Hello Blender thread! Long time 3ds Max/ Maya user here ... now learning Blender. I would like to consult the minds here on Polycount over some learning curve issues.
As you can see I am getting major issues with my Anvil mesh in render mode displaying hard edges. The mesh displays normally with all soft edges in the modeling and layout ports, and I don't see any errors in the normal map itself. Could be a bad mesh issue? I adjusted the horn UVs and they are now no longer baking correctly. These hard edges only show in render mode, and with the normal map applied. Adding a subsurf mod only shrinks and adds to the hard edges.
Is it possible to detach or break UVs in the UV editor, including when they are down the middle seam of a mirrored object? I used a mirror mod and collapsed it, but then I could not find a way to move the overlapping UV islands that were down the center horn of the anvil, or move them into the tiling area to the right exactly +1 distance. Possible?
I have also experienced some seemingly buggy cameras. Sometimes I can't move or rotate them after placing them in the scene ... sometimes I can. Is this common?
As you can see I am getting major issues with my Anvil mesh in render mode displaying hard edges.
Try disabling autosmooth or setting angle to 180
ScottMichaelH said: Is it possible to detach or break UVs in the UV editor, including when they are down the middle seam of a mirrored object? I used a mirror mod and collapsed it, but then I could not find a way to move the overlapping UV islands that were down the center horn of the anvil, or move them into the tiling area to the right exactly +1 distance. Possible?
I guess you need to select half of mesh in 3dview (select middle vert, then in "select" menu choose "side of active"). Then in uv editor move it in face select mode with G + x + 1
I have also experienced some seemingly buggy cameras. Sometimes I can't move or rotate them after placing them in the scene ... sometimes I can. Is this common?
Point #1 - thanks, although it wasn't the smoothing on the mesh. I eventually remembered having the same type of error back in 2014 when I was first learning Unreal 4. The issue then was that the check box for displaying the map as a normal or color map was moved to a different place from Unreal 3... so I didn't realize it was not displaying as a normal. So, I checked the shader view in Blender here more carefully and realized it was set to sRGB. Changed it to non-color and the issue is solved.
Point #2 - 100% exactly what I needed (just learned that CTRL movement can snap increments as well). Thank you! I was worried Blender didn't have that capability. As for selecting one half, the issue was that I had both UV's selected and showing in the UV editor. I guess the best way to break the UV islands in Blender is to only select and show one half, and move that by itself.
Point #3, thanks ... not sure what happened but I fixed it by exporting/importing the models to a new scene.
What is the best way to add support loops simultaneously in Blender, similar to the pinch function in Max and Maya where you can scale the two edges apart at the same time without altering the shape of the mesh. This thread shows a better example of what I mean:
The closest I can come to replicating it (with stock tools) is selecting the vertical edges between the loops and using scale with the pivot point set to "individual origins" in edge select mode.
Another option would be to add a middle edge loop and use the bevel command. In the options you would need to change the segments to 2 so you get two extra loops, profile to 1 to maintain the original shape, and swap over to the percent mode so you don't overshoot the original edges. From there you just need to adjust the width to the desired amount and delete the extra loop.
Edit: Offset edge slide does all this with way less steps though.
The closest I can come to replicating it (with stock tools) is selecting the vertical edges between the loops and using scale with the pivot point set to "individual origins" in edge select mode.
Thanks for that. Offset edge slide seems quickest, still have to delete the middle loop afterwards though but decent workaround. Hard to believe no pinch function exists after so many iterations of Blender though
Another option would be to add a middle edge loop and use the bevel command. In the options you would need to change the segments to 2 so you get two extra loops, profile to 1 to maintain the original shape, and swap over to the percent mode so you don't overshoot the original edges. From there you just need to adjust the width to the desired amount and delete the extra loop.
Edit: Offset edge slide does all this with way less steps though.
Thanks for that, seems Offset Edge Slide will have to make do(for now)...
I'm trying to figure out library overrides in 2.81a. My use case is I want to have two instances of the same character (armature plus meshes) each using different animations. Let's say, shaking hands. So I link my armature and meshes, select Object->relations->Make Library Override the armature and... nothing? Can't access pose mode or even move the armature around. Is it just not implemented yet for armatures? If it is, what's the workflow?
@Chev You have to put the armature and mesh in a collection in the library. The armature has to also be the parent of the mesh. When linking, link the collection, then run the library override operator on the linked collection.
EDIT: Well, mostly. Overriding works, but how do I create the second instance? If I duplicate the overridden collection (choosing either duplicate or duplicate linked), the duplicate isn't marked as an override in the outliner but a full copy. The process that seems to work is linking again, overriding again and setting each overridden rig to a new action. Is that the right way to do it?
Also what's the purpose of the empty that's created after each override?
@Chev did you use the proxy workflow in 2.79? If you find that it works better you, you could work on 2.79 anyway, and then use 2.8x for rendering (or whatever the reason you're using it now).
You are missing my point. If you don't have any reason to switch to the new generation of Blender, then don't. .79 is still usable for production, and you can keep both versions installed anyway.
In 2.7x (and everything before it) you just plain can't make two proxies of the same character using two different animations. In fact that huge problem is one of the reasons 2.8x library overrides were developed in the first place. So no, 2.7x is useless for this case, as proxies are unless they changed them in 2.81 to actually be wrappers for library overrides. In fact I haven't tested them in 2.81 but in 2.80 proxies would just crash anyway.
(this absence of independent duplication support in proxies is because proxies are uniquely identified by the file path to their source libraries, so an asinine workaround did exist by creating a symbolic link to the source file so that one file would have two filenames. It goes without saying that that approach is easily breakable and doesn't scale up at all)
It's possible to code a simple add-on to "refresh" the data of objects in your scene from external files whose paths you specify as custom properties inside each object, so that these objects can be appended to the scene rather than linked, and you don't run into this limitation.
The only difference with the built-in proxy/override system that already refreshes everything when you load the .blend file is that you would have to press a button to trigger this operation. Sounds like a bargain to me.
Why would I code an add-on to accomplish a poor knockoff of a built-in functionality that now actually exists and solves my use case, though? My second question was about whether I'm doing it in the most efficient way since the feature isn't particularly well tutorialized so far, but it does work fine. If it's about going back to 2.79, then no, 2.79 doesn't do what I need and 2.81 does so there's no point in coding it myself, and no other part of my custom pipeline would justify staying behind, they were all already made 2.8x-compliant in august.
"Poor knockoff" -- you make it sound like it would be lacking or malfunctioning, which I disagree. I'm glad you have everything you need, I hope you make some great art with it.
The only difference with the built-in proxy/override system that already refreshes everything when you load the .blend file is that you would have to press a button to trigger this operation. Sounds like a bargain to me.
To correct what I said, using the bpy.app.handlers.load_post app handler in a script would let you run a function anytime a file is opened, making this custom refresh (or anything else) process fully automatic.
How would I go about 'combining' or 'laying' two identical islands on top of one another in the UV editor? Trying to make the most efficient use of space. I saw a video that demonstrated this once but I just cannot find it again for some reason and I've been searching for a while. I saw one post online about enabling a "copy attribute" addon but I did it but that only seems to be for the 3D view. For references I'm trying to combine the two selected islands and the two next to them.
UV Menu, Snap, Cursor to Selected, then select the second part and perform selected to cursor could help you with the position. For fitting the exact rotation though, hmmm ...
You could simply unwrap just half of the mesh though. Then mirror it when done.
Went ahead and mirrored it, that was pretty simple. I still tried to download that addon though. Downloaded the zip to a folder, but couldn't find it in the install addon screen in Blender for some reason. But I guess that's a question for another day. Thank you.
Just wondering if there is anything like Easy Trim in Blender. Basically, you create an edge profile and then select an edge to extrude the profile along to create trims.
I'm currently working on my first project fully done with 2.82 and am wondering if anybody is aware of planned improvements to Eevee/Material Preview and its shadow flickering when rotating the view or adjusting anything in the scene? Alternatively are there any efforts to get alpha masking features working in Solid mode?
Right now, working with alpha mapped geometry in the scene is quite the pain for me - slow and flickering all over the place when 2.79 was stellar to deal with.
Would a 2080/TI as a replacement for my current GTX 1070 help in any way with this?
I'm currently working on my first project fully done with 2.82 and am wondering if anybody is aware of planned improvements to Eevee/Material Preview and its shadow flickering when rotating the view or adjusting anything in the scene? Alternatively are there any efforts to get alpha masking features working in Solid mode?
Right now, working with alpha mapped geometry in the scene is quite the pain for me - slow and flickering all over the place when 2.79 was stellar to deal with.
Would a 2080/TI as a replacement for my current GTX 1070 help in any way with this?
One of the great things about Blender is its rapid development. The downside is that that not all features update at the same time. Im working in 3 versions atm (2.79, 2.80RC and 2.82 Beta). Its a bit strange jumping from 2.82 to 2.79 and back, but a small price to pay for all the features and the support of a ripping and knowledgeable community of worldwide developers. I have about 5 versions of B on my laptop but they really don't take up that much space.
Im working in 3 versions atm (2.79, 2.80RC and 2.82 Beta). Its a bit strange jumping from 2.82 to 2.79 and back, but a small price to pay for all the features and the support of a ripping and knowledgeable community of worldwide developers. I have about 5 versions of B on my laptop but they really don't take up that much space.
Yeah well it's not like 2.79 and 2.8 are so alike you can just switch back and forth on the same project - materials require different settings to display as intended in the viewports and for the stuff I do even the way curves are being rendered as geometry in the viewport has changed.
I definitely am considering to move back to 2.79 for this task but every scene being transferred between versions would need adjusting down to the geometry/modifier stack. That aside from the interface changes, workflow/feature-differences in addons - and my customizations on top which due to the interface changes do behave differently.
You just have to select your high poly, eventually use my texturing node group or your own to add curvatures and colors, you set the polycount and you press Generate Game Asset. In the background it will decimate it, do the UVs, bake the texture and send a .glb in the path you have specified. Then Unity with UniGLTF will be able to read the file, once you will drag it to the 3D view it will be converted into a prefab.
To the above point raised by @V!nc3r : this is a really big deal, and I think it's really a shame that 2.8 came out with such a badly thought out default behavior for something as important as objects and components selection, as this is precisely the kind of stuff that can make an app feel sluggish to experienced users ... As far as I am concerned this was one of the reason why I waited quite a bit to dive deeper into 2.8 - only to eventually realize that it was just a poor setting that could be reverted and not an actual bug.
I've personally went through the keymap manually and changed any selection event I needed to be a Press. A bit more tedious than a full-on edit/replace for sure I'd encourage anyone curious about picking up Blender post 2.8 to fix this setting one way or another. It makes a huge difference if you are used to working very fast - you'll get much less selection errors.
Seeing that this went unnoticed by the devs and whoever is currently in charge of overseeing UX is genuinely worrisome, as that shows that whoever is making these calls is certainly not a modeler. It's also a bit sad to see that quite a few contributors in the bug report just don't seem to get it. Oh well.
Yeah, it's a very common scenario when dealing with engineers/developers - user reports a serious problem using the bug tracker because it really is the only way to report anything ... developer rightfully states that "it's not a bug" because it actually is a design issue ... and said design issue ends up in limbo and never gets addressed.
One way around that would be for the bug ticket to only be closed once a product or UX guy acknowledges the issue and creates a ticket for it ... but that's something they probably won't want to do anyway because that'd be admitting their own bad design
Anyways - If you ever need more ammo on this (footage showing the issue, and so on), count me in. I completely forgot about it myself because I fixed it in my keymap manually months ago, but this default sluggishness is something that new users shouldn't have to deal with.
Yes you can. You need to have a image created or loaded. And in the UV menu you can turn pixel snapping on.
EDIT, i have turned UV Sync selection on here in the shot to work with the single vertices. But the snapping works also with this method off and with whole UV patches.
... but that's something they probably won't want to do anyway because that'd be admitting their own bad design.
I dont think is really about admitting errors, but general lack of people to work into it and / or bad priority queuing. The open source nature is a democratic one, and sometimes the very nature of its system works against it, making immediate actions difficult to take place.
There're numerous things to be fixed in Blender, prioritizing it is not a task for mere mortals. A good example is the "Auto Smooth" option, debated on this thread. I really wish we had more active developers willing to take up on those little things that makes up "Modeling" in general and discuss them.
Blender3D is indeed a multi-tool software, but before it was a video editor, animator or compositor, it was and still is primarily a 3D modeling software. The only one that appears to be improving modeling tasks so far is Howard Trickey, I'm not counting Pablo Dobarro because he's mainly on Sculpting tools.
Well admittedly this case of click VS pressed is a bit different : the setting has been changed by whoever is in charge of the keymap ... and also, the person in charge of UX in general didn't catch it through the beta. Kindof worrisome because it was *really* noticeable honestly.
So yeah, I would say that it's not so much an issue related to the nature of open source development but rather a case of someone being assigned a task beyond ones skillset/expertise.
Overall this makes me a tad nervous because this highlights that whoever used to be in charge of modeling UX earlier on probably isn't involved anymore, and that's too bad.
Anyways ! At the very least it's just a setting to revert and not a broken feature
The click/press thing is a deliberate design to make LMB select work correctly. It's discussed in this bug report and this design task. Basically drag = box select, click = select. There is an extra tool in the selection called Tweak if you need to shuffle a bunch of verts around.
Is there some easy way to set up way in Blender 2.82/ Eevee to create a shadow catcher (material)? I found a tutorial on youtube that requires a complex material setup for this, and only works if there is a sunlight in the scene set to a certain intensity (really?), so not usable for me.
It works pretty easily in Cycles, but I'd like to render in Eeevee as it is sufficient faster for this project.
@xrg : Just for the sake of clarity : these two things are not mutually exclusive. Drag box selection can very well live alongside press select rather than click-release select - if I got it up and running with just some simple alterations to my keymap then they sure can
But yeah all that said bug reports will never be a good place to solve these things anyways since it's literally not a bug, just a bad default setting. But even if a big report is not a great place to bring up this kind of stuff it still brings some attention to it so that's good overall. It's always fascinating how there are always folks in these bug report threads just not grasping the high level issue though (beyond it being literally a bug or not). Really illustrates the "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation more often than not leading to lowest denominator or even straight up bad solutions/choices. Making the most basic object/component interaction in 2.8 feel sluggish really can't be justified imho
@thomasp : care to upload a problematic example for testing ?
Yeah, it's a very common scenario when dealing with engineers/developers - user reports a serious problem using the bug tracker because it really is the only way to report anything ... developer rightfully states that "it's not a bug" because it actually is a design issue ... and said design issue ends up in limbo and never gets addressed.
One way around that would be for the bug ticket to only be closed once a product or UX guy acknowledges the issue and creates a ticket for it ... but that's something they probably won't want to do anyway because that'd be admitting their own bad design
Anyways - If you ever need more ammo on this (footage showing the issue, and so on), count me in. I completely forgot about it myself because I fixed it in my keymap manually months ago, but this default sluggishness is something that new users shouldn't have to deal with.
I've just had a look on blender for this but it doesn't seem sluggish? It feels similar to 3ds max but that might be because i've set it to industry standard? I dont know if that makes a difference or not?
I hadn't realised the last page wasn't selected and this from you dude. " the setting has been changed by whoever is in charge of the keymap .."
@MrNinjutsu : by that I meant that someone proactively changed that setting sometime between 2.79 and the 2.8 beta, leading to 2.8 feeling sluggish. Now on my end I've since fixed it in my own keymap which I then port over to new versions (2.8 Release, 2.81, and so on) so I cannot really tell if this setting is still broken (so to speak) by default now without investigating further by removing my preferences and redownloading the software. But as you pointed out it may very well be different between some of the provided presets anyways (Maya style, Max style ...).
To test it out : when in object or in component mode, do a mouse click selection. If the selection is confirmed (gets highlighted/turns yellow) when you press down, it's the super snappy 2.79 behavior - basically the program reacting instantly to your inputs. But if the selection is confirmed when you let go of the mouse button press, then this is indeed sluggish behavior and imho not acceptable. It may not be noticeable to new users starting out, but when going fast it definitely cause issues and is just not feeling responsive overall. It becomes especially noticeable when doing multiselections (and no, using marquee selections to avoid this scenario is not a "fix" for this issue )
Using box selections might not be a fix, but try using circle select with a really small radius. I can't test it right now, but I would be surprised if that only selects on mouse up.
Edit: In fact it shouldn't, otherwise click-drag selects would not be possible.
Hehe of course Circle Select is not a fix either The point of these comments (and the bug report mentioned above) is not to find workarounds to avoid a problem - the point is to highlight an issue that makes the app feel sluggish even for the most basic operation, and to make some noise one way or another so that knowledge of the issue spreads - both from an altruistic perspective (it's in everyones interest to have tools behaving as smoothly as possible) and/or also to help development (if this reaches the ears of someone in charge it may change things for the better). Otherwise we end up in Apple Fanboy territory ("oh nah, you don't need that feature you say you need, trust us, Steve Jobs thought about it")
And as said : selection validation on clickdown is absolutely *not* incompatible with drag box selection. Try it on your desktop icons, you'll see
I haven't been using 2.8 much yet, but thanks to the information here I finally know why it felt different I usually used the standard "Select"-tool which selects on "press", but once you add a selection using Shift-key it selects on "click", feels strange. I don't see any issues so far changing everything to "press" and using tools that require "drag", I don't quite understand the design decision.
Replies
Hello Blender thread! Long time 3ds Max/ Maya user here ... now learning Blender. I would like to consult the minds here on Polycount over some learning curve issues.
As you can see I am getting major issues with my Anvil mesh in render mode displaying hard edges. The mesh displays normally with all soft edges in the modeling and layout ports, and I don't see any errors in the normal map itself. Could be a bad mesh issue? I adjusted the horn UVs and they are now no longer baking correctly. These hard edges only show in render mode, and with the normal map applied. Adding a subsurf mod only shrinks and adds to the hard edges.
Is it possible to detach or break UVs in the UV editor, including when they are down the middle seam of a mirrored object? I used a mirror mod and collapsed it, but then I could not find a way to move the overlapping UV islands that were down the center horn of the anvil, or move them into the tiling area to the right exactly +1 distance. Possible?
I have also experienced some seemingly buggy cameras. Sometimes I can't move or rotate them after placing them in the scene ... sometimes I can. Is this common?
thanks.
No, I never experienced it
Point #2 - 100% exactly what I needed (just learned that CTRL movement can snap increments as well). Thank you! I was worried Blender didn't have that capability. As for selecting one half, the issue was that I had both UV's selected and showing in the UV editor. I guess the best way to break the UV islands in Blender is to only select and show one half, and move that by itself.
Point #3, thanks ... not sure what happened but I fixed it by exporting/importing the models to a new scene.
https://blenderartists.org/t/how-to-pinch-scale-uniformly-with-an-edge-constraint-blender-2-8/1141329
Another option would be to add a middle edge loop and use the bevel command. In the options you would need to change the segments to 2 so you get two extra loops, profile to 1 to maintain the original shape, and swap over to the percent mode so you don't overshoot the original edges. From there you just need to adjust the width to the desired amount and delete the extra loop.
Edit: Offset edge slide does all this with way less steps though.
EDIT: Well, mostly. Overriding works, but how do I create the second instance? If I duplicate the overridden collection (choosing either duplicate or duplicate linked), the duplicate isn't marked as an override in the outliner but a full copy. The process that seems to work is linking again, overriding again and setting each overridden rig to a new action. Is that the right way to do it?
Also what's the purpose of the empty that's created after each override?
2.79 (the last nightly build for it) is my go-to at the moment.
https://www.blender.org/download/previous-versions/
.79 is still usable for production, and you can keep both versions installed anyway.
(this absence of independent duplication support in proxies is because proxies are uniquely identified by the file path to their source libraries, so an asinine workaround did exist by creating a symbolic link to the source file so that one file would have two filenames. It goes without saying that that approach is easily breakable and doesn't scale up at all)
The only difference with the built-in proxy/override system that already refreshes everything when you load the .blend file is that you would have to press a button to trigger this operation. Sounds like a bargain to me.
I'm glad you have everything you need, I hope you make some great art with it.
To correct what I said, using the
bpy.app.handlers.load_postapp handler in a script would let you run a function anytime a file is opened, making this custom refresh (or anything else) process fully automatic.For references I'm trying to combine the two selected islands and the two next to them.
You could simply unwrap just half of the mesh though. Then mirror it when done.
Select both islands and press "Match Islands" button in UV sidebar
I still tried to download that addon though. Downloaded the zip to a folder, but couldn't find it in the install addon screen in Blender for some reason. But I guess that's a question for another day.
Thank you.
Basically, you create an edge profile and then select an edge to extrude the profile along to create trims.
I've personally went through the keymap manually and changed any selection event I needed to be a Press. A bit more tedious than a full-on edit/replace for sure
Seeing that this went unnoticed by the devs and whoever is currently in charge of overseeing UX is genuinely worrisome, as that shows that whoever is making these calls is certainly not a modeler. It's also a bit sad to see that quite a few contributors in the bug report just don't seem to get it. Oh well.
One way around that would be for the bug ticket to only be closed once a product or UX guy acknowledges the issue and creates a ticket for it ... but that's something they probably won't want to do anyway because that'd be admitting their own bad design
Anyways - If you ever need more ammo on this (footage showing the issue, and so on), count me in. I completely forgot about it myself because I fixed it in my keymap manually months ago, but this default sluggishness is something that new users shouldn't have to deal with.
EDIT, i have turned UV Sync selection on here in the shot to work with the single vertices. But the snapping works also with this method off and with whole UV patches.
I dont think is really about admitting errors, but general lack of people to work into it and / or bad priority queuing.
The open source nature is a democratic one, and sometimes the very nature of its system works against it, making immediate actions difficult to take place.
There're numerous things to be fixed in Blender, prioritizing it is not a task for mere mortals. A good example is the "Auto Smooth" option, debated on this thread. I really wish we had more active developers willing to take up on those little things that makes up "Modeling" in general and discuss them.
Blender3D is indeed a multi-tool software, but before it was a video editor, animator or compositor, it was and still is primarily a 3D modeling software. The only one that appears to be improving modeling tasks so far is Howard Trickey, I'm not counting Pablo Dobarro because he's mainly on Sculpting tools.
So yeah, I would say that it's not so much an issue related to the nature of open source development but rather a case of someone being assigned a task beyond ones skillset/expertise.
Overall this makes me a tad nervous because this highlights that whoever used to be in charge of modeling UX earlier on probably isn't involved anymore, and that's too bad.
Anyways ! At the very least it's just a setting to revert and not a broken feature
It works pretty easily in Cycles, but I'd like to render in Eeevee as it is sufficient faster for this project.
But yeah all that said bug reports will never be a good place to solve these things anyways since it's literally not a bug, just a bad default setting. But even if a big report is not a great place to bring up this kind of stuff it still brings some attention to it so that's good overall. It's always fascinating how there are always folks in these bug report threads just not grasping the high level issue though (beyond it being literally a bug or not). Really illustrates the "too many cooks in the kitchen" situation more often than not leading to lowest denominator or even straight up bad solutions/choices. Making the most basic object/component interaction in 2.8 feel sluggish really can't be justified imho
@thomasp : care to upload a problematic example for testing ?
I hadn't realised the last page wasn't selected and this from you dude. " the setting has been changed by whoever is in charge of the keymap .."
@MrNinjutsu : by that I meant that someone proactively changed that setting sometime between 2.79 and the 2.8 beta, leading to 2.8 feeling sluggish. Now on my end I've since fixed it in my own keymap which I then port over to new versions (2.8 Release, 2.81, and so on) so I cannot really tell if this setting is still broken (so to speak) by default now without investigating further by removing my preferences and redownloading the software. But as you pointed out it may very well be different between some of the provided presets anyways (Maya style, Max style ...).
To test it out : when in object or in component mode, do a mouse click selection. If the selection is confirmed (gets highlighted/turns yellow) when you press down, it's the super snappy 2.79 behavior - basically the program reacting instantly to your inputs. But if the selection is confirmed when you let go of the mouse button press, then this is indeed sluggish behavior and imho not acceptable. It may not be noticeable to new users starting out, but when going fast it definitely cause issues and is just not feeling responsive overall. It becomes especially noticeable when doing multiselections (and no, using marquee selections to avoid this scenario is not a "fix" for this issue
And as said : selection validation on clickdown is absolutely *not* incompatible with drag box selection. Try it on your desktop icons, you'll see
I don't see any issues so far changing everything to "press" and using tools that require "drag", I don't quite understand the design decision.