@StephenVyas Small suggestion; For the upper/lower leg joint you should be able to just select the upper joint and then assign the first child as the lower joint.
That's pretty nice how the IK goal stays with it even when using FK, instead of being blended/snapped afterwords. How is that being setup?
@StephenVyas Small suggestion; For the upper/lower leg joint you should be able to just select the upper joint and then assign the first child as the lower joint.
Agreed. I had thought about doing this ... The reason i kept it in there was because I intended to include Quadrupeds and insect legs into this as well. Then it becomes important to differentiate ( in mel) between the quadruped mid-bone and lowerbone
That's pretty nice how the IK goal stays with it even when using FK, instead of being blended/snapped afterwords. How is that being setup? While in FK A point constraint keeps the Ik controllers following a locator parented to the lower leg bone. The real trick is keeping the controls in place(from popping) when the IK/fk switch happens.
Just released another Photoshop Extension called Normally Panel, some handy buttons to help people when they are doing Normal Map editing/rotations in Photoshop. Normally Panel Polycount Thread.
Just released the first iteration of my smart scripts for Maya. Heres some pereview's of whats included so far. More to come! Link to the thread: http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2450256
Just released the first iteration of my smart scripts for Maya. Heres some pereview's of whats included so far. More to come! Link to the thread: http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2450256
Super Smart Symmetry:
Smart Edge Loop Selection:
Smart Edge Ring Selection
Haven't delved too far into Maya yet, but the smart symmetry looks rad. I had to watch the loop and ring selection a few times to see what was different but it looks pretty handy too
I have made a tool able to generate a game asset and a good quality texture in 5 minutes. Discover how it works in this video:
You can get it here it is completely free to use: http://linko.projects.free.fr/dblender.zip
Well here's my 3rd and probably (hopefully) last Photoshop extension for a while I introduce Lazy Save.
Made it mainly for myself to quickly save out stuff like icons and what not from PSD's cause I hate having to do save as and select the file type and then name it etc. (and I don't want to have to go and write the pre/postfix everytime) So Lazy Save allows you to chose from a couple naming conventions based on your PSD itself using Groups as the pre/postfix or even the full output file name.
You select the folder you want to output to and select your naming convention and then just make your group visible, select the group header and hit the desired image output.
New personal project. More on the shaderstuff this time. Snow shader
with basic refill. Dynamic heightmap based on screencapture2D / topdown
and decals spawning. Super fun! Unreal Engine 4. It works very similar
to this technique: http://www.slideshare.net/…/gdc2014-deformable-snow-renderi…
Breakdown of snow shader and project files: #UE4 If you love something set it free. Superbasic setup. documentation included. Learn from it, make it better, break it, make cool stuff, share: https://goo.gl/xLYC9d
Game Asset Generator addon I am starting a standalone addon of my game asset generator tool, it will create an high quality static asset (i mean not optimized for animation) in one click and you will be able to use it in every version of Blender. This tool generate all your LoDs at the desired polycount in tris, envelop the high poly so you get no intersection, it unfold your UVs (and half if it's symmetrized, it bakes your maps, save them (you get: ao map, bent map, normal map, cavity map, top lighting, specular, grayscale), import them, setup a shader and a lighting scene and finally switch to paint mode. You go from 5-10 hours of work to few seconds with my tool, it should revolutionize the industry once it will be finished. I get very good results with it already.
Breakdown of snow shader and project files: #UE4 If you love something set it free. Superbasic setup. documentation included. Learn from it, make it better, break it, make cool stuff, share: https://goo.gl/xLYC9d
Took a few hours to work on something other than QuickPïpe.Always wanted to boolean objects super quickly so here is a GIF showing a small script (roughly 80 lines of code) that creates "Smart Bevels" without all the annoying stuff you would normally face in Maya's Bevel.
Early WIP,might work a little bit more on it next month.I've made a (ghost) thread where i put all my bevel/boolean/hard edges experimentations.You can find it right here :
I started putting toghether a photoshop panel which does brush preset managment a tiny bit better than the default one. Main ideas were: - Groups, because the list is getting large quite quickly - Update a brush, like not having to add new brush preset and open dialog, drag preset into place, delete old one - Easy rearranging via drag&drop, because i dont want to open an extra dialog for that
It progressed nicely over last days, but there are still some things to solve.
Breakdown of snow shader and project files: #UE4 If you love something set it free. Superbasic setup. documentation included. Learn from it, make it better, break it, make cool stuff, share: https://goo.gl/xLYC9d
Breakdown of snow shader and project files: #UE4 If you love something set it free. Superbasic setup. documentation included. Learn from it, make it better, break it, make cool stuff, share: https://goo.gl/xLYC9d
I needed a skybox with a low poly styled landscape. I ended up making one with a little more than that! The last few months I've been exploring the fantastic combination of Substance and Shader Forge. It allows me to move some of the computation out of the shader and have it baked into a nice bitmap for the shader to use instead.
I needed a skybox with a low poly styled landscape. I ended up making one with a little more than that! The last few months I've been exploring the fantastic combination of Substance and Shader Forge. It allows me to move some of the computation out of the shader and have it baked into a nice bitmap for the shader to use instead.
Well Lazy Save v 1.2 is up now. With it comes all the controls for the image types that it supports at the moment as well as resizing and the ability to also choose the resampling type while doing so. http://polycount.com/discussion/171661/photoshop-extension-lazy-save -Quickly saving out images in all the image types -Naming Conventions example
i really think you put in some more love for your icons
Not really :P But I am going to push a "update" because a friend of mine made some much better looking ones so I'm gonna go do that now Edit: Lazy Save now has better looking buttons :pleased:
Been working on improving and expanding a signed distance field texture generator, originally by Jasper Bekkers, to whom all credit for the heavy lifting goes. Unreal and Source (and probably Unity with minimal effort) have support for these types of images, but I've not found many/any tools to render them correctly. Distance fields are a great way to get really crisp edged decals and graphics, pretty much regardless of size in engine, even with rather small textures. example: the icons on top are from a single channel 1024 square texture sheet. Each individual icon fits in a 128 square. The supporting pins are from another texture sheet, not a distance field, and each pin is given 128x256 pixels. You can easily see the quality degradation at this scale along the edges.
Latest build is here. github: https://github.com/Vailias/signed-distance-field-font-generator It's a pretty simple program, and still a work in progress, but it does the job. Note that the "Height" dropdown doesn't actually do anything right now. The output dimensions are based on the original aspect ratio of the input SVG file and the width setting. "Spread factor" controls how tightly the distance gradient falls off from the edge of the shape. Higher values = tighter distance gradient.
Its been a lot of fun getting my head around multithreading, and working more with actual windows programming.
@Vailias: very cool to see this in practice, since the Valve paper so long ago. Thanks for sharing your work, this is really neat. How heavy is the shader for this? Curious about usage on mobile...
@Vailias Very interesting! Do you have any info on how to use that in an Unreal shader? Also, have you ever tried Substance Designer for distance fields? I don't know if it'd generate similar results though.
@Vailias: very cool to see this in practice, since the Valve paper so long ago. Thanks for sharing your work, this is really neat. How heavy is the shader for this? Curious about usage on mobile...
Thanks @Eric Chadwick! I don't think its a terribly heavy shader. It relies on the smoothstep function and the graphics hardware's internal automatic bilinear filtering. Both of which should be available to OpenGL ES devices. I tested the scene at the "Android" OpenGL ES2 rendering feature level and the distance field portions look identical to full SM5.
The one caveat is that the distance field textures have to be single channel uncompressed to avoid artifacts. So they have a memory footprint of about a compressed RGB or RGBA texture of the same dimension.
The shader I'm using in the above shot has the following stats:
Info Texture samplers: 5/16
Info Base pass shader with only dynamic lighting: 74 instructions
Info Base pass shader for self shadowed translucency: 110 instructions
Info Vertex shader: 68 instructions It allows for decal switching, and an optional outer stroke. It's node graph looks like this:
Mind you, it is set as just additive surface shader, so that makes things fairly simple at the composite stage of the render.
As for implementation in Unreal, there are some built in material functions, as of at least 4.11, that make using these easy. The Packed Distance Field one is specifically for decal sheets like I've been using. These are locked to have their edge placement at 0.5. I wound up building my own, more customizable, versions so I can do things like an outer stroke effect.
The HLSL code at the core of those material functions is:
return smoothstep(varMin,varMax,varA); <br>
varMin and varMax are set to 0.5 typically, and varA is the pixel value input from the distance field texture.
@Bruno Afonseca, I've not tried it in Substance before. I'm certain you could mimic the math behind how this is calculated with some up front effort, but its more than just a "distance" node will output, as the distance computed is from the edge of the shape, both inner and outer. The way the output gets mapped is pixels "inside" a shape are less than 0.5, while pixels outside are greater than 0.5. The slope of the gradient is from the "spread factor" in the tool.
Replies
That's pretty nice how the IK goal stays with it even when using FK, instead of being blended/snapped afterwords. How is that being setup?
http://polycount.com/discussion/169343/maya-scripts-plug-ins-mostly-for-modelling?new=1
Have plan to update it occasionally
First plugin is for duplicating polys along curves: Here is video:
It is still WIP, so i would be glad for ideas
<embedvideo service="youtube">
Tycooon bend any custom mesh.
New workflow example. Testing it on teapots this time.
Because teapots are awesome. Soooo... giant teapot monster?
#madewithtycooon
[3DS MAX TOOL] [COMING SOON]
- UI fixes / improvementsTo do list before beta 1.0 release:
- Clean up and fixing small bugs.
- Writing documentation including tutorials.
- More testing
I'm new here & I thought I show you this
Discussions and descriptions here:
http://polycount.com/discussion/170078/brodynamics-spring-like-simulation-tool-for-character-animation#latest
http://polycount.com/discussion/170649/control-mesh-creator-maya-script#latest
Normally Panel Polycount Thread.
Here's the gif of it in action
Link to the thread: http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2450256
Super Smart Symmetry:
Smart Edge Loop Selection:
Smart Edge Ring Selection
You can get it here it is completely free to use: http://linko.projects.free.fr/dblender.zip
Official topic: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?383624-Dark-Blender-(Official-Thread)-optimized-for-sculpting-and-game-asset-creation
Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/user?utm_source=twitter&u=3305044&utm_medium=social&ty=h&utm_campaign=creatorshare
First supersmall experiment with spline painter for upcoming Tycoon/3Ds Max update.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tguRxtjK61A
I introduce Lazy Save.
Made it mainly for myself to quickly save out stuff like icons and what not from PSD's cause I hate having to do save as and select the file type and then name it etc. (and I don't want to have to go and write the pre/postfix everytime)
So Lazy Save allows you to chose from a couple naming conventions based on your PSD itself using Groups as the pre/postfix or even the full output file name.
You select the folder you want to output to and select your naming convention and then just make your group visible, select the group header and hit the desired image output.
You can get in on the conversation if you have ideas
http://polycount.com/discussion/171661/photoshop-extension-lazy-save
https://vimeo.com/170023651
password: vhacd
I will work on this video thru the weekend, but for now it shows at what stage the project currently is.
I am starting a standalone addon of my game asset generator tool, it will create an high quality static asset (i mean not optimized for animation) in one click and you will be able to use it in every version of Blender.
This tool generate all your LoDs at the desired polycount in tris, envelop the high poly so you get no intersection, it unfold your UVs (and half if it's symmetrized, it bakes your maps, save them (you get: ao map, bent map, normal map, cavity map, top lighting, specular, grayscale), import them, setup a shader and a lighting scene and finally switch to paint mode.
You go from 5-10 hours of work to few seconds with my tool, it should revolutionize the industry once it will be finished.
I get very good results with it already.
I started putting toghether a photoshop panel which does brush preset managment a tiny bit better than the default one.
Main ideas were:
- Groups, because the list is getting large quite quickly
- Update a brush, like not having to add new brush preset and open dialog, drag preset into place, delete old one
- Easy rearranging via drag&drop, because i dont want to open an extra dialog for that
It progressed nicely over last days, but there are still some things to solve.
I re-recorded some videos (I think all the node ones beside V-HACD Generate) to talk about things I forgot to mention in preview and I also split them, so you can easier find topic that you are interested in:
1. Intro: https://vimeo.com/170697685
2. V-HACD Generate: https://vimeo.com/170694188
3. V-HACD Setup: https://vimeo.com/170604708
4. V-HACD Scout: https://vimeo.com/170574720
5. V-HACD Debug: https://vimeo.com/170574894
6. V-HACD Merge: https://vimeo.com/170574982
7. V-HACD Delete: https://vimeo.com/170575967
8. V-HACD Transform: https://vimeo.com/170575700
9. Project 1: https://vimeo.com/170688253
10. Project 2: https://vimeo.com/170681421
And if you prefer to watch it as one long presentation, here it is (with timestamps):
This is a short breakdown video:
With it comes all the controls for the image types that it supports at the moment as well as resizing and the ability to also choose the resampling type while doing so.
http://polycount.com/discussion/171661/photoshop-extension-lazy-save
-Quickly saving out images in all the image types
-Naming Conventions example
-Resizing quickly.
Edit:
Lazy Save now has better looking buttons :pleased:
Article:
The Joy of VFX - Pintable
Youtube Video:
Unreal and Source (and probably Unity with minimal effort) have support for these types of images, but I've not found many/any tools to render them correctly.
Distance fields are a great way to get really crisp edged decals and graphics, pretty much regardless of size in engine, even with rather small textures.
example: the icons on top are from a single channel 1024 square texture sheet. Each individual icon fits in a 128 square.
The supporting pins are from another texture sheet, not a distance field, and each pin is given 128x256 pixels. You can easily see the quality degradation at this scale along the edges.
Latest build is here.
github: https://github.com/Vailias/signed-distance-field-font-generator
It's a pretty simple program, and still a work in progress, but it does the job.
Note that the "Height" dropdown doesn't actually do anything right now. The output dimensions are based on the original aspect ratio of the input SVG file and the width setting.
"Spread factor" controls how tightly the distance gradient falls off from the edge of the shape. Higher values = tighter distance gradient.
Its been a lot of fun getting my head around multithreading, and working more with actual windows programming.
Also, have you ever tried Substance Designer for distance fields? I don't know if it'd generate similar results though.
Houdini Procedural rocks in engine test. High poly.
to do/ideas:
- launching xNormal or Houdini baker to automate the baking process?
Breakdown: https://3ducttapes.tumblr.com/post/147295610916/houdini-rocks?is_related_post=1I don't think its a terribly heavy shader. It relies on the smoothstep function and the graphics hardware's internal automatic bilinear filtering. Both of which should be available to OpenGL ES devices. I tested the scene at the "Android" OpenGL ES2 rendering feature level and the distance field portions look identical to full SM5.
The one caveat is that the distance field textures have to be single channel uncompressed to avoid artifacts. So they have a memory footprint of about a compressed RGB or RGBA texture of the same dimension.
The shader I'm using in the above shot has the following stats:
It allows for decal switching, and an optional outer stroke. It's node graph looks like this:
Mind you, it is set as just additive surface shader, so that makes things fairly simple at the composite stage of the render.
The Packed Distance Field one is specifically for decal sheets like I've been using. These are locked to have their edge placement at 0.5. I wound up building my own, more customizable, versions so I can do things like an outer stroke effect.
The HLSL code at the core of those material functions is:
varMin and varMax are set to 0.5 typically, and varA is the pixel value input from the distance field texture.
@Bruno Afonseca, I've not tried it in Substance before. I'm certain you could mimic the math behind how this is calculated with some up front effort, but its more than just a "distance" node will output, as the distance computed is from the edge of the shape, both inner and outer. The way the output gets mapped is pixels "inside" a shape are less than 0.5, while pixels outside are greater than 0.5. The slope of the gradient is from the "spread factor" in the tool.