable the the point and edge selections and run one or two relax commands with the option to pin border points enabled.
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LSCM unwrapping |
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ABF unwrapping |
As you can see, not a massive difference but the resulting UV map is more uniformly laid out. So that's it. Not a lot of enhancements. There's a few things that BodyPaint badly needs like the ability to display multiple UV maps on one texture since you can apply the same texture to multiple objects, grid for the 2D view, interactive relaxing as you move points around and vector drawing tools just to name a few. I would hope to see a lot of enhancements in BodyPaint 4.0.