About the tweak mode:
yay for being able to arbritarily place widgets. Hurray for the option, too.
As for where it is in 'other 3d software', I'm used to the way it is in Wings3d/Silo (I use a script to have it in 3ds ,max, but it's just not the same without Wings/Silo's advanced and natural selection-tools), where I've set it up to tweak on ctrl-lmb. holding down ctrl and click-dragging on any element (vert/edge/face/object) will automatically drag it, without needing a confirmation (which --to me-- entirely defeats the point of the tweak-tool. it shouldn't be a mode)
Yeah thought it would be something like this. I'm no dev, but if I remember correctly such implementation shouldn't be too hard to make once 2.5 is ready.
Now that I've brought up Silo/wings, has there ever been an effort to bring it's multi-mode selection to Blender? It's one thing I miss a LOT in 3ds Max.
Hold shift and click on the icons to enable other selection modes. This way you can have a combination of edge + vert, edge + face, edge + face + vert, etc. The same applies to the manipulator widget (rotate, scale, grab).
As for 3dsMax's object/element selection mode, simply hover your mouse over an object and press L to select all "linked" verts/edges/faces, or if you already have a part of the object/element selected, press ctrl+L to expand the selection to all linked verts/edges/faces.
I would really appreciate you (as someone who has a real investment in Blender, rather than --like me, at the moment-- only a passing interest) taking my suggestions to the devs.
Daaark:
when talking about anything, examples will come up. I don't feel I should come up with an elaborate way to explain what something does while doing everything to avoid talking about how it's been implemented in other software. If I bring up an example, it should not be interpreted as being 'I WA?NT BELENDER TO BE L1ke 3ds MAX!!', as I've had people interpret it all too often. I complain about Max on a near-daily basis, in fact. I try to word things in a way that's clear and concise. If I fail to do that, feel free to let me know how I could better phrase it.
No offense; it's just that --while I see your point-- I don't think my examples are all part of this mythical 'industry standard' way and Blender does something contrary to that. Silo and Max are very different in implementation and ideology, for instance.
Anyway, I don't want this post to contribute to nudging this conversation ever closer to 'that Blender conversation' that we've all witnessed too many times. Just know that anything I say is not to put other software on a pedestal and detract from what Blender does. It's only to allow myself to find things in Blender that allow me to work the way I like, and alternatively request that it's changed to allow for this workflow.
Lamoot: that's pretty cool, and I'm trying to adapt to the idea of 'verts can be faces' and so on, but that's not what I was talking about. I'll see if I can find a video or something.
Here's me trying to explain it in simple terms, though
I've set it to spacebar (big button, always have my thumb on it), and everytime I press that it deselects everything and highlights every vert, edge or face you hover over. Upon clicking on (for instance) a highlighted edge, that edge is selected and you're now in edge-selection mode. The cool thing is that you can just tweak things in multi-selection, though. It's really easy, and it saddens me that it's not available in every program I use.
Edit: here you go: http://www.nevercenter.com/videos/features/?vidclip=selection_modes.mov
He deselects by clicking outside of the model, but that's not always practical, so that's why I set it to space. very handy!
Check out this entire page, by the way: http://www.nevercenter.com/videos/features/
Sticky keys have beco,e invaluable as well, especially when the sticky functionality is different than when you'd press and release. I also love how Silo hasa lot of context-sensitive tools, and how one shortcut can do a lot of different (but related and logical) things depending on the situation.
No offense; it's just that --while I see your point-- I don't think my examples are all part of this mythical 'industry standard' way and Blender does something contrary to that. Silo and Max are very different in implementation and ideology, for instance.
Yeah. Do not use the words industry standard, or keyboard cat will quickly be playing you off. :poly124:
And it's not my point. It's their point.
On their side of it, they are a group of volunteers who work their asses off trying to do all the work to keep pumping out new Blender builds, and they get a constant stream of users with only a passing interest who make long winded posts about how they need to program everything to work like 3DS max. With the attitude of them wanting the blender team to make them a free version of max/maya because they can't afford a license.
Ton is officially not interested in how max or maya work.
So make sure you post in the correct tone, and offer good examples.
Personally, I really want wireframe overlays in the renderer. So I could get nice AO renders with a thin black wire on top.
Anyway, I don't want this post to contribute to nudging this conversation ever closer to 'that Blender conversation' that we've all witnessed too many times. Just know that anything I say is not to put other software on a pedestal and detract from what Blender does. It's only to allow myself to find things in Blender that allow me to work the way I like, and alternatively request that it's changed to allow for this workflow.
I'm not arguing with you. This is a good discussion. If someone gets pissed, we'll just hand them a paper bag. :thumbup:
Nice to see some more professional training materials starting to happen. Probably see a lot more once 2.5 goes live. I've bought a few things off the blender e-store as well that helped with learning. The wiki is always there for quick reference too.
I'm going through the mammoth modeling vid right now and picking up a few things I hadn't known about. New users will probably get even more value out of it as he does a pretty good job of explaining as he goes.
Nice to see some more professional training materials starting to happen. Probably see a lot more once 2.5 goes live. I've bought a few things off the blender e-store as well that helped with learning. The wiki is always there for quick reference too.
I'm going through the mammoth modeling vid right now and picking up a few things I hadn't known about. New users will probably get even more value out of it as he does a pretty good job of explaining as he goes.
Are those videos downloadable or do you have to watch them through the website player? I might be interested if I could keep a personal copy of the video.
Have to use the webplayer as far as I can tell. This is my first purchase from them and that's the only option I see. The player is quite nice though and I have no gripe with it. Anything you pay for is stored in your account to be watched whenever you like. You can bookmark spots in the vid too if you don't want to sit through one big session.
Okay, first question: where's 'connect'? as in: select two adjacent edges, split them and connect the resulting verts into a new edge
If all we have is this knife, then my forray into Blender is over before it started, heh
MightyPea: Ctrl+R- adds new edgeloop (wheel will let you select the number of cuts)
And if you want something like wings connect tool, you must select those two , or more edges and hit W and select subdivide from list.ou can also do this by hittin W and then 1. but as in blender there are no ngons this will result in getting some triangles.
Do you by any chance know if all this nested shortcut-stuff (ie. pressing a hotkey to get a list of options) can be bypassed in the upcoming 2.5 by hotkeying only specific options out of those lists? For some things I like being given the option everytime, but for things like Connect I can see that being tiring.
I suppose so, i mean what would be the point of the whole thing if you wouldn't be able to change, or assign hotkey to antything.
Here is the note from blender.org
Blender 2.5 has been designed from scratch to enable users configuring their own hotkeys. Hotkey definitions will be grouped in "key maps", and each map will allow to fully customize or disable it. Keymaps can also be configured for special input methods such as directional gestures and tweak events, any-key modifiers, multi-key input or can even modifier-order based.
I find the Knife quite versatile really.
It can do many of the things that connect can, just in Blenders own way :P
After cutting the mesh, you can select 2 edges and then constrain the axis by hitting X, Y or Z and then S to scale across the axis...this will emulate pinch. (you can also designate the amount of pinch by inputting the amount with the numpad.)
You can get to most things through the interface but to be truly harmonious with Blender you need to learn the shortcut keys.
I rarely use the GUI for much anymore for anything other than essential stuff.
I think the Loop cut would be much more versatile if you only has to hit Ctrl+R once to turn the tool on and then again to turn it off (Much like the new Swift loop in Max 2010)
another good thing with small file size of the program that i see, is faster loading times.
with a really fast HD, blender pops up the instant you click it..
this is in stark contrast with the monolithic bloated structure of photoshop, and 3ds max.
The fast load time is freaking awesome. It's not a 'selling' feature, but yea, after loading max multiple times a day on my work machine, blender is lightning fast. I hope they can maintain this as development continues.
As for the knife tool, I'm going to have to give it a 'meh'. It's an ok tool, but the popup really has got to go. There's no reason at all that you couldn't consolidate everything in there into one tool.
I'll just point at silo's cut tool as a good example to follow. It's contextual, so it can work with any element selections (automatically forces it into 'connect' mode) or it can be interactive if you have no selection, allowing you to either cut into a mesh using points, edges and faces to draw new edges, or you can use it as a quick knife tool by dragging from outside the mesh, across it to slice right through. Loop cuts and partial loop cuts are easily possible too considering that you have such good selection bindings in Silo. Double middle click to select a ring then cut... gives you a loop cut or pick one edge, then double middle click on another to get a partial ring selection, then cut. Not fancy, but more often than not gets the job done.
Silo's acceptance of n-gons and its ability to rotate the viewport while the tool is active are also good features. I don't mind being forced to work with quads and tris in blender... it's just a slight adjustment to my preferred mindset when dealing with polygons but if I had my choice I'd go with n-gons for their flexibility.
I have to say though I love the smooth option for blender's loop cut tool, and the multi-cut (mouse wheel) control is also nice. Mostly I just wish I didn't need to access those popups when I fire commands - or have to hit 'enter' to commit. I like how the rmb in silo acts as the 'enter' key does in blender for finishing a command... however, I also love using the rmb in blender to cancel an op without committing, much like in max. I'd be hard pressed to decide which I preferred more. Looking forward to binding stuff like this into my mouse as well in 2.5.
If I need to cut, I just add an edge loop. It's easy to use, especially with using the mouse wheel to change the number of cuts, and holding CTRL to keep them on the grid.
... blender is lightning fast. I hope they can maintain this as development continues.
Keeping the bloat and bugs out and keeping the program efficient is one of the fundamental principles among Blender developers. In practice it's not always ideal (the raytracer for example), but it's good to know there is an effort to make and keep things efficient. Seeing how most of the developers develop Blender for a hobby it's not hard to understand why they strive to code things in a proper, quality way.
And yes, we all hope they will also keep things efficient in the future
Gwot how are you finding moving from Silo to Blender? I used to use Blender exclusively, but now just for uv mapping and do my modeling in silo, so am out of practice and not up to date with Blender modeling.
Having watched the videos for the Dom War 4 winner, I'm really wanting to work in something with deformers and such, which I think Blender has.
I still use Silo. I'm doing a couple things in blender on the side though at home. But at work it's pretty much all Silo still. I have a feeling though that with 2.5, and hopefully bmesh that could change. I do enjoy working in blender even now for modeling. It has some nice workflow even without ngon support or custom binds. I still find it has a very organic approach to modeling, and I hope that only improves from here on in. My main interest up till now has been as a pipeline tool for Unity, and for that I think it rocks.
I thought some of you would like to know that the blender dev's have now implemented real world units
I have also made a head to head video that's over at Vimeo which shows the viewport speedup thats currently being developed by imbusy for his GsoC project.
The aim of this project is to increase the viewport responsiveness by reducing rendering time of meshes by utilizing OpenGL features, such as Vertex Arrays and Vertex Buffer Objects (VBOs). They allow rendering the same meshes, but using significantly less OpenGL API calls and, in case of VBOs, storing most of the data in video memory for future access.
Real nice stuff
I was very surprised with the performance improvement gained
There wasn't any noticeable speed-up when I tried that build. Could be my old computer though.
The speed ups come as the complexity of the scene in the real time viewport increases.
Blender was still using immediate mode, which is sending the vertices, uvs, normals, and etc, one at a time from the CPU to the GPU to draw. That's function 3-9 (or more) calls per polygon. That's lots of needless function call overhead for the CPU side, and needlessly sending data across the bus to the GPU. It's an old, slower, way of sending data to be drawn. OpenGL only retains those commands for backwards compatibility, and Direct3D ditched their equivalent mode long ago.
VBOs store all the vertex data in the GPU's own memory, and then it's just one call to tell the GPU to render those vertices. There is nothing to send from the cpu to gpu across the BUS. A complex model will be rendered with this method long before the other method has even finished sending the data.
I subdivided a cube and could only get up to the same polycount as in the current official version before things stopped. My GPU only has 64MB though, so that must be why, lol.
Yeah sorry about that. I live in the past and have to project my forum posts into the future so that those living in the present can read them. It's nuts!
As much as I hate to revive threads from page 17 (!), there's news on the horizon.
Firstly, videos from the Blender Conference are finally up! I haven't had the chance to watch them back yet, but Ton's last presentation is a good one, IMO, showing various new 2.5 things, like scriptability and the ability to keyframe anything. (If you can actually get the videos to work...)
Secondly, 2.5 Tour #9 is about Python in Blender 2.5. It's a bit long at 47 minutes and a little rehearsal wouldn't have hurt the guy, but it shows how easy scripting will be - and for how much you can use it! If you're unhappy with the UI, it shouldn't actually be terribly hard to recode it to your likings.
Thirdly, maybe not entirely related to 2.5, the third Open Movie project, Project Durian, now named Sintel, is finally releasing information, including, if you track back a bit, a mockup of the (unused) first minute.
Fun fact: MightyPea attended the Blender Conference and he has now dedicated his life to the software. True story. Well, the first half of it, anyway.
well MightyPea is from Amsterdam anyway so it should be rather easy for him attending to the local conferences.
Will have a look at the scripting videos
Replies
Hold shift and click on the icons to enable other selection modes. This way you can have a combination of edge + vert, edge + face, edge + face + vert, etc. The same applies to the manipulator widget (rotate, scale, grab).
As for 3dsMax's object/element selection mode, simply hover your mouse over an object and press L to select all "linked" verts/edges/faces, or if you already have a part of the object/element selected, press ctrl+L to expand the selection to all linked verts/edges/faces.
I'll see what can be done
when talking about anything, examples will come up. I don't feel I should come up with an elaborate way to explain what something does while doing everything to avoid talking about how it's been implemented in other software. If I bring up an example, it should not be interpreted as being 'I WA?NT BELENDER TO BE L1ke 3ds MAX!!', as I've had people interpret it all too often. I complain about Max on a near-daily basis, in fact. I try to word things in a way that's clear and concise. If I fail to do that, feel free to let me know how I could better phrase it.
No offense; it's just that --while I see your point-- I don't think my examples are all part of this mythical 'industry standard' way and Blender does something contrary to that. Silo and Max are very different in implementation and ideology, for instance.
Anyway, I don't want this post to contribute to nudging this conversation ever closer to 'that Blender conversation' that we've all witnessed too many times. Just know that anything I say is not to put other software on a pedestal and detract from what Blender does. It's only to allow myself to find things in Blender that allow me to work the way I like, and alternatively request that it's changed to allow for this workflow.
Lamoot: that's pretty cool, and I'm trying to adapt to the idea of 'verts can be faces' and so on, but that's not what I was talking about. I'll see if I can find a video or something.
Here's me trying to explain it in simple terms, though
I've set it to spacebar (big button, always have my thumb on it), and everytime I press that it deselects everything and highlights every vert, edge or face you hover over. Upon clicking on (for instance) a highlighted edge, that edge is selected and you're now in edge-selection mode. The cool thing is that you can just tweak things in multi-selection, though. It's really easy, and it saddens me that it's not available in every program I use.
Edit: here you go:
http://www.nevercenter.com/videos/features/?vidclip=selection_modes.mov
He deselects by clicking outside of the model, but that's not always practical, so that's why I set it to space. very handy!
Check out this entire page, by the way: http://www.nevercenter.com/videos/features/
Sticky keys have beco,e invaluable as well, especially when the sticky functionality is different than when you'd press and release. I also love how Silo hasa lot of context-sensitive tools, and how one shortcut can do a lot of different (but related and logical) things depending on the situation.
And it's not my point. It's their point.
On their side of it, they are a group of volunteers who work their asses off trying to do all the work to keep pumping out new Blender builds, and they get a constant stream of users with only a passing interest who make long winded posts about how they need to program everything to work like 3DS max. With the attitude of them wanting the blender team to make them a free version of max/maya because they can't afford a license.
Ton is officially not interested in how max or maya work.
So make sure you post in the correct tone, and offer good examples.
Personally, I really want wireframe overlays in the renderer. So I could get nice AO renders with a thin black wire on top.
I'm not arguing with you. This is a good discussion. If someone gets pissed, we'll just hand them a paper bag. :thumbup:
http://www.blender3darchitect.com/2009/06/using-the-b-mesh-for-architectural-modeling-in-blender-3d/
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-249/249-update/
Using code from a GSoC project.
[ame]
Nice to see some more professional training materials starting to happen. Probably see a lot more once 2.5 goes live. I've bought a few things off the blender e-store as well that helped with learning. The wiki is always there for quick reference too.
I'm going through the mammoth modeling vid right now and picking up a few things I hadn't known about. New users will probably get even more value out of it as he does a pretty good job of explaining as he goes.
Are those videos downloadable or do you have to watch them through the website player? I might be interested if I could keep a personal copy of the video.
If all we have is this knife, then my forray into Blender is over before it started, heh
And if you want something like wings connect tool, you must select those two , or more edges and hit W and select subdivide from list.ou can also do this by hittin W and then 1. but as in blender there are no ngons this will result in getting some triangles.
Here is the note from blender.org
I find the Knife quite versatile really.
It can do many of the things that connect can, just in Blenders own way :P
After cutting the mesh, you can select 2 edges and then constrain the axis by hitting X, Y or Z and then S to scale across the axis...this will emulate pinch. (you can also designate the amount of pinch by inputting the amount with the numpad.)
You can get to most things through the interface but to be truly harmonious with Blender you need to learn the shortcut keys.
I rarely use the GUI for much anymore for anything other than essential stuff.
I think the Loop cut would be much more versatile if you only has to hit Ctrl+R once to turn the tool on and then again to turn it off (Much like the new Swift loop in Max 2010)
with a really fast HD, blender pops up the instant you click it..
this is in stark contrast with the monolithic bloated structure of photoshop, and 3ds max.
As for the knife tool, I'm going to have to give it a 'meh'. It's an ok tool, but the popup really has got to go. There's no reason at all that you couldn't consolidate everything in there into one tool.
I'll just point at silo's cut tool as a good example to follow. It's contextual, so it can work with any element selections (automatically forces it into 'connect' mode) or it can be interactive if you have no selection, allowing you to either cut into a mesh using points, edges and faces to draw new edges, or you can use it as a quick knife tool by dragging from outside the mesh, across it to slice right through. Loop cuts and partial loop cuts are easily possible too considering that you have such good selection bindings in Silo. Double middle click to select a ring then cut... gives you a loop cut or pick one edge, then double middle click on another to get a partial ring selection, then cut. Not fancy, but more often than not gets the job done.
Silo's acceptance of n-gons and its ability to rotate the viewport while the tool is active are also good features. I don't mind being forced to work with quads and tris in blender... it's just a slight adjustment to my preferred mindset when dealing with polygons but if I had my choice I'd go with n-gons for their flexibility.
I have to say though I love the smooth option for blender's loop cut tool, and the multi-cut (mouse wheel) control is also nice. Mostly I just wish I didn't need to access those popups when I fire commands - or have to hit 'enter' to commit. I like how the rmb in silo acts as the 'enter' key does in blender for finishing a command... however, I also love using the rmb in blender to cancel an op without committing, much like in max. I'd be hard pressed to decide which I preferred more. Looking forward to binding stuff like this into my mouse as well in 2.5.
If I need to cut, I just add an edge loop. It's easy to use, especially with using the mouse wheel to change the number of cuts, and holding CTRL to keep them on the grid.
And yes, we all hope they will also keep things efficient in the future
http://cg.cgcookie.com/2009/06/22/model-and-texture-a-wooden-barrel
A great movie to follow to watch some Blender workflow.
Awesome! Nice to see how the custom mouse binding is shaping up.
Having watched the videos for the Dom War 4 winner, I'm really wanting to work in something with deformers and such, which I think Blender has.
http://www.blendernation.com/2009/07/25/realtime-stone-with-detail-maps-in-blender/
Blender's interface still confuses the hell out of me but I am getting to know it slowly.
Couldn't get your link to work so here is an alternative for those who are interested...
http://www.cgcookie.com/articles/model-and-texture-a-wooden-barrel
I thought some of you would like to know that the blender dev's have now implemented real world units
I have also made a head to head video that's over at Vimeo which shows the viewport speedup thats currently being developed by imbusy for his GsoC project.
Video clickie
Project Overview
Real nice stuff
I was very surprised with the performance improvement gained
keep them coming the updates and news
http://www.blendernation.com/memory/
Blender was still using immediate mode, which is sending the vertices, uvs, normals, and etc, one at a time from the CPU to the GPU to draw. That's function 3-9 (or more) calls per polygon. That's lots of needless function call overhead for the CPU side, and needlessly sending data across the bus to the GPU. It's an old, slower, way of sending data to be drawn. OpenGL only retains those commands for backwards compatibility, and Direct3D ditched their equivalent mode long ago.
VBOs store all the vertex data in the GPU's own memory, and then it's just one call to tell the GPU to render those vertices. There is nothing to send from the cpu to gpu across the BUS. A complex model will be rendered with this method long before the other method has even finished sending the data.
http://www.vimeo.com/6430167
Yeah sorry about that. I live in the past and have to project my forum posts into the future so that those living in the present can read them. It's nuts!
Taken from here.
So I'm not sure how it works exactly, but at the last, BMesh (with ngons and other fancy stuff) will be in in a february release.
I can't get into it without it, and it seems to be a nifty application
When they implement it
http://www.cgcookie.com/articles/2009/09/08/unveiling-our-introduction-to-blender-2-5-training-series
Now i'm waiting for bmesh (2010
And then i'm probably switching to blender :>
Firstly, videos from the Blender Conference are finally up! I haven't had the chance to watch them back yet, but Ton's last presentation is a good one, IMO, showing various new 2.5 things, like scriptability and the ability to keyframe anything. (If you can actually get the videos to work...)
Secondly, 2.5 Tour #9 is about Python in Blender 2.5. It's a bit long at 47 minutes and a little rehearsal wouldn't have hurt the guy, but it shows how easy scripting will be - and for how much you can use it! If you're unhappy with the UI, it shouldn't actually be terribly hard to recode it to your likings.
Thirdly, maybe not entirely related to 2.5, the third Open Movie project, Project Durian, now named Sintel, is finally releasing information, including, if you track back a bit, a mockup of the (unused) first minute.
Fun fact: MightyPea attended the Blender Conference and he has now dedicated his life to the software. True story. Well, the first half of it, anyway.
Will have a look at the scripting videos
Any ideas why?
True story!
edit: render, I'm not from Amsterdam, I'm merely someone who lives here as is often treated as if I'm from Atlantis (or other mythic country).