3DS Max Full Head Mapping

The real challenge is to get a head mapped all the way around.  Cylindrical mapping helps us quite a bit, but there is still that problem with how to generate the textures.  On the source code page  there is a plug in for 3D Studio Max^® that will help you generate a single unfolded texture.  It may seem like it isn’t too difficult to do, but after this explanation you would probably agree that this was one of the most difficult pieces of code to write.   What we want to accomplish is the ability to map to orthogonal view pictures into one texture map.

Getting Started

For the plug-in to work we need to set up some mapping for the head that was created.  Create a Multi/Sub-Object in the material editor of 3D Studio Max^®.  Set the number of sub-objects to four by clicking on the set number.  Next create four sub-materials that have textures.  The first one should have its material ID set to 1.  This one will be used for the cylindrical map that will be applied in the final stage.  The plug-in used the Material IDS to figure out which side of the head the 2D texture is being applied to.  The IDS are preset in the plug-in as follows:

1. Final Cylindrical Map
2. Right Side
3. Left Side
4. Top Side
5. Bottom Side
6. Front Side
7. Back Side

For the pictures that were used earlier, we will planar map these pictures on the left, right (for the side view) and the front for the front view.  Here is how the material editor should have been set up.

 

Figure 11

Mapping the Photographs

We must now use the UVW Mapping modifiers to map the pictures onto the head.  For mapping the first material ID (1), just use cylindrical mapping with a dummy texture for now.  This will be explained in a little bit.  Now map the 2 photographs by adding UVW Mapping modifiers for each of the faces. In this example, the left, right and front were planar mapped onto the object. 

Figure 12 

Creating a Single Texture Map

Make sure you have installed the unwrap.dlu plug-in in your 3D Studio Max^Ò “plugins” directory.  We will delve into this tools source code a little later.  For now select the Utilities panel (the hammer).  Next select the “more..” button.  Then scroll down until you find the utility named “Unwrap Object Texture” and then click “OK”.  Most of the defaults are fine, except that you do want to select the “Spline Blending” radio button.  The differences between no spline blending and spline blending can be seen in Figure 13.  The algorithm for selecting the triangles to render is based on using the normal of the triangle and doing a dot product with the direction of the unit cube.  This then selects the texture map, which is most likely to contribute the “best” pixels to the triangle.  There could have been some sort of simple blending done, but there was a better solution.
Figure 13

Normal Based	Normal Based with Spline Blending

This tool was quite a feat to write and hopefully you will really get some use out of it.  Peter Watje wrote the original program and my thanks go out to him for his fine work.  The code was since modified and texture mapping was added.  Chris Hecker wrote the original texture mapping code, but it was modified to fit into this framework.  The last part of the code is the actual difficult part.  It was very hard and very frustrating to write. The code is based on a paper written by Peter J. Burt and Edward H. Adelson entitled “A Multiresolution Spline with Application to Image Mosiacs.  The difficult part of the code was decomposing the images into Gaussian and Laplacian Image Pyramids.  The code uses memory quite heavily and the plug-in will warn you that it can take a while to generate the images and then merge them all back together.  On a Pentium III 500 MHZ, it takes about 20 seconds.  The time to generate the map is acceptable given the results of the blending.  Save this image to the disk.

Putting it all together

 Now that you have a single texture map, we can re-run the process that was described at the beginning of the chapter.  From this image we can generate the diffuse, specular and bump map in the same way we did before.  Before you export the file, you should remove the UVW mapping coordinates for the front, left and right views, leaving the cylindrical map.  Now change the map type to a normal bitmap and load in the image you had save before.  You don’t even have to modify the UVW coordinates, because the image was generated from the cylindrical map and they should line up automatically for you.  You can render the image in 3D Studio Max^Ò (See Figure 14)