VPaint: Advanced Vertex Painting [Released]

So, some of the more advanced shaders require shader model 3 to run, which it appears that your graphics card does not support. Following are the blend shaders which require SM3:
- Blend 4 Bumped
- Blend 5 Bumped
- Blend 5 Bumped, Spec, T4Color

Could you verify that it's those 3 that are broken, and no others? If not lets keep searching...

One thing you might check is under Edit->Graphics Emulation make sure you have "No Emulation" selected.

 

Yes, it's working now. We'll test it on ipad and other mobile platforms. Thanks for the help.

 

Great! As far as I know, iOS and modern android devices have comparable support to SM3 so hopefully you won't run into any problems. Let me know if anything comes up.

 

hi , sorry if this is a dumb question I'm not very knowledgeable about shaders , I'm wondering if it's possible to have unlit version of the vertex colour shaders especially for mobile or does this already have something similar? , thanks!

 

There are no dumb questions VPaint has the shader you're talking about included, and they'll work great on mobile. If you want just straight unlit vertex colors, you can use "VPaint/Unlit/VertexColorsRGB", and if you want to have a diffuse texture as well you can use "VPaint/Unlit/VertexColorsDiffuse".

 

ah awesome ill see about purchasing it when I get time

 

Hey beck. VPaint is awesome.
Just a question though: will I be able to use the combine children script or derivatives thereof? What's best practise regarding this and VPaint?

 

Hi Marco,
Well, VPaint does instance meshes so it could possibly conflict with a combine children script or manual mesh batching. To get it to work properly, you'll just need to make sure that your VPaint data is applied before the combine children script is run. On the VPaint group there is an option for when the colors are applied - the earliest option is on Awake. If the combine children also runs in the Awake function, you could try setting the script execution order so that VPaintGroup is executed before the combine children script.
Hope that helps

 

Hey Beck. Something I've been wondering is if there would be a way using a tool like this to create a tool similar to the terrain tools where you could use rgba channels to not just paint textures but meshes/detail meshes. Similar to what you can do with the terrain tools. Maybe there is something already like this out there, but it would be really great to be able to paint detail meshes, such as small rocks, grasses/flora or other similar stuff, right on your prefabs. I know this is not really the idea at all behind VPaint, but wondering if it would be possible with a similar tool. Anyways, just stumbled upon VPaint today, and will likely buy. Looks like a great tool! Thanks!

 

Hey Jesse, thanks for bringing that up, that's actually something we've been thinking about for some time. I agree that it doesn't fit in the VPaint context but it would be a very nice workflow and would combo well with it. I'll keep you posted if/when we move on that.

 

Hey Beck, how are things? I haven't done much work with vPaint since buying it, have been focusing on modeling, but I would like to start bringing the two formats together.

I was just wondering if it was possible to set up an exclusive colour for each vert. Instead of blending two textures together, having one or the other showing at any one time. I think this might be possible with layers right? I will start playing around with it, see if I can hit it myself, but if you have any tips to get me there I would appreciate that as well.

I was also wondering if I were to paint vertex colours inside Blender and then used a material with one of your vPaint shaders on it would process work also?

 

Hey Beck, I was wondering if it is possible with what you have set up now to do automatic directional blending of materials based on world vectors. I know you do something like that with blending between two objects, but what I am more specifically talking about would be a world vector blend material, so that for example I could have a up blend material like snow or moss, where the snow or moss would automatically blend on the top surface of the mesh. using a heightmap, no matter how you rotated it and moved it. I have used this type of shader in several other editors and it is really great. It would be awesome to see on the feature list, if it isn't already in there somewhere.

 

Hi Beck,

Wondering if you could comment on whether it'd be possible to use Texture Arrays with vertex colors to have the ability to use a huge amount of textures in the blending shader pass? Unity3D seems to have a component called Texture3D for this. I've put up a thread HERE on the topic, as there is little to no documentation on it.
I'm hoping you could offer your expertise on this topic and maybe even take a guess at how hard it'd be to implement in your product?

 

@Steven What you're asking for seems like something you would want to accomplish on the shader level. If you're asking for individual faces having different vertex colors from their neighboring faces, unfortunately VPaint does not yet support that. As for using VPaint materials on a mesh which has vertex colors from another application, that is absolutely possible

@JesseCarpenter Yeah, that is definitely something you generally do on a shader. If it were a VPaint function, then the vertex colors wouldn't be relative to world up if you started rotating objects. However, that does seem like an interesting use case. One thing that I'll be adding to VPaint sometime in the future is a flexible API for writing your own custom baking functions like this.

@strich To be honest I'm not too familiar with using Texture3D. Whether it's a Texture Array or not, you would still run into the 4-channel constraint of vertex colors. Since there's only RGBA at your disposal for mesh-specific data, you can only blend a max for 5 textures (1 base, and 1 texture for each channel).
One solution might be to pack multiple color sets into the color channels and unpack them on the shader. You'd lose some precision, but you'd have more data at your disposal. VPaint doesn't currently support this though - maybe sometime in the future!
Another option, if you're not looking to use normal maps, is to pack color data into tangents. VPaint has a function for doing that on the VPaintGroup.

 

Yeah I just got confirmation from Unity Support that they do not support Texture Arrays, which really sucks.
But to take the point further - I was thinking about the texture limitation yesterday one thought that occurred to me was to have at least 1 of the textures be a 'texture mask' for the entire mesh, with the colors being an ID for the texture to use per vertex, and the vertex colors on the mesh itself to perform the blending.
Granted I didn't think too much into this so maybe there are some basic flaws in the above. Even so, I'd love to get your thoughts on it - If you had Texture Arrays at your disposal, how would you implement a feature where you could paint 32+ textures on a single mesh?

 

Unity Support have got back to me and confirmed that Texture Array's are NOT supported. I have created some feedback on the Feedback site and if anyone is interested I would suggest you go there and vote to see Texture Array's get into the engine: http://feedback.unity3d.com/suggestions/implement-texture-arrays-for-a-modern-replacement-to-atlass

 

Sorry to hear they're not supported strich, that would definitely be a nice feature to have.

I haven't posted much about the new update coming yet, so I wanted to drop a screenshot of the new color picker coming in version 1.4:



Complete with hex input and HSB picking, the new color picker makes it much easier to select colors while working with VPaint. 1.4 will also comes with a lot of small bug fixes, performance improvements, and workflow features. More to come later this week

 

Awesome! Definitely the best update !!
But I got a little wish - while the square "default window color picker" is definitely usable - utilitarian even, but I can't help wishing for a little something more fancy......


Something like this :

View attachment 75513
View attachment 75514


The reason being, the color picker is about PICKING THE COLOR - the default "windows color picker" with color bar to the left is small and actually not very good for artist to pick the right color. That's the reason why professional color grading softwares almost always use other type of color picker layout where it maximize the color (hue) part instead of having dedicate the majority of the area to saturation.

Also, the alpha bar to the bottom of the color picker is a bit more logical and nicer user usability wise.





Lastly, for some reason the selected color box to the left looks nicer.... I know the reason to put it in the middle so it seperate RGBA and the HSV, but I can't help felt putting to the right looks nicer....

 

I saw this at blizzcon and was wondering if this would be a possible feature in the future

http://youtu.be/KUnJdVAS3U4?t=26m42s

 

@I am da bawss Thanks for the feedback, you make some good points. I'll definitely move the alpha bar down to the bottom, and I'm still playing with the positioning of the bottom region. As for your hue bar, that really is a pretty cool way to pick colors, it makes sense that that would be a more intuitive way to select colors. However, in the interest of pushing this release out soon, I'm going to stick with the layout I have. Definitely not ruling it out as a potential add-on in the future though!

@Mcg Yeah that is absolutely possible. In fact, VPaint already comes with 1 heightmap blending shader which can achieve that effect.

 

Just sent off v1.4 to the Asset Store. Assuming there aren't any conflicts on Unity's side, it should be up sometime next week. Here's a list of changes that you can expect in the update:

I already posted the color picker (although there have been some minor changes to its layout) so here's a screenshot of the Hotkey Editor included in the new version:



This will let you customize the various hotkeys in VPaint in case there are conflicts with other tools or workflows. None of the default hotkeys have changed, though!

I'm currently compiling a target feature set for the next version, so if you have anything that you'd really like VPaint to tackle please post it here.

 

Sorry for the triple-post, but I also want to mention to @I am da bawss that although the color picker doesn't have the circular wheel you've described, you can of course select a color by hue when you have Saturation or Brightness as the selected color ramp:



The above image also shows the final layout for the 1.4 update.

 

Hi Beck,

Having some problems getting VPaint to work in the Android environment. I had a scene setup with some vertex blending going on. When I swtiched over to the Android platform my textures disappeared. The material is still setup, along with VPaintGroup. No matter what I do I cant seem to paint on my textures. I get a 'nullpointerexception' on the line (even if a completely new VPaintGroup):

Should this all work comfortably on Android?

 

Yes, VPaint should work just fine on android. The error you're getting is actually caused by an incompatibility with VPaint and Unity 4.3 - they changed up their undo system and it broke the VPaint editor. The new update I sent off this morning actually fixes those problems, and to my surprise Unity passed VPaint 1.4 this afternoon (astoundingly fast!). Could you download the new update and verify that the update fixes the problem for you?

One thing that can happen as well with mobile platforms in particular is that older GPUs don't support shader model 3. Unity's default setting is to emulate these older GPUs, thus causing the shader to not render. Try setting the preference Edit / Graphics Emulation / No Emulation.

 

I think that's an awesome alternative, that's what I want too! (its probably the easier than implementing circular type)
It follows the same logic as maximizing the hue selection area which is great for artist!

 

thanks sorry I'm still getting to grips with the tool , is that the terrain example shader? also I'm wondering how I can achieve a unlit blended texture I see I can do unlit colors but was wondering i unlit blended textures is possible? thanks!

 

HI there, I'm currently looking into vertex painting and baking options for my game, and this sounds like exactly what I'm after.

But I have two questions:

First, the major issue I am trying to solve is this: My current game uses lightmaps for its lighting, but there are large numbers of small, clutter objects that are being baked that really don't need to be. My plan is to remove these from the lightmap and instead light them by matching their vertex colours to the surrounding lightmap. Am I right in assuming your toolset can do this, or something to similar effect? The lightmap import options seems to imply this is will work.

Second, I assume in the end all the information from all the layers is collapsed down to a single colour for each vertex, so the memory overhead in the final build is no greater than any other means of storing vertex colours? Basically, I'm working on a mobile game and need to make sure I'm not about to blow out my memory budget storing extra information that my game doesn't need.

Thanks!

 

Hello,

I have some weird issues with Vpaint, I don't quite know what to make of it, so any help would be appreciated.

Ever since the last update (v1.4) I lost specularity in blend textures shaders. I have spec maps in diffuse alpha, and it works fine with vanilla Unity shaders, but when I plug in Vpaint shaders - nothing. Gloss/specular sliders in blendx5 bump,spec,t4color shader seems dead as well.

Also, previews for materials with blend textures shaders are pitch black by default, but lights up when I change saturation or value in base color. I don't know is that the way it is supposed to work, because I think that I had proper previews on older versions of Vpaint.

 

Hey beck. I was thinking about the possibility of blending a new texture on some kind of trigger, like collision. Would it be possible at runtime to have vpaint blend area affected to a secondary texture? I think I would have to calculate which verts were affected, but that I can do. What you think?

 

Sorry for the delayed responses as I was on holiday.

@Mcg Yup that's the terrain shader example. The one included is slightly jumbled as we are using multiple channels in the same texture for the heightmap. If you have a special need for a shader permutation let me know and I can make the modifications and post them here. I'll get some unlit versions of the texture blends posted here later today.

To answer your first question, yes that's exactly what the lightmap importer does. The object must first be lightmapped using Beast lightmapping, and then you can convert the lightmap for a given object into vertex colors. If you're using a different lightmapping solution, you can also use the import texture option.
Your second question is a little more complicated. By default, your layer stack will be carried across into the build, so if you're concerned about memory it's good practice to collapse them where possible. There is an API for abstracting your color data into an asset file (VPaintLayerCache) but there's not a built-in implementation of it. The reason for this is that abstracting the color data would require the objects to be indexed in a serializable format - but Unity doesn't provide a consistent indexing system for objects which live in the scene. In other words, an asset has no way of referencing a scene object, but to remove the extra layer data from the build it would need to be stored in a separate asset. A solution we've come up with for our internal project is to index our objects every time the scene is saved, but the workflow isn't smooth enough to be appropriate for a public release. If you have thoughts on this, please voice them as it's a problem I'd really like to provide a solution to.

@ebbsoft I believe that the blend texture previews typically show black in the preview if the vertex colors imported with your mesh are either nonexistent, or flooded black - could you make sure that neither of these are the case?
As for the bumped shaders not getting specularity, it seems like there was a regression somehow with the specularity in general. To mimic Unity's setup, I've set up a new shader family in Lit/Blend N Bumped Spec. They will be available in the next update, and I've also put the shaders in a zip file, available here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/12558999/VP/VPaint_TexBlendwBumpedSpec.zip


@bpears Yup, that's absolutely possible. In fact, there is a function already built into VPaint for this. You can use VPaintObject.OverlapSphere to find all VPaint Objects in the scene within a certain radius of a position, and then you can use VPaintObject.ApplyColorSpherical to apply your change. For example:

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. var objs = VPaintObject.OverlapSphere(transform.position, 5f);
3. foreach(var obj in objs)
4. {
5.     obj.ApplyColorSpherical(Color.blue, transform.position, 5f, 1f, 1f);
6. }
7.  

Whew, long post. Hope that answers your questions!

 

Awesome! Thank you

 

I don't think it's mesh related issue, because previews are black on material previews - unity's default sphere/cube/etc, not mesh previews. Anyhow, that specular thingy was the real problem, and it is now fixed with these new shaders. Thanks Beck!

 

Hi Beck,

This looks fantastic, Im looking buy it

one question, is possible blend textures with alpha? something like this.



Also the features UDK have, will be great.

Check the second video

https://www.3dmotive.com/f100602

R - Blend Texture
G - Fall Off/Smooth
B - Normal Map Intensity
A - Vertex pull

Also the water one is really helpfull.

 

@OP

I have hundred of gameobjects placed at the start of the game. It is possible to blend these gameobjects with the terrain in run time? In the Awake or Start function?

 

UP!!

No messages since 3 weeks.
There is one thing you and others must understand: with no response from you and without demo version, a possible solution (outside of using a competitor's product) is to seek a underground version of your tool. My 2 cents.

 

@ZJP
it is indeed possible to blend objects during runtime. There is even an asynchronous method if you want to run the process over a period of time. The function you'll be looking for is VPaintUtility.BlendDirectional (make sure you include "using Valkyrie.VPaint" at the top of your script). This will only work if your terrain is a mesh with a VPaint Object.

@ratonmalo
Looks like that is already possible, since VPaint uses the same underlying technology as the video you were talking about. You could get something working like this using one of the shader editors, like Strumpys. I'll see about getting a shader family set up for that purpose for the next update as well (I'll PM you the shaders when they're complete as well)

 

Thanks for the reply.

 

I think if you look at the thread you'll see Beck has been pretty helpful and responsive since the launch of the tool.

It's a bummer there was a delay in communications around the holidays but that attitude is completely unacceptable. Either you use a competitors product or this one. There is no excuse to use pirated software, specially since I can only assume you intend to use it for creation of a software product.

Also, there was no question waiting to be answered for 3 weeks.

 

I JUST PURCHASED IT AND IT LOOKS AWESOME!


Could add a feature where all the visual information would render into a PNG/PSD for layers or flattening).

This way One could simply set it all up and then render it all out into 1 basic map which would make everything much easier and then apply it as a normal baked texture for max optimization.

Because right now I see several scripts attached to every object in the demo scene and too many texture and other options on each game object and that can't be good in the long run.

Regardless it would be an AMAZING feature - so I am requesting it - please let me know if it can be done!

 

I am definitely going to need a step by step tutorial this program is quite big and no small pdf or text tutorial is going to beat a video tutorial.

 

Hello beck,

I've purchased your asset and have a few questions.

1: you mentioned that you could use this for flow maps, all the flowmap shaders I've seen use RGB texture for flows. could you tell me of any shaders that use mesh vertex color to control the flows?

2: is there a way to bake out vertex color to texture? if no then is this a feature you're planning on releasing?

Although I didn't purchase this for that particular reason, I just thought that if I was able to paint flow data and see it at runtime that would be awesome.

Regards
Mohoe

 

Thanks for the feedback!
Well, the components attached to each object have a pretty low footprint, and a baked texture would actually perform worse on the GPU (more texture samples, more texture memory, for very little savings), but I agree that would be a useful feature in some case. In fact, this is requested two posts down as well - I'll add that to the to-do list.
Also, a video tutorial should be available with the next update.

@MoeHoe
Indeed that's how many flow maps work, although you can get a more general flow painted with vertex colors. I'm not actually aware of any flow shaders for unity which do this though - sorry! I've planned on writing one to include with VPaint for a while now so I'll bump up the priority on that. There's also a paint tool I'd like to implement in VPaint to make painting the flow easier.
As for your second question, as I mentioned above that's not currently implemented but due to your requests I've added it to the to-do list.

 

Hi, i have a quick question
if i am painting on imported mesh (fbx or obj)
painted data will become part of fbx or obj? or it will be stored as separate file? or it will be stored as texture?
thanks in advance

 

@Beck

Indeed that's how many flow maps work, although you can get a more general flow painted with vertex colors. I'm not actually aware of any flow shaders for unity which do this though - sorry! I've planned on writing one to include with VPaint for a while now so I'll bump up the priority on that.

No need for sorry Beck I wasn't expecting a flow vertex shader when I purchased this asset and you never said you had one. I actually didn't know it was possible to use vertex info to do flow until you mentioned it. It would be interesting to see how the performance is though.

There's also a paint tool I'd like to implement in VPaint to make painting the flow easier.

I think that would great, being able to see it live within Unity whilst making changes. If performance proves to be better, then I think you could have people switching from texture RGB flows to Vector and your tool would be even popular then it is now.

As for your second question, as I mentioned above that's not currently implemented but due to your requests I've added it to the to-do list.

That's awesome Beck

Keep up the great work

 

The paint data is stored in the VPaintObject component - your fbx file is not modified. When the game is played and while your mesh is being edited the mesh gets an internal instance with the colors applied. I've been slowly working on an fbx exporter but it's not yet ready for a public release. However, you can save your instanced mesh out to a .asset file using this tool I've created: https://gist.github.com/becksebenius/6958389

 

Hey Bech at the moment my use in the application is on hold mainly because it lags quite a lot when I paint and the cursor size when I use the paint feature has to be 0.01 or something when I paint otherwise it is so large that it covers the whole window! Theirs definitely something strange on my end, I tried importing a Texture but it went really weird - I will wait until the video is released to see further use of it before taking judgement further. I have high hopes for this program.

 

Hi Beck.

I am wondering if it is possible to bake scene lighting info into vertex color? And I don't mean using the imporint lightmap, but just direct baking of lighting information from point/spot/directional/ambient light into vertex color? It is much like baking AO in runtime, but lighting information instead.

This will be super useful in case if you want to have procedually generated meshes to have lighting info baked into in runtime. If it is not in runtime, then I think work around functionality is already in the tool.

thanks!

 

@SilverStorm
I'm sorry you're experiencing lag, could you describe the circumstances a bit more? As for the cursor size, it seems that you must be building your scene at an incredibly small scale. That's no excuse for the tool not suiting your needs, though - I'll add an option for defining the radius min/max in the next version.
If you're feeling clever, here's a hack to fix the cursor temporarily:
In the file VPaint/Editor/VPaint.cs, modify this line: ( line 1308 )

Code (csharp):

1.  
2. VertexEditorControls.radius = EditorGUILayout.Slider("Radius", VertexEditorControls.radius, 0, 30);
3.  

The last two values define the range of the radius gui. If you lower 30 to, say, 3, the cursor should fit your scene size a bit better.

@castor76
Currently there's not a method of doing this, although it does seem possible and even practical to do so - excellent idea! I don't think Unity has a built-in API for accessing dynamic lighting information at a given point, though, so any implementation I offer would likely be a recreation of their system rather than an integration of it. And indeed, this would be available at runtime. I can't promise this feature for the next update, but I'll definitely look into it.

 

Yes, it would be like lite version of beast at vertex color level at run time!
If it can do some radiosity and it is relatively quick (ie, run once at start time for about few sec) then it should be awesome!

 

Oh I would love to bake Radiosity
And thanks for the Tip Beck!
As far as the lag goes all I can say is any painting action causes anything from a little bit of lag to a lot....and I have an AMD 6 Core Cpu so I don't really know what else to say.

By the way is the Video Tutorial ready now?