Useful graphic apps
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@solo said:
Sculptris (Thanks to pilou on another thread)
Gave it a quick try and I'm amazed that this product is free.
Not only can you sculpt organic shapes like an artist/sculptor, it also allows you to map UV's and export them with model, so importing into SU your model is fully mapped.
Pete,
How are you getting the mesh back into Sketchup?
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Sculptris -> deep exploration -> SU
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For the little story Sculptris is now hosted by Zbrush (Pixologic) and the creator Dr Petter is now in Pixologic team (creator of Zbrush)
Whishing it stay free
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It's a shame I can't get Scultpris to work with TIG's .obj importer plugin. The polyreducer brush, voxel like sculpting and texture painting would make a great free workflow addition for most sketchup users. If anyone can make it work, please let me know. I've tried all settings.
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Try Meshlab(free)
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Adam
You never lost the UV's, it's not exported with model (notice no mtl file) you need to export texture out seperately.
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I did it also with Blender, but lost the UV's. (Probably naming and file issue) I'll try Meshlab. Sculptris works great with an already made SDS mesh. I just made a nice cushion! Can't figure out why TIG's importer won't work though.
(Sorry for taking up this thread. I'll find another thread for just Sculptris issues)
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I see! Thanks Pete!
Came across this one today - Artizen HDR- http://www.supportingcomputers.net/Applications/Artizen/Artizen.asp
"From real to surreal, Artizen HDR is a Windows based stand alone image editing application that has a complete set of state of the art technologies that makes working with photographs easier than ever. Artizen is full featured photo editor with ability to work with JPEG's, +14 Digital Camera RAW files and High Dynamic Range images in an easy and efficient manner suitable for both professionals and hobbyist photographers."
Free for 8 bit image editing!!
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Visual Color Picker does exactly what it says
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Thanks James, impressive list!
I already use some of them but there's indeed a bunch to discover... -
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sure this is very helpful if you work with a lot of files:
http://www.mootools.com/plugins/us/index.asp
You can see all files as small tumbnails. It reads different files and you can also save them as different. Also convert files with batch command or polygon reduce with batch command and much more is possilbe. I could not be without it!
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http://www.artweaver.de/ is ignored.... simple and powerfull painting application for free
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Found this free photoshop plugin for normal map creation: http://cgted.com/
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Nice find Pixero.
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Plugin for Gimp for normal map creation:
(Only free software, as always
)By the way, do you know how to turn a normal map into a bump map? I want to use Bitmap to Mesh with a normal map, but first I have to turn it into a bump map...
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@pichuneke said:
By the way, do you know how to turn a normal map into a bump map? I want to use Bitmap to Mesh with a normal map, but first I have to turn it into a bump map...
Converting a normal map to a bumpmap/heightmap/displacementmap isnt so easy.
You can maybe fake it either by converting the normalmap to grayscale or using the blue channel as a base.
There are some programs that can do it rather well:http://www.crazybump.com/
Commercial, good but kind of expensive.http://www.xnormal.net/Downloads.aspx
Free? Can convert normalmap to cavity map but that isnt really a heightmap more like a occlusion map.http://shadermap.com/
Free command line version or commercial (19.95) pro version with UI.
Here is some examples with Shadermap:
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Thanks Pixero. It seems that Shadermap is what I am looking for (as I do my work for free, with free tools).
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@unknownuser said:
By the way, do you know how to turn a normal map into a bump map? I want to use Bitmap to Mesh with a normal map, but first I have to turn it into a bump map...
[Edit - I presumed you wanted to turn a mesh into a bump map - I may have answered the wrong question.]
We wrote a (not free) app to turn a mesh into a bump-map. The trick is to look at the mesh from head on and make the closer faces either brighter or darker. A bump map does not have colors, but uses intensity of gray scale to represent Z-distance offsets.
We did this by extracting all the faces and running them through an OpenGL renderer which turned the distance from the camera into shading intensity. This worked well, but it was hard to find a good application for it.
You might be able to get a similar effect by making the object white, using a parallel projection, turning off all lighting, turning off edges, and adding fog. Then the amount of fog should represent the distance from the camera plane, and product the bump map.
Al Hart
IRender nXt from Render Plus -
Thanks for sharing Pilou, Chaoscope is really beautiful!
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