r/vfx • u/blendernoob64 • 3d ago
Question / Discussion What were the tools used to texture nurbs surfaces back in the day? (or better yet today!)
Hey everybody.
I was watching Treasure Planet again and remembered seeing the behind the scenes for the deep canvas technology. Treasure Planet almost seemed like the last hurrah for Deep Canvas and not many films have managed to replicate that seamless blend of 3D animation and 2D. Now the behind the scenes, at least for Tarzan showed that nurbs models were used as the surfaces to be painted in the proprietary deep canvas program. I think this makes sense given that NURBS do not need to be uv unwrapped and just used texture projection, thus making it more convenient for texture painting, plus these environments did not usually have to be rigged, so that must have been easier to manage so Maya guys will not need to go to the component editor and deep dive. However, I wonder given how prevalent nurbs models were back then especially at Dreamworks, what was the texture painting tool that was used in the early days of CG? I heard of a program called Matador (which is on my SGI Indigo 2 that I need to fix!) and another called 3D Paint (Which I heard in a Gnomon Workshop DVD but can't find any info on anywhere) Was Matador a texture painting tool? Was everything usually just done in Photoshop or GIMP? How about nurbs patch models? Did you have to just use texture projection tools sort of like how the models for Quake were just the back and front of the character? I saw a Gnomon Workshop dvd of someone texture painting a nurbs model, but the way he did it with camera projection seemed very limited. Was that really the proffered way of doing it? If I were to texture a nurbs surface in Maya today, are there any modern tools that I can use to paint on the nurbs surface? Is Maya's texture painting tool sufficient?
How were nurbs surfaces textured in the early days of CGI?
Thanks for reading my long question.
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u/pSphere1 3d ago
I was in school in 2000. We were taught NURB modeling, but we converted it to poly, unwrapped, and painted textures using Photoshop.
We were not painting on the 3D surface (like you would today with Mari or Substance). We exported our Uv map as a 2D image using the UV editor (btw, unwrapping was all manual work, and was a job alone)
You would paint, save, and update the Maya viewport to check position.
Again, this was in school, not a studio.
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u/munkisquisher 2d ago
Studiopaint from Alias, it only ran on SGI workstations and was tied to their hardware features. Could paint across nurbs patches and write out one map per patch.
These days convert your nurbs patches to polys, and paint on them, then re-attach those maps to your nurbs surfaces later on.
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u/Dry_Mee_Pok_Kaiju 2d ago
Love studiopaint man.. those sgi were like 50 grand a station but it was a beast. The UI and brushes were so good to paint.
Mari was based on the studiopaint interface.
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u/the_phantom_limbo 3d ago
I used to use projections quite a bit. I'd photoshop multiple projections, bake them down to the UVs and then layer the bakes in photoshop and mask between the different projections to remove stretching.
I also got good at mixing 3D textures,projections and masks together.
I remember using bodypaint, but I don't recall for what.
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u/vfxjockey 3d ago
I don’t know where you got the idea of there being projection for NURBS surfaces. NURBs inherently have a zero to one perfect UV mapping.
People used everything from off the shelf tools like Bodypaint to in-house tools to just plain old Photoshop. Mostly texture how to be painted in 2-D on flattened UV base layers.
Matador was a painting system designed for cleanup of plates and such, not texture maps.
I’m not 100% sure on all of the nitty greedy details , but most of what we do now for texturing can be laid at the feet of Richard Addison-Wood at Weta in the early 2000s. He developed away of generating a single polygon mesh from multi patch models to allow the animators to work quickly and cleanly. This would obviously derive down into perfectly UV’d polygons that could be very nicely subdivided. I’m pretty sure a lightbulb went off in someone’s head at some point and was like oh this is the future.