Painting
 
 
 

The following describes known limitations related to painting in Mudbox 2009.

Difficulty painting models with hard edges

Paint is not applied properly on sharp-edged objects. For example, the edges of cubes.

Workaround: Subdividing the model may help in these situations, or also try enlarging the brush size.

Paint does not bleed correctly when UV shells share coincident edges

The automatic edge bleed feature may not work as expected while painting whenever UV shells have been laid out to share identical edges or lie exactly on top of each other to optimize texture space.

Workaround: The edge bleed feature is currently designed to work optimally when UV shells are separated. If possible, sew any coincident UV edges to reduce areas where the automatic edge bleed might fail or ensure UV shells have a small distance of separation. Otherwise, if UV shells must be laid out in a coincident fashion, some touch-up to the 2D texture image may be required.

UV smoothing produces unexpected results on tri-based models

The UV smoothing options for the Add New Subdivision Level and Extract Texture Maps features do not produce expected results on models with three-sided polygon topologies.

Workaround: Smooth the mesh and UVs on a tri-based model prior to importing to Mudbox.

Saving file when unpainted UV tiles exist outside of camera view causes those tiles to be not paintable

Painting and subsequently saving a scene file containing multiple UV tiles, and some unpainted UV tiles exist outside of the camera’s current view when the file is saved, causes those tiles to appear black and not paintable when the file is subsequently re-opened. That is, texture files for the unpainted UV tiles are not saved with the scene.

Workaround: Ensure when painting a file with multiple UV tiles that the file is saved early on with all objects visible to the camera’s view with some tiles initially painted.

Workaround: When a scene has not been saved as previously described, and the texture maps for some UV tiles are missing, re-create the texture maps as follows:

  1. View the mudbox.log file that was created when the file was saved in <drive>:\My Documents\Mudbox\2009\data\Logs. The names of all of the associated missing texture files for the UV tiles will be listed here (even though the files were not saved).
  2. Re-create a blank texture file(s) for each of the missing texture files by copying/renaming one of the correct texture images (found in the files directory for the scene file) multiple times so the copies have the correct file name, bit depth, and file format. Place the copied/renamed files in the files directory associated with the scene file. While this produces a duplicate of one of the painted textures, it can be erased or re-painted when you re-open the scene.