Tattoo 1.4

Community Forums/Showcase/Tattoo 1.4

TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#1]
Version 1.4 is out for those that are interested.

What's New?
* Projection Painting. This allows for distortion free painting which respects UV seams and boundaries.

You can download the demo to play with at the Tattoo Homepage


Rimmsy(Posted 2003) [#2]
mmmmmm, projection. It's works lovely.


Mustang(Posted 2003) [#3]
projection painting! Now you're talking... :)


Space_guy(Posted 2003) [#4]
sounds great! :) just hope u left the solid brush tool i like using so much intact ;)


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#5]
I did in the end. I'll still be adding the config options to the first two airbrushes in the next update though. No harm in having two ways of doing something I suppose :)

In the case of Projection Painting, I though it best in the end to have an update all to itself (for bug finding purposes at least!).


fredborg(Posted 2003) [#6]
Wunderbar! It's superb, now it's much much easier to work with!

Just a small question: Why do you get two cursors when you move the mouse towards either the left or the right side of the viewport?

Tattoo - I'm loving it!


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#7]
Glad you're getting on ok with it. Projection painting is now my favourite method of painting.

Just a small question: Why do you get two cursors when you move the mouse towards either the left or the right side of the viewport?



Do you? Erm.. I don't unless you mean the mouse pointer leaving the brush outline and paint behind at the edge of the viewport?

If that's not it, could you post a screenshot?


fredborg(Posted 2003) [#8]
Here! It doesn't matter which side I'm doing it on, the cursor is repeated on the other side regardless.



I'm running my screen in 1280x1024, which did introduce a mini bug in the previous version. Might be the same again?


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#9]
Well shiver me timbers. I've not seen that before! 8D

Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
[edit]

Ok. Found it.. Yes it's a screen resolution thing.

The largerst texture size that I can get to work at any reasonable speed is 1024 x 1024. Hence that is the maximum size of the projection screen.

Anything bigger than that is getting tiled... I'll have to see what can be done about that. Also models are too big in the viewport at this resolution.

Anything up to 1024 x 1024 seems to be fine though.


fredborg(Posted 2003) [#10]
Here is a probably related bug:



This happens when you draw in projection paint, while you have zoomed close in on the model... This seems a lot worse :)


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#11]
Hi Mikkel,

Yes this is a problem I just found myself too! This problem is based on triangles which go outside the viewport.

If a triangle is only partially inside the viewport, then the remainder of it will be blacked out. Working on it..

See I knew the bugs would start crawling out of the woodwork as soon as it was released :)


Ross C(Posted 2003) [#12]
Hey Lee, what exactly is triangle select used for?


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#13]
Hi All,

Tattoo Version 1.4a is now ready for download. It fixes the issues listed above.

Could anyone that gets a chance give it a test please!

Thanks.



@Ross C

Triangle Select is currently only used in conjunction with Tattoo Image.

This allows you to select sections of triangles which will be affected by the Tattoo. So if you have a big tattoo image, but only want to print it onto a few triangles, select them with the Triangle section tool first, then go to Tattoo image.

Pressing 'Enter' drops your selection, as does right clicking with the Triangle Selection tool over selected triangles.


Ross C(Posted 2003) [#14]
Cool, thanks Lee. Man you seem to have this all figures out. We're in safe hands ;)


fredborg(Posted 2003) [#15]
Ok, it's fixed! But it runs at a whopping 4 FPS!!! Did you leave debugging on?

[edit] The projection paint stuff, that is, it used to run at around 60 FPS.


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#16]
No. It's faster than that with Debug on! (100 FPS on my machine in debug)

All the speed sapping on Tattoo comes from Texure copying.

CopyRect appears to drop through the floor when textures larger than 1024x1024 are involved.

Ok, so the texures are 3 - 4 Meg each! But with supposedly 4GB internal bandwidth, that shouldn't make it fall on it's head!

These are relatively powerful machines, but damn...

Dropping back to 1024x768 screen res, brings it up to happy speeds again. In fact using any textures above 1024x1024 will almost certainly kill it stone dead.

PANNO is working on something to see if he can copy Textures around in a bit more of a spritely manner.

I hope he does. I am beginning to think that splitting it into four textures might be a good idea, but I could see that opening a whole new set of Pandora's boxes!


fredborg(Posted 2003) [#17]
Ok, changing the resolution works, but it would be nice if you could get it up to speed even in higher resolutions.

Could you use an image instead of a texture? Or perhaps chop the texture into several smaller textures?


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#18]
Are you running on an Nvidia card? I wonder if the problem is Nvidia based again.

Can anyone with a (decent) Radeon test the speed at higher resolutions?

Chopping it into smaller sections might work, but alignment of the pixels between the bits might prove... problematic. Mixing the 2D and 3D images would likey be (FPS) suicide given the way Nvidia is messing with 2D.


fredborg(Posted 2003) [#19]
Yup, GeForce 4-Ti4200.


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#20]
To anyone testing with a Radeon. Could you post your FPS (listed bottom left) results both in and out of Projection mode (F8 Toggle).

Thanks!


NTense(Posted 2003) [#21]
Hi Lee,
I tried testing it on my system (for FPS), but it locks up on loading a 3-D model. The window becomes in-accessable, and I have to terminate the program from task manager. To be fair though, for some reason, windowed blitz programs usually crash on my system. I don't know if it's a Radeon thing or not, because I don't see many others complaining about it. I'm running Win2K if that helps.


Rob Farley(Posted 2003) [#22]
Lee, I've got a question about tattoo, does this UV map anything or do you still have to do all the mapping first?

Painting the texture I don't really find difficult it's the making sensible mapping first. Once you've got it mapped correctly painting is reletively easy.

So what part does tattoo do?


sigi(Posted 2003) [#23]
Hi,Lee

I got 28 fps with my Radeon 9500 Pro in 1024 x 768.
With or without Projection Mode.
(2 GHz P4).


Ross C(Posted 2003) [#24]
Tattoo requires you to uv map first. But i think editing the texture whilst it's own the model, especially for organic models, is excellent and very helpful :)


Shambler(Posted 2003) [#25]
With woman.b3d model loaded and painting...

1024*768 40 fps out 36 fps in proj mode
1600*1200 36 fps out 32 fps in proj mode

Radeon 9700Pro with 3.9 cat drivers


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#26]
Thanks all. It appears that the speed for this kind of thing is better on Nvidia than Radeon (which is a little unexpected after the driver issues we had recently).

Also shows that textures sizes over 1024x1024 are realllly slow in blitz on both Nvidia and ATI.

That asks the question why?
1024x1024 is 60 fps
1280x1280 is 4 fps?!


Rambus(Posted 2003) [#27]
Pentium4 2.8, 1gig ram, 7200rpm hard drive
radeon 9800pro latest drivers

20 FPS at 1600x1200 (plus a 800x600 window)


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#28]
Cool!

Maybe there is a scarcity of VRAM.

If you uncheck the 'Force to VRAM' option, then the speeds shoot up to the 'Usable' range even at higher screen sizes.


MrCredo(Posted 2003) [#29]
http://www.blitzbasic.com/Community/posts.php?topic=28543


Shambler(Posted 2003) [#30]
I think you are in the minority there MrCredo, this is in the usercreations forum and as such I don't see a problem.

@Tera note that it runs at 32 fps on my radeon in projection mode 1600*1200

What fps do you get on Nvidia hardware?


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#31]
With force to VRAM off, about the same. With it on 4FPS 8/

I've got some ideas to deal with it, but it will be a few days.

@MrCreado - Hmmmmmmmm.


Skitchy(Posted 2003) [#32]
Lovely tool - 1 suggestion :
Could you include a 'paint from picture' option. Let me explain. Supposing I have a picture of some human skin. I want to transfer it to the model ie. not just draw it from scratch using paint tools. I could load the picture and have it appear in a window. Then, I could select the starting point to copy from by clicking a point on the picture. The brush used on the 3D model would then copy the data from the 'skin' picture and use it to draw on the model. As the brush is moved, the point at which the 'skin' picture is being copied would alter accordingly. Obviously, you could use soft edges etc.

Using such a method you could quite easily take 4 pictures of a face (front back left right) and transfer them seamlessly onto a head model for example. Another good use would be clothes.

I'm sorry if Tattoo can already do this, but I played with it for a while and couldn't find a way.


BlitzSupport(Posted 2003) [#33]
Runs fine on my Radeon 9800.

Couple of weird bits -- the projection button takes ages to switch on and off; a progress bar would be good while it does whatever it's doing once you turn off projection; the resulting painting after it's calculated the projection stuff always looks jagged here, like this:



Overall, though, works very intuitively, and certainly does what it says on the tin!


BlitzSupport(Posted 2003) [#34]
Oops, you wanted FPS -- a solid 16 in both (feels OK), except if I go nuts scribbling everywhere! Sometimes the Projection button doesn't react though... :/


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#35]
@Skitchy

What you are describing is done (more or less) via the clone brush.

If you go to the file menu and select 'Load Texture Guide', this will load the texture you want to paint (the view can then be swapped in and out with space).

You can then use the clone brush to copy from one to another.

@ BlitzSupport

Uncheck the 'Force to VRAM' option (then restart) and see if this improves your speed.

The problem with the jaggedness is likely due to the difference is resolution between the projection and the texture it goes into.


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#36]
Ok.

Version 1.4b is now up. Should resolve many of the speed issues and improve accuracy slightly. The jagged edges on the projection painting is due to being unable to turn off Bilinear filtering. I got most of it cleared off, but can't get rid of it completely until blitz can turn of filtering.

The new demo can be downloaded here Tattoo Demo


fredborg(Posted 2003) [#37]
Much better! I get around 60 FPS compared to 4 in the previous version.


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#38]
Great! The wonders of Rect combining writes :)

PANNO has sent me some DLL stuff to play with, so it might get a bit more spiffy still. Here's hoping.


Skitchy(Posted 2003) [#39]
Thanks Terrabit - I had a strong suspicion you wouldn't have left out such an important feature. Excellent work as always :)


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#40]
1.4c is up.

More bug fixes (yeah this update has been a pig so far) and a few minor speed tweaks.

PANNO's DLLs look promising too! I'm getting 4 to 1 Transfer rates in tests as opposed to CopyRecting. Have to see how this turns out when plumbed in! :)

It also looks like the Nvidia driver bug has been bypassed by my rejig of the copyrecting order.

Detonators 53.03 are running quite happily with 1.4c so... let's hope it stays that way!

Version 1.4c


Tom(Posted 2003) [#41]
Gonna give it a go now.

Where can I get Pannos DLLs Lee?

cheers
Tom


jfk EO-11110(Posted 2003) [#42]
AFAIK Panno has only posted a test Exe which was comparing the speed of blitzes imagebuffer handling and his hacked way for direct access trough some ASM code. which was 200 times faster on some machines (although due to code-repetition aka command-cache, probably not fully real-world representative, but anyway). Someone please correct me if i missed a release or someting.


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#43]
PANNO sent me some bits which are specific to some code I posted. I haven't seen it running on real world stuff yet as jfk says.

Since it hacks into the buffer structure, even if it works well (as it appears to) I'll have to include a fallback option in case of incompatibilities.


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#44]
In an attempt to solidify 1.4 before I run out of letters. Tattoo 1.4d is up. :)

Version 1.4d


TeraBit(Posted 2003) [#45]
Version 1.4e of Tattoo is now available. This resolves some more minor issues and improves accuracy on Projection Painting.

Version 1.4d