Anyone has any issues with the new 2.90 tool search? I can't find some functions that I used to access via a search on previous versions, for example the tessellate addon, or some rigid body functions.
Hey guys! So I am making a small model in Blender to learn the software and am up to unwrapping the object. I come from 3DS Max when I simply use the TexTools function "Assign smoothing groups to UV shells" and it sets up the model for baking but I can't do that in Blender. What is the best way of achieving this? Do I just have to make the entire object "Shade Smooth" and then manually select the UV seams and "Mark Sharp"? Is there a quicker way?
Also what export settings should I have applied? I apply a Triangulate modifier on the object and turn on "Tangent Space" in the export settings but is there anything else I should know about before baking in Marmoset Toolbag? Any help would be very much appreciated!
If it's an add-on, check that it is still enabled after the upgrade. Other than that, the command could have been renamed.
I can still use the addon, the GUI in the menus is there, just no commands for any of the actions. Which perhaps means that addon creators will have to update for 2.90?
About a year or so ago the early iteration of the improved sculpt features was released in the form of the Pablo Dobarro "sculpt branch". It had new sculpt options, cursor settings, sculpt mode mesh filters, voxel remesh, and so on :
Most of these features are now part of the official releases. However these builds also had experimental support for polypaint from within Sculpt mode, using an alternate way of handling/storing vertex colors (and it also came with two operators to convert vertex color data back and forth between the two structures). Has this ever made its way to a recent release (2.83+ or 2.9) ? More specifically to any release with the new shift-R grid preview for remesh, or even better, to a release with the recent Multires Unsubdivide ?
It is said to be part of the 2.9 codebase but I cannot seem to find a build with it :
Sometimes i can't see an object's UVs in the UV Editor when i enter Edit Mode. When this happens, I also cannot see the subobject-related toggle icons, like UV Sync Selection, vertices, edges, etc... This is because the mesh has no UVs, yes? Or is there any other reason why Blender would do this?
Following-up on the above : turns out that it was there the whole time in 2.9 and 2.91 experimental builds, just hidden as a "developper feature" enabled in the preferences as it was pointed out to me in the Blenderartists thread. Once enabled it shows up as expected, along with the new data type. Also seems to require a flush of user preferences for the paint brush to operate.
@Justo That sounds to me like the sync setting for UVs. In the top left of the UV editor, there should be a button with two arrows. With it you can toggle between two modes:
- always show all UVs and sync the selection between UV editor and 3D viewport
- only show UVs of geo that is selected in the 3D viewport and allow separate selection of items in the UV editor
@Justo That sounds to me like the sync setting for UVs. In the top left of the UV editor, there should be a button with two arrows. With it you can toggle between two modes:
- always show all UVs and sync the selection between UV editor and 3D viewport
- only show UVs of geo that is selected in the 3D viewport and allow separate selection of items in the UV editor
I know this, yeah. What I wanted to know is why is it that sometimes I don't see this button, nor any other ones related to subobject modes in the UV Editor, when I'm in Edit Mode with a mesh. I assume this is Blender trying to tell the user the mesh has no UVs, but maybe it was something else. Exporting these meshes into other DCC apps certainly show the meshes don't have UVs, so yeah, I suppose this is the only reason why Blender would do this.
To me this would be completely new that parts of the UI disappear, just because the model has no UVs. I mean normally you also just unwrap for the first time and don't have to manually create a UV layer.
@f1r3w4rr10r, @Justo : this is 100% the case and it's been like that since forever. If you go to edit mode on a mesh with no UVs, the UV window will not have these controls. Yet as soon as you create UV data, even from scratch, the controls will show up.
UVs are just like Vertex Groups and Vertex Color data - these channels can be created, renamed, and deleted.
So, it's been more than a year since 2.8 and I personally still find the new Collections to be very annoying and a waste of time.
It's a constant juggle between using the interface of the M hotkey (to move objects in and out of collections), having to actually go dig inside the outliner and constantly having to collapse/expand collections to get a clean view of the whole thing just to be able to click the relevant eye icons to hide and unhide things ; and then also having to keep an eye on the little dots from the Collection Grid addon in the upper right corner of the screen (extremely useful addon/feature that is, but still a band-aid).
Besides the "Collection Manager" addon (which attempts to replaces the M interface by a more complete one, but unfortunately way too complicated and busy), is there any addon out there that simply does ... this ?
Basically a single simple popup to hide/unhide collections and renaming them. This along with the regular M hotkey to move things in and out is all one would really need 99% of the time ...
Also ... maybe there is some sort of way to force Alphabetical ordering of collection ? In the sense of, making sure that if two collection are present ("Anna" and "Bernard"), then they are guaranteed to be assigned slot 01 and 02 respectively. Because there are few things more annoying than searching for an item in a list that is not alphabetically ordered ...
[edit] Ha, screw this, this is a deeply rooted UX mess anyways. Manually naming collections #1#2#3#4 as "01" "02" "03" "04" and then handling the display of the collections with Collection Grid seems to be the only logical, consistent way of dealing with this in a way that doesn't waste user time.
I was looking to open through a script a separate window that would have a UV editor, from no matter the workspace I'm currently in. From here, I was able to make a script that does it: # Call user prefs window
bpy.ops.screen.userpref_show("INVOKE_DEFAULT")
# Change area type
area = bpy.context.window_manager.windows[-1].screen.areas[0]
area.type = "TEXT_EDITOR"
bpy.context.area.ui_type = 'UV'
However, it uses the user prefs window, so if I want to open it while I have my UV Editor window open, this one will be replaced. More importantly, I also have no way of modifying the new window's size, which is something I would like to do.
I was looking to open through a script a separate window that would have a UV editor, from no matter the workspace I'm currently in. From here, I was able to make a script that does it:
# Call user prefs window
bpy.ops.screen.userpref_show("INVOKE_DEFAULT")
# Change area type
area = bpy.context.window_manager.windows[-1].screen.areas[0]
area.type = "TEXT_EDITOR"
bpy.context.area.ui_type = 'UV'
However, it uses the user prefs window, so if I want to open it while I have my UV Editor window open, this one will be replaced. More importantly, I also have no way of modifying the new window's size, which is something I would like to do.
I threw something together that works but has its own inconveniences.
import bpy
# Define your desired workspace here
UV_WORKSPACE_ID = "UV Editing"
bpy.ops.wm.window_new_main()
bpy.context.window_manager.windows[-1].workspace = bpy.data.workspaces[UV_WORKSPACE_ID]
<br>
This will open a new main window and change it to the specified workspace. It's resizeable, not maximized, but here's the catch: Blender refuses to change the workspace of the new window, changing the one of the window that ran the script instead.
I thought it had something to do with the script not waiting the operator to finish before changing the workspace so I wrote a lengthy workaround to ensure it only changed the workspace after the new window operator was done, only to see it keep changing the window that ran the script anyway.
That's when I realized it didn't matter the windows[ID] I used the script always changed the active window, which is weird since if you do a bpy.context.window_manager.windows[-1].workspace.name in the console it'll list the correct workspace for window you want to target (the last one created). This might be a bug or something.
Regarding things like efficiently accessing the UV editor window, or similar (like what you are attempting here with this new window and workspaces) : I've been trying to find an elegant way to do that myself and came to the conclusion that the best is to play along with the Blender limtations (that is to say : embracing the split viewport paradigm), while at the same time *not* playing along with some of the pre-made UX/UI elements, which are just a bunch of custom menus and shortcuts to python commands anyways.
The switcher letting one change a viewport from one type to another (3D View, Dopesheet, UV editor, Image editor ...) is one of those things that got worse with 2.8 even if the change obviously came from a good intention. It's just not as well organized as before, and I am certain that everybody is having a harder time than before switching things quickly because the order and layout is just slower to browse and sort through (organizing things by themes "makes sense" for sure, but in practice it makes things slower and more frustrating to reach).
So instead of using that, one can just run the commands directly from a custom popup (here built using Pie Menu Editor). It makes the switching of modes extremely fast and efficient. I'd recommend everyone to try it really.
With that approach you only ever need two sub viewports : the main 3d view, and one multi-purpose area that you switch at will. This is obviously not an answer to your specific issue but it might be a good solution to your higher-level problem.
Yah, you're on the right track about my line of thought Pior. To me, the problem isn't the arguably longer-than-needed switching of spaces to do UVs or any different setup (I think switching workspaces is quite fine actually). The real gripe comes with all the wasted space, and the uncomfortable sense I get of feeling claustophobic in a divided viewport.
Diving the viewport in half for the UV Editor is too much - horizontal or vertical, there's so much wasted space at the sides or up/down. Then the model is left in a very tiny space, and often I feel I am doing a lot more clicks to navigate around the tiny viewport to look at the things i want to. Thus, I want a separate window.
At work I use Maya, and managing windows there is a breeze. Perhaps if I was switching full time to Blender I would try to mold myself more to it, but at the current time I refuse to, given that I know I will keep working in Maya for the near future, and I will always have in the back of my mind that voice saying 'this is so silly'. I'm all for adopting other philosophies and being flexible, but I suppose I like pushing the limits of what's possible, and how much I can mold the programs to the way I, the user, wants to work
I'm launching a pack of organic patterns directed towards 3D artists. I'd really appreciate if you guys could give this a look. There's an example .blend scene and you can get the substance nodes I made to create these https://gumroad.com/l/oTTGq
Guys, what's your preferred method of turning UV seam edges to sharp for baking? I found this addon that turns UV border edges to Sharp, then applies an EdgeSplit modifier to those. The problem with this is that it doesn't clean the mesh first, so if I had some sharp edges set from before, these will remain after the operation. I can of course automate this, (there are also other scripts out there that do this), but I thought it'd be worthwhile to drop a comment here and ask for your personal way of doing things.
@Justo Textools has a tool to set mesh smoothing by UV islands "UV Smoothing" as well as countless other tools I rely on so I have always just used that
@Justo no addon or edgesplit needed - actually I keep things very simple. I just place seams (not sharp). When im done with unwrapping and layout - I just select all objects and do uv>seams from islands> mark sharp (uv editor) - just make sure to turn on autosmooth at 179° or so. To redo the sharp edges it's easy enough to just select all edges, clear sharp and then rerun seams from islands again.
Yeah, as said on my end I've decided to just always name them according to their internal number (hence forcing proper alphabetical order everywhere) ; and also using the RN addon for the dots (same functionality as the Collection Manager widget, just better looking imho )
I've had bad experience with this addon in the past so I'd like to find another, more reliable way of doing just that (doesn't need to be tweakable after the fact). Thanks !
I've had bad experience with this addon in the past so I'd like to find another, more reliable way of doing just that (doesn't need to be tweakable after the fact). Thanks !
The fastest way I can think of is:
1. Add a curve, go into edit mode, delete it. 2. Set an Extrude distance in the Geometry panel. 3. Select draw tool, set Projection Depth to Surface and draw your path. 4. Tilt it to better fit the underlying geometry.
But it can look stinky if you don't fiddle with settings to configure the stroke as it'll catch any trembling of hand, and the auto generated planes may not stick well to the underlying geometry. Poly type is precise but beaks into too many planes, bezier is smoother but doesn't work very well on highly curved surfaces. Doing Draw in Poly > Bezier Conversion > Decimate has a higher fidelity but adds steps. This is more like the (vanilla) poor man's alternative to that addon.
Hey @birb , that's actually very cool ! I tend to like raw polygons most of the time, but here the Decimate and Twist tools make the spline approach very much worth it. And combined with the Draw tool it's all quite fluid really. Thanks !
@Justo : some interesting things in there for sure, but not quite what I am after. Thanks though !
Any idea why I am getting a seam here in the gold section? I am using tri-planar projection in Painter and I hardened that edge in Blender. The UV is a perfect even strip also. Is there a setting in blender that I am forgetting to apply before export?
It doesn't show up in the immediate bake in Toolbag: Any help would be very much appreciated.
@guitarguy00 Did you bake and export any normals in Blender? If yes check the Y direction.
Hey there! No, I baked it out in Marmoset. I triangulated the Low Poly meshes on export, selected "Tangent Space" and exported. Smoothing set to "Normals Only". Am I missing something? Could the Autosmooth settings be wrong?
I have taken the Mesh into 3DS and applied Smoothing Groups to UVs via Textools and I can see some shading changes in that area.
"I hardened that edge" Why would you put a hard edge (the harshest, most abrupt change of shading possible) in the middle of a perfectly smooth surface ? You're basically asking for a low res texture to compensate for an infinitely sharp shading discontinuity. There is zero reason to do that.
"... and applied Smoothing Groups to UVs" Just because there are tools to do that, doesn't mean that you should.
"I hardened that edge" Why would you put a hard edge (the harshest, most abrupt change of shading possible) in the middle of a perfectly smooth surface ? You're basically asking for a low res texture to compensate for an infinitely sharp shading discontinuity. There is zero reason to do that.
"... and applied Smoothing Groups to UVs" Just because there are tools to do that, doesn't mean that you should.
I hardened that edge because that is where the uv seam is. Should i only harden(make sharp) edges that are only above 70degree angles?
"I hardened that edge because that is where the uv seam is"
There is absolutely zero reason to do that. You misunderstood why UVs need to be split at hard edges (to allow for texture padding in places of infinite change of normal directions = hard edges). The other way around (automatically putting hard edges at all the UV borders with no need for them) makes zero sense - never did, and never will be, despite it being a widespread practice Because Youtube Tutorials.
Just think about it : why would you add an infinite amount of sharpness in the middle of places that are supposed to be smooth ?
"Should i only harden(make sharp) edges that are only above 70degree angles?" You place them where you need them for what they do. Could be any angle - every case is different.
@pior makes a lot of sense here, not just that the sharpness isn't always necessary at UV seams but each sharp edge will double the geometry in game engine even if you just mark the edges as sharp (without using edgesplit modifier) as that's just how things are rendered in engines. So suggesting to mark all the UV seams as sharp is a really bad idea for performance reasons too
Any UV seam would double vertexes too, prevent tri-stripping, not only sharp edges. So performances wise there is no difference. Just not necessary to always make hard edge where UV seams are for nm baking
@gnoop I stand corrected, just tested that out. UVs and sharp edges both have the same impact on the geo count. I previously thought that UVs are stored separately from regular geo and this wouldn't have an impact on actual rendered geo count but I was wrong. Thanks!
Replies
I can't find some functions that I used to access via a search on previous versions, for example the tessellate addon, or some rigid body functions.
Also what export settings should I have applied? I apply a Triangulate modifier on the object and turn on "Tangent Space" in the export settings but is there anything else I should know about before baking in Marmoset Toolbag? Any help would be very much appreciated!
About a year or so ago the early iteration of the improved sculpt features was released in the form of the Pablo Dobarro "sculpt branch". It had new sculpt options, cursor settings, sculpt mode mesh filters, voxel remesh, and so on :
https://blender.community/c/graphicall/3cbbbc/
https://blender.community/c/graphicall/dcbbbc/
Most of these features are now part of the official releases. However these builds also had experimental support for polypaint from within Sculpt mode, using an alternate way of handling/storing vertex colors (and it also came with two operators to convert vertex color data back and forth between the two structures). Has this ever made its way to a recent release (2.83+ or 2.9) ? More specifically to any release with the new shift-R grid preview for remesh, or even better, to a release with the recent Multires Unsubdivide ?
It is said to be part of the 2.9 codebase but I cannot seem to find a build with it :
TLDR : is there a recent build out there with the alternate sculpt paint brush and conversion operators ?
[edit] : solved, see below.
UVs are just like Vertex Groups and Vertex Color data - these channels can be created, renamed, and deleted.
It's a constant juggle between using the interface of the M hotkey (to move objects in and out of collections), having to actually go dig inside the outliner and constantly having to collapse/expand collections to get a clean view of the whole thing just to be able to click the relevant eye icons to hide and unhide things ; and then also having to keep an eye on the little dots from the Collection Grid addon in the upper right corner of the screen (extremely useful addon/feature that is, but still a band-aid).
Besides the "Collection Manager" addon (which attempts to replaces the M interface by a more complete one, but unfortunately way too complicated and busy), is there any addon out there that simply does ... this ?
Basically a single simple popup to hide/unhide collections and renaming them. This along with the regular M hotkey to move things in and out is all one would really need 99% of the time ...
Also ... maybe there is some sort of way to force Alphabetical ordering of collection ? In the sense of, making sure that if two collection are present ("Anna" and "Bernard"), then they are guaranteed to be assigned slot 01 and 02 respectively. Because there are few things more annoying than searching for an item in a list that is not alphabetically ordered ...
[edit] Ha, screw this, this is a deeply rooted UX mess anyways. Manually naming collections #1 #2 #3 #4 as "01" "02" "03" "04" and then handling the display of the collections with Collection Grid seems to be the only logical, consistent way of dealing with this in a way that doesn't waste user time.
# Call user prefs window bpy.ops.screen.userpref_show("INVOKE_DEFAULT") # Change area type area = bpy.context.window_manager.windows[-1].screen.areas[0] area.type = "TEXT_EDITOR" bpy.context.area.ui_type = 'UV'However, it uses the user prefs window, so if I want to open it while I have my UV Editor window open, this one will be replaced. More importantly, I also have no way of modifying the new window's size, which is something I would like to do.The first link I posted also proposes another method (which lets you resize the window just as I want) , but this is from an old version. The attribute 'display_mode' from RenderSettings no longer exists in my version of Blender. Is there another attribute I can use instead, or do you know another method of doing this?
I threw something together that works but has its own inconveniences.
This will open a new main window and change it to the specified workspace. It's resizeable, not maximized, but here's the catch: Blender refuses to change the workspace of the new window, changing the one of the window that ran the script instead.
I thought it had something to do with the script not waiting the operator to finish before changing the workspace so I wrote a lengthy workaround to ensure it only changed the workspace after the new window operator was done, only to see it keep changing the window that ran the script anyway.
That's when I realized it didn't matter the windows[ID] I used the script always changed the active window, which is weird since if you do a bpy.context.window_manager.windows[-1].workspace.name in the console it'll list the correct workspace for window you want to target (the last one created). This might be a bug or something.
The switcher letting one change a viewport from one type to another (3D View, Dopesheet, UV editor, Image editor ...) is one of those things that got worse with 2.8 even if the change obviously came from a good intention. It's just not as well organized as before, and I am certain that everybody is having a harder time than before switching things quickly because the order and layout is just slower to browse and sort through (organizing things by themes "makes sense" for sure, but in practice it makes things slower and more frustrating to reach).
So instead of using that, one can just run the commands directly from a custom popup (here built using Pie Menu Editor). It makes the switching of modes extremely fast and efficient. I'd recommend everyone to try it really.
https://imgur.com/a/gE27N1i
With that approach you only ever need two sub viewports : the main 3d view, and one multi-purpose area that you switch at will. This is obviously not an answer to your specific issue but it might be a good solution to your higher-level problem.
Diving the viewport in half for the UV Editor is too much - horizontal or vertical, there's so much wasted space at the sides or up/down. Then the model is left in a very tiny space, and often I feel I am doing a lot more clicks to navigate around the tiny viewport to look at the things i want to. Thus, I want a separate window.
At work I use Maya, and managing windows there is a breeze. Perhaps if I was switching full time to Blender I would try to mold myself more to it, but at the current time I refuse to, given that I know I will keep working in Maya for the near future, and I will always have in the back of my mind that voice saying 'this is so silly'. I'm all for adopting other philosophies and being flexible, but I suppose I like pushing the limits of what's possible, and how much I can mold the programs to the way I, the user, wants to work
Guys, what's your preferred method of turning UV seam edges to sharp for baking? I found this addon that turns UV border edges to Sharp, then applies an EdgeSplit modifier to those. The problem with this is that it doesn't clean the mesh first, so if I had some sharp edges set from before, these will remain after the operation. I can of course automate this, (there are also other scripts out there that do this), but I thought it'd be worthwhile to drop a comment here and ask for your personal way of doing things.
- - - - -
Another question : at this time, what is the best/most efficient way to quickly create strips of polygons on a surface ? Similarly to what Retopoflow does here :
https://s3.amazonaws.com/markets-rails/uploads/1533048649070-rf-2.0_polystrips.gif
I've had bad experience with this addon in the past so I'd like to find another, more reliable way of doing just that (doesn't need to be tweakable after the fact). Thanks !
1. Add a curve, go into edit mode, delete it.
2. Set an Extrude distance in the Geometry panel.
3. Select draw tool, set Projection Depth to Surface and draw your path.
4. Tilt it to better fit the underlying geometry.
But it can look stinky if you don't fiddle with settings to configure the stroke as it'll catch any trembling of hand, and the auto generated planes may not stick well to the underlying geometry. Poly type is precise but beaks into too many planes, bezier is smoother but doesn't work very well on highly curved surfaces. Doing Draw in Poly > Bezier Conversion > Decimate has a higher fidelity but adds steps. This is more like the (vanilla) poor man's alternative to that addon.
@Justo : some interesting things in there for sure, but not quite what I am after. Thanks though !
It doesn't show up in the immediate bake in Toolbag:
Any help would be very much appreciated.
I have taken the Mesh into 3DS and applied Smoothing Groups to UVs via Textools and I can see some shading changes in that area.
Why would you put a hard edge (the harshest, most abrupt change of shading possible) in the middle of a perfectly smooth surface ? You're basically asking for a low res texture to compensate for an infinitely sharp shading discontinuity. There is zero reason to do that.
"... and applied Smoothing Groups to UVs"
Just because there are tools to do that, doesn't mean that you should.
There is absolutely zero reason to do that. You misunderstood why UVs need to be split at hard edges (to allow for texture padding in places of infinite change of normal directions = hard edges). The other way around (automatically putting hard edges at all the UV borders with no need for them) makes zero sense - never did, and never will be, despite it being a widespread practice Because Youtube Tutorials.
Just think about it : why would you add an infinite amount of sharpness in the middle of places that are supposed to be smooth ?
"Should i only harden(make sharp) edges that are only above 70degree angles?"
You place them where you need them for what they do. Could be any angle - every case is different.
I stand corrected, just tested that out. UVs and sharp edges both have the same impact on the geo count. I previously thought that UVs are stored separately from regular geo and this wouldn't have an impact on actual rendered geo count but I was wrong. Thanks!