Using the Projection Brush

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In this tutorial, we will show you how to use a 2D painting application such as Photoshop as a 3D painting application. realityPaint will be used to setup high resolution projections that can be edited in Photoshop, and the changes brought back into realityPaint.

You may ask, why not just paint the textures directly inside of Photoshop? Well here a few reasons to do it this way…

  • Paint across UV seams as if they did not exist. Everything will line up perfectly. The seam is only noticable under extreme zoom.
  • Paint across map boundaries. For a character, this may mean paint across the head and body texture boundaries.
  • Paint unstreteched details. Unless the UV map is horribly stretched, you can get a great result that is not possible with 2D painting alone.

If you are having trouble with the projection not aligning properly, please read this post.

Ok, let up begin

  • Import and setup your model into realityPaint

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  • Using the navigation tools ( Hotkeys F1, F2 and F3 for Move, Zoom and Rotate), focus on the area that you wish to paint

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  • From the realityPaint menu, choose the Projection Brush  tool
  • Set the Resolution value to 500%
    • This will re-render the viewport in the background  so the width and height is 5x the size as it appears
    • This helps fight resolution loss
    • Through trial and error, you can make this value higher unless you run out of RAM, or it just becomes too slow ( save your project first)

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  • Click on Take Snapshot and save the file somewhere, preferably on you Desktop
  • This is meant to be a temporary file, and not kept for long term

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  •  Run Photoshop or the 2D painting application of your choice.
  • Drag and drop the file Projection.png into the main window ( unless you have your file extensions hidden, otherwise it will be Projection )

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  • Now, at this moment, Photoshop will be acting just like a 3D painting application, from a single perspective.

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  • It is recommended that you create a Layer, and paint your details on it, unless you intend on Bluring, smudging, etc. the existing texture, in which case you will want to edit the Base Layer

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  • Now, you can paint anything you wish
  • To illustrate the above mentioned point about UV Stretching, we are going to fix the stretched portion on the character’s nose.
  • First, we re-select the base layer Layer 0, choose the clone brush and then ALT-Click on a portion of the skin that you feel most closely matches the nose area.
    • We won’t get into too much detail since this is not a Photoshop tutorial
  • Then re-select Layer 1, and then clone over the nose area

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  • Now, let’s bring the changes back into realityPaint
  • Hide the base layer, so we only export the changes
    • This is optional, but recommended
  • Save the file..
    • Note that because is a PNG file and there are two layers in total, Photoshop will prompt you to save a PSD file. Be sure to re-select the PNG file type and resave the file over top the original.

 

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  • Now, go back to realityPaint, and click on Reload Snapshot
  • Select the file Projection.png ( again, if you have file extensions visible, otherwise Projection )
  • Notice how the projection has now been loaded as a Brush Image and no changes have been made in the viewport.

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Attention, important note

  • This tutorial was created assuming that you were starting with a fresh project. If you had previously changed the Brush Tile settings ( SHIFT-V ), then will either want to set it back to Viewport Plane with Repeat = 1, or better yet, read this post for a superior technique
  • The Projection Brush, is after all, a brush, so you must paint the changes back on.
  • Paint over the nose area to reveal the changes, and notice how the stretch marks went away

 

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  • Voila! That is the procedure.
  • Repeat as many times as necessary, and export the resulting image maps when you are done.
  • Just to show off, we’ll show how you can do this across UV seams and map boundaries below.

 

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We bet you can’t do that all of that with just Photoshop alone ;)

So, if you love to paint your texture in Photoshop, that’s great. Let realityPaint help you with those tricky things that can only be done with good 3d painting intergration. Make realityPaint a part of your texturing workflow.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this tutorial, and we hope you have found it informative.

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