Dirty Virtex Paint Problem

Hello Kent, I was wondering if you maybe can help me! I am working on this tutorial and I finally got all the way to the Dirty Virtex Paint Baking and it worked just fine for 3 rocks but on my last rock the dirty virtex paint looks completely wrong. I have tried everything but cannot find a solution. My normals are all correct (blue) and it worked on my other three rocks. Do you have any idea what I am missing?

Thank you for your help. It is a great tutorial but quite a challange in blender 2.8 :-)

Here an image of my dirty virtex paint:

  • smurfmier1985 replied

    philip79 Just thinking out loud, have you checked the other ‘classics’ besides the normals? 

    Is the scale applied? 

    Are there no double vertices?

  • Philip Rampa(philip79) replied

    Thank you smurfmier1985 I just checked it in my file. Scale is applied and I did have 3 double verticies in it but the dirty virtex paint has not changed. I have no idea what else it could be.

  • spikeyxxx replied

    Hi philip79 

    Didn't Kent have a similar issue? He removed the Col from the Vertex Colors tab and re-did the Texture Paint > Dirty Vertex Colors and then it worked O.K., I think...

  • Philip Rampa(philip79) replied

    Hi spikeyxxx 

    yes I have tried this too. I removed the col in the vertex colors tab and redid it many times but although it looked a bit different, it never came out correctly.

  • spikeyxxx replied

    philip79 If you can post a link to your .blend file (any cloud service will do), I'll be happy to take a look at what could be causing this.

  • Philip Rampa(philip79) replied

    Thank you spikeyxxx

    I would be very greatful if you could look at the blend-file. Thank you very much. :-)

    https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1GA0myoJtTFgf02xg4g0d3j25uv-bXmyW?usp=sharing

  • spikeyxxx replied

    philip79 

    Thank you for the .blend! 

    I haven't been able to figure it out yet, but I won't give up so easily; I will look at it again tomorrow, when I am in a fresh state of mind;)

    As far as I can see for now, it is at least not something obvious...

  • Philip Rampa(philip79) replied

    Thank you :-)

  • smurfmier1985 replied

    philip79 maybe it just needs a clean slate... have you tried appending the rock into a fresh blender file?

  • Philip Rampa(philip79) replied

     (smurfmier1985) I tried it but no, it didn't change the appearance of the dirty vertex paint :-( It was a good idea though. I didn't think of it. :-)

  • spikeyxxx replied

    philip79 

    Hi Philip, I found the issue.

    If you set all the shape keys to 0, you can see that the bottom rock is all messed up!

    My guess is that you sculpted the bottom one 'on the shape key' in stead of on the basis...

    The Dirty Vertex Colors are being calculated before Modifiers and as it seems also before the shapekeys.

    What you need to do is to 'apply' the shape key (when it's set to 1), then remove the Col and re-do the Dirty Vertex Colors:

    To 'apply' the shape keys, you can press the down arrow under the plus and minus in the Shape Keys Tab and select New Shape from Mix.

    Now delete the Shape Keys top to bottom, so the new Key last! Now you don't have any Shape Keys left, so you can delete the Col and Dirty Vertex paint again.

  • Philip Rampa(philip79) replied

    spikeyxxx

    You are awesome!! Thank you so much for taking the time to help me. I would have never figured this out and thank you also for explaining how to correct it. It works perfektly now and I am very excited to finish this learning flow. I must say I need to understand the Object Data menu a bit better with the shape keys and all the other options there!

    Thank you very much :-)


  • Kent Trammell replied

    That was some serious troubleshooting. You're awesome, spikeyxxx  👏

  • John (emericanized) replied

    Hello, philip79 ! Do you recall doing anything specific to get your sculpt vertex colors baked out to your cavity map in 2.8?  My bake result is totally black unless I unwrap my sculpt geometry.  I didn't see that as a requirement in the course. I jumped over to the pirate chest course for any 2.8 specifics I could glean, but that didn't work either!  

  • Philip Rampa(philip79) replied

    Hi John S (emericanized)

    I checked my file again and what I did is the following:

    - I first select the sculpted rock

    - Hold Shift and select the retopo-rock so that it is the active one

    - in the shader editor add a image texture node and create a new image "cavity"

    - In the render-Tab choose cycles

    - In the render-Tab under Bake choose Bake Type: Emit

    - set a mark at "Selected to Active" Option

    - Clear Image is only selected by the first bake, after that you need to turn it off 

    - Hit bake and it should bake it for you onto the new image you called "cavity"


    For one bake, I had the problem that I got black spots on my image texture. There I needed to turn off the Render-Option in the Outliner for all the other rocks and it worked out well, but I think it was not for the cavity map . I hope it works this way for you. :-)


  • Philip Rampa(philip79) replied

    In case you meant how to see the Dirty Virtex Paint on your Sculpt I did the following:

    - select all verticies of the rock in edit mode

    - go into vertex paint mode

    - select Paint > Dirty Vertex Colors

    - In the properties Tab go to Object Data: Here you should see by Vertex Colors an "Active Vertex Color Index" called Col. If not, add one with the plus sign and select once again Paint > Dirty Vertex Colors

    - Now go to the Shader, add new material and add An Input-Node: Attribute and write the Name "Col" or whatever you have called the Active Vertex Color Index into the bottom field.

    - with Node Wrangler on in your Properties you simply Shift & Ctrl Click on the node to see it and your Rock should show the Dirty Virtex Colors. 

    - to adjust the dirty vertex colors you can add a Color Ramp to the Attribute-Node

  • John (emericanized) replied

    Hey Philip,  

    I managed to get the vertex colors on the sculpt mesh, but baking to the image was always turning out black.  

    I've followed your steps in your first reply, and it worked great!  I'm not sure where I was tripping up last night, but I have a feeling I was messing up the order of operations.

    Thanks for your time!

  • Philip Rampa(philip79) replied

    I am glad it worked :-)


  • Jan-Willem van Dronkelaar(3dioot) replied

    I concur with Kent, great job spikeyxxx !

  • John (emericanized) replied

    Oof, the issue has popped up again, and I'm starting to think it's a software/scene problem.  I recorded my process to be sure I'm not leaving something out.  If nothing seems off in the above video, I will leave it be and move on without the dirty vertex!

    • the "_lod1" mesh is the retopo'd rock 
    • tried with cpu & gpu render, as well as with the image node hooked up to the BSDF node 
    • tried clearing the map & creating a new texture node 
    • the pre-baked section of the map was the mesh that worked yesterday  (multiple models)