Personally, I don't use sharp edges (aka hard edges or smoothing groups) anymore. I pretty much always use more geometry, and bevel my low poly models, and if I want to further improve their shading, I'll use face weighted vertex normals.
We're living in 2020, triangle count isn't THAT demanding anymore on current hardware, that you need to make so crazy optimized low poly models, with hard edges. At least not on the actual hand-made LOD0. But generally speaking, optimizing is important for reducing unnecessary polygons from flat surfaces and areas where they don't have an effect on the HP silhouette.
Of course triangle count matters depending on the game project, but especially IMO, portfolio pieces can have nicer-looking low poly models with more geo.
Personally, I don't use sharp edges (aka hard edges or smoothing groups) anymore. I pretty much always use more geometry, and bevel my low poly models, and if I want to further improve their shading, I'll use face weighted vertex normals.
We're living in 2020, triangle count isn't THAT demanding anymore on current hardware, that you need to make so crazy optimized low poly models, with hard edges. At least not on the actual hand-made LOD0. But generally speaking, optimizing is important for reducing unnecessary polygons from flat surfaces and areas where they don't have an effect on the HP silhouette.
Of course triangle count matters depending on the game project, but especially IMO, portfolio pieces can have nicer-looking low poly models with more geo.
Portfolio pieces, sure why not but when developing assets for pc games, you can't really rely solely on more geometry because 2020. Developing Rust for example, there is an abundance of people who don't have current hardware, it's incredibly varied. Optimizing, in any way, is still completely necessary.
I hate to be nitpicky (or do I ?) but : hard edges are very much relevant now. Simply because there are scenarios when some parts will just connect sharply (for instance an arm sticking out from a shoulder sleeve). In such cases, hard edges are not about some nebulous performance savings bur rather all about clean execution - like they've always been really. Similarly some artists may not care about precisely matching edges of parts wedged into each other, while some will care and make things snap perfectly clean.
Now this may sound like not much in the grand scheme of things but when an artist doesn't know how to deal with these things then it can mean hours of wasted time, maybe having to rebake parts altogether, and so on. And imho the most high-end games with the best visuals tend to be the ones where this sort of care is indeed given to the execution.
I know I've asked this before, but can't find the answer now. Again:
I'm using Blender to model assets, and export them in OBJ format to texture them in Substance Painter. The problem is that Blender does not export the object names correctly in OBJ format (or any other export format I have tested). This is a problem because Substance Painter uses the _exact_ names of the objects to determine which objects influence each other in the baking process and which don't.
When I have a mesh object in Blender e.g. named 'part_001_low', export that in OBJ format, then import that OBJ into another application (e.g. Modo), that same object is now named 'part_001_part_001_low'. Blender simply seems to attach the mesh name to the object name upon export.
Which is, of course, utter nonesense. When I need to bake using the object names in Substance Painter, I always need to import the OBJs into Modo, create the correct object (mesh) names there, and export again. Otherwise, the OBJ is unusable in Painter.
I would like to use Blender only though. Can I somehow tell Blender to use the MESH names only when exporting? It must not attach the mesh names to the object names, it destroys the workflow entirely.
According to that, if you name the container object the same as its data ("part_001_low" for both the Object and the Mesh data), then it will use a single name like you want.
I would like to use Blender only though. Can I somehow tell Blender to use the MESH names only when exporting? It must not attach the mesh names to the object names, it destroys the workflow entirely.
I would like to use Blender only though. Can I somehow tell Blender to use the MESH names only when exporting? It must not attach the mesh names to the object names, it destroys the workflow entirely.
A new question for you all. While in sculpt mode, is there any way to apply a global Sculpt Filter effect without having to select the filter tool and filter type themselves ? And maybe even without having to click drag in the viewport. For instance being able to apply a global Smooth or Inflate of a given strength in one click or button press (basically a filter flood) while sculpting.
The current workflow of selecting the tool and type and clickdown-drag to apply it is okay-ish, but it is constantly interrupting the flow of sculpting, I think.
I added 2 options from the object viewport display and made the material display properties more compact since the last time I posted. This addon also allows you to remove and add materials and slots without having to get out of edit mode.
The button "X" remove materials from the object and delete them from the library, so if you just want to remove it from an object use the "minus button". Debating if i should remove the "X" button.
You need to use "popup.dc_materials" to create the shortcut.
Anyone knows if you can bake to udims now? I know we can paint udims in Blender currently. Any news about this and when it might be implemented? EDIT: No baking to udims yet: https://developer.blender.org/T72390
@Udjani "Debating if i should remove the "X" button."
If you mean removing your custom round X button that nukes the material from the file, FWIW I personally find it very useful since there seems to be no intuitive way of doing that by default (besides manually deleting orphan materials from the scene). Might just need some clearer explanation as to what it does, or an icon that differenciates it more from the "regular" X ? Trashcan maybe ?
@pior I like the trash can suggestion, I think it makes more sense this way? Better to have it separated since you would have to do some ctrl+z if you missclick the delete button.
Just wondering - I can't be the only one who gets really mad at Blender when it's time to render something out and the result includes all sorts of elements that are actually hidden in the viewport?
Is there any quick way to only render visible objects instead of having to go through the scene basically object by object and exclude them from render? Mine are full of nested collections and hair emitters which come with their own visibility settings. Argh.
Does anyone here likes that the "Local View / Isolate" also does "Auto Focus" on the selected object instead of just keeping the view in the same place?
Wow, had no idea it was even possible to disable that haha I would have never thought of looking into the keymap for something like that , but I guess it makes sense huh ...
as of september 2020, are there any addons which make animations much much easier to do/understand, either making a load of animations for a single model for exporting, and ways of show casing the different animations for that model,
or way of compiling a load of animations, different objects in one large scene? cause currently doing either is too confusing for me!
@oraeles77 You should first read up on the action stash, NLA and force user. To me that sounds like it would already help you with managing multiple animations and playing them consecutively.
Is there any way to tell the app to absolutely / without fail / definitely save (pack) all currently unsaved edited textures ? And by that I mean, *not* having to rely on the prompt for unsaved content on exit.
In other words : I am looking for an equivalent to ctrl-S, but for all textures. So that I never end up with this after a ctrl-S :
It boggles my mind that even though there is now a prompt for unsaved textures on exit, there seems to be no way to proactively save them all. Meaning that if I ctrl-S right before a crash I would *still* lose my work. Madness ...
@oraeles77 You should first read up on the action stash, NLA and force user. To me that sounds like it would already help you with managing multiple animations and playing them consecutively.
trust me, I've been 'reading up' on these things for the last 6 or 7 years and Im able to add a keyframe and move something about and press play etc, but anything more complex and the entire NLA/Dopesheet/Action Editor all bcome confusing and i get lost easily.
In other words : I am looking for an equivalent to ctrl-S, but for all textures. So that I never end up with this after a ctrl-S
@pior I can't attest to how well it works since I don't use it, but there's the command Image > Save All Images on the UV / Image editor header. To add it to custom menus, the operator name is "bpy.ops.image.save_dirty".
trust me, I've been 'reading up' on these things for the last 6 or 7 years and Im able to add a keyframe and move something about and press play etc, but anything more complex and the entire NLA/Dopesheet/Action Editor all bcome confusing and i get lost easily.
sometimes things aren't meant for us.
This course here can help regarding advanced character animation using Blender:
- When you're finished with the above the animation has a beginning and end but it's still rough, so set keyframes to Bézier interpolation and then on the Graph editor polish the keyframe curves by adding proper easing between those poses, as well as more keyframes to break down the movements more.
@garciiia It's not the same for everyone, I tried blender guru when i started learning 3d, it was horrible frustrating. The best aproach for me was to think about modeling something very basic, then google about it or search for it on the blender manual.
I made this ugly guy using the Facebuilder addon, what should I do next, Im new to character modelling.
I know about making eyeballs and hair.
I assume that before you texture the character's face I should at least make the ears a bit more detailed and or do some highpoly sculpting to make it more ugly? what else should i do? i only usually do non-organic hard surfice stuff so im totally lost.
Is there any way to properly blend 2 normal maps when using 2 uv sets? I have the trim/decal normal in the first uv set and tilling in the second, you can see the seams where i have the decals on the mesh, looks kinda like if the normals are inverted. This setup works fine in unreal and unity but i can't figure out how to make work in blender.
@Udjani for one you are throwing away the "Z" (blue) channel of one of your textures with this setup. And just adding them is not the right way to go about it either. With normals, 128 (or 0.5 for greater color depth) is the unmodified normal direction. With just adding both together you are only ever rotating the normals in one direction on one axis, never both directions. Either use a combination node that's made for normals or do the proper math.
The proper math would be to first determine which of the textures has your main detail normal and which your noise normal. Then, for values less than 0.5 in the noise normal, subtract the value from the detail normal, otherwise add it.
Depending on the effect you want to achieve, you could also do a weighted average of the two values. But simply adding them is not the right way to go about it.
As a side note to what Prime8 posted, adding two vectors works, because those use a different number space in 3D. They show a direction in 3D space, while the channels in the normal map essentially represent an angle from 0 to 255 (or 1.0).
Has anyone ever needed to assign to all objects in a scene using the same material, another one? So for example, we have multiple objects using material A, sometimes along other material slots, and we want to replace this material A with material B, which we have already created in our scene.
I only know how to do this manually 1 object at a time, and depending on the number of objects that need to be modified, this can be a task that takes more time than what I would wish for...
@Tiles That will only work if the objects have their material slots set up in the same way. If you want to switch out the material in different slots linking will not work. You would just replace the material slot setup.
I didn't finish the video, but I think the situations are different: in the video, you know exactly which objects you want to have this new material. In my case, I don't. I am using Blender as my main hub in which I will import OBJ/FBXs that I take elsewhere to work on. When I bring them back, the materials I initially exported them out with will now be created as new materials, usually called something like "OldMaterialName.001".
My intentions would be to have a script or something in which I can tell it "search in the scene for all instances of the material 'Material A', and replace those with "Material B".
Hello all - In 2.8+, does anyone know how to make "Frame offset" (screen.frame_offset) behave as it should when triggering it with alt+mousewheel ? It is extremely slow compared to the 2.7 behavior. This is not a performance issue on my end as scrubbing the timeline (by grabbing the cursor) is as smooth as responsive as one would expect (still a little bit slower than 2.7, but acceptable).
I assume that the mousewheel input is somehow trying to execute too many times at once. It is infuriating when checking for deformation errors, adjusting weights, and so on.
My intentions would be to have a script or something in which I can tell it "search in the scene for all instances of the material 'Material A', and replace those with "Material B".
Materials behavior is and have always been a huge flaw in Blender IMO. In Max for example if you import an object it asks if it expected to usealredy existing material in your scene. Blender just adds 001 to both material and textures . You end up with a huge mess of materials and textures : Material.001, material.002 and so on . Same with copying materials from one object to another . So tremendously inconvenient and tedious to keep in order
My intentions would be to have a script or something in which I can tell it "search in the scene for all instances of the material 'Material A', and replace those with "Material B".
The only way I know o keep materials in order is saving another blender file for materials only and use "Linked" materials in your master file. It doesn't do it exactly but just makes the switch not so many time necessary
Replies
Now this may sound like not much in the grand scheme of things but when an artist doesn't know how to deal with these things then it can mean hours of wasted time, maybe having to rebake parts altogether, and so on. And imho the most high-end games with the best visuals tend to be the ones where this sort of care is indeed given to the execution.
Anyways, all this is hardly related to Blender
I'm using Blender to model assets, and export them in OBJ format to texture them in Substance Painter. The problem is that Blender does not export the object names correctly in OBJ format (or any other export format I have tested). This is a problem because Substance Painter uses the _exact_ names of the objects to determine which objects influence each other in the baking process and which don't.
When I have a mesh object in Blender e.g. named 'part_001_low', export that in OBJ format, then import that OBJ into another application (e.g. Modo), that same object is now named 'part_001_part_001_low'. Blender simply seems to attach the mesh name to the object name upon export.
Which is, of course, utter nonesense. When I need to bake using the object names in Substance Painter, I always need to import the OBJs into Modo, create the correct object (mesh) names there, and export again. Otherwise, the OBJ is unusable in Painter.
I would like to use Blender only though. Can I somehow tell Blender to use the MESH names only when exporting? It must not attach the mesh names to the object names, it destroys the workflow entirely.
The current workflow of selecting the tool and type and clickdown-drag to apply it is okay-ish, but it is constantly interrupting the flow of sculpting, I think.
The button "X" remove materials from the object and delete them from the library, so if you just want to remove it from an object use the "minus button". Debating if i should remove the "X" button.
You need to use "popup.dc_materials" to create the shortcut.
EDIT: No baking to udims yet: https://developer.blender.org/T72390
"Debating if i should remove the "X" button."
If you mean removing your custom round X button that nukes the material from the file, FWIW I personally find it very useful since there seems to be no intuitive way of doing that by default (besides manually deleting orphan materials from the scene). Might just need some clearer explanation as to what it does, or an icon that differenciates it more from the "regular" X ? Trashcan maybe ?
https://gumroad.com/l/sMNjc
https://github.com/Draise14/Addon-Match-to-Render
Personally I toggled that option off. Mimics the behaviour of the Isolate function in other DCC apps I use, so brownie points to that.
Is there any way to tell the app to absolutely / without fail / definitely save (pack) all currently unsaved edited textures ?
And by that I mean, *not* having to rely on the prompt for unsaved content on exit.
In other words : I am looking for an equivalent to ctrl-S, but for all textures. So that I never end up with this after a ctrl-S :
It boggles my mind that even though there is now a prompt for unsaved textures on exit, there seems to be no way to proactively save them all. Meaning that if I ctrl-S right before a crash I would *still* lose my work. Madness ...
This course here can help regarding advanced character animation using Blender:
You can try the normal blend method I posted some time ago.
https://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2667698/#Comment_2667698
Vector Math Average node doesn't exist anymore, here is a workaround.
https://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2714346/#Comment_2714346
I only know how to do this manually 1 object at a time, and depending on the number of objects that need to be modified, this can be a task that takes more time than what I would wish for...
My intentions would be to have a script or something in which I can tell it "search in the scene for all instances of the material 'Material A', and replace those with "Material B".
In 2.8+, does anyone know how to make "Frame offset" (screen.frame_offset) behave as it should when triggering it with alt+mousewheel ? It is extremely slow compared to the 2.7 behavior. This is not a performance issue on my end as scrubbing the timeline (by grabbing the cursor) is as smooth as responsive as one would expect (still a little bit slower than 2.7, but acceptable).
I assume that the mousewheel input is somehow trying to execute too many times at once. It is infuriating when checking for deformation errors, adjusting weights, and so on.
The only way I know o keep materials in order is saving another blender file for materials only and use "Linked" materials in your master file. It doesn't do it exactly but just makes the switch not so many time necessary