Mudbox 2009 in October

Mudbox 2009 is scheduled to be released by Autodesk in October 2008. From the information in Area forum, here I conclude some of the notable features :

1. An ability to match or even surpass Zbrush3.1 in terms of polycount. It is said that mudbox will be able to handle tens of million polygons easily. It means that the performance will be increased by tenfold at least from current version (1.0.7). Also it is available in 64-bit version, meaning that we can maximize or memory usage.


2. 3D painting feature. It's not polypainting, nor screen projection painting it is. SkyCastleMud in the Area forum called it “tumble style painting”. It seems that we can avoid having artifacts with projection painting when some mesh overlap each other from screen. He also said :

-Paint faster than ever without the need to enter projection modes with full GPU acceleration
-Paint in reflection (ie: with mirror X ON for example. Both sides of the a head even with different UVs on both sides )
-Project across multiple high res texture maps within the same scene
-Paint/view multiple shading channels like diffuse color, specular, bump, reflection etc…
-Paint with multiple texture layers with support for multiple resolutions and bit depths within the same layer stack
-Paint using brush tip stamps with color and alpha channels

link to area

Hopefully the painting feature is intuitive and easy to use, unlike polypainting in Zbrush which has too many limitation.

3. Realtime lighting and shadows. Mudbox 2009 supports CGFx shaders and HDRI lighting, which means that you can use your own custom shaders, so that the preview results will be much more resemble to final result in rendering.

link to area


Can't wait to try it in our production pipeline. If it is as smooth and feature-rich as it seems, than I think our texturing process will be a lot more intuitive than now!

Zebruv released

Two weeks ago I have released the ABF++ unwrap plugin, which is ported from Blender, and I called it Zebruv (Zebra+UV). The file can be downloaded at highen3d .

Currently I'm still not that satisfied with the result from Zebruv, compared to Roadkill or Blender one. It seems that there's parameter called "fill holes" that makes the result much better. I'll try to dig into the codes later when I have more time. Currently I have a lot of displacement maps to generate, all 4K. One image require about 1-2 hour to generate, while more complex ones can take half a day, so it's very time consuming. Hope that with the new version of Mudbox, I'll be able to generate maps in much more efficient way.

Here comes ABF++ for Maya!

Finally I have finished a stable version of ABF++ unwrapping plugin for Maya. The result isn't disappointing, but it's still not a 'wowing' tool yet. But it does a good job for most UVing purpose.
Here's the screen shot of my tool (call it dgJustUV for now, I'm planning to choose a better name for him, lol).


I really hope to be allowed to released this plugin for public (in highend3d), so this could be my first contribution to Maya community which has give me a lot.