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
Ok guys, I am currently doing a retopolgoy over a sculpt in Blender.
Everything have been silky smooth up to now until you know, after alot of vertex merging and tweaking, the scene started to lag and I am experiencing some slow down.
In Maya, when these happened, it was because you geometry had alot of history on it and you hd to clear it. However, may that be the same reason I have slowdown in Blender? How do I clear my history then?
Tbank you.
Edit: OK I figured it out. I had a smooth modifer applied on both my sclupt and mesh, causing framerate drops!
yeah, Blender has some of these tricky tricks, hopefully we got a better performance with the new opengl 2.1 support and opensubd
btw, are you sculpting in dyntopo mode or multiresolution?
actually blender has no deep history stack like maya or softimage, because there are modifier and data properties to keep important stuff like modifiers, uv, vertex groups/color etc.
yeah, Blender has some of these tricky tricks, hopefully we got a better performance with the new opengl 2.1 support and opensubd
Open subdiv is sure to improve performance (although only in very specific case).
[As a low-mid end computer user I would love any kind of performance increase...mainly in exporting, I find that I can make more hi-rez meshes than I can export for baking without crashing .]
btw, are you sculpting in dyntopo mode or multiresolution?
Multirez unless I am doing blockout. Makes changes on lower subdivisions possible, smooths surface equally (or where you want most geometry), has way faster undo ...
actually blender has no deep history stack like maya or softimage, because there are modifier and data properties to keep important stuff like modifiers, uv, vertex groups/color etc.
Do want "dump modifiers, uv, vertex groups/color etc." button (just like Maya has "remove history stack" or however it's called)... those things spread like plague when kitbashing.
yeah, Blender has some of these tricky tricks, hopefully we got a better performance with the new opengl 2.1 support and opensubd
btw, are you sculpting in dyntopo mode or multiresolution?
actually blender has no deep history stack like maya or softimage, because there are modifier and data properties to keep important stuff like modifiers, uv, vertex groups/color etc.
I've been sclupting in Dynotop which works like wonders, almost as good as zbrush!
Been working on this:
I started the whole thing from a sphere and this is the second 3D sculpt I ever made from scratch with no base mesh.
My first was with Mudbox, which even though is a nice sclupting/painting software, the simple fact that it doesn't have a dyntopo/ dynamesh feature makes it totally irrelevant in the sculpting market...I mean come on, even sculptris has that!
In Mudbox, I like the fact that you have access to multiples layers of sclupt on which you can add details progressively but sincerely, for the price, I don't think it is interesting. I think autodesk should sell it packed with Maya
and not as a standalone software...
Though Zbrush still stays the king, I'm surprised on how much Blender sclupting features are quite complete : mirroring in all of the axis can be activated at the same time (in mudbox you can't do that), snake hook brush, the pinch brush work like wonders, the masking is easy to set and the hotkeys are very intuitive!
Though, one a bug or something happened and When I tried to sculpt details over low-rez surface, the surface wasnt subdividing for unkown reasons + Grab brush lags ALOT in dyntopo.
The presets brushes are quite sufficient for basic sculpting however can we create custom brushes?
Just wondering is there an Blender Addon/Plugin that allows you to use symmetry in a modo like way ?
You mean like an instance mirror type of thing, or a breaks all the time so you have to constantly delete half your model and re-mirror it type of thing?
You mean like an instance mirror type of thing, or a breaks all the time so you have to constantly delete half your model and re-mirror it type of thing?
modo does symmetry with one click you just enable it and whatever you do on one side happens live on the other side, on the axis you pick, i know you can do this stuff in Blender, but that mirror thing only works on one axis when active and you always have to prepare your model, on modo you can switch around as often you like, this is unbelivable helpful.
there a bunch of addons that automate symmetry in blender. The one I like the most is this one. surface constraint tools... it's bundle of really useful scripts for retopology. it has a really nice layout.
You could use two array modifiers. Have one tile 3 times in the x axis and the other in the y axis and you should be good to go by sculpting on the middle object. I've derped around with this method for texture painting and it works fairly well, so I imagine it works for sculpting too.
If your tilable texture consists of objects that are scattered across the ground it should be very doable with clever usage of the array modifier. If you just want to push a plane in and out and propagate the changes to the other corners of it, I personally find that Mudbox works best. Or, if you're dead set on not spending money, you can bake out a displacement map using Blender Internal to 32-bit float, save it out as a 32-bit exr, offset it in Krita, and apply the new displacement to a new plane in Blender and sculpt on that again.
Thanks darkmag07 and JodTheKrampus!
So in the end these are the methods I used before, haha. I was hoping for a tool that makes the process a little easier/less time consuming then baking out maps and reimport them with the done offset.
Does anyone know a good (efficient) way to sculpt tileable textures like ground textures in Blender? Is there a helpful tool or something?
Probably not quite what you're looking for, but this guy has some interesting techniques on making tileable textures in Blender (and more on his youtube channel). The tileable dirt texture is nice, it shows how to use the particle system to quickly add lots of small objects.
You could probably also automate the offset process a little bit by doing it in Blender's compositor with a file output node rather than using an external app.
Since you're interested I will go ahead and make a test build! It's written in C, not a Python addon, so I've got to set the build up in Windows which will take a bit. Check back ITT in a bit.
OK folks, here's a testbuild for the flatten faces operator. You can find it under Mesh->Cleanup->Flatten Non-planar Faces. Just select the faces you want flattened (or select them all) and run the operator.
When I was working with Maya, I sometimes used to create Quick Select sets of various objects when modeling and especially animating ( qucik selection set of controllers).
Is there a way to do the same in Blender?
Also, is it possible to create your own custom toolbar with ''Pithon'' pre-made scripts like in Maya (and XSI).
As for managing lots of objects you have a few options. If you want to save a set of vertices to be selected again you could use vertex groups. I think most people use Blender's layers to manage lots of objects, and Blender gives you a good number of layers to work with. If you want to give the layers a name to help you remember what to put on them there's an addon for that called Layer Management that you can enable in the user preferences.
Armatures each have their own independent layer system which you can use to organize your bones into different sets. You can figure out your standard way of organizing your bones so that you can hide and show different control bones easily. Of course if you're redistributing the rig it might behoove you to write a quick script that can switch between various sets of layers in the rig. If you want to look at how the "pros" do it there are .blend files from the open movies floating around the Internet that have the Open Movie rigs in them that you could open up and poke around in. The Open Movie assets are Creative Commons licensed so it's 100% legal to reproduce and share them.
When I was working with Maya, I sometimes used to create Quick Select sets of various objects when modeling and especially animating ( qucik selection set of controllers).
Is there a way to do the same in Blender?
Also, is it possible to create your own custom toolbar with ''Pithon'' pre-made scripts like in Maya (and XSI).
For managing complex scenes / object selection sets Super Grouper Addon is an option.
I'm trying my hand at some complicated hard-surface props using both subdivision surface and boolean mods. Unfortunately, the boolean mods create ngons that don't work well for edge flow in the subdiv mod, and applying the booleans after the subdiv creates a lot of smoothing artifacts. Does anyone have experience on how to do this better?
This is more of general modeling question than a Blender one, but still :
- If you want to get the clean, "traditional" highpoly look, you need to add control edges around these boolean parts manually.
- However and if your target art style allows it, you could very well keep the razor-sharp look of raw booleans. For these edges not to shade badly, set them as hard, or turn on auto smoothing of edges for the mesh at the desired value for these to be picked up.
For general reference here are one hundred and one pages of discussion on this specific subject :
Completed my first ever work in Blender. A lil female base mesh. That was quite a journey!
Helped myself with an already existing one (for the legs and the arms) and redid the retopo according to my needs.
It took me quite some time to get used the the general shortcuts and hotkeys but in the end, it speed my modeling workflow.
Now, I still have to open Maya from time to time to not forget how this software works also!
ANyway, I really enjoyed the intuitive and simple approach in Sculpting. The retopology tools are really good, though I'm a bit disappointed by Bsurface.:(
Time for some UV Unwrapping although, from what IVe seen, it doenst looks as good and complete as Maya..
I could never really get into bsrufaces for retopo, I prefer the manual way with face snapping and maybe the F2 addon (still learning this): [ame]www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5NvQihCrAc[/ame]
...
The retopology tools are really good, though I'm a bit disappointed by Bsurface.:(
Time for some UV Unwrapping although, from what IVe seen, it doenst looks as good and complete as Maya..
BSurfaces addon is essential to the retopo workflow, although out of the box settings hinder it a bit.
There is another addon that integrates BSurfaces and some other stuff, plus some unique tools. By far is my favorite addon for retopo work, it takes Blender to a whole nother level when it comes to retopo.
PHEW..finally managed to get the hang of the UV unwrapping workflow in Blender.
Gosh, it's quite...oddly made..?
I mean I'm really used to the old traditionnal way in Maya in which you simply select your edges manually, hit ''cut'' and it separates your selected portion into a new shell. Easy peasy. Also, what happening in the UV editor is sync with what's happening in the 3D viewport.
In Blender, it's all a bit too automated in my opinion. It works exactly like the Auto Unwrap UV bonus tool in Maya which I don't really like.
At first, I was quite amazed with it, especially the Live unwrap option but there's a lot of mistakes in the unwrapping there and there, not to mention, manual corrections are difficult to make sine you AlWAYS have to PIN your all of your shells (islands) before unwrapping again since the software unwraps the whole mesh...
Again, if you wanna cut some specific edges without changing your layout, you have to pin everything before doing so..what a hassle.
Live Unwrap is what is causing it to unwrap the entire mesh each time and require pinning. Be careful using that.
I made a video on UV Unwrapping in Blender a couple months back. It's not a very complex mesh, but it might show enough to understand how to approach unwrapping fairly efficiently in Blender.
I NEVER use live unwrap. But I think Blender uv skills are pretty high-level especially compared to 3Dsmax, I have not deep experience with maya, but I remember that you need a script also to move/scale/rotate the uvs precisely, in Blender at least you can put exact numbers during the transfomration and use the cursor as alternative manipulator also in the uv editor.
@blond
if you want unwrap just a single piece, in the 3dview just select the faces that you want to unwrap and press unwrap.
if you have already marked the seams, and you want to select an area, again in the 3dview in face mode selection, press ctrl+l and blender automatically fit the selection to the seams border.
I put a model through the cycles renderer a while ago and was really happy with how it turned out
My only complaint is that it took a while (almost 40 minutes with CUDA).
I had trouble getting a noise free image, at a certain point it just didn't seem like increasing the render cycles was doing anything so I ended up just rendering it at double size and resizing it in photoshop to reduce the noise which you can imagine... took twice as long to render.
Is this normal? Do you guys just render for a really long time or am I missing something?
My only complaint is that it took a while (almost 40 minutes with CUDA).
I had trouble getting a noise free image, at a certain point it just didn't seem like increasing the render cycles was doing anything so I ended up just rendering it at double size and resizing it in photoshop to reduce the noise which you can imagine... took twice as long to render.
Is this normal? Do you guys just render for a really long time or am I missing something?
also having small light sources with strong values doesn't help.
I took 20min per frame in hd size via CPU for the characters that you can see in the demoreel, but it was 1 year ago on a 2700k.... so I think the same frame via GPU could be around 5 min on my new gtx980...
can you post somewhere the scene, so I can take a look (if you mind, you cand decimate your character )
also having small light sources with strong values doesn't help.
I took 20min per frame in hd size via CPU for the characters that you can see in the demoreel, but it was 1 year ago on a 2700k.... so I think the same frame via GPU could be around 5 min on my new gtx980...
can you post somewhere the scene, so I can take a look (if you mind, you cand decimate your character )
I do have a really strong spotlight, maybe thats the problem?
I'll PM you the scene in a second, it was already decimated for the render.
Also I'm on a GTX 760, not the greatest card but still 40 mins seems like a long time for one frame.
Conventional path tracers can struggle with strong, small lights. Generally you'll get the most noise-free result with Cycles right now if you have some light coming from all sides. Once portal lights are included you should get a little bit more flexibility with how things are rendered.
I've put together a pretty comprehensive PBR surface shader for Cycles that works damn well in my limited testing. It has pretty accurate ad-hoc roughness-dependent Fresnel and diffusion that I proofed against Mitsuba, it's energy-conserving in a way that handles transition areas between metal and plastic really nicely and doesn't introduce fireflies, and it uses Toolbag's horizon occlusion term to regulate normal map intensity, greatly reducing artifacts on the edges of normal-mapped surfaces. Here's some example renders with Quixel brick, just to get your body ready for my tutorial. First, with no normal map this is the resulting render:
Pretty boring, in spite of Megascans. Here's the second render, this is with the normal map applied in a conventional manner for Cycles. Note the awful black spots.
If you've worked with Cycles for a while you'll probably be familiar with these. Here's the last render. This uses the horizon occlusion term to decrease the strength of the normal map where it causes those artifacts.
It does have to sample the normal map twice to do this so the technique may be of limited usefulness for now in real-time, but it's a big step up for Cycles image quality in my opinion to be able to use normal maps like this.
Currently the shader doesn't support anisotropy or alpha test or a metallic setup or any of that other fancy Disney BRDF stuff. Maybe I'll do that as an extension.
Here are some Quixel balls to show off the shader a bit more. Note how the Fresnel of the specularity doesn't look completely wacky on the rougher surfaces.
Is that achieved through clever use of regular Cycles nodes, or is it a OSL shader ? (I would assume that OSL might give more creative freedom ... but then of course, Cycles nodes being accelerated might be better for the end user)
Replies
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
http://store.steampowered.com/app/365670
Everything have been silky smooth up to now until you know, after alot of vertex merging and tweaking, the scene started to lag and I am experiencing some slow down.
In Maya, when these happened, it was because you geometry had alot of history on it and you hd to clear it. However, may that be the same reason I have slowdown in Blender? How do I clear my history then?
Tbank you.
Edit: OK I figured it out. I had a smooth modifer applied on both my sclupt and mesh, causing framerate drops!
btw, are you sculpting in dyntopo mode or multiresolution?
actually blender has no deep history stack like maya or softimage, because there are modifier and data properties to keep important stuff like modifiers, uv, vertex groups/color etc.
Open subdiv is sure to improve performance (although only in very specific case).
[As a low-mid end computer user I would love any kind of performance increase...mainly in exporting, I find that I can make more hi-rez meshes than I can export for baking without crashing
Multirez unless I am doing blockout. Makes changes on lower subdivisions possible, smooths surface equally (or where you want most geometry), has way faster undo
...
Do want "dump modifiers, uv, vertex groups/color etc." button (just like Maya has "remove history stack" or however it's called)... those things spread like plague when kitbashing.
Made a girly scream when I read that.
I've been sclupting in Dynotop which works like wonders, almost as good as zbrush!
Been working on this:
I started the whole thing from a sphere and this is the second 3D sculpt I ever made from scratch with no base mesh.
My first was with Mudbox, which even though is a nice sclupting/painting software, the simple fact that it doesn't have a dyntopo/ dynamesh feature makes it totally irrelevant in the sculpting market...I mean come on, even sculptris has that!
In Mudbox, I like the fact that you have access to multiples layers of sclupt on which you can add details progressively but sincerely, for the price, I don't think it is interesting. I think autodesk should sell it packed with Maya
and not as a standalone software...
Though Zbrush still stays the king, I'm surprised on how much Blender sclupting features are quite complete : mirroring in all of the axis can be activated at the same time (in mudbox you can't do that), snake hook brush, the pinch brush work like wonders, the masking is easy to set and the hotkeys are very intuitive!
Though, one a bug or something happened and When I tried to sculpt details over low-rez surface, the surface wasnt subdividing for unkown reasons + Grab brush lags ALOT in dyntopo.
The presets brushes are quite sufficient for basic sculpting however can we create custom brushes?
you could also download brush packets/addons like this one
if you want additional brushes rather quickly.
[ame="
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-XHii26cfvWQ21zNDkxNWF1N28/view
You mean like an instance mirror type of thing, or a breaks all the time so you have to constantly delete half your model and re-mirror it type of thing?
modo does symmetry with one click you just enable it and whatever you do on one side happens live on the other side, on the axis you pick, i know you can do this stuff in Blender, but that mirror thing only works on one axis when active and you always have to prepare your model, on modo you can switch around as often you like, this is unbelivable helpful.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5Q...ew?usp=sharing
So in the end these are the methods I used before, haha. I was hoping for a tool that makes the process a little easier/less time consuming then baking out maps and reimport them with the done offset.
Probably not quite what you're looking for, but this guy has some interesting techniques on making tileable textures in Blender (and more on his youtube channel). The tileable dirt texture is nice, it shows how to use the particle system to quickly add lots of small objects.
[ame]
[ame]
[ame]
https://developer.blender.org/D1275
If even a single person wants a test build just ask in this thread and I will put it up in short order, just for you. :>
Testbuild
This is a test build and the standard disclaimers apply. If you would cry if Blender ate the file you're working on, don't use the testbuild with it.
When I was working with Maya, I sometimes used to create Quick Select sets of various objects when modeling and especially animating ( qucik selection set of controllers).
Is there a way to do the same in Blender?
Also, is it possible to create your own custom toolbar with ''Pithon'' pre-made scripts like in Maya (and XSI).
Blond, this tutorial may be of interest to you as far as the scripting goes.
https://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/07/12/creating-custom-toolbar-panel-python-scripting/
As for managing lots of objects you have a few options. If you want to save a set of vertices to be selected again you could use vertex groups. I think most people use Blender's layers to manage lots of objects, and Blender gives you a good number of layers to work with. If you want to give the layers a name to help you remember what to put on them there's an addon for that called Layer Management that you can enable in the user preferences.
Armatures each have their own independent layer system which you can use to organize your bones into different sets. You can figure out your standard way of organizing your bones so that you can hide and show different control bones easily. Of course if you're redistributing the rig it might behoove you to write a quick script that can switch between various sets of layers in the rig. If you want to look at how the "pros" do it there are .blend files from the open movies floating around the Internet that have the Open Movie rigs in them that you could open up and poke around in. The Open Movie assets are Creative Commons licensed so it's 100% legal to reproduce and share them.
https://vimeo.com/26339130
Hard to believe this stuff is free...
I'm trying my hand at some complicated hard-surface props using both subdivision surface and boolean mods. Unfortunately, the boolean mods create ngons that don't work well for edge flow in the subdiv mod, and applying the booleans after the subdiv creates a lot of smoothing artifacts. Does anyone have experience on how to do this better?
- If you want to get the clean, "traditional" highpoly look, you need to add control edges around these boolean parts manually.
- However and if your target art style allows it, you could very well keep the razor-sharp look of raw booleans. For these edges not to shade badly, set them as hard, or turn on auto smoothing of edges for the mesh at the desired value for these to be picked up.
For general reference here are one hundred and one pages of discussion on this specific subject :
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=56014
Completed my first ever work in Blender. A lil female base mesh. That was quite a journey!
Helped myself with an already existing one (for the legs and the arms) and redid the retopo according to my needs.
It took me quite some time to get used the the general shortcuts and hotkeys but in the end, it speed my modeling workflow.
Now, I still have to open Maya from time to time to not forget how this software works also!
ANyway, I really enjoyed the intuitive and simple approach in Sculpting. The retopology tools are really good, though I'm a bit disappointed by Bsurface.:(
Time for some UV Unwrapping although, from what IVe seen, it doenst looks as good and complete as Maya..
There is another addon that integrates BSurfaces and some other stuff, plus some unique tools. By far is my favorite addon for retopo work, it takes Blender to a whole nother level when it comes to retopo.
Retopo MT
I strongly advise going through the thread, he's got a lot of info and demos in there.
UV unwrapping workflow in Blender is convoluted at best. It takes time getting used to, other than that it's pretty decent.
Gosh, it's quite...oddly made..?
I mean I'm really used to the old traditionnal way in Maya in which you simply select your edges manually, hit ''cut'' and it separates your selected portion into a new shell. Easy peasy. Also, what happening in the UV editor is sync with what's happening in the 3D viewport.
In Blender, it's all a bit too automated in my opinion. It works exactly like the Auto Unwrap UV bonus tool in Maya which I don't really like.
At first, I was quite amazed with it, especially the Live unwrap option but there's a lot of mistakes in the unwrapping there and there, not to mention, manual corrections are difficult to make sine you AlWAYS have to PIN your all of your shells (islands) before unwrapping again since the software unwraps the whole mesh...
Again, if you wanna cut some specific edges without changing your layout, you have to pin everything before doing so..what a hassle.
ANy good free UV unwrapper?:p
I made a video on UV Unwrapping in Blender a couple months back. It's not a very complex mesh, but it might show enough to understand how to approach unwrapping fairly efficiently in Blender.
[ame]
if you want unwrap just a single piece, in the 3dview just select the faces that you want to unwrap and press unwrap.
if you have already marked the seams, and you want to select an area, again in the 3dview in face mode selection, press ctrl+l and blender automatically fit the selection to the seams border.
hope this help.
Misread.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDRTjzLNK0g
I put a model through the cycles renderer a while ago and was really happy with how it turned out
My only complaint is that it took a while (almost 40 minutes with CUDA).
I had trouble getting a noise free image, at a certain point it just didn't seem like increasing the render cycles was doing anything so I ended up just rendering it at double size and resizing it in photoshop to reduce the noise which you can imagine... took twice as long to render.
Is this normal? Do you guys just render for a really long time or am I missing something?
lately Cycles is getting faster, be sure to turno on the multiple importace sampling for lights and HDRI, than recently they added the portal lights
also having small light sources with strong values doesn't help.
I took 20min per frame in hd size via CPU for the characters that you can see in the demoreel, but it was 1 year ago on a 2700k.... so I think the same frame via GPU could be around 5 min on my new gtx980...
can you post somewhere the scene, so I can take a look
I'll PM you the scene in a second, it was already decimated for the render.
Also I'm on a GTX 760, not the greatest card but still 40 mins seems like a long time for one frame.
I've put together a pretty comprehensive PBR surface shader for Cycles that works damn well in my limited testing. It has pretty accurate ad-hoc roughness-dependent Fresnel and diffusion that I proofed against Mitsuba, it's energy-conserving in a way that handles transition areas between metal and plastic really nicely and doesn't introduce fireflies, and it uses Toolbag's horizon occlusion term to regulate normal map intensity, greatly reducing artifacts on the edges of normal-mapped surfaces. Here's some example renders with Quixel brick, just to get your body ready for my tutorial. First, with no normal map this is the resulting render:
Pretty boring, in spite of Megascans. Here's the second render, this is with the normal map applied in a conventional manner for Cycles. Note the awful black spots.
If you've worked with Cycles for a while you'll probably be familiar with these. Here's the last render. This uses the horizon occlusion term to decrease the strength of the normal map where it causes those artifacts.
It does have to sample the normal map twice to do this so the technique may be of limited usefulness for now in real-time, but it's a big step up for Cycles image quality in my opinion to be able to use normal maps like this.
Currently the shader doesn't support anisotropy or alpha test or a metallic setup or any of that other fancy Disney BRDF stuff. Maybe I'll do that as an extension.
Here are some Quixel balls to show off the shader a bit more. Note how the Fresnel of the specularity doesn't look completely wacky on the rougher surfaces.
Gonna go write up that guide now.
are you the guy that makes the super-intersting video on youtube about cycles and PBR ?
Is that achieved through clever use of regular Cycles nodes, or is it a OSL shader ? (I would assume that OSL might give more creative freedom ... but then of course, Cycles nodes being accelerated might be better for the end user)
Regardless, can't wait to try it !