lcRetopoBasic–UPDATE

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Still BETA, but I’ve squashed some bugs and added some helpful features

• Should deal with object names better, and namespaces from importing obj’s
• Should no longer hang on occasion when relaxing or shrink wrapping
• You can work in any selection mode, object, face, edge, vertex and use the Relax and Shrink-Wrap tools
• Will keep your selection mode so you can continue editing components
• Highlights the Object List red to remind you that you have no high-res selected

Still to do:
    Viewport 2.0 should(?) offer some speed boosts, especially when working with large high-res objects, but the method for layering the high and low res geo doesn’t work properly in VP2.0.  I need to come up with an updated method

Yes, Shadow Baking is delicious

a short video demonstrating some progress on the shadow baking scripts for the lcShader.  Its coming along well, and I will release a beta version at some point in the next few weeks.

lcReproject.cgfx–A Novel Texturing Technique

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I was inspired by Brice Vandermoortele’s Normal Map Reprojection Shader and wanted to extend the idea to new uses.  This is a novel way of texturing using lit sphere images and cubemaps.  You can reproject color and normal textures to a new UV Set.

As a CGFX shader, only Nvidia cards will load this reliably, but I’ve added a arbfp1 technique that might work on AMD and older cards.  Cubemaps are lower quality and don’t have any blurring using this mode.

Getting close . . .

My new shader ‘lcShader’ is almost feature complete.  It’s a very close approximation to the Mental Ray mia_material, but in real-time.  In testing I’m able to get very realistic looking materials using a standard texture workflow (diffuse, spec, gloss, cubemap).  Again, HLSL and CGFX versions will be identical, running the same exact code.  Lights react much nicer than previous shaders and have realistic fall-off.  And baked shadow maps too.

My shadow map baking script is also nearing completion, it will automatically link raytrace-baked shadow maps to the shader for linked lights and supports transparency in both the shader surface and the shadow cast.

Here is a quick screen grab, HLSL on the left, CGFX on the right.  They don’t have the exact same shader settings so some slight differences

lcRetopoBasic–Maya Retopology Tool

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I was inspired after seeing RetopoG, but since it is not currently available I decided to make my own tool for Maya.

This tool will let you use Maya’s makeLive features to easily draw new topology on a mesh.  The tool is designed to be very simple and rely heavily on Maya’s built-in modeling tools.  This is written in pyMel, which only comes pre-installed on Maya 2011 and later.

This is a very early beta-like version, I’ve only just begun to test this in the last few days but it seems workable.  I don’t have any plans to include a full custom toolset like RetopoG, you will mostly have to use Maya’s tools.

A short video explaining the tool:

The Relax Verts and Shrink-Wrap Verts are tools based on Oleg Alexander’s oaRelaxVerts.mel

New Shader Tools Update

I did some proof of concept work on the new shader and everything looks very positive.  In order to broaden compatibility support I’m co-developing a CGFX and HLSL shader.  They share most of their code by using #include files and are visually identical.  This way people with AMD cards etc. wont be complete out of luck, although Shader Model 3.0 support will always be required.

Here is a quick screen grab, on the left is HLSL on the right CGFX.

Still a long way to go before the shader is feature complete, and the new pyMel UI is another matter. 

This is a great time for Feature Requests, I have a ton of things planned, but I’m always open to suggestions.

New Shader Tools for Maya

Congrats to Laurens Corijn and Robbert-Jan Brems on their XoliulShader 2 release, it looks amazing.  They've noted that there will be only limited Maya support - so lets fill that void.

I'm going to update an entire new toolset for interacting with my CGFX shaders.  Here is a preview UI layout.  Very preliminary work.  I have most of the functionality in place from other tools, just have to bring it together in one Monster release.

lcTextureSaver Extension

I know some people were interested in this Photoshop extension tool, I wrote it for a very specific workflow we use at Turbine but if you find it useful all the better.  I don’t have any plans to edit or modify the tool.

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Here is a quick intro video on installing and using the tool.

Some updates

I’ve made some relatively minor updates to a few shaders, check the dates on the Downloads page.  I like to keep things fluid and make rapid changes back and forth.  Hopefully I’ll get some time to do a major pass on the Uber and Skin shaders soon.

I posted download links to a tool I made to simplify texturing at work a bit.  the lcTextrueSaver is an extension for Photoshop CS4 and 5 that creates a custom folder structure for your PSD and uses that structure to save out RGB+A ‘combinations’ such as Diffuse+Clip, Normals+Specular, etc.  It’s a tool mostly set up for the way we do texturing at my job but if you find it useful or inspiring run with it.

As a note on installing Photoshop extensions, make sure you run the Adobe Extension Manager as an Administrator in Windows. (Also I never test this stuff out on Mac so good luck to you guys)

I’ve been doing a lot of pyMel development, I’ll get around to releasing updated tools with these new skills.

lcShaderTools.mel–v2.3

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Updated to let you interact with my new CGFX shaders featuring point lights.