[Blender] DECALmachine: surface detailing using mesh decals
sublime tool
DECALmachine is a blender addon, which through mesh Decals, allows for surface detailing in a very non-committal, non-destructive, UV-less way. As such it represents an alternative approach to hard surface texturing.
In addition DECALmachine has deep Trim Sheet support, and supports Atlasing, as well as Baking to facilitate exporting to game engines like Unity, Unreal Engine etc.
Decals can be projected, sliced, created from grease pencil or edges. They can be material matched, and you can easily create your own.
Trims can be easily placed, cut, manipulated or removed - all directly in the 3D view.
Trailer (2.0)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjeJl5aS5xMTrailer (1.8)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcaL9k2BW1kDECALmachine works with Blender 2.83/2.90!
Features
- quick and precise raycast-based Decal insertion
- easily select Decals by parent object or by type
- automatic material matching, parenting, normal transfer
- automatically organize Decals in collections
- advanced Decal materials using emission, transparency and transmission
- unlimited decal libraries + flexible asset loader layout
- create all four Decal types directly in blender, including batch creation of Info Decals from folders of images
- quickly adjust height, object or UV rotation, panel width and type, and much more using the convenient modal adjust tool
- enforce default settings scene-wide and change them quickly in the DECALmachine panel in the sidebar
- store Decal textures on disk or directly in the blend file
- place Decals on flat surfaces and project or shrinkwrap them on curved ones
- slice Decal panel strips "boolean-style"
- or create them from grease pencil strokes or edge selections
- use Panel Decals to cut the underlying mesh
- benefit from parallax adding convincing depth to normal mapped Decals, even in realtime in Blender's Eevee viewport
- retain sharp details at all scales, independent of texture resolution, via UV-less object based detailing
- take advantage of Decals being objects, by using modifiers like mirror and array
- join and split Decals completely non-destructively to stay organized
- hide Decal materials (incl. in Batch Ops and Hard Ops), textures and node groups to keep Blender clean
- 3 export approaches:
- create and use Decal Atlases to efficiently export to deferred rendering engines like Unity HDRP, Unreal Engine etc.
- utilize Trim Sheet detail to export anywhere, even forward rendering engines like Unity URP
- bake Decals to their parent object's UV space
- create Trim Sheets from existing texture sheets, or from Decal Atlases
- place trims or remove them - directly in the 3d view in edit mode
- cut trims into the mesh from oject mode using Trim decals
- change, rotate, move and scale trims at any time
- additional UV tools like Quad Unwrap, Box Unwrap, Mirror Trim and Stitch
- 109 Decals, 64 Trim Decals, 1 Trim Sheet and 2 Atlases included
- 7 example blend files to study
- best documentation in the business
Links
Buy
Support
If you need to get in touch with me to report an error, report tool misbehavior or have another problem READ THIS FIRST.Attachments
Comments and questions appreciated!
Replies
This is...interesting. Coming from a max/maya hard surface modeler, this blender+DMplugin combo looks fascinating and terrifyingly deep honestly.
So, the basic idea behind this would be to model out the big volumes, and then apply with this tool decals for panel lines and terciary details? I suppose the decals/floater cards are generated automatically by this?
For a game asset, we would need to bake all that floater info into textures inside only Blender, or is it possible to take the mesh and decals to other bakers, like say, Substance Designer's?
Anyway, mad good job on this
https://polycount.com/discussion/155894/decal-technique-from-star-citizen
Basically, some games simply uses the decals as they are, without baking them down. This way things stays very high res for very little performance cost.
Let's take the star citizen decal workflow approach for example. Correct me if I'm wrong Kristóf, but for that you (usually) need at least two materials:
>your decal material, which often reads from an atlas full of the terciary details used for the floater cards + some shader setup inside the engine
>and a simple tilable material, used for the main body of the asset.
How far into this finished state does the plugin take me? From what I gather, it is an awesome tool at placing decals and previewing in Blender's viewport a final target quickly and easily. Does it help in creating the decal atlas material in any way? Or any textures? Someone tell me if I'm speaking nonsense though.
the bad vibes in me: goddammit all these cool dudes making cool toys for cool blender stop making me want to pick up blender aaaa---
Placed a heap of decals and now up to needing them to batch into atlas(s) (one is info decals, other is subset)... I remember seeing a vid of it a while ago, but now found out it's only back in the old version. What can I do to get them all atlas'd and exported? Freaking out atm hopefully all this work isn't wasted!
I'd recommend holding off on the big "workflow-changing" addons for the first while. Most of their value comes from how they change workflows, rather than how they create workflows, which means you'll get more out of them if you dive into the vanilla Blender experience first.
I made the mistake of getting HardOps and Boxcutter before I really knew what I was doing with Blender, and I didn't really get my money's worth out of them until I made a conscious effort to learn Blender's boolean/hard surface workflow the 'old fashioned' way. I had a totally different experience when I picked up MeshMachine a few months later, though, because I had enough saddle time at that point to apply it immediately.
That said, I would heavily recommend Pie Menu Editor to experienced modelers coming over from other software suites. It's a solid customization tool with tons of depth, and you can use it to recreate the quick convenience features of other addons or modeling programs. I like using it to build meta menus, listing out the useful (but hard to remember) operators from multiple addons in one place, and cleaning up keymap conflicts by turning overlapping keys into pie menus.
coming soon:
You probably know about this workflow already but here is an illustration; https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6UZf-R1MbsfaUVKZExSU3Vfb2M3a2JTcWRDWmVnaS1PUXRJ
What I would normally do is in max is to duplicate the object I want to make decals for, extrude my selection of edges with a height of 0 and width of whatever width I want my decals to have, inverse select faces and delete unneeded faces, clean up edge geom, unwrap by unfolding from edge, and setting it to a single smoothing group. This is a very tedious workflow and one I would not miss if it could be made any simpler.
Also, bonus request in regards to the unwrap; it would be nice if there was an unwrap setting where you could choose to split the UWs along the originating edge and also set it to hard. Often I would opt to bake it with a hard edge and split it in the UVs to avoid too much gradient in the bakes.
Hope you will consider my suggestion
in finish_panel_decal
panel.cycles_visibility.shadow = False
AttributeError: 'Object' object has no attribute 'cycles_visibility'
Ok, I see the export options seem to be gone in the 2.8 verions.
Either way I have a question.
There one thing I'd like to be able to do with the DECALmachine,
I'd like to configure one decal atlas that can be used over several .blend files, possibly one that can be adjusted.
Now, when I tried making atlases in older versions of DM it made an atlas for a given group or object if I remember correctly.
The problem is when I created an atlas within one file for say a part of a building, I moved on to another file I had no way of using that atlas.
I'd have to create another one, that would most likely have a different UV layout etc., for rendering it wouldn't be a problem, but I don't want multiple redundant atlases in UE4.
Hope I explained it clearly enough.
I just can't think how I can work around this. What do you think?
I made a second Decal Pack for it! (WIP)
https://gumroad.com/l/gXSaS
There is also a free pack for “numbers”: https://gumroad.com/l/dFfFz 10
I hope you enjoy it!
Existing customers are welcome to take a look as well of course
https://gumroad.com/l/ejUWl
A discount is current available! Use “hardopsfan” to get it.
This is an awesome way to add fidelity to edges and a workflow that would perfectly compliment the existing DecalMachine