TexTools for Blender
sublime tool
About 8 years ago I created TexTools for 3dsMax. A lot of stuff hapennend in that time and just last year I started seriously learning Blender. Eventually I decided to create another TexTools for blender as UV & Texturing is a passion mine and seriously sucks in most 3D packages.
Download & Documentation
http://renderhjs.net/textools/blender/
Release Log
http://renderhjs.net/textools/blender/log.html
Some of the Features
Why Blender
What I like about Blender that its a tool I can take with me anywhere with no licensing restrictions. This makes investing time and tools attractive to me as it's something that will always be available to me even when changing work environments. With other subscription software it's harder to obtain older versions when API's and compatiblity change a lot.
If you haven't had a serious look at Blender check out Hard Ops and Decal Machine or the upcomming Blender 2.8 Eevee viewport. Just Blender out of the box is a very serious modeler and in many ways seriously faster than 3dsMax. Since it's free you might as well give it try.
Download & Documentation
http://renderhjs.net/textools/blender/
Release Log
http://renderhjs.net/textools/blender/log.html
Some of the Features
Size tools
• Set UV/texture/baking size & padding
• Crop selection to UV bounds
• Resize or extend UV canvas
• swap and change UV channels
UV Layout tools
• Align Verts / Islands
• Align Island to edge
• Rotate 90 degree to bounds
• Align and UV shells by size,
• Iron Faces: unwraps selected faces to UV Island
Selection Tools
• Select similar UV islands
• Select overlapping UV islands
• Select Island Bounds in 3D view
Texel Density tools
• Assign checker maps with non square, square in any sizes
• Get texel density from objects or selected mesh faces
• Set texel density to selected objects or selected mesh faces
• Scale texel density by individual UV islands or as a combined group
Texture Baking
• Bake: Select object and press bake: That easy!
• Anti Aliasing for all bake types
• Bake to single texture or multiple
• 6 bake types: AO, ID map, normal, cavity, worn, gradient Z. And more to come.
• Automatically group objects by matching names.
• Supports lowpoly, highpoly to lowpoly, with or without cage and or floating objects
• Explode: Explode bake pairs
• Organize: Auto match bake object names by location and bounding box matching
In depth features and documentation can be found on the official website
Why Blender
What I like about Blender that its a tool I can take with me anywhere with no licensing restrictions. This makes investing time and tools attractive to me as it's something that will always be available to me even when changing work environments. With other subscription software it's harder to obtain older versions when API's and compatiblity change a lot.
If you haven't had a serious look at Blender check out Hard Ops and Decal Machine or the upcomming Blender 2.8 Eevee viewport. Just Blender out of the box is a very serious modeler and in many ways seriously faster than 3dsMax. Since it's free you might as well give it try.
Replies
Great that people like you start using Blender, it's amazing how much it's developed over the last
couple of years and to see great addons being made.
I remember vividly back in 2011, there were no ngons, no UV stitching, no custom vertex normals etc.
There's still a few things that could be improved, but hopefully with a growing userbase we should get there.
It probably takes quite some time before the developers of Blender release the version 2.80, so in the meanwhile, you have plenty of time to add features, polish things and probably get your tools built-in in the next release, because your tools are SO robust already! AND you're so fast and efficient with your programming skills, just wow.
The UI design looks great.
Loving the addon so far! Awesome work. Wondering how I can increase the AO Bake Intensity? Or the AO spread distance? I don't normally bake anything in blender but might incorporate it into my workflow
New Tool 'Peel Edge'
I have been prototyping a new unwrap tool 'Peel Edge' it does not use the follow active quad technique and is much quicker with pipe shapes. You select a single edge or edge loop and the script will unwrap the associated mesh shell along the selected edge.
Even some triangles in the topology are fine
: D
The 'Peel Edge' also seems to have some kind of 'Rectify' functionality; Is 'Rectify' also coming for TexTools in Blender?
P.S.
I checked out the TexTools git repository and started playing around with some of the python scripts, would you be open for collaborative development? Thinking of some tools which I might want to open a PR for
the new peel tool looks awesome. man, you're killing it
i mean, blenders uv tools aren't terrible, you get the job done after some fiddling around, but its just getting better and better from here on out. the peel tool will save tons of time. no more fiddling with non quad geometrys
So here is a preview of another new too 'Smooth by UV', not sure yet about the name but it will be part of the next release.
Thank you. I'll post here first once I have something worthy to show
Personally I'm not a big fan defining 'hard edges' or 'smoothing groups' in Blender using the edge split modifier. It makes editing the mesh after the split a bit of a pain since it splits more than only the normals. My suggestion would be to mark the edges as 'sharp' and set the mesh's normals to 'Auto Smooth' with an angle of 180 degrees instead of using the edge split modifier.
I found this method to be the easiest and non-destructive compared to the edge split modifier. It is a personal preference though
Meanwhile been working on an icon for the 'Smooth by UV' tool
Other icons got some more unified color language as well (active, move, modify,...)
Thank you so much for creating these tools. I've been slowly learning Blender in my spare time to see what it can do. These type of tools makes the transition easier
Do you have any suggestions for add ons that relate to modeling? i'll be checking out Hard Ops eventually!
Hey Renderhjs!
Will there maybe be a 3DSMAX Update? The last Version is stable and good, but maybe you have some funky new Ideas for a cool 3DSMAX Version? I use it all the time for my LowPolys, especially before i bake i use Smoothing Groups From UV Shells, always always always always! :-)
Thank you for TexTools, i love it!
@Gazu: No update anytime soon for 3dsmax. Should i have to work in an environment with a newer max version then maybe, but currently i do enjoy Blenders modeling far more + the eco system: I get to keep what i create, not with max: have to keep paying or you are out.
@Slipstream: that's great, if you are keen on more advanced stuff to learn in blender tgen i highly recommend penfinity's youtube videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCgEWZe5DyLJGBk6qUC96NCg
I have started on a new panel in TexTools called " Color ID". The idea is to have a few tools for blocking out models and the materials or face sets.
Usually this technique in max or blender is manually where you create sub-materials and assign them to objects or faces.
in my current progress i can assign a color to objects or in edit mode to selected faces. Colors can be tweaked in real-time and the usual blender shortcuts work great like copy pasting colors.
I will add a few color templates and buttons to selected by color as well.
For the future i plan to have tools to convert to a texture Atlas or from a texture Atlas back to material ID's. And of course you will be able to bake this.
Unfortunately I stumbled on an error. Lets say I bake normal map, I save it to a file, bake AO, save it to a file then I try to bake normal again and I get this error. Any idea?
Also how to I go about baking 2 highpolies into 1 lowpoly?
edit1: Oh and I can't succesfully bake 2 sets into 1 texture, with Single checked. It bakes only one set. The uv space of the second set is just blank. If I bake without Single one of the texture renders blank too. <--- ok solved this one. One of the LP had an additional material. Removing it and leaving only TT_bake_node made it render properly.
edit2: Also even though I have 2 sets with hp and lp suffix (and they are properly identified by TexTools), clicking Organize changes hp into high.
Thank you very much!
The color ID tool looks really useful too.
One question/ request. Would it be possible to apply the Color Grid texture, rather than the UV Grid Texture under the "Texels" panel?
Maybe an option to choose between the two?
I personally prefer the color grid texture because it contains alpha numerics, which makes it easy to identify the orientation of the UV shell in the viewport.
It is possible to assign a hotkey for some of the actions? like the iron face for instance
Thank you for the addon!
The ID colors can now have a maximum of 15 colors. I also added a few color themes to quickly cycle through
But if you're planning to fuse this kind feature to your addon as that cool "Rectify" version of yours, that's just perfect. Super awesome! Looking at your work, I get the feeling you're so organized and pedantic with your coding skills from your extensive past experience, and I appreciate that highly.
Keep up with the great work, and I know you will.
@FourtyNights
It works really well but i think the code has evolved over a long time and by different people.
I have been playing yesterday with the color ids on a test model. Its almost a modeling and texturing process in one.
@Ruka deal!
Thank you for your contributions.
The color id stuff looks great! Wondering though how someone uses this feature if they need more than 5 different id's? Also I'm not sure if you saw my previous post but I've had some issues getting a good AO bake using TexTools. Would be great if the user could enable/disable 'normalized'(or have this be enabled by default to avoid extra ui stuff) and be able to adjust falloff. Without these settings the user has little to no control over the bake result.
Let me know if you want me to open a PR for it, I can send you my BitBucket details through a PM.
Download & Documentation
http://renderhjs.net/textools/blender/
Some text editors come with color highlight plugins
As for the normalize, I just realised you're using cycles and I'm used to using Blender Render. When using blender render there is an option to normalize which makes sure the AO bake will use the full 0-1 range. More here
As a side note I did this test bake to compare. Both took about the same amount of time and have the same(ish) sample count. See how the one baked out using textools/cycles is washed out and doesn't utilise full 0-1. Also there is some seam issues, this is something else entirely. I've attached blendfile with the mesh and bake settings. Hopefully that will help you debug. Perhaps an option to switch between cycles and blender render would be best?
I have been working today on a new tool for the Color ID panel. The tool 'Create Atlas' generates a mini texture where each color is a tile of an atlas. Each face of the model is unwrapped to match the correct color in the texture.
Since it uses just 1 draw call and no sub materials this is great for realtime graphics. The goal is to have another tool that does the reverse: Read color ID's from a diffuse texture.
Can't make it work... I open Blender, add Suzanne, use Smart UV Project on her and try to bake. Both Cavity and Dust just fill islands in black. I also try to make the mesh more dense but it changes nothing. Hard to say what I'm doing wrong if there is only so few steps to recreate it :P
I really like the idea of Create Atlas.