Also it's Ctrl+LMB not Ctrl+RMB, and it is pretty imprecise I will admit, but it sure can be fast. If you need precise controls E+axis or E+axis+number is the way to go, I agree.
Exactly, I use LMB as selection button, simply because other software use it, your OS use it and in real life, what finger you use to "indicate" something?
I've also reassigned the 3D cursor to CTRL+ALT+RMB, if I want to position it, I'll SHIFT+S when I want, so that I don't accidentally set it while mechanically calling a non existent RMB menu.
I still don't know with which criteria the default keys have been chosen.
[*]How do I apply properties to multiple objects at once? The properties panel only edits like the last selected one, which is not very useful. Do I need to use separate tools/actions for this every time, like 'move to layer' ?
Blender has a few workaround to change the properties of multiple objects, as you sadly can't change them all at the same time by yourself. There is the 'Make Link' that Skyway posted, but I usually prefer the 'Copy Attributes' add-on as it gives you some different (and, to me, more useful) options. It's not activated by default but it's bundled with Blender. It will overwrite the CTRL+C command for the viewport so if that's something you use often you might want to reconfigure it a bit, I never really used the copy command in the viewport much so I can't say I've really missed it.
under the W menu you have merge selected. this gives you an ugly pop up menu each time which asks you how you want to merge
but you can bin a specific funtion to any hotkey
iยดve bound merge -> last to active to Q
and weld at center to shift-Q
When I'm optimizing low poly models, sometimes I'll tick snapping tool on set with vertices and "closest", and "automatically merge vertices moved to the same location" ticked on too. So, you'll just grab, move and confirm, to snap and merge at the same time.
Oh, and that's so cool, kio. I've been looking for that kind of tool in Blender, as I've seen it in a couple of Max tutorials. I hope you can work on it to make it better, as you say it's not "exactly the same".
It's a bit of a pity there seems to be no videos covering the normals transfer. I myself may not have time to do this before release, but I do think it's a pretty big feature, even few people seem to understand it...
Well the proper release is not out yet and Plasmasloutions will surely make a video with more features soon. There's some documentations on the release link too
Custom split normals - call for game artwork/demos
Hi all,
Anyone here who can give us screenshots or artwork that shows the use case well?
We've been pressed by so many game artists for it, time to give something back
Image license CC BY NoDerivatives is OK if you want to protect character designs.
Veezen i think this could help. Not sure whats going on in your window area other then double check to see that those verts are welded.
So basically unwrap the front faces ignoring the perpendicular ones. You could plane map or regular either should work. Then pin em. And unwrap everything.
pin the stuff you want to keep in the wished position (press p)
after that select only the additional parts (front wheel part) you want to correctly unwrap
and it should have the right proportions.
I implemented the Dota 2 hero shader, minus warps and detail map, in Cycles. This means that I had to turn the super nice energy-conserving GGX BRDF into Phong specularity from the 80s. You can download the shader here:
And an example render with 4 heroes and parameters taken from VMTs for each mesh:
If you have questions about how I came up with this or what some of the nodes are doing, go ahead and ask. You can append the node groups from the .blend I provided if you want to use this for a final presentation render for the workshop or for a high-end animation. I recommend using the node group with image inputs for putting together renders of existing models and textures, and using the node group with scalar inputs for lookdev and easier mask authoring that doesn't require you to channel pack again every time you change something. The node group with image inputs inverts the green channel of the normal map so that you can use models and textures that are in Dota 2 without any additional fuss.
Anyone played around with the new normal options in 2.74? I'm getting a little weirdness with my FBX and/or OBJ exports in Quixel now, and I'm wondering if I should be using different export settings from 2.74 on.
Also, that's quite the node setup Jed. Looking good, too!
Anyone played around with the new normal options in 2.74? I'm getting a little weirdness with my FBX and/or OBJ exports in Quixel now, and I'm wondering if I should be using different export settings from 2.74 on.
I actually figured out my specific issue - I just stopped exporting smoothing groups from Blender, and it's looking good now.
My overall question, though, was just that I had read that Blender had a new feature or option for exporting custom normals as of 2.74, but I wasn't sure what it was or how it could be used.
In my limited experimenting so far, it looks like just exporting normals as-is means I don't need to bother with smoothing groups anymore, but maybe that's wrong, or maybe there's more to it than that.
It's basically the same thingarino as the test builds that Bastien was posting testbuilds for a while back. You now have a few more options for editing and exporting normals in 2.74. First there are the old ways of editing normals--you can mark meshes to be flat shaded or smooth shaded, or you can enable Auto Smooth and mark the mesh smooth shaded to get hard edges at certain angles, then mark specific edges sharp to get hard edges there. These ways will both export correctly if you choose Face or Edge smoothing in the FBX export options.
The new way is to use the new modifiers, Normal Edit and Data Transfer to edit the normals. (There's also some attribute transfer operators in Edit Mode, but those seem to be a little less robust than the modifiers.) Data Transfer lets you transfer normals from one mesh to another and you can use this to get very clean, very lightweight bevels or control your normals with relative precision. Normal Edit lets you set up normals toward a sphere, or in a certain direction, and you can use vertex groups and mix factors for both for even more control over the edited normals. To export these normals, you have to set Smoothing to Normals in the FBX export options. This will export a vertex normal at every vertex, and won't export any explicit smoothing groups or hard edges, so if you want to use this feature you need to be sure that your pipeline will understand the custom normals. (UE4, Unity, and Toolbag all do, I think, though for UE4 you should check whether it's set to Import Normals or Calculate Normals just in case.)
Previously the name of the export option for explicit vertex normals was Smoothing: Off rather than Smoothing: Normals, but it was changed because this way makes a lot more sense.
Thanks for the info, Jed. When you're talking about the Normal Edit and Data Transfer modifiers, is that transferring from a high poly to a low poly mesh still? So it's taking the normal data from the high poly and just transferring it to the low poly vertices?
Have you seen any guides on using these modifiers? I'll have to play around with those when I get home.
You can transfer from any polycount to any polycount with the Data Transfer modifier Think of that thread about Guilty Gear Xrd and how they made giant balloon pants to transfer the normals from onto the guy's in-game pants. Using this modifier you can make the low-poly look quite a bit closer to the high-poly model at a much lower polycount than was previously possible in Blender. You can basically think of the vertex normals as a really low-resolution normal map that costs you nothing to use.
Normal Edit modifier is mostly useful for foliage. While you can use it in combination with vertex groups to edit the normals of small parts of your mesh, you'll probably find that for any sort of hard surfaces you'll have an easier time working with the Data Transfer modifier.
Here's a quick example of how you'd set the modifier up for hard surface work. The modifier is on in the right pane, and off in the left pane.
I have an ordinary cube with hard edges on the first layer. The modifier is on on the right side, and off on the left side. To get it working for a hard-surface type of thing you would want to set hard edges and smooth shading up on your lowpoly as needed with Auto Smooth on (without regard for UV seams, actually) and then duplicate that low-poly and set bevel weights on one of them (select a sharp edge in edge select mode, Shift+G to select other sharp edges too, set edge bevel weight with Shift+E, B, add bevel modifier and set its limiting mode to Bevel Weight, adjust bevel weights down or up in particular spots as needed to better match your high-poly model, apply the bevel modifier if needed if it messes up UVs or geometry in places, then add the Data Transfer modifier, enable Face Corner data and custom normals, set to Projected Face Interpolated, unmark any existing sharp edges, set up the other low-poly model as the source for the normals, and then you're done. It sounds pretty complicated now that I go and say it, but it's actually a little easier to do than it sounds and doesn't take much longer for complicated models.
You mean like in UE4 when you move something with the move tool and then press Shift to bring the camera along while you're moving the object? Or do you just want to orbit around the object while moving it? Please clarify your use case.
As far as I know you can only do viewport navigation while using a tool with the knife tool. I agree that the UE4 style camera-moves-with-you thing could be pretty neat to have.
No I mean like for instances, I grab a face,vertex or edge, or even a full mesh and then I wanna translate,rotatei or scale it.
I press G,R or S depending on what i wanna do and then, I slide the mouse to change values right?
Hoever, at that moment, all possible camera controls or movement get lock.
So for example, I press G to grab a vertex, I move it to point in spcae and then I wanna see that particular point from another perspective, just to be sure thats where I wanna put before confirming.
I'd like to move the cam and orbit around the vert but I cant since the orbit ctrl is now used to snap and move along axis. The numbers on numpad which were used to rotate around are used to put step values.
In anyway, it's impossible to move the camera while modifying an object...
So for now just confirm it and then rotate the viewport afterwards. You can always undo if you really messed things up. As you use the program more you'll get a better feel for where things are in the viewport and the effect you're having as you move things.
If you're on 2.74 you can turn on viewport ambient occlusion which can help make things a little more readable in some cases.
In the meantime I'll think about putting this on my todo list. It does sound like that could be a little more handy of a use for the MMB during transforms than the somewhat awkward MMB axis locking since there are hotkeys and manipulators for that anyway, so maybe I will implement it sometime, but I'm certainly not making any guarantees until I've tried it out for myself and discussed it with real Blender devs.
the only function which comes to my mind which works in such a case is the knife tool which has the hotkey k.
so there might be some more functions which allow such movements.
@JedTheKrampus
sounds interesting, please inform us if something happens in that area.
I just started learning Blender and I'm having some issues:
1) Is there any way to adjust the grid snapping increments in the perspective viewport? With units set to metric the persp viewport seems to only snap to increments of 1 meter. Which is essentially useless because I'm never working with anything large enough where 1 meter of precision is 'good enough'
This means whenever I want to use grid snapping I have to exit perspective, switch to an ortho view, zoom in until the grid changes, then snap to where I think they should be, then turn perspective mode back on to evaluate my changes... This is horribly convoluted. There's gotta be a better way to do this... right?
2) Is there any way to make rectangular lasso selections of groups of vertices without pressing the B key? In pretty much every 3d application you only need to click in an empty space and drag to make a lasso selection. Is there any way to replicate this behavior in Blender?
3) Is there any way to deselect all your selections without pressing A? Again, like other applications if you single click in an empty area of the scene it will drop your selections.
1) In the "display" section of the N pannel, you can adjust the size of the grid (and the number of lines). By holding "shift" during the trasformation, you can also be more precise !
2) B is the shortcut for box selected so you can map it as ou want in the user pref. However with ctrl+click you can do a lasso selection.
3) Same as "B", that's a shortcut you can change it. But there's no default behavior to deselect when you click in an empty field ( I don't find the shortcut A hard to reach though )
Atticus - yeah, having to press a button to deselect truly is convoluted and a waste of time, similarly to having to ok a popup warning when deleting an object. Fortunately these two behaviors can be fixed through scripting. I got the answer to these questions in this thread :
Here's a quick example of how you'd set the modifier up for hard surface work. The modifier is on in the right pane, and off in the left pane.
I have an ordinary cube with hard edges on the first layer. The modifier is on on the right side, and off on the left side. To get it working for a hard-surface type of thing you would want to set hard edges and smooth shading up on your lowpoly as needed with Auto Smooth on (without regard for UV seams, actually) and then duplicate that low-poly and set bevel weights on one of them (select a sharp edge in edge select mode, Shift+G to select other sharp edges too, set edge bevel weight with Shift+E, B, add bevel modifier and set its limiting mode to Bevel Weight, adjust bevel weights down or up in particular spots as needed to better match your high-poly model, apply the bevel modifier if needed if it messes up UVs or geometry in places, then add the Data Transfer modifier, enable Face Corner data and custom normals, set to Projected Face Interpolated, unmark any existing sharp edges, set up the other low-poly model as the source for the normals, and then you're done. It sounds pretty complicated now that I go and say it, but it's actually a little easier to do than it sounds and doesn't take much longer for complicated models.
How do you apply this modifier? When I go to apply it before exporting, it just reverts back to the original normals.
Turns out I'm an idiot and failed the very first step. Didn't enable autosmooth in mesh properties.
Also just... minor complaint. But if you're going to post directions you should separate the steps with line breaks rather than make it one huge run on sentence.
Not blaming you, since this was the very first step you listed so obviously I am just blind :U But the directions were a little hard to follow.
Sorry about that, I was in a hurry (as I recall I was very hungry at the time) and wanted to get something out in around seven minutes. Next time I write up a tutorial I'll put a little more effort in.
Are there many artists here currently using Blender in-house? (I mean at a studio, rather than freelancing remotely.) How do places that are Max/Maya heavy feel about you using Blender instead?
I guess there's a lot of artists that work at studios like this but still use Modo, so I can't imagine it would be a huge deal.... thought it was worth asking though
Replies
Also it's Ctrl+LMB not Ctrl+RMB, and it is pretty imprecise I will admit, but it sure can be fast. If you need precise controls E+axis or E+axis+number is the way to go, I agree.
I've also reassigned the 3D cursor to CTRL+ALT+RMB, if I want to position it, I'll SHIFT+S when I want, so that I don't accidentally set it while mechanically calling a non existent RMB menu.
I still don't know with which criteria the default keys have been chosen.
under the W menu you have merge selected. this gives you an ugly pop up menu each time which asks you how you want to merge
but you can bin a specific funtion to any hotkey
iยดve bound merge -> last to active to Q
and weld at center to shift-Q
its not exactly the same, but it already delivers decent results. I also implemented an interaktive tweak mode.
scripting blender has been pretty pleasant ride so far.
So, im gonna do some more testing and code cleanup .. if anyone wants to test, just drop me a line.
When I'm optimizing low poly models, sometimes I'll tick snapping tool on set with vertices and "closest", and "automatically merge vertices moved to the same location" ticked on too. So, you'll just grab, move and confirm, to snap and merge at the same time.
Oh, and that's so cool, kio. I've been looking for that kind of tool in Blender, as I've seen it in a couple of Max tutorials. I hope you can work on it to make it better, as you say it's not "exactly the same".
RetopoFlow is out !
[ame]
and Blender 2.74 ReleaseCandidate2 too (http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.74 ):
[ame]
That set flow script is looking good kio!
Custom split normals - call for game artwork/demos
Hi all,
Anyone here who can give us screenshots or artwork that shows the use case well?
We've been pressed by so many game artists for it, time to give something back
Image license CC BY NoDerivatives is OK if you want to protect character designs.
Log:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.74/Modeling
Manual page:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Mont29/Foundation/Split_Vertex_Normals/Custom_Split_Normals_Manual
Thanks,
-Ton-
Might not be the most beautiful example, but I think it illustrates the idea pretty well.
I can see the modifier's layout changed though.
Who else is looking forward to PBR?
Blender Internal is pretty much discontinued though
Why this happening? I tried reset scale and two types of Unwrap (Conformal and Angle Bases) and it's still looks like !@#>!
P.S - I moved to 3DS Max from Blender, but I still like modeling in Blender, that's why I used this software.
P.S 2 - I would like to see a magic button "Relax" which could help me with this like 3DS Max did. Ctr + V isn't great for this.
Yes, it's always a solution but not in this case.
So basically unwrap the front faces ignoring the perpendicular ones. You could plane map or regular either should work. Then pin em. And unwrap everything.
pin the stuff you want to keep in the wished position (press p)
after that select only the additional parts (front wheel part) you want to correctly unwrap
and it should have the right proportions.
* rory
explained it quicker.
Working on a thing that makes faces planar. I'll keep you guys posted and maybe post some test builds if there's interest.
http://pasteall.org/blend/35343
or here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/15437561/dota2_hero_shader.blend
Here's a node tree:
And an example render with 4 heroes and parameters taken from VMTs for each mesh:
If you have questions about how I came up with this or what some of the nodes are doing, go ahead and ask. You can append the node groups from the .blend I provided if you want to use this for a final presentation render for the workshop or for a high-end animation. I recommend using the node group with image inputs for putting together renders of existing models and textures, and using the node group with scalar inputs for lookdev and easier mask authoring that doesn't require you to channel pack again every time you change something. The node group with image inputs inverts the green channel of the normal map so that you can use models and textures that are in Dota 2 without any additional fuss.
Also, that's quite the node setup Jed. Looking good, too!
tell me more please.
My overall question, though, was just that I had read that Blender had a new feature or option for exporting custom normals as of 2.74, but I wasn't sure what it was or how it could be used.
In my limited experimenting so far, it looks like just exporting normals as-is means I don't need to bother with smoothing groups anymore, but maybe that's wrong, or maybe there's more to it than that.
The new way is to use the new modifiers, Normal Edit and Data Transfer to edit the normals. (There's also some attribute transfer operators in Edit Mode, but those seem to be a little less robust than the modifiers.) Data Transfer lets you transfer normals from one mesh to another and you can use this to get very clean, very lightweight bevels or control your normals with relative precision. Normal Edit lets you set up normals toward a sphere, or in a certain direction, and you can use vertex groups and mix factors for both for even more control over the edited normals. To export these normals, you have to set Smoothing to Normals in the FBX export options. This will export a vertex normal at every vertex, and won't export any explicit smoothing groups or hard edges, so if you want to use this feature you need to be sure that your pipeline will understand the custom normals. (UE4, Unity, and Toolbag all do, I think, though for UE4 you should check whether it's set to Import Normals or Calculate Normals just in case.)
Previously the name of the export option for explicit vertex normals was Smoothing: Off rather than Smoothing: Normals, but it was changed because this way makes a lot more sense.
Have you seen any guides on using these modifiers? I'll have to play around with those when I get home.
Normal Edit modifier is mostly useful for foliage. While you can use it in combination with vertex groups to edit the normals of small parts of your mesh, you'll probably find that for any sort of hard surfaces you'll have an easier time working with the Data Transfer modifier.
I have an ordinary cube with hard edges on the first layer. The modifier is on on the right side, and off on the left side. To get it working for a hard-surface type of thing you would want to set hard edges and smooth shading up on your lowpoly as needed with Auto Smooth on (without regard for UV seams, actually) and then duplicate that low-poly and set bevel weights on one of them (select a sharp edge in edge select mode, Shift+G to select other sharp edges too, set edge bevel weight with Shift+E, B, add bevel modifier and set its limiting mode to Bevel Weight, adjust bevel weights down or up in particular spots as needed to better match your high-poly model, apply the bevel modifier if needed if it messes up UVs or geometry in places, then add the Data Transfer modifier, enable Face Corner data and custom normals, set to Projected Face Interpolated, unmark any existing sharp edges, set up the other low-poly model as the source for the normals, and then you're done. It sounds pretty complicated now that I go and say it, but it's actually a little easier to do than it sounds and doesn't take much longer for complicated models.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.72/UI/Pie_Menus
Edit:
Ok well it's great, I feel like I'm home, back with Maya however I just noticed hotkeys are faster and way more intuitive...
edit:oh man, I just figured it out...
EDIT: oK NO, i DID NOT..i GUESS IT'S NOT POSSIBLE..tHIS CAN BE QUITE FRUSTRATINg...
I can't believe you can move or rotate the camera while moving objects...-_-
As far as I know you can only do viewport navigation while using a tool with the knife tool. I agree that the UE4 style camera-moves-with-you thing could be pretty neat to have.
I press G,R or S depending on what i wanna do and then, I slide the mouse to change values right?
Hoever, at that moment, all possible camera controls or movement get lock.
So for example, I press G to grab a vertex, I move it to point in spcae and then I wanna see that particular point from another perspective, just to be sure thats where I wanna put before confirming.
I'd like to move the cam and orbit around the vert but I cant since the orbit ctrl is now used to snap and move along axis. The numbers on numpad which were used to rotate around are used to put step values.
In anyway, it's impossible to move the camera while modifying an object...
If you're on 2.74 you can turn on viewport ambient occlusion which can help make things a little more readable in some cases.
In the meantime I'll think about putting this on my todo list. It does sound like that could be a little more handy of a use for the MMB during transforms than the somewhat awkward MMB axis locking since there are hotkeys and manipulators for that anyway, so maybe I will implement it sometime, but I'm certainly not making any guarantees until I've tried it out for myself and discussed it with real Blender devs.
so there might be some more functions which allow such movements.
@JedTheKrampus
sounds interesting, please inform us if something happens in that area.
I just started learning Blender and I'm having some issues:
1) Is there any way to adjust the grid snapping increments in the perspective viewport? With units set to metric the persp viewport seems to only snap to increments of 1 meter. Which is essentially useless because I'm never working with anything large enough where 1 meter of precision is 'good enough'
This means whenever I want to use grid snapping I have to exit perspective, switch to an ortho view, zoom in until the grid changes, then snap to where I think they should be, then turn perspective mode back on to evaluate my changes... This is horribly convoluted. There's gotta be a better way to do this... right?
2) Is there any way to make rectangular lasso selections of groups of vertices without pressing the B key? In pretty much every 3d application you only need to click in an empty space and drag to make a lasso selection. Is there any way to replicate this behavior in Blender?
3) Is there any way to deselect all your selections without pressing A? Again, like other applications if you single click in an empty area of the scene it will drop your selections.
1) In the "display" section of the N pannel, you can adjust the size of the grid (and the number of lines). By holding "shift" during the trasformation, you can also be more precise !
2) B is the shortcut for box selected so you can map it as ou want in the user pref. However with ctrl+click you can do a lasso selection.
3) Same as "B", that's a shortcut you can change it. But there's no default behavior to deselect when you click in an empty field ( I don't find the shortcut A hard to reach though
Anyway thank you for the answers!
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?351344-Customization-questions-from-a-Blender-curious-2d-3d-artist
I dint have the exact page number, but it should be there. I hope this helps !
How do you apply this modifier? When I go to apply it before exporting, it just reverts back to the original normals.
Doesn't work. Reimporting the FBX into Blender shows the unedited normals, same result if the file is imported to UE4 (with import normals set)
Also just... minor complaint. But if you're going to post directions you should separate the steps with line breaks rather than make it one huge run on sentence.
Not blaming you, since this was the very first step you listed so obviously I am just blind :U But the directions were a little hard to follow.
Anyway thank you for the tut.
I guess there's a lot of artists that work at studios like this but still use Modo, so I can't imagine it would be a huge deal.... thought it was worth asking though