@musashidan I totally get that. But as you said, you removed the edge split modifier. Udjani used and kept it on to tweak the normals. And if one does that, they create custom normals, which then have to be exported from Blender and imported into any other software down the pipeline, otherwise the normals maps based on those break.
@musashidan I totally get that. But as you said, you removed the edge split modifier. Udjani used and kept it on to tweak the normals. And if one does that, they create custom normals, which then have to be exported from Blender and imported into any other software down the pipeline, otherwise the normals maps based on those break.
@f1r3w4rr10r The "Split Edge" modifier does not create custom normals, it literally does split edges, that's why you don't want to export it applied. If you treat the model with the bevel shader as your high-poly, you don't need the modifier and it has the benefits that you can add geometry just for baking, which you don't necessarily need on the low-poly, or attach other high-poly details.
@Prime8 Yeah you are right. Split edges should also cause split normals which in that case would not need to be exported specially. Seems that I have to look more into the bevel node. From what I've seen, it didn't give me results as good as the bevel modifier. Though I use the "Harden Normals" option in the bevel modifier a lot, which would in that case actually cause custom normals.
Somethings completely different: @pior I never use thumbnails in the Windows Explorer, but I just checked myself and the previews are not working for me either. I am using an installed version of Blender 2.82.
@Prime8 Yeah you are right. Split edges should also cause split normals which in that case would not need to be exported specially. Seems that I have to look more into the bevel node. From what I've seen, it didn't give me results as good as the bevel modifier. Though I use the "Harden Normals" option in the bevel modifier a lot, which would in that case actually cause custom normals.
...
You make it sound as if custom normals are something bad For the low-poly it doesn't matter at all if you bake from a mesh with custom normals or not.
Question to you all - does anyone know of a reliable way (as in : you tested it yourself) to get .blend files thumbnails to show a scene preview in windows files explorer ? I've definitely had that in the past around an early 2.7 version but I can't seem to get it to work now.
@Prime8 I assure you I am not trying to. Just to my knowledge, if you have custom normals in a mesh and you bake a normal map on top of those, that normal map will not be correct if used with averaged normals.
AlI am trying to say is, if custom normals are used, take care to also export them as such. Because not all formats support them or have that enabled by default.
Edit: Maybe a crucial bit to avoid misunderstandings: I mean custom normals on the bake target (low poly). Not on the source meshes.
@Surfa : no, this isn't the fix It gets brought up everywhere the question is asked, and I suppose that by some coincidence or in some rare occurrence it may have fixed the issue for people at some point, but that's definitely not the case on my end. I also don't see how registering a file extension (which I suppose simply means associating it to double click) would have any influence on thumbnails display ... but maybe it's supposed to trigger both, who knows.
@pior I tried that solution just now and it worked for me. But only really for those files where you can see a preview in the blender file explorer.
And it doesn't only register the file extension. There is a .dll for the previews in the application dir. Don't ask me how that works, I'm a Linux coder, no idea how that part of the windows API works.
I am not on my machine right now. But for some files Blender seems to be able to create a preview on it's own, on some not. For example files without a camera, it just uses the viewport view of when you saved. When there's a camera in the scene, I think it uses the view of the camera. If you have multiple scenes in a file and the scene you save in does not have a camera, it seems to break. This is just what I observed.
On that note, the manual also mentions that you have to create previews for some things, like collections, yourself, whereas it creates previews for others, like materials, on its own. I can see material previews in the material selections, but not in the Blender file explorer. And I have not found a way to generate previews for collections for example. The documentation just mentions that you have to create them manually, but does not explain how.
I somehow doubt of it being related to the presence of a camera in the scene though, as even without one the internal thumbnail preview gets generated perfectly fine based on the look of the viewport at the time of saving.
It does add some sort of a film gate though, which is interesting. But yeah as far as I am concerned still no windows thumbnails anywhere to be seen.
Also I should have mentioned indeed : my question is about .blend files containing a 3D scene with geometry - as opposed to, say, .blend files used as material libraries.
@pior The solution I posted worked for me when I couldn't see the thumbnails in the file explorer. Also I missed the part whereby you have tried that earlier (my bad).
Before I ran the command mine was not showing the blender logo (like yours) and was just showing a blank ICON as I didn't even have it registered to open blend files. I rarely use the windows file explorer so did not notice.
I will note that I did not have any versions of blender installed except 2.8.2 when I tried this solution. I wonder if your issue is the registry already had a entry for .blend file which is not setup for how you want it. If you open up regedit on your machine and search for .blend do you see a entry like this:
Where E357FCCD-A995-4576-B01F-234630154E96 is the ID for the Windows thumbnail provider. In this case there should be a registry Item which points to blender thumbnail handler as the ID. This can be found by looking in the registry for the CLSID folder for example for the current user:
Hello @Surfa ! Thank you so much for the thorough investigation and report.
The registry side of things is consistent with what I've read online earlier, and matches what I am getting from a fresh install on a separate machine combined with running blender -r. And on this test machine ... the Explorer thumbnail previews show up just fine for me once both of that is done This leads me to believe that -r does takes care of both the file association and the initial setup of thumbnail previews ... but it is not able to repair/override thumbnail previews not working properly. Bummer !
Note that on my previous screenshot the logo (as well as the registration of the double click open action) were initially set manually as I usually don't install Blender. But even after removing any trace of any installed version of Blender as well as removing any .blend-related registry key (hence going back to blank icons without double-click association) and reinstalling from scratch and running -r, I just can't seem to get the explorer thumbnails to show up on my work machine.
The only difference between the two machines is that the test machine is win10 while the work machine is win7. But I doubt that this is related, as file thumbnails previews predate both systems. So from there there I think there isn't much I can do unfortunately as even manually adding any seemingly missing registry entry doesn't seem to do anything. Oh well ! Thanks for the help though
Windows 7 should work as I believe they added the custom thumbnail handlers in Windows VISTA. One thing you could try is run the disk cleanup utility and delete all the thumbnails. It might be that it cached the default blender thumbnail. Although registering a new thumbnail handler should in theory mean that it does a refresh for those files but Windows doesn't always behave as you expect.
Edit: Adding one last thing. You could always see if the Shell Extension security is on. This is another registry value that can be written at:
Well ... I was about to leave it at that as don't have that security option enabled (all image thumbnails behave as expected), and the msdn doc goes way over my head ... but this actually led me on the right track. What if it was caused by a windows conflict or option ?
Turns out it was. There is a Folder View option called "Always show icons, never thumbnails" which when set to on, is overriden by image thumbnails extensions but not by other file types. (This option, when turned off, is what allows folder icons to display a little preview overlay of what's inside). Turns out that unlike for image files, the option needs to be disabled for .blend files previews to show up ...
Hello everybody. I am trying to split a simple mesh into a grid of roughly even sizes.
I have tried knife projecting, manual cutting, but not many options that automatically create the face cap, as the pieces will have rigid body applied.
Hardops seems to be the best option, but again, no real solution was found.
Hello everybody. I am trying to split a simple mesh into a grid of roughly even sizes.
I have tried knife projecting, manual cutting, but not many options that automatically create the face cap, as the pieces will have rigid body applied.
Hardops seems to be the best option, but again, no real solution was found.
Any support or tips would be very useful.
Thanks a lot
Can you show some screenshots for explanation? Bisect or Knife Project might work.
I think they mean cutting the surface of the object with a regular grid that also produces solid blocks on the inside of the mesh, as if you sculpted a wall of bricks into some arbitrary shape, the surface is smooth but it's still formed by full individual pieces on the inside.
There must be some add-on for this, there's one for pretty much everything...
Hi everyone! Just found out how lit Decimation in Planar mod was. How did we use to do that in other softwares I wonder? What would be the maya / max equivalent? I can pic example if needed. I find it so relevant especially on assets you want sharp (landscape, rocks etc)
I'm getting these artifacts in my object when trying to bake normal maps using the Bevel Edge shader. Anyone know the reason for this, or a guide somewhere explaining this? I think I could solve some of these shading errors in my lowpoly by modifying vertex normals, but I don't know how nice that behaves with the bevel shader, and in any case, the end result I'm looking for is to get a normal map bake...
Note that some (all?) of these errors already start showing up in the hp renders.
Looks like two different issue's to me, high poly needs that normal edit but the actual bake might be also having the issue in the thread below - but trying your file baked at 1k with edited normals with 'set normals from face' didn't reproduce the same results for me for the bake errors so you should be fine with simple normal fix.
Basically set to CPU, open shading language, use OSL shader via script node in material in place of the bevel node set sampling to what you want, Recommend you turn
sampling down to 1 under render properties, set tile size under
performance to the same size as texture resolution for faster bake.
Personally I using edited normal's on my high poly was fine, but on the low poly normal edits were giving me bake errors in the last project I tried with it.
@Justo looks as if the surfaces on the highpoly are not flat and the bevel shader is applying bevels onto teh edges crossing the surface. Can you share a viewport shading of the highpoly?
@Zeist thank you for the detailed response. I switched to using the OSL shader via script and set my render settings as said, but I didn't understand how to setup the edited normals you talked about. Should I just apply a "Weighted Normal" modifier, and set the Weighting Mode to "Face Area" without altering anything else? Doing this to my highpoly changed my bakes for sure, but not in a good way - it just came out with crazier errors.
Anyway, setting now my bevel samples to 1024 provides very similar results to the previous bakes - faster render times, but same errors.
Attaching bake scene with HP, LP and baking setup. Note that the scene has multiple bevel materials to account for different bevel widths, though I am aware there are already methods to change the width using a single material with a little shading nodework and UV manipulation...
@Justo Add a Weighted Normal modifier, check ''keep sharp'' and ''face influence''. Then select the faces that have shading issues and go to Mesh > Normals > Set Face Strenght > Strong. I think this is what Zeist ment by set normals from face.
I tested here and it bakes fine, tho i tested with a normal set up and not the OSL.
Preview is from marmoset, you still get banding cuz dithering
Hello everybody. I am trying to split a simple mesh into a grid of roughly even sizes.
I have tried knife projecting, manual cutting, but not many options that automatically create the face cap, as the pieces will have rigid body applied.
Hardops seems to be the best option, but again, no real solution was found.
Any support or tips would be very useful.
Thanks a lot
Can you show some screenshots for explanation? Bisect or Knife Project might work.
Knife project merely will cut a shape on the face of the mesh. I am trying to have this cut go through the entire model and create faces.
Imagine this mesh that actually has little separate cubes with all 6 side faces. I would like to do something like this on a much less simple shape without perfect straight lines.
The cell fracture addon comes very close, but not enough control over shapes.
@Justo Add a Weighted Normal modifier, check ''keep sharp'' and ''face influence''. Then select the faces that have shading issues and go to Mesh > Normals > Set Face Strenght > Strong. I think this is what Zeist ment by set normals from face.
I tested here and it bakes fine, tho i tested with a normal set up and not the OSL.
Perhaps I'm being silly over here, but if I replicate that I don't get good results. After adding the modifier, testing it with the OSL does not provide good results, and in that bakeScene.blend file, if I switch the Bevel002 material to use a Bevel node (16 samples), I get the following result:
Even if I save it as a 16bit TIFF and convert it to a 8bit png in PS, or I tweak the render settings to not use OSL or set the render samples to a higher number, I cannot reproduce your results. Did you change anything in the render settings? What exactly do you refer to as 'normal' setup?
@Justo that surfaces are not shaded completely flat on both the low and high poly with the same topology which seems to add up to the issue. Changing the topology can help, but there is still some banding. I would add sharp edges on the border, as on the other side, to make these complete flat.
@Justo By normal i meant just the bevel shader node without any custom stuff like the OSL.
I tested now with OSL and is working too, changed two things on render settings but they are not related to this problem, one was the green channel to Y+ so i could preview in eevee and also changed the ray distance to something higher, since i was getting some intersection.
Attached the scene here, you should only need to create a texture, set to non-color and hit bake. I added a triangulate modifier on the lowpoly so i could test it on marmoset too.
@Udjani Thanks for the testing. I suppose I must be doing something wrong then in the process of saving out the normal map, because applying it inside marmo still shows errors. In case they're due to dithering, again I tried saving them out as 16bit TIFF and then in PS saving them into 8bit PNG.
While doing this, I noticed that even when I save the texture as a TIFF (Color - RGB; Color Depth - 16; Compression - None / Deflate), when opening the file in PS, I notice the TIFF file is already in 8bit. Shouldn't an exported TIFF map saved at 16bit from Blender be read as 16bit in PS?
also changed the ray distance to something higher, since i was getting some intersection.
This also intrigues me. In other baking apps, if the lowpoly is the same as the highpoly, if I set the ray distance to 0 I am literally ensuring there will be no ray intersections (for example, baking this shape inside Substance apps). Does Blender need to offset rays as a necessity?
@Prime8 I don't think the bevel is the issue here, as demonstrated by Udjani. Adding a hard edge there would defeat the purpose of having a soft bevel modeled in too. If I did that, I would just remove the bevel and make a 90deg hard edge cut. But since this is a shape I want to be able to look up relatively close, the bevel is important and needs to stay
@Justo It doesn't remove the bevel because of the bevel shader smoothing the hard edges, it does add a bit of hardness at the transition area depending on the settings and bevel geometry though, that's a trade-off but it is still an valid option. Edit: fyi I used the standard bevel shader not OSL
@Justo To save it in 16bit you have to create a 32bit float image to bake.
About the ray distance, i also don't understand really how it works in blender, if i am getting too much problems with it i usually just make a cage.
I have a question to you now, about the OSL. Are you able to preview the bevel shader in your viewport? if yes, what's your cpu?, i have a ryzen 2700x and it almost freezes my pc and takes forever to render the preview. It's fast to bake tho.
Yeah sorry - OSL was supposed to be regarded as a recommendation rather then a necessity for this. I brought it up originally because I jumped the gun and mistook what I saw and in rushing the changes to the post I didn't reflect this well enough. It was supposed to state that it wasn't needed in this case but was recommended because I had always ended up randomly encountering issues with the standard normal bevel node.
OSL will kill performance in Cycles rendering if you have it at 1k
for bevel samples, for previewing either lower the bevel samples or probably better yet to just stick with the normal bevel and render on GPU but honestly recommend the swap to OSL at bake times imo.
With 'Set normals from face' that's just how it's appears in the search bar, under the 'Normals' menu it's just 'Set from faces' - it just skips using the modifier, no real reason to use this over the weighted normal modifier with what Udjani said before, just habit. Editing the mesh heavily after this usually means I have to set 'normals from face' again or 'reset vectors' entirely so the modifier is probably the better choice tbh.
@Udjani like Kirk said above, yeah OSL in Cycles freezes like blue hell. My CPU is a i7-4790k.
Creating a 32 bit float saves it as a 16 bit correctly as you said, and now I can finally see the normal map correctly inside Marmoset There is one problem though - I need to make it sRGB color space in Marmo to view it correctly, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not normally the standard settings being used nowadays? Certainly at work our normal maps are linear, and the neutral normal color is 128,128,255 - we don't deal over there with these washed-out-looking maps Is there not a way to push out normal maps in the linear color space out of Blender with this method? Switching the Color Space field to Linear in the texture node doesn't change this either.
Let me know if I'm messing up with any terminology though, I might very well be having a wrong misconception in here.
...- I need to make it sRGB color space in Marmo to view it correctly, and correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not normally the standard settings being used nowadays? Certainly at work our normal maps are linear, and the neutral normal color is 128,128,255 - we don't deal over there with these washed-out-looking maps Is there not a way to push out normal maps in the linear color space out of Blender with this method? Switching the Color Space field to Linear in the texture node doesn't change this either.
Maybe it is an issue of Marmoset that you need to set it to srgb? 8bit normal maps in linear space always look washed-out, that is the same in Blender and Marmoset. If I'm not mistaken images above 8bit are always in linear space.
Okay, I finally got it down...The problem was that I was not setting the image node's color space to Non-Color before baking. If I leave it at the default Linear, the map will come out wrong.
Thanks for the help guys. I noticed Udjani says to save it as a Copy, and Zeist as Save As Render. I tried it both, and no changes happened that I could perceive - both worked. Is there any occasion in which I should do one and not the other? I can also save it with both boxes checked.
The text that pops up when hovering over the boxes:
Save As Render: Apply render part of display transform when saving byte image. I have no idea what this means. Render part of display transform?
Copy: Create a new image file without modifying the current image in Blender. This sounds...like what I want? Does that mean that Save As Render actually modifies the current image in Blender?
@Justo I tried a lot of normal map baking related things today, not related to your problem. But I can definitely tell you from what I tried: Do *not* check the Save as Render checkbox when saving normal maps! If you do, that will bake color corrected values into the texture and not the normal data you expect. You should never check that, when you deal with Non-Color data.
An easy way to verify that is, if you have a normal map, save it out without Save as Render, then check the image in the image editor view. Click and hold on a neutral area, it should show 0.5 for the red and green channel. If you now repeat that with a texture saved with Save as Render, it will not show 0.5 anymore, meaning your normal map is not correct anymore.
Oh and as a side note, create normal maps as 32bit float in blender and save them in image formats that support at least 16bit color depth.
Quick question: if I have an octagonal shape and I want to mirror a design on it to every face, is there a quick way to do it?
Usual mirror happens on XYZ axis, so I can get to 4 faces quite easily.
My alternative would be to duplicate the face and replace it manually.
EDIT:
actually, maybe instancing is the faster way, just copy the octagon column as a mesh, and use parent-child instancing per face, make the result "real", and bang we have a shape to boolean with.
ok perhaps Array + Curve modifer is the better approach: separate an edge loop around the octagon and convert to curve, then use these 2 modifiers on my design, and get the final shape for boolean.
Still, because Curve modifier bend the mesh around target curve (instead of rotating instances to face curve), there are distortion I don't want. But it's not a big deal in this case.
For now, I don't see a better option to instance along a curve.
Anyone here that has worked extensively with exporting cameras from Blender to other apps? I'm particularly interested in Keyshot and UE4. I was curious if it was possible to arrange a scene in Blender (meshes posed and a camera shot created) and be able to export it somewhere else to be able to render the exact same picture in another engine. This shot in particular is in the portrait format and is very reliant on distorting and exaggerating perspective, so the smallest of differences in its placement would be very evident.
Yesterday I tried exporting FBXs and other formats that supported cameras to Keyshot, but I couldn't get Keyshot to render the exact same picture I had framed in Blender. I haven't tried with UE4 yet, though I suspect the result will be similar. Has anyone dealt with similar needs before, and what did you do about it?
Some software consider the camera FOV value differently, horizontal or vertical. Toolbag for example uses vertical FOV and Blender uses horizontal by default (you can change it, it's the Sensor Fit setting in the camera properties).
If you can get the camera position and rotation imported into the other software (doesn't need to be a camera node, it can be any node that you can align the engine camera to), then all it takes is to adjust the FOV to be the same in both alignment and value.
Hey, I need help with UV Editor, is it possible to move this shell so upper left vert would be exactly at upper left corner of uv space (0,1)? And if it is possible to scale/rotate around any chosen point other than default pivot options(like corner of uv space for example)? I thought 2d cursor would help me but it is not snapping to anything. And last question, is there any grid for uv editor? This may be basic but I just switched from Maya to blender and as far as I am super happy with Blender modeling, shading, rendering etc. But UV's are lacking so much so far. But maybe you will help me and I will love uv editing as well
@Fletcher I've heard that complaint before, you should check out textools addon. You can set specific coordinates of the 2D cursor in the N panel. Also if you use the command search function you get the snap cursor command which you can use to snap cursor to selected vertex.
Its a bit of a workaround but you can check the coordinate of the vertex which you want on the corner, say the vert has coord 0.6 and 0.2 and you want to move it so that vertex has 0 and 0 and the rest moves along. You just select all verts and subtract the first coordinate from the median coordinate and same for the second.
Also you can try using this setting, it will clamp the verts to the UV bounds
Thanks! Constrain to image bounds is doing the trick! But I did some more digging and found neat addon just for aligning uv's perfectly - BlenderArtists
Replies
If you treat the model with the bevel shader as your high-poly, you don't need the modifier and it has the benefits that you can add geometry just for baking, which you don't necessarily need on the low-poly, or attach other high-poly details.
For the low-poly it doesn't matter at all if you bake from a mesh with custom normals or not.
Seems like the installer doesn't register the application properly. This is the fix
https://blenderartists.org/t/blend-files-not-using-preview-thumbnails-in-windows-explorer/643180/7
Edit: Just a quick point you don't need to run it as admin if you only want to register it for yourself.
AlI am trying to say is, if custom normals are used, take care to also export them as such. Because not all formats support them or have that enabled by default.
Edit: Maybe a crucial bit to avoid misunderstandings: I mean custom normals on the bake target (low poly). Not on the source meshes.
Have you tried it yourself ?
What do you mean ? The only relevant type of file here is .blend ... Would you mind posting a screenshot ?
I somehow doubt of it being related to the presence of a camera in the scene though, as even without one the internal thumbnail preview gets generated perfectly fine based on the look of the viewport at the time of saving.
It does add some sort of a film gate though, which is interesting. But yeah as far as I am concerned still no windows thumbnails anywhere to be seen.
Also I should have mentioned indeed : my question is about .blend files containing a 3D scene with geometry - as opposed to, say, .blend files used as material libraries.
The solution I posted worked for me when I couldn't see the thumbnails in the file explorer. Also I missed the part whereby you have tried that earlier (my bad).
Before I ran the command mine was not showing the blender logo (like yours) and was just showing a blank ICON as I didn't even have it registered to open blend files. I rarely use the windows file explorer so did not notice.
I will note that I did not have any versions of blender installed except 2.8.2 when I tried this solution. I wonder if your issue is the registry already had a entry for .blend file which is not setup for how you want it. If you open up regedit on your machine and search for .blend do you see a entry like this:
Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.blend\ShellEx\{e357fccd-a995-4576-b01f-234630154e96}
or the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT for all users:
Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.blend\ShellEx\{e357fccd-a995-4576-b01f-234630154e96}
Where E357FCCD-A995-4576-B01F-234630154E96 is the ID for the Windows thumbnail provider. In this case there should be a registry Item which points to blender thumbnail handler as the ID. This can be found by looking in the registry for the CLSID folder for example for the current user:
Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID\
In there they should be a Blender Thumbnail Handler defined under one of these IDs. Mine is shown in the above screenshot.
The registry side of things is consistent with what I've read online earlier, and matches what I am getting from a fresh install on a separate machine combined with running blender -r. And on this test machine ... the Explorer thumbnail previews show up just fine for me once both of that is done
This leads me to believe that -r does takes care of both the file association and the initial setup of thumbnail previews ... but it is not able to repair/override thumbnail previews not working properly. Bummer !
Note that on my previous screenshot the logo (as well as the registration of the double click open action) were initially set manually as I usually don't install Blender. But even after removing any trace of any installed version of Blender as well as removing any .blend-related registry key (hence going back to blank icons without double-click association) and reinstalling from scratch and running -r, I just can't seem to get the explorer thumbnails to show up on my work machine.
The only difference between the two machines is that the test machine is win10 while the work machine is win7. But I doubt that this is related, as file thumbnails previews predate both systems. So from there there I think there isn't much I can do unfortunately as even manually adding any seemingly missing registry entry doesn't seem to do anything. Oh well ! Thanks for the help though
Edit: Adding one last thing. You could always see if the Shell Extension security is on. This is another registry value that can be written at:
Also the MSDN article for registering shell extensions is very good and might help:
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/shell/reg-shell-exts
Well ... I was about to leave it at that as don't have that security option enabled (all image thumbnails behave as expected), and the msdn doc goes way over my head ... but this actually led me on the right track. What if it was caused by a windows conflict or option ?
Turns out it was. There is a Folder View option called "Always show icons, never thumbnails" which when set to on, is overriden by image thumbnails extensions but not by other file types. (This option, when turned off, is what allows folder icons to display a little preview overlay of what's inside). Turns out that unlike for image files, the option needs to be disabled for .blend files previews to show up ...
So that about wraps it up ! Thanks
But good to know, thx!
I am trying to split a simple mesh into a grid of roughly even sizes.
Bisect or Knife Project might work.
There must be some add-on for this, there's one for pretty much everything...
Note that some (all?) of these errors already start showing up in the hp renders.
Anyway, setting now my bevel samples to 1024 provides very similar results to the previous bakes - faster render times, but same errors.
@Prime8 The surface is planar
Attaching bake scene with HP, LP and baking setup. Note that the scene has multiple bevel materials to account for different bevel widths, though I am aware there are already methods to change the width using a single material with a little shading nodework and UV manipulation...
I tested here and it bakes fine, tho i tested with a normal set up and not the OSL.
Preview is from marmoset, you still get banding cuz dithering
Knife project merely will cut a shape on the face of the mesh. I am trying to have this cut go through the entire model and create faces.
Imagine this mesh that actually has little separate cubes with all 6 side faces.
I would like to do something like this on a much less simple shape without perfect straight lines.
The cell fracture addon comes very close, but not enough control over shapes.
Even if I save it as a 16bit TIFF and convert it to a 8bit png in PS, or I tweak the render settings to not use OSL or set the render samples to a higher number, I cannot reproduce your results. Did you change anything in the render settings? What exactly do you refer to as 'normal' setup?
I would add sharp edges on the border, as on the other side, to make these complete flat.
I tested now with OSL and is working too, changed two things on render settings but they are not related to this problem, one was the green channel to Y+ so i could preview in eevee and also changed the ray distance to something higher, since i was getting some intersection.
Attached the scene here, you should only need to create a texture, set to non-color and hit bake. I added a triangulate modifier on the lowpoly so i could test it on marmoset too.
Preview from eevee
Thanks for the testing. I suppose I must be doing something wrong then in the process of saving out the normal map, because applying it inside marmo still shows errors. In case they're due to dithering, again I tried saving them out as 16bit TIFF and then in PS saving them into 8bit PNG.
While doing this, I noticed that even when I save the texture as a TIFF (Color - RGB; Color Depth - 16; Compression - None / Deflate), when opening the file in PS, I notice the TIFF file is already in 8bit. Shouldn't an exported TIFF map saved at 16bit from Blender be read as 16bit in PS?
@Prime8 I don't think the bevel is the issue here, as demonstrated by Udjani. Adding a hard edge there would defeat the purpose of having a soft bevel modeled in too. If I did that, I would just remove the bevel and make a 90deg hard edge cut. But since this is a shape I want to be able to look up relatively close, the bevel is important and needs to stay
Edit: fyi I used the standard bevel shader not OSL
About the ray distance, i also don't understand really how it works in blender, if i am getting too much problems with it i usually just make a cage.
I have a question to you now, about the OSL. Are you able to preview the bevel shader in your viewport? if yes, what's your cpu?, i have a ryzen 2700x and it almost freezes my pc and takes forever to render the preview. It's fast to bake tho.
like Kirk said above, yeah OSL in Cycles freezes like blue hell. My CPU is a i7-4790k.
Creating a 32 bit float saves it as a 16 bit correctly as you said, and now I can finally see the normal map correctly inside Marmoset
Let me know if I'm messing up with any terminology though, I might very well be having a wrong misconception in here.
Maybe is the file format?
Thanks for the help guys. I noticed Udjani says to save it as a Copy, and Zeist as Save As Render. I tried it both, and no changes happened that I could perceive - both worked. Is there any occasion in which I should do one and not the other? I can also save it with both boxes checked.
The text that pops up when hovering over the boxes:
Save As Render: Apply render part of display transform when saving byte image.
I have no idea what this means. Render part of display transform?
Copy: Create a new image file without modifying the current image in Blender.
This sounds...like what I want? Does that mean that Save As Render actually modifies the current image in Blender?
@Prime8
This is incorrect. 8bit normal maps can perfectly look ok using the average 128,128,255 color as the base normal map color
Example in 3 Blender, Marmoset and Krita, looks washed out to me at least.
Quick question: if I have an octagonal shape and I want to mirror a design on it to every face, is there a quick way to do it?
Usual mirror happens on XYZ axis, so I can get to 4 faces quite easily.
My alternative would be to duplicate the face and replace it manually.
EDIT:
actually, maybe instancing is the faster way, just copy the octagon column as a mesh, and use parent-child instancing per face, make the result "real", and bang we have a shape to boolean with.
the drawback is as described in doc, I have to figure out the instanced objects rotation manually...
EDIT2:
ok perhaps Array + Curve modifer is the better approach: separate an edge loop around the octagon and convert to curve, then use these 2 modifiers on my design, and get the final shape for boolean.
Still, because Curve modifier bend the mesh around target curve (instead of rotating instances to face curve), there are distortion I don't want. But it's not a big deal in this case.
For now, I don't see a better option to instance along a curve.
Did you try Array with an offset object?
Yesterday I tried exporting FBXs and other formats that supported cameras to Keyshot, but I couldn't get Keyshot to render the exact same picture I had framed in Blender. I haven't tried with UE4 yet, though I suspect the result will be similar. Has anyone dealt with similar needs before, and what did you do about it?
You can set specific coordinates of the 2D cursor in the N panel. Also if you use the command search function you get the snap cursor command which you can use to snap cursor to selected vertex.
Its a bit of a workaround but you can check the coordinate of the vertex which you want on the corner, say the vert has coord 0.6 and 0.2 and you want to move it so that vertex has 0 and 0 and the rest moves along. You just select all verts and subtract the first coordinate from the median coordinate and same for the second.
Also you can try using this setting, it will clamp the verts to the UV bounds