[maya] 3d paint script (as in geometry paint)

Coding
1

Hi all,

I posted this earlier on polycount, but I though I could repost it here and get some more exposure to other tech artists around.
The story so far; after getting frustrated a lot trying to use geometryPaint, it seemed writing a new one was the easier way for me to get the work flow I was looking for.

Chance is if you don’t feel oppressed by the way geometryPaint works (read the limitation/constraint with UVs and managing the grid), there’s probably no point in trying this one instead.
However, if you are looking for a somewhat low-maintenance, straight point and shoot script to ray cast geometry, you might appreciate the difference over geometryPaint. If you are familiar with how AdvancedPainter (max script) works, you will definitely see the similarities.

Either way, here it is.

I haven’t gone through intensive testing yet, but so far, it seems to work properly despite some known issues. It isn’t anything really fancy, but it serves its purpose.
Please contact me if you find any bugs.

here’s a screenshot:

hoping it is useful to some here

-g

2

Hey, I can’t believe no one made a response to this. This tool is freaking awesome and it’s saving me tons of time at work. Thanks for the scripts!
I kind of wished there was a scatter function though haha.

thanks again for the hard work!

3

Nice work dude!

I need to spend less time at work working on tools and spend more time at home writing tools that I can push onto the web for everyone.

I think it’s time to change the way it works. :D:

~B)

4

I tried this the other day and I must say you did a great job! I wanted to write one of these sort of tools one day, but this is a good starting point :slight_smile: Some things I wanted to do in mine:

Orient objects to stroke direction (so you could lay down feathers for example)
“Scale Mode” - would increase/decrease scale of objects you brush across, with altor ctrl as mode flip (like the brush in zBrush)
Orient mode - to drag across objects and push their orientation to the brushed direction (like combing hair in many hair tools).

Again - awesome job!

5

thanks for the feedback guys,
I am still struggling with some unit conversion bugs, damn you maya lol

whargoul: I have a roadmap for features I hope to implement some time, but work is getting the most of me lately.

6

Mostly a great script, though it seems to have some issues with transparency/depth sorting or correctly reading surface normals, or whatever it uses to determine which faces are closest to/facing camera. I’ve been using it to paint onto some pretty complex organic geometry and it keeps placing objects on the back side, facing away from the camera. This seems to get worse with increasing scene weight.

But a lot more intuitive to use than Maya’s native tool.

7

yeah, this one has been on my list since the start ahah. but never came around and took the time to figure out a way to fix it.
I’ve just been using the raw output from the API, but obviously it could be polished further.
But I’ve been busy doing ‘other’ things :rolleyes: