Just got Art Engine.

Recently I did a couple surface scans the old fashioned way and tiled them using geometry in max and then baked in xnormal, then used photoshop to finish it. Everything turned out great, though I had some trouble with max crashing on some of the high poly stuff.

I've had a little time to fiddle with Art Engine and I really like it. I think its going to be an important part of this nutritious breakfast. Art Engine seems like it could be quite a bit faster in total. I'm going to have to refine my methods and decide how much work I'll do on any geometry before baking out the textures. I have to research the ortho-photo option in Zephyr to see if I even want to export geometry, or will I do it all with stuff baked right out of the photogrammetry program. I do like being able to raise and lower areas manually to get them 'close enough' for further processing. I'll report back once I've had a little time to head out and take some more scans.

I like the node system. Everything is rather easy to figure out. I have a lot more exploring to do but its been a breeze to get really good results. The only thing I dont like is the paint-brush doesn't tile. That seems a little silly for a tile-making program.

In the future, I wouldn't entirely mind a manual clone brush tool. I get that its supposed to be an automatic thing but sometimes ya just gotta do it the old fashioned way. And you know, its hard to find software that lets you paint-clone all the layers at once like that.

 

Got a link to that discord? I get nothing when I search for art engine or artomatix on discord...

 

Same here.

 

Hey there. I bake all of my maps in Xnormal usually, and I think everyone knows it takes 20 minutes for xnormal to bake a 4K occlusion map. I decided to see what ArtEngine could do compared to Xnormal's results, and it seems instant and looks impressive. I'm getting a banding effect though. Its not in the export node, but rather, I see it directly in the occlusion creation node, which has no options other than intensity. Xnormal saved the height as an 8 bit bitmap, so of course its not ultra precise, but really, who cares for games and textures that arent pushing too far. Anyhow I put together a picture of what I'm seeing. Whatcha think?