Currently Texture baking is broken in 2.8 e.g. normal baking. Also just a few days ago the UV editor got split from the old UV/Image Editor, so there is a lot of construction still going on.
I haven't figured out yet for myself how to deal with the UI, should I go tools, tool panel or property panel or a pie menu etc. Or maybe the context menu - things changed a bit and its not so obvious anymore to addon developers where to best put their interface.
I think I will start soon a new branch in the Git repo for 2.8 but I think that in the next few months the blender foundation will still change a lot in the new UV editor and to the baking backend.
As you need quite some UI space I think the only choice you have right now is to add it to sidebar? I think you dont even need your own tab, uv sidebar is still pretty plain.
You could probably also split off some of the operators into a pie menu or even multiple pie menus?
As far as I know - baking is still under construction, and it might even miss some of the features 2.79 had. Cycles currently does not bake vertex colors for example. Guess this will be improved at some point - but who knows when they find time to do it.
I like world align, rectify and iron button from text tools but at the same time the set lacks very key and powerful native Blender UV tools: live unwrap + and pin/unpin and V stitch + "I" and "Tab" button. Those tools are not always obvious and hidden behind tricky hotkeys combinations slipping from your mind constantly. Would be nice to see them all as a set of simple textool styled buttons, all in one place
@Goshi I believe @Michael Knubben means the select island works his end. Textools hasn't been ported to 2.80 yet so of course the 2.79 version won't work.
On page 2, someone asked how to bake alpha information. I'm trying to figure out if there's a way to bake it into the diffuse layer. I don't know if there's a way to do it. Would I need to do the whole thing of baking the alpha layer separate and merging it with the diffuse texture in photoshop, or is there another way in Blender?
Thanks to @xrg for the link over in the Blender mega thread. For me it seems to work fine even on recent 2.8 builds although I haven't tested all of the features.
The SavMartin port does not work with RC 2 and 3, or?
Error Message when try to install it as an AddOn.
Another question: Where in Blender 2.8 RC2-3 is the function to set my Smoothing from UV Shells?
Under Normals i only can find Auto Smooth with a degree value. But i want it to be bake ready, so i want to set the SGs from UV shells, like in TexTools
"Seams from Islands" sets the seams, but not the smoothing.
you can do this without any addon at all - stock blender in the uv editor -> UV > Seams from islands then in the operator you can also set the sharp edges along with the seams.
@Gazu It works correctly for me using both the Seams From Islands tool and Textools' UV Smoothing tool. I installed SavMartin's port from here by downloading the zip and installing it as an addon in RC3. No error messages and I could use it right away through the UV editor > right sidebar > Textools tab. If you can't get it to install, you should post the error msg in the blenderartists thread and mention SavMartin.
Hi all and thanks the author for this brilliant piece of (free!) addon. It´s been working great so far, but I do have an issue when unwrapping a cylinder, then using the rectify function (to straighten the island) and combining it with set texel density. It creates a seam on the mesh as seen on the attached picture - the checker texture is clearly not seamless and that creates problems when exporting the mesh to UE4 and using lightmaps (nasty seam with black splotches). Any idea how to remedy this? Maybe I am not using the addon the correct way? Thanks a lot for any advice.
For the texture to be seamless you would want the UV shell to take up the entire texture space. It seems like your desired texel density is at a different scale than you would need to make this possible.
Hi and thanks for taking the time to answer. I had the suspicion that texel density might have something to do with this (or padding perhaps). Can you please elaborate on your comment? I am attaching the complete UV sheet made for this asset. What would be the ideal texel density then if I want to have one UV sheet for the whole mesh. As you can see, the seam has now shifted even more and the checker pattern is somehow doubled along the seam.
@rollin the problem is what happens when I bake my lighting in UE4, where a nasty seam appears on the mesh. Probably something to do with the lightmaps not adjusting properly to my UV layout? The problem with the checkerboard pattern is the banding that appears around the seam which could be causing the seam I guess. But I don´t know how better I could have unwrapped the cylinder not to have that seam. The tool actually caused the banding. And adjusting it by hand is not very practical because I will never match the grid perfectly enough not to have the seam. If that makes sense. Below the seam in UE4.
Hi Super addon. I am trying 1.3.0 out on 2.82. Yesterday it was working but I must have done something because my hipoly meshes are showing errors in the bake list. I have named them appropriately. The low poly shows no warning but when I hit bake I get an error that says no lowpoly in the list. The lowpoly has uvs assigned through Smart select. Any help appreciated.
Hi Super addon. I am trying 1.3.0 out on 2.82. Yesterday it was working but I must have done something because my hipoly meshes are showing errors in the bake list. I have named them appropriately. The low poly shows no warning but when I hit bake I get an error that says no lowpoly in the list. The lowpoly has uvs assigned through Smart select. Any help appreciated.
Not properly named. When you have a highpoly mesh tagged, you need a lowpoly with the same name except the _tag, -tag, .tag or whatever. It's not needed the lowpoly is tagged with _low, but the base name has to be equal for every high you have, which basically defines a different set.
Hi franMarz Thanks for the headsup! Just downloaded the addon and installed it in 2.9. Everything looks great but no uvs. Applied a checker material and tried a new image but no luck. Still no uvs. Any ideas?
Blender 2.92 Beta TT 1.4.1 Hm, a while later and I cant get it to bake a normal map. Pic shows the high temporarily above the low for the screen grab. Tried scaling the low up a little as having the polys on each other resulted in loads of artefacts. The addon info is a bit spars. High poly with mats. Low poly with uvs. For a start trying to bake the normal to use on the lowpoly. This is Cycles. Tried it in 2.83 LTS and it seems it isnt referencing the hipoly in a way that can be used for textures. This thing has me stumped.
Anyone here know why the Apply button for texel density sometimes becomes greyed out? I've not been able to figure out why it stops working occasionally, seems very strange.
Blender 2.92 Beta TT 1.4.1 Hm, a while later and I cant get it to bake a normal map. Pic shows the high temporarily above the low for the screen grab. Tried scaling the low up a little as having the polys on each other resulted in loads of artefacts. The addon info is a bit spars. High poly with mats. Low poly with uvs. For a start trying to bake the normal to use on the lowpoly. This is Cycles. Tried it in 2.83 LTS and it seems it isnt referencing the hipoly in a way that can be used for textures. This thing has me stumped.
You have to play with the cage extrusion / ray distance variables, especially with the later. This is as complex as baking directly in Blender as the addon is only making the process more straightforward, but there is a limit from where you have to tweak some values for your own interest.
Anyone here know why the Apply button for texel density sometimes becomes greyed out? I've not been able to figure out why it stops working occasionally, seems very strange.
Anyone here know why the Apply button for texel density sometimes becomes greyed out? I've not been able to figure out why it stops working occasionally, seems very strange.
Anyone here know why the Apply button for texel density sometimes becomes greyed out? I've not been able to figure out why it stops working occasionally, seems very strange.
Unsure if this is a related issue or not. Have been using "apply" texel density fine until now (although one quirk is I had to set "pixels per 1 unit" to 2, even though my subdivisions per unit is 16).
However, upon hitting "apply" just now I received the below error: AttributeError: 'TexPaintSlot' object has no attribute 'texture' ("pick" throws a similar error)
Which is strange as the texture can clearly be seen on the object In the meantime I have manually set the picker to 128 which works fine.
The material to Color ID baker is awesome but is it possible to handle more than 20 materials? I've got a model with 74 materials that is just not importing in Substance Painter the viewport color 2 file method at all.
- Massive performance gains in Rectify, Straight, Edge Peel, Select Bounds, Create UV Mesh, Randomize, Align World, Align Sort, Select Similar, Texel Density Get and Texel Density Set, among others, from x2 to 10000x (https://blenderartists.org/t/textools-for-blender/700811/829?u=franmarz). Basically it should be possible now to use any utility of this addon with high-poly meshes.
- Relax: added new utility for UV vertices smoothing.
- Unwrap: new custom operator to unwrap only selected UVs, with the capacity to constrain the operation to the U or V axis (_BenjaminSauder_)
- Straighten: any chained sequence of edges is supported, not only edge loops. Added support for multi-object UV editing.
- Align: Fix weird behaviour with partial selections while in Face UV Selection Mode; made it to work on the selected faces only.
- Rectify: recovered align verts, edges. Updated, simplified code. Tuned detection of lines in Rectify, triangular faces and ngons are discarded now.
- Create UV Mesh: it now works on the whole object or the selected UVs. Most of the original mesh data is now preserved. The created UV Mesh will inherit the origin location from the original mesh, instead of being placed in the global origin.
- Randomize: Within Image Bounds now takes into account strenght values and rotation. Adjusted defaults. Simplified code.
- Align World: process only coincident UV loops per vert for a more accurate and predictable result; removed simple and recursal modes. Highly optimized "Per Face".
- Edge Peel: implemented multi-object UV editing support. Improved unwrapping of pipe caps. The Rectify fase is now -hopefully- error proof. Better organized outcome. Introduced verification to avoid crash when faces are selected. Do not perform average islands scale and packing if the main functions wasn't executed in any of the selected objects. Some fixes when improper selection input and if no internal rectification of selected faces could be performed.
- Iron Faces: cancel the script before the unwrap fails (no seams marked in entirely selected manifold meshes)
- Crop and Fill: fix for working with the Active Object while in Edit Mode even if no object is selected.
- Texel Density Get/Texel Density Set: restructured code for working with multiple objects selected in all cases. Functionality with UV Sync On fixed.
UDIM SUPPORT
UV Layout
- Added support to work within the active UDIM Tile in UV Layout utilities that may take advantage of it: Align (to Canvas), Centralize, Randomize (Within Image Bounds or Pre-Centered), Texel Density Set (Combined mode), Edge Peel, Iron Faces, Crop - Fill.
- Added Active UDIM Tile detection mode in the TexTools panel: from the Linked (background) Image in the UV Editor, or from the Active Object (bare in mind the Active tag when working in multi-object editing as the object where the last element selection was performed will be the Active)
- Added Active UDIM Tile select list under the TexTools panel.
Texel Density in Image Get Mode.
- The resolution of the image bound to the active UDIM Tile is taken into consideration when computing texel densities in both get and set modes. This follows the workflow pointed before, that is, the user must manage the active UDIM Tile as needed in the first TexTools panel for the tools to work based on it, which would be sufficient in most common scenarios.
- For some utilities, switching the active status to the UDIM Tile closest to each UV island on the selection may be nice to have, but would be overkill for the script to work. Anyway, it may be considered for the future.
BAKING
- 3.0 CyclesX and Principled BSDF material support, while maintaining backward compatibility with pre 3.0 Blender releases.
- Thickness material for baking no longer missing.
- Baking Samples fix: it have to be an integer, not a float. _flakusha_ pointed it out.
- AO pass is not available in Blender since 3.0 and, consequently, have to be ignored in the Combined baking mode.
MESH UV TOOLS
- UV Smoothing: renamed to "Smooth by UV Islands" and moved to the also renamed "Mesh UV Tools" panel, in order to avoid it to be confused with the new Relax tool or vice versa. Added option to ignore islands uv borders to itself, improving shading and normal map baking (_BenjaminSauder_)
GENERAL
- We rely on a custom, more stable version of the 3dn_bip library v1.0.8, for loading the addon icons faster.
- TexTools Popup restored: was deleted by error during the 3dn_bip library usage implementation, disrupting a number of TexTools operators. Restored by _TitusLVR_.
- VC limit reached warning: some bake modes use internally a custom Vertex Color layer which is removed once the bake finishes. If the maximum number of VC layers are in use in an object to be baked from (that is, 8), warn about it and gray out the Bake button to avoid an exception.
- Displayed UV controls under the TexTools panel: better detection of the Active Object while within a multi-selection of objects.
- Update_edit_mesh arguments error fix.
- Fixed variable name collision with built-in "set". Use enumerate() where it makes sense (_consolegrl_)
- Nicer arrows for the UV Layout panel (_BenjaminSauder_)
- Adjusted, reorganized menus entries.
- Use copys instead of tuples to store changeable states.
- Remove unnecessary selection mode changes.
- Avoided as possible selection store and restore, in general.
- Removed some annoying console prints, some old commented-out code.
- Make sure materials without node tree don't make the addon UI refresh fail in the search of UDIMs, writing an error in the Console.
Replies
I haven't figured out yet for myself how to deal with the UI, should I go tools, tool panel or property panel or a pie menu etc. Or maybe the context menu - things changed a bit and its not so obvious anymore to addon developers where to best put their interface.
I think I will start soon a new branch in the Git repo for 2.8 but I think that in the next few months the blender foundation will still change a lot in the new UV editor and to the baking backend.
I look forward to having textools in Blender - the standard UV system is farkin' jank!
Like wow, you never appreciate something so much until you no longer have it.
>>>http://renderhjs.net/textools/blender/
Very nice work!
Super addon. I am trying 1.3.0 out on 2.82. Yesterday it was working but I must have done something because my hipoly meshes are showing errors in the bake list. I have named them appropriately. The low poly shows no warning but when I hit bake I get an error that says no lowpoly in the list. The lowpoly has uvs assigned through Smart select.
Any help appreciated.
Can you share your development process? thank you very much!
Thanks for the headsup!
Just downloaded the addon and installed it in 2.9. Everything looks great but no uvs. Applied a checker material and tried a new image but no luck. Still no uvs. Any ideas?
Ak! I was in the image editor.
Hm, a while later and I cant get it to bake a normal map. Pic shows the high temporarily above the low for the screen grab. Tried scaling the low up a little as having the polys on each other resulted in loads of artefacts. The addon info is a bit spars. High poly with mats. Low poly with uvs. For a start trying to bake the normal to use on the lowpoly.
This is Cycles.
Tried it in 2.83 LTS and it seems it isnt referencing the hipoly in a way that can be used for textures. This thing has me stumped.
It is planned to investigate this, sharing this for the public knowledge now in https://github.com/SavMartin/TexTools-Blender/issues.
Should be fixed now.
Have been using "apply" texel density fine until now (although one quirk is I had to set "pixels per 1 unit" to 2, even though my subdivisions per unit is 16).
However, upon hitting "apply" just now I received the below error:
AttributeError: 'TexPaintSlot' object has no attribute 'texture'
("pick" throws a similar error)
Which is strange as the texture can clearly be seen on the object
In the meantime I have manually set the picker to 128 which works fine.
Blender 2.93.5
TexTools 1.4.4
**TEXTOOLS 1.5**
*NEW RELEASE*
UV LAYOUT
General refactor. Performance and polishing.
- Massive performance gains in Rectify, Straight, Edge Peel, Select Bounds, Create UV Mesh, Randomize, Align World, Align Sort, Select Similar, Texel Density Get and Texel Density Set, among others, from x2 to 10000x (https://blenderartists.org/t/textools-for-blender/700811/829?u=franmarz). Basically it should be possible now to use any utility of this addon with high-poly meshes.
- Relax: added new utility for UV vertices smoothing.
- Unwrap: new custom operator to unwrap only selected UVs, with the capacity to constrain the operation to the U or V axis (_BenjaminSauder_)
- Straighten: any chained sequence of edges is supported, not only edge loops. Added support for multi-object UV editing.
- Align: Fix weird behaviour with partial selections while in Face UV Selection Mode; made it to work on the selected faces only.
- Rectify: recovered align verts, edges. Updated, simplified code. Tuned detection of lines in Rectify, triangular faces and ngons are discarded now.
- Create UV Mesh: it now works on the whole object or the selected UVs. Most of the original mesh data is now preserved. The created UV Mesh will inherit the origin location from the original mesh, instead of being placed in the global origin.
- Randomize: Within Image Bounds now takes into account strenght values and rotation. Adjusted defaults. Simplified code.
- Align World: process only coincident UV loops per vert for a more accurate and predictable result; removed simple and recursal modes. Highly optimized "Per Face".
- Edge Peel: implemented multi-object UV editing support. Improved unwrapping of pipe caps. The Rectify fase is now -hopefully- error proof. Better organized outcome. Introduced verification to avoid crash when faces are selected. Do not perform average islands scale and packing if the main functions wasn't executed in any of the selected objects. Some fixes when improper selection input and if no internal rectification of selected faces could be performed.
- Iron Faces: cancel the script before the unwrap fails (no seams marked in entirely selected manifold meshes)
- Crop and Fill: fix for working with the Active Object while in Edit Mode even if no object is selected.
- Texel Density Get/Texel Density Set: restructured code for working with multiple objects selected in all cases. Functionality with UV Sync On fixed.
UDIM SUPPORT
UV Layout
- Added support to work within the active UDIM Tile in UV Layout utilities that may take advantage of it: Align (to Canvas), Centralize, Randomize (Within Image Bounds or Pre-Centered), Texel Density Set (Combined mode), Edge Peel, Iron Faces, Crop - Fill.
- Added Active UDIM Tile detection mode in the TexTools panel: from the Linked (background) Image in the UV Editor, or from the Active Object (bare in mind the Active tag when working in multi-object editing as the object where the last element selection was performed will be the Active)
- Added Active UDIM Tile select list under the TexTools panel.
Texel Density in Image Get Mode.
- The resolution of the image bound to the active UDIM Tile is taken into consideration when computing texel densities in both get and set modes. This follows the workflow pointed before, that is, the user must manage the active UDIM Tile as needed in the first TexTools panel for the tools to work based on it, which would be sufficient in most common scenarios.
- For some utilities, switching the active status to the UDIM Tile closest to each UV island on the selection may be nice to have, but would be overkill for the script to work. Anyway, it may be considered for the future.
BAKING
- 3.0 CyclesX and Principled BSDF material support, while maintaining backward compatibility with pre 3.0 Blender releases.
- Thickness material for baking no longer missing.
- Baking Samples fix: it have to be an integer, not a float. _flakusha_ pointed it out.
- AO pass is not available in Blender since 3.0 and, consequently, have to be ignored in the Combined baking mode.
MESH UV TOOLS
- UV Smoothing: renamed to "Smooth by UV Islands" and moved to the also renamed "Mesh UV Tools" panel, in order to avoid it to be confused with the new Relax tool or vice versa. Added option to ignore islands uv borders to itself, improving shading and normal map baking (_BenjaminSauder_)
GENERAL
- We rely on a custom, more stable version of the 3dn_bip library v1.0.8, for loading the addon icons faster.
- TexTools Popup restored: was deleted by error during the 3dn_bip library usage implementation, disrupting a number of TexTools operators. Restored by _TitusLVR_.
- VC limit reached warning: some bake modes use internally a custom Vertex Color layer which is removed once the bake finishes. If the maximum number of VC layers are in use in an object to be baked from (that is, 8), warn about it and gray out the Bake button to avoid an exception.
- Displayed UV controls under the TexTools panel: better detection of the Active Object while within a multi-selection of objects.
- Update_edit_mesh arguments error fix.
- Fixed variable name collision with built-in "set". Use enumerate() where it makes sense (_consolegrl_)
- Nicer arrows for the UV Layout panel (_BenjaminSauder_)
- Adjusted, reorganized menus entries.
- Use copys instead of tuples to store changeable states.
- Remove unnecessary selection mode changes.
- Avoided as possible selection store and restore, in general.
- Removed some annoying console prints, some old commented-out code.
- Make sure materials without node tree don't make the addon UI refresh fail in the search of UDIMs, writing an error in the Console.
https://github.com/SavMartin/TexTools-Blender/releases/tag/v1.5
i love this addon so much
thanks for keeping it up to date, really appreciate it