It looks nice, but I can do what that does with the shrinkwrap modifier. Create a cylinder>remove caps>add SW modifier>Set to nearest surface point>Position loops at each end of limb>Add loop cuts>Adjust Loops>Apply Modifier
As long as you place your start and end loop on the limb before turning on the modifier in edit mode, you can loop cut to your heart's content.
It looks nice, but I can do what that does with the shrinkwrap modifier. Create a cylinder>remove caps>add SW modifier>Set to nearest surface point>Position loops at each end of limb>Add loop cuts>Adjust Loops>Apply Modifier
As long as you place your start and end loop on the limb before turning on the modifier in edit mode, you can loop cut to your heart's content.
Sure you can, but it's no where near as fast or accurate. That was actually one of the reasons for me designing the tool. I got sick of shrinkwrap
If you can set two vertex loops at each end of a limb and bridge them before adding the shrink wrap, the loop cut will do the job just a fast. Edge slide and rotate permits accurate placement the of loops. It took me merely a minute to set up and execute.
Don't get me wrong, it looks like a nice tool, but the same result can be had with the right technique. Using extrude isn't the right technique. Wrapping it like a bandage and adding loops is more effective, which is basically what your tool does.
If you can set two vertex loops at each end of a limb and bridge them before adding the shrink wrap, the loop cut will do the job just a fast. Edge slide and rotate permits accurate placement the of loops. It took me merely a minute to set up and execute.
Don't get me wrong, it looks like a nice tool, but the same result can be had with the right technique. Using extrude isn't the right technique. Wrapping it like a bandage and adding loops is more effective, which is basically what your tool does.
Oh definitely, sorry didn't mean to disagree with you. I always get frustrated with how finicky shrinkwrap can be on more complex forms, even when used in conjunction with surface snapping. It definitely works, I've always just felt it was more of a hack than anything.
Sorry for the double post, but I did a workflow demo with Contours last night that shows it in use alongside Blender's normal tools. Usage feedback is welcome!
Hey Jonathan, I want to offer a critique on your workflow if I may. As I was watching you work, you were really getting mired in extruding faces/F2 fills to build the non-cylindrical forms (i.e. the deltoid). Have you considered placing large simple geometry (like a plane) first and increasing the density with subdivisions/loop cuts and connecting those to other forms with bridge/face fill/extrude? It seemed like you were making a lot of extra work for yourself that you didn't need to make. I think you could speed up your workflow by using the largest primitive geometry you can and dividing it into more topology-friendly shapes.
Hey Jonathan, I want to offer a critique on your workflow if I may. As I was watching you work, you were really getting mired in extruding faces/F2 fills to build the non-cylindrical forms (i.e. the deltoid). Have you considered placing large simple geometry (like a plane) first and increasing the density with subdivisions/loop cuts and connecting those to other forms with bridge/face fill/extrude? It seemed like you were making a lot of extra work for yourself that you didn't need to make. I think you could speed up your workflow by using the largest primitive geometry you can and dividing it into more topology-friendly shapes.
Thanks for the input! This is actually something that I do a lot. It tends to depend on the area that I'm working on which way I go. Either way, I end up tweaking the result a lot (mostly because I'm a tad obsessive) and so with the F2 add-on I often lean towards the one at a time approach.
carter, that tool looks awesome, I'll give it a shot once I'm working on my next character
Does anyone know if there are any options for adjusting vertex colors once they're assigned like in 3dsmax's Vertex Paint modifier? Blender seems to hold all this info in a "layer" so it seems like it should be doable, but I imagine there hasn't been much demand for this. Tweaking the brightness/contrast, basically having the "adjust color" dialog from 3dsmax would really help me out. If not this may finally make me plunge into Blender tool development :P
Surprise this hasnt been posted yet.... but theres been some communication between Valve and the Blender Foundation.
Here are two quotes, one from Valve and the other Ton.
Hi everyone, I work for Valve (http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/). We would like to make our digital distribution platform Steam (www.steampowered.com<http://www.steampowered.com>) one of the places where you can download Blender. The long-term goal would be to make it easier for people to build their own mods for PC games with Blender and share these mods with other gamers. So I was wondering if there are any Blender users on this list who are interested in PC games and could see themselves working on an integration between Blender and PC games that offer official modding support such as DOTA 2.
Long story: Valve is a company that is built on modding. The original Half-Life was built on a modified version of the Quake engine. All our major games since then started out as mods which we found cool, hired the people who built them and released them as major game titles. This is true for Counter-Strike, the original Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and DOTA 2 (Portal was not technically a mod but a student project - but you see the pattern). Similarly, one of the most successful features of our Steam platform is the Steam Workshop (http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/), which is an interface for users to share, discover and install mods for their games. Essentially, you can publish your mod there and other gamers can bring your mod into their games with a single mouse click. This is something that we think would be a cool feature for Blender to tap into. Like modeling a sword in Blender, pushing a button and having it available to all users of Skyrim. But we bet there are more creative ideas out there than this one. What we are currently looking at is offering a completely vanilla version of Blender as a free download on Steam that is completely the same as that offered on other websites. We'd hope that this will get enough of our users exposed to and interested in Blender so they will be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would talk to Steam's backend services such as Workshop. If you think you might be interested in being part of that, we'd be happy to hear from you! Best, Jan-PeterHi all,
- - -
To put this in perspective - I've been in contact with JP and others from Valve (they added a donation system, to mark a percentage of sales going to Blender Foundation).
Valve was very interested to find other ways to support Blender, and I suggested them to more activily involve users of their platform in a stakeholder role. That could be by adding forums there, maintaining todo or issue lists, inviting people to contribute to Blender (C or with add-ons).
Game modding is a popular 3d activity online, and Blender for sure has a big following there. Their requirements probably won't differ much from game artists in studios either - it's all about getting the tools well defined and functional, and ensure I/O is as smooth as possible.
JP's suggestion for platform integration I cannot judge really... nor how much it would be a priority or how it can be delivered license-compitable. I'll leave that to the experts here.
I am sure more sources will be forthcoming since its less than 24 hours old, but ultimately it shouldnt come as a surprise. Blender was spotted in a Valve promo video for their Source film maker as well as one of the targets for funding via steam workshop resource allocation seen here: http://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements/detail/1819734886367365945
This might be a unique turning point for Blender as a tool, one free of licensing and upgrade issues.
It's kinda funny reading through the first pages of this thread and then the last pages.
Shit just flipped 180 around here.
Its lack of accessibility still seems to hurt it quite a bit; which are what most of the complaints are early in the thread. However, every year I've used it, it seems to get more and more difficult for people to just brush off.
I literally got laughed at for using it when I first started using it. Within the past 2 years or so attitude towards it seems to have shifted quite a bit though.
I'm wondering about the Steam Workshop thing. Other than Valve's own games, are there other games where what they're talking about with Blender would make sense?
I know you can make items and then sell them for Dota2 and TF2. But say for Skyrim it's really just for fun. You can't sell that stuff. So are there any other games that let you sell items in that way?
I'm wondering about the Steam Workshop thing. Other than Valve's own games, are there other games where what they're talking about with Blender would make sense?
I know you can make items and then sell them for Dota2 and TF2. But say for Skyrim it's really just for fun. You can't sell that stuff. So are there any other games that let you sell items in that way?
THe SoE Player Studio is the only Workshop like system that I know of.
Recently I worked on a new FBX importer for a client who prefers to remain anonymous,
This importer is bundled with any recent build, available in the import menu and will be included with blender 2.69.
Its functional without any SDK or 3rd party tools.
At this point I it would be helpful if I could start testing the importer with files from various applications to check its able to load the files correctly.
- Note that the client only needed certain features so the importer is not yet supporting all features.
But it can load meshes with UV's images, parenting, lamps, cameras - supporting both cycles and blender internal materials.
If you'd like to help out, you could try import BINARY-FBX files into Blender, if they don't load 100% perfectly...
Please make FBX files available, including...
* Application they were created with.
* What the model should look like (screenshot, or OBJ export).
We can't support all the features that the exporter supports for 2.69 but I'll at least go over all FBX samples I can get my hands on and see if they can be supported.
This way it means Blender-2.69-release will include and importer that has had some testing and is less likely to be tripped up because of simple bugs/incompatibilities (and I wont get a flood of bug reports in my inbox ).
PS - it can't import files exported from blender, this is stupid, the exporter will be eventually updated to write FBX7.1+ files too.
I'm wondering about the Steam Workshop thing. Other than Valve's own games, are there other games where what they're talking about with Blender would make sense?
I know you can make items and then sell them for Dota2 and TF2. But say for Skyrim it's really just for fun. You can't sell that stuff. So are there any other games that let you sell items in that way?
Pretty much any provider of a content-for-sale service (and there are a lot of them, either as dedicated mesh content services or providers like Second Life et-al) can be included in answer to that as there are no exploitation restrictions on producing and selling content created with Blender, unless the resulting 'product' contains, or includes, Blender code in some way, which would then subject that content to GPL T&C.
@SHEPEIRO: I've been in the same boat, but after using the Blender 2012 Experimental input preset I've really started liking Blender I've been using it quite a bit now for the past month or so.
someone here posted a video series of blender tuts where he explained the many important features of blender in a very fast fashion
too lazy too look them up, but iam sure you can find them with a little bit searching
they were quite good to get into blender if you have some basic knowledge
thanks for the links, used the cgcookie stuff for the most part, getting the hang of the basics (made some rivets and bolts to add to HP meshes nothing fancy), moving onto some fancier stuff tomorrow
i keep loosing menus etc all over the place, its way better than it used to be (pretty much feels like a different package which is great ;-) just need a bit of practise and get the hotkeys embeded into my memory (which will cause havoc with using max at work)
had a few issues with needing to remap hotkeys due to the lack of num pad on a macboo keyboard but nothing major, and i couldn't get the 'max' viewport navigation working with a three buttoned mouse plugged in which is a pain
the viewport works really well the retina screen on my mac, better than max and maya its so nice to be able to get all that res/ viewport real-estate AND see the text
The UI is generally really good (much better than it used to be) but theres still something that makes it a bit tricky to know where stuff is
it may be the fluidity of the context driven menus take a bit of getting used to
or it could be a simple as the menus are not quite bordered visibly enough (space between things and not enough contrast in the dividers.
There should be 3ds Max/Maya keymaps bundled with Blender that you can choose off the splash page or by going into User Preferences -> Input and picking them from the drop-down menu. Almost all Blender tutorials are geared towards the default keymap though, so you'll probably still struggle finding things.
had a few issues with needing to remap hotkeys due to the lack of num pad on a macboo keyboard but nothing major, and i couldn't get the 'max' viewport navigation working with a three buttoned mouse plugged in which is a pain
You can just enable 'Emulate Numpad' under the 'Input' in the preferences. Doing this maps the numbers above the letters to do what the numpad keys would otherwise do. Those numbers are otherwise regularly used to switch layers which isn't something used that often anyway (for me at the very least).
While you're in there you might just as well enable the 'Continuous Grab' if it's not enabled per default yet.
xrg- i always find trying to bend an app to anothers workflow sometimes doenst work that brilliantly, i did try both the max and maya keymaps, but struggled with them... not sure why im not familiar enough with the package to get a good idea
i tend to relearn but bias the keymap to what im used to.
re-top is awsome
one thing that im getting stuck on constantly is the need to click to release things, i get it in the right place then forget i need to click and shoot it off...anyway to turn this off?
...one thing that im getting stuck on constantly is the need to click to release things, i get it in the right place then forget i need to click and shoot it off...anyway to turn this off?
It's context sensitive, some actions need the click, others can be set on release (rather than specifically a click), so it's probably best not to change that one in case you 'break' some actions but not others.
one thing that im getting stuck on constantly is the need to click to release things, i get it in the right place then forget i need to click and shoot it off...anyway to turn this off?
Go into User Preferences -> Editing tab and you can check the box "Release confirms."
thats a fair bit better thanks very much... one object is always selected which in my lazy max style way i keep translating without meaning too still. is this something you just have to learn not to do?
thats a fair bit better thanks very much... one object is always selected which in my lazy max style way i keep translating without meaning too still. is this something you just have to learn not to do?
If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, then ya this bugged the crap out of me too. The fix for me is down by the orientation drop-down list (Global, Local, Normal, etc.) There's a little button with a 3D widget icon on it. If you click that, then you get the traditional move rotate and scale manipulators. You can turn them all on and off as well. They're all coded into the Maya hotkeys, but i don't know about the max ones.
By the way, Does anyone know how to make box and lasso selections additive? Holding shift only makes the selections subtractive. Shift+Alt will additively select loops, but that's as far as I have found out. I am using the Maya hotkeys, too.
By the way, Does anyone know how to make box and lasso selections additive? Holding shift only makes the selections subtractive. Shift+Alt will additively select loops, but that's as far as I have found out. I am using the Maya hotkeys, too.
In the default keymap, they're just additive regularly without holding any modifier key. Not sure on the Maya keymap.
In the default keymap, they're just additive regularly without holding any modifier key. Not sure on the Maya keymap.
yep, default blender adds everything without modifier, but the maya preset doesnt do this
couldnt find the right combination either, maybe the function just doesnt exist in this preset ?
yep, default blender adds everything without modifier, but the maya preset doesnt do this
couldnt find the right combination either, maybe the function just doesnt exist in this preset ?
it can be changed in maya for selections, by defualt dragging a selection will replace the selection, but with modifers your can add subtract and toggle. Blender can do the same or maya can do the same as blender just depends on the binds for selection.
if people are refering to the blender keyset for maya being wrong well it is off in a lot of areas.
in the maya binds it seems blender has a few thigns wrong, a drag seleciton no modifers works, but adding shift which should be add is subtract selection, and control does nothign
Alright, I figured it out! The Maya hotkeys for border and lasso selection don't have "extend" check marked. After checking those, it works perfectly! Thanks for all the replies everyone. It really helped me pin-point the problem.
Replies
[ame="
Thanks for the compliment! I made that theme.
http://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/07/31/announcing-the-contours-retopology-tool/?utm_content=buffer275a8&utm_source=buffer&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=Buffer
I remember trying to retopo some roots it would have been very handy for!
also in case your interested, all the art in the link in my sig is done in blender
As long as you place your start and end loop on the limb before turning on the modifier in edit mode, you can loop cut to your heart's content.
Thanks for the really fast plug!
Sure you can, but it's no where near as fast or accurate. That was actually one of the reasons for me designing the tool. I got sick of shrinkwrap
The next step is to integrate poly strip sketching support: http://cgcookie.com/blender/forums/topic/retopology-tools-development-roadmap/
Don't get me wrong, it looks like a nice tool, but the same result can be had with the right technique. Using extrude isn't the right technique. Wrapping it like a bandage and adding loops is more effective, which is basically what your tool does.
Oh definitely, sorry didn't mean to disagree with you. I always get frustrated with how finicky shrinkwrap can be on more complex forms, even when used in conjunction with surface snapping. It definitely works, I've always just felt it was more of a hack than anything.
[ame="
Thanks for the input! This is actually something that I do a lot. It tends to depend on the area that I'm working on which way I go. Either way, I end up tweaking the result a lot (mostly because I'm a tad obsessive) and so with the F2 add-on I often lean towards the one at a time approach.
Does anyone know if there are any options for adjusting vertex colors once they're assigned like in 3dsmax's Vertex Paint modifier? Blender seems to hold all this info in a "layer" so it seems like it should be doable, but I imagine there hasn't been much demand for this. Tweaking the brightness/contrast, basically having the "adjust color" dialog from 3dsmax would really help me out. If not this may finally make me plunge into Blender tool development :P
Yay, I don't have to make a repeating plane to paint walls in the 3d view anymore!
Here are two quotes, one from Valve and the other Ton.
Hi everyone,
I work for Valve (http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/). We would like to make our digital distribution platform Steam (www.steampowered.com<http://www.steampowered.com>) one of the places where you can download Blender. The long-term goal would be to make it easier for people to build their own mods for PC games with Blender and share these mods with other gamers.
So I was wondering if there are any Blender users on this list who are interested in PC games and could see themselves working on an integration between Blender and PC games that offer official modding support such as DOTA 2.
Long story:
Valve is a company that is built on modding. The original Half-Life was built on a modified version of the Quake engine. All our major games since then started out as mods which we found cool, hired the people who built them and released them as major game titles. This is true for Counter-Strike, the original Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and DOTA 2 (Portal was not technically a mod but a student project - but you see the pattern).
Similarly, one of the most successful features of our Steam platform is the Steam Workshop (http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/), which is an interface for users to share, discover and install mods for their games. Essentially, you can publish your mod there and other gamers can bring your mod into their games with a single mouse click.
This is something that we think would be a cool feature for Blender to tap into. Like modeling a sword in Blender, pushing a button and having it available to all users of Skyrim. But we bet there are more creative ideas out there than this one.
What we are currently looking at is offering a completely vanilla version of Blender as a free download on Steam that is completely the same as that offered on other websites. We'd hope that this will get enough of our users exposed to and interested in Blender so they will be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would talk to Steam's backend services such as Workshop.
If you think you might be interested in being part of that, we'd be happy to hear from you!
Best,
Jan-Peter Hi all,
- - -
To put this in perspective - I've been in contact with JP and others from Valve (they added a donation system, to mark a percentage of sales going to Blender Foundation).
Valve was very interested to find other ways to support Blender, and I suggested them to more activily involve users of their platform in a stakeholder role. That could be by adding forums there, maintaining todo or issue lists, inviting people to contribute to Blender (C or with add-ons).
Game modding is a popular 3d activity online, and Blender for sure has a big following there. Their requirements probably won't differ much from game artists in studios either - it's all about getting the tools well defined and functional, and ensure I/O is as smooth as possible.
JP's suggestion for platform integration I cannot judge really... nor how much it would be a priority or how it can be delivered license-compitable. I'll leave that to the experts here.
-Ton-
Official mailing list:
1) http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-August/041483.html
2) http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-August/041487.html
Reactions and some publicity can be seen here:
https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/367347464396742657
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=nl&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=cs&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Ftweakers.net%2Fnieuws%2F90702%2Fvalve-wil-3d-pakket-blender-via-steam-aanbieden.html&act=url
I am sure more sources will be forthcoming since its less than 24 hours old, but ultimately it shouldnt come as a surprise. Blender was spotted in a Valve promo video for their Source film maker as well as one of the targets for funding via steam workshop resource allocation seen here: http://steamcommunity.com/games/SteamWorkshop/announcements/detail/1819734886367365945
This might be a unique turning point for Blender as a tool, one free of licensing and upgrade issues.
I was referring to the ability to access older versions at any time of the software, which are not necessarily present with commercial applications.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?303391-ADDON-EWOCprojects-presents-PreSel
**edit** apparently there are quandries with how to do this in a license compatible way. either way an interesting thread to follow.
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-August/041500.html <-- summary of points made
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2013-August/041483.html <-- start of thread
Shit just flipped 180 around here.
It's now Apache License 2.0, making it able to be integrated freely into commercial software.
Link: http://code.blender.org/index.php/2013/08/cycles-render-engine-released-with-permissive-license/
Its lack of accessibility still seems to hurt it quite a bit; which are what most of the complaints are early in the thread. However, every year I've used it, it seems to get more and more difficult for people to just brush off.
I literally got laughed at for using it when I first started using it. Within the past 2 years or so attitude towards it seems to have shifted quite a bit though.
edit: nevermind, just had to get out of texture paint mode in the 3d port.
I know you can make items and then sell them for Dota2 and TF2. But say for Skyrim it's really just for fun. You can't sell that stuff. So are there any other games that let you sell items in that way?
THe SoE Player Studio is the only Workshop like system that I know of.
"add support importing edge and face smoothing"
http://markmail.org/message/oamh6i3bdq2dv6u3
More can be read on the FBX Importer thread:
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?304646-FBX-importer-included-in-blender-ready-for-testing&p=2450347#post2450347
edit-duh... found some...hangover must be wearing off now
too lazy too look them up, but iam sure you can find them with a little bit searching
they were quite good to get into blender if you have some basic knowledge
edit :
here ya go
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=70687&highlight=blender+tutorial
Great vid - one I missed first time around - thanks for the link!
i keep loosing menus etc all over the place, its way better than it used to be (pretty much feels like a different package which is great ;-) just need a bit of practise and get the hotkeys embeded into my memory (which will cause havoc with using max at work)
had a few issues with needing to remap hotkeys due to the lack of num pad on a macboo keyboard but nothing major, and i couldn't get the 'max' viewport navigation working with a three buttoned mouse plugged in which is a pain
the viewport works really well the retina screen on my mac, better than max and maya its so nice to be able to get all that res/ viewport real-estate AND see the text
The UI is generally really good (much better than it used to be) but theres still something that makes it a bit tricky to know where stuff is
it may be the fluidity of the context driven menus take a bit of getting used to
or it could be a simple as the menus are not quite bordered visibly enough (space between things and not enough contrast in the dividers.
anyway see if i get into it a bit more tomorrow
While you're in there you might just as well enable the 'Continuous Grab' if it's not enabled per default yet.
xrg- i always find trying to bend an app to anothers workflow sometimes doenst work that brilliantly, i did try both the max and maya keymaps, but struggled with them... not sure why im not familiar enough with the package to get a good idea
i tend to relearn but bias the keymap to what im used to.
re-top is awsome
one thing that im getting stuck on constantly is the need to click to release things, i get it in the right place then forget i need to click and shoot it off...anyway to turn this off?
Go into User Preferences -> Editing tab and you can check the box "Release confirms."
you can also press a to deselect/select all
If you're talking about what I think you're talking about, then ya this bugged the crap out of me too. The fix for me is down by the orientation drop-down list (Global, Local, Normal, etc.) There's a little button with a 3D widget icon on it. If you click that, then you get the traditional move rotate and scale manipulators. You can turn them all on and off as well. They're all coded into the Maya hotkeys, but i don't know about the max ones.
By the way, Does anyone know how to make box and lasso selections additive? Holding shift only makes the selections subtractive. Shift+Alt will additively select loops, but that's as far as I have found out. I am using the Maya hotkeys, too.
In the default keymap, they're just additive regularly without holding any modifier key. Not sure on the Maya keymap.
yep, default blender adds everything without modifier, but the maya preset doesnt do this
couldnt find the right combination either, maybe the function just doesnt exist in this preset ?
it can be changed in maya for selections, by defualt dragging a selection will replace the selection, but with modifers your can add subtract and toggle. Blender can do the same or maya can do the same as blender just depends on the binds for selection.
if people are refering to the blender keyset for maya being wrong well it is off in a lot of areas.
in the maya binds it seems blender has a few thigns wrong, a drag seleciton no modifers works, but adding shift which should be add is subtract selection, and control does nothign