Simple question and I have some ideas to do it if there isn't a straitforeward way … but how in Houdini does one

“render to texture” .. or “bake texture”

I don't see much in the way of features for that so just wondering if they're hidden somewhere. Basically want to bypass Max for this task. I want to take in a blending shader that blends to eliminate seams and “render/bake” it to a new image on the origional 2D-uv layout.

I was just enlightened to Road Kill for uv mapping so don't think I'll be doin' that part in Max anymore

http://www.pullin-shapes.co.uk/ [pullin-shapes.co.uk]

(it's free)

andrewlowell
Simple question and I have some ideas to do it if there isn't a straitforeward way … but how in Houdini does one

“render to texture” .. or “bake texture”

I don't see much in the way of features for that so just wondering if they're hidden somewhere. Basically want to bypass Max for this task. I want to take in a blending shader that blends to eliminate seams and “render/bake” it to a new image on the origional 2D-uv layout.

I was just enlightened to Road Kill for uv mapping so don't think I'll be doin' that part in Max anymore

http://www.pullin-shapes.co.uk/ [pullin-shapes.co.uk]

(it's free)

from ‘mantra -h’:

-u object Beta-version of a texture baker

YMMV.

andrewlowell
I was just enlightened to Road Kill for uv mapping so don't think I'll be doin' that part in Max anymore

http://www.pullin-shapes.co.uk/ [pullin-shapes.co.uk]

(it's free)

http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/ShaderUnwrap [odforce.net]

Oh, and there's the pelt SOP.

ah ha … thanks very much

Hey Andrew, this was my results for baking out textures:

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?showtopic=5186&hl=baking [forums.odforce.net]

HTHs!

very cool Alvin .. ok time for resurch

also I've done pelt in Max and Houdini but the reason I think road kill is so cool is because it will show you how stretched or distorted your UV's are by coloring them interactively … all you do is make the seams and everything else is automated for you. It would be great to have a uv coloring/unwrapping method in Houdini similar to that.

Does it actually fix the distortion, or do you have to handle that manually afterwards?

I'm not trying to plug it or anything .. a zbrush artist told me about it, but not being a texture artist I think it's quite cool.

It automatically unwraps and arranges the whole thing, the only thing the user has to do is select the edges that will be seams. It does seem to have a bug or something when trying to move an individual UV, you can see the colors changing but then once your done it will snap it back into place. Multiple UV's with locks don't do that .. .weird … but hey it's free. And I can always edit the uv's in the main apps once they're done in this thing.

As I said I don't think I'll be using the pelt much anymore in these apps, it does a better job than I can without me having to do much of anything. I'm sure a hard-core texture artist might have some objections though.

Green means no distortion / equidistant

I don't mind you plugging it, if it works then use it that's what I say. I was just interested, it sounds like you use the colouring interactively to then fix the stretching.

I'm interested for 2 reasons
1. I wrote a tool that helps to remove this stretching automatically.
2. From what I read the algorithm for implimenting their method is pretty simple, the maths is mind bending but the process is simple, so it would potentially be easy to intergrate into Houdini if I could figure out the math. Of course its only worth trying if it truly works well, all the examples I've seen so far look excellent.

awsome … texture rendering works perfectly … this is extremely useful in Houdini since texture maps on characters can be procedurally generated with cops … and also shaders can be re-applied with Takes.

… and can be made dependent on render nodes. Great for variations in crowd characters

The $F feature can be used to render all the unwraps, like this
mantra -u frogCrowdMember$F2

hello,
Simon, have you compile your UV tools for H9, I would like to try them ( UVuniform sounds nice ).
tks.

I have but at the moment H9 is changing so much I haven't uploaded them to the site. If you are interested mail me off list and let me know what version you are on and I'll knock up a compile for you.