I've always painted my textures in Photoshop and then applied them in Houdini. The workflow works, but I saw a video about how a guy did textures in Blender and I wondered if there is a way to do a similar thing in Houdini.

Here's the video I saw on youtube:
https://youtu.be/LcCQKuWPhXk [youtu.be]

Any ideas?

Dave

you have two options, but i doubt you want to paint textures in Houdini.
Use dedicated apps instead.


one is paint onto high poly mesh using paint node (your geometry needs to be super high res)

second is to scatter huge amount of points onto your geometry, paint with paint node on points and then transfer color in shader back to mesh

Thanks Martin,

Those are interesting ideas. If those are the only options, you are right, I don't want to paint textures in Houdini. I was just hoping that someone knew of a paint COP that would let me do this in an image rather than on huge amounts of geometry. The geometry required would probably make performance pretty slow and the extra step of up-rezzing the geometry kind of defeats the purpose.

Thanks for your thoughts though.

Dave

I put in an RFE for a Paint COP. I'm not expecting Photoshop in a COP, but it would be nice to be able to paint quick textures.

Dave

Hi Dave, fair enough, i was not even considering painting in 2D like in Photoshop. I was only considering painting in 3D space.

Will be good to have some sort of 2D paint option as you suggested.

PaintCOP has been consistently rejected. Don't hold your breath!

You can use the paint vdb tools, and then a bake textures to bake the color to texture images. You will probably need to make a surface shader that uses volume sample file from a rest position to get the volume data into the render. This method is the most like “3D paint” that is possible in houdini.

qLib has a couple tools that can be jerry-rigged together to effectively create a a texture painting tool. Theres a SOP that generate points on a surface according to the UVs and a texture size, with each point equating to a pixel. There's then a COP that can read those points and write their color to a texture. You can then read that texture back into a material on the orginal geo. It's unworkably slow for interactive painting, however.

Conceivably you could also build something around the stroke SOP, but it would be a lot of R&D.

Mari non-commercial version is the best tool for texturing, if you are little savy with python, you can automize conversion etc very easily.

Guys, I think the question is good. I don't see why you need to recommend other softwares instead of answering the question.
I often need to paint a quick mask to use outside of Houdini in a game engine. Painting directly on 3D model into texture would be a nice option.
Right now I have to paint on subdivided mesh and then bake it into texture which take a lot of unnecessary time.