Anyone got any neat tricks, tips, work flow ideas for creating weld seams for a high poly model?

This seemed somewhat relevant.
Zbrush: http://www.staticcurve.com/Artists/v...php?f=11&t=168

I have my max way that very easy. Just grab what ever area you want to have welded and slice up a section you want to be welded detach that as a copy and then extrude that then turn on mesh smooth and add noise at a very small scale say .5, but it justs depends. Its not perfect but its fast and when baked down looks close enough.

Cool thanks guys

I paint welds, with a custom weld brush.


- Reset the back/foreground color to B/W
- Create a new layer, set it to overlay
- Take a hard brush
- Turn on color dynamics
Set the back/foreground jitter to 20%
Sat jitter to 10%
Brightness Jitter 25%
- Turn on Scattering
Set both Axes to 50%
- Turn on Noise

Sometimes (and of course you want to be careful with this) it can help to apply bevel/emboss to the weld layer to give it a little depth and shadows. For obvious reasons this isn't a great idea, and it can help to go in and hand paint highlights and shadows based on the arrangement of your UV pieces.

Depending on the workflow, its not too hard apply the B/W welds to a normal map.

Marek Denko does it with a couple of noise mods in max:
http://www.duber.tv/cs/maxcon-2008/s...-buggy-series/

Oh and its in Czech too, but pretty straight forward

I liked that method. He grabs an edge, creates a shape from it, turbosmooth, and then adds noise, super quick. Thanks for posting it!

I like alot of his methods. Very quick and to the point.

Yeah very easy to use, I can see why he went the edge loop only way the poly ring method saves a step but at the cost of loosing the back side.

Side note kinda funny to see someone else using that for welds too... Yeah it makes backwards welds, but i bet if you saved out your welds as separate layer you could invert the channels and get the inverted welds like you see some times.

I love the " chain array " in that Marek Denko video tutorial.

Originally Posted by Vig

I liked that method. He grabs an edge, creates a shape from it, turbosmooth, and then adds noise, super quick. Thanks for posting it!

This was the method I was going to post but thought it would be too obvious

Jesse must be psychic...I was just curious about this same topic this week. I have a question about the final application of textures though, when using intersecting geometry with this method.





If I have two pieces like this, and the UVs are going to be separated

1) simply painting it in Photoshop obviously wouldn't work, because the weld normals wouldn't be accurate across both UV chunks.

2) Doing it with modeling should generate correct normal maps, but the color and spec would likely be incorrect, and therefore cause a seam split.

So how would you tackle this same process with two elements that would have separated UV chunks? The examples you guys have shown look great in the modeling phase, but the UV's and texturing of something like this are were I get confused, particularly in the example of multiple cylinders intersecting or other odd shapes that will require unique UVs.

i either zbrush it straight onto the highpoly which gives more realistic results

or i create shape from edge loop and then use the paint deform thing to make it blobby. i guess noise would work too.

BTW that "Normalize Spline" trick for the chains in Marek Denko's video is very smart, I hadn't seen that before.

Yea that was great, I've seen longer more involved methods to do pretty much do the same thing. Nice to see a quicker approach.

Any further thoughts on the actual baking and texturing process with UV splits?

I can only come up with a few hack fix ideas.

- Create a small floating weld plane that sits at 45 degree angle where the pieces meet.

- Fuse the pieces together so there won't be a UV seam.

- Put the weld on one plane or the other.

- Is there a reason both planes need to clip into each other? Can you place one piece on the surface, and flare out a row of polys to put the weld on?