The Mattepainting Toolkit

1、Introduction

The Mattepainting Toolkit is a plugin suite for Autodesk Maya that helps artists build photorealistic 3D environments with minimal rendering overhead. It offers an extensive toolset for working with digital paintings as well as datasets sourced from photographs. The Mattepainting Toolkit uses an OpenGL implementation for shader feedback within Maya's viewport. This allows users to work directly with paintings, photos, and image sequences that are mapped onto geometry in an immediate and intuitive way.

2、User

3、Highlights

The User Interface

Textures are organized in a UI that manages the shaders used for viewport display and rendering.

Clicking on an image thumbnail will load the texture in your preferred image editor.

Texture layer order is determined by a drag-and-drop list.

Geometry shading assignments can be quickly added and removed.

The Viewport

A custom OpenGL shader allows textures to be displayed in high quality and manipulated interactively within the viewport.

Up to 16 texture layers can be displayed per shader.

HDR equirectangular images can be projected spherically. Texture mattes can be painted directly onto geometry within the viewport. Image sequences are supported so that film plates can be mapped to geometry.

Rendering

The layered textures can be rendered with any renderer available to Maya. Custom Mental Ray and V-Ray shaders included with the toolkit extend the texture blending capabilities for those renderers.

The texture layers can be baked down to object UVs.A coverage map can be rendered to isolate which areas of the geometry are most visible to the camera.For Mental Ray and V-Ray, textures can be blended based on object occlusion, distance from the projection camera, and object facing ratio.

Import Point Clouds and Cameras

Spatial data from Agisoft Photoscan, Photosynth, and other Structure From Motion Software can be imported into Maya through the Mattepainting Toolkit.

Project spherical HDRIs

In addition to camera projection mapping, the Mattepainting Toolkit also supports spherical projections for equirectangular maps. Multiple HDRIs can be mapped onto geometry and blended together.

Paint Mattes on Geometry

Layered textures can be blended together directly in Maya's viewport by painting mattes on geometry. The resulting map is baked out to object UVs.

Bake Textures to UVs

Layered textures can be baked to object UVs for use as game assets or uploading to the web.

Rendering Flexibility

Any renderer that supports Maya's native layered textures can be used to render the output of the toolkit. Mental Ray and V-Ray shaders are included with the toolkit for additional raytracing functionality.