Sup duders. This blog will act as a semi private journal of my 3D/2D art investigation, as well as rambling long winded notes so that I can come back later if I need to refresh myself on a thing.
Monke man was an attempt at learning how to sculpt in 3DCoat and get the result into Blender with a multiresolution and a microdisplacement map.
I found that using autopo to a lowpoly, auto or manual unwrap of the generated topo in retopo room, then pre-subdividing + snapping the retopo mesh a few times before baking “microdisplacement” helped a lot with capturing silhouette details.
3DC does not support multires so getting 1:1 from a low to a high in a displacement map is quite difficult, as there is no direct topology correspondence between the bake target and the retopo, so the best is just to presubdivide and snap, and reduce the amount of work the actual displacement texture needs to do. The general idea is that if we presubdivide, we can rebuild a multiresolution modifier from the midpoly in Blender and then use displacement for only small details, hence “microdisplacement”
A tricky bit when using mirrored uvs, you will get bake errors if the mirrored mesh has overlapping uvs. However, a workaround is to apply symmetry after uving the low, creating a new uv set called “flip”, and moving the uvs on the mirrored half to the flip uv set. This will double the amount of textures that are produced, but they will be identical and the flip material can be discarded or set to a very low resolution. After importing the midpoly into blender, you can just apply a mirror modifier to discard the unnecessary half.
So far I haven’t been able to get AppLink working. I used file -> Export objects and textures and manually imported the FBX into Blender.