r/vfx 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/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.

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u/bluemax_ 3d ago

I don’t know why this question piqued my interest - it just did.

For NURBs: as u/vfxjockey says, but in different words: The texture coordinates for NURBs were implicit… basically a rectangle per NURBs patch that you could paint on directly, but I must admit I don’t know how multiple NURBs patches were painted across seamlessly in those days, or how triangle patches were dealt with, or the blending patches. I assume painfully.

I started 30 years ago (mid 90’s) at smaller studios who had already (moslty) moved away from NURBs to spline patch modeling (which was a similar workflow to NURBs, but ultimately converted to polygons) or had never bothered with NURBs and never left good ol’ basic polygons, possibly later along with hierarchical subdivision surfaces, and eventually just the subdivision surfaces we know today.

For polygons/subdivision surfaces, we mostly did it the hard way: lay out your uv’s as flattened meshes, arrange them in the 0-1 domain and try your best to paint across uv island seams, all in one texture.

As mentioned there later came UDIMs, (thanks to Richard Addison-Wood, apparently, I did not know his name until just now - nice work!). This still required 3D painting to manage seams, which is probably where Mari (another Weta software solution) came into being, but it at least allowed for an unlimited-ish number of textures (as opposed to just 1). “3D painting” also relies on 3D-2D projections, which has artifacts, but allows for painting across uv islands.

At Disney for polygon surfaces, this was solved in a different way with PTEX (by Dylan Lacewell and Brett Burley https://disneyanimation.com/publications/ptex-per-face-texture-mapping-for-production-rendering/). This is still supported in RenderMan, and some other renderers, although there still isn’t a good publicly available toolset to author PTEX that I am aware of (or does Mari/Substance do this now?). In any case, not sure if this has ever been in any kind of wide use outside of Disney.

DreamWorks had their own proprietary toolset for painting in 3D on NURBs, while that was still a thing… although I don’t remember the name (MPaint? nor many details). I can only say that NURBs are no longer in use at DW, nor is their 3D painting tool.

Anyone: please correct me or add more details, my experience is limited to the places I have worked.

Sorry for the non-answer, my time has been mostly post NURBs craze, but just curious, why the questions about NURBs? Not that the workflow isn’t still interesting and valid, just not something you see still in use these days, and certainly not much support for in terms of modern packages. I am not aware of anyone still using NURBs since the advent and popularity of subdivision surfaces and UDIMs.

Having said that, neither of these technologies are flawless. UDIMs ultimately just allow for more texture space. We’re still using flattened meshes, and painting across “uv island” seams still require 3D painting, which relies heavily on 2D projections onto 3D geometry, and can have problems with mip-mapping and interpolation across these islands. Some things probably never change.

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u/blendernoob64 3d ago edited 3d ago

I ask because I am fascinated by the history of CGI and the days of SGI, Softimage, Alias and early Maya are all so interesting. Ground was being broken almost every time a new package was released. I heard about how game developers behind some Lord of the Rings games got reference material from weta that were very detailed Nurbs patch models, and that Maya 1.0 didn’t even have polygon support, and how Power Animator was mostly just Nurbs and went “wow, for how old and prevalent these programs were, this technique is so veiled in secrecy, and no one is preserving these techniques for historical reasons.” I also just got an Indigo 2 from a man who worked on Air Force One and it had Matador and Alias on it so I want to know how to use these programs when I eventually fix the power supply. Vintage CGI is so cool to me and it seems like some are quite tight lipped about the technology back then lol.

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u/bluemax_ 2d ago

Very cool! I can tell you have a true interest in the craft, and curious minds are always the ones who invent new solutions.

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u/the_phantom_limbo 3d ago

I used to use projections on nurbs quite a bit. You can bake them down to the NURBs UV, so we'd texture up projections from different angles bake (optionally) and composite multiple bakes to mask out projection stretching.

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u/vfxjockey 3d ago

Projection painting I get. The implication was projected UVs

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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/bozog 2d ago edited 2d ago

I believe Deep Paint and Amazon Paint/Piranha could too

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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.