can you do the last one if you change "pivot center" to active element and "transformation orientation" to normal? and make sure the face you want to align to is selected last so it is active selection
You would place the 3d cursor where you want it to pivot, change the transformation orientation to normal, select which edges you want aligned, then press Z + Z (or YY etc) then Scale 0.
Those solutions doesn't seems to work. On that specific case I would do a cut trough with axis snapping then delete the vertices I don't want.
But I agree that the normal behavior should be G,G with vertex snapping !
can you do the last one if you change "pivot center" to active element and "transformation orientation" to normal? and make sure the face you want to align to is selected last so it is active selection
Thanks this works for the alignment part of the faces, but I have still to figure out how to align the vertex while keeping the correct direction.
You would place the 3d cursor where you want it to pivot, change the transformation orientation to normal, select which edges you want aligned, then press Z + Z (or YY etc) then Scale 0.
At least that's how I would do it.
This doesn't work, because as you add selections to what you set previously, it will update the pivot orientation (don't know why, since it's set to 3D cursor, that in theory has a fixed position).
Those solutions doesn't seems to work. On that specific case I would do a cut trough with axis snapping then delete the vertices I don't want.
But I agree that the normal behavior should be G,G with vertex snapping !
This is the only workaround that works, I've also tried the vertex slide without much success, the vertex snap turns on incremental snap.
This doesn't work, because as you add selections to what you set previously, it will update the pivot orientation (don't know why, since it's set to 3D cursor, that in theory has a fixed position).
The pivot orientation gets updated because it's set to Normal. The cursor only affects the pivot location. If you need a custom pivot you can get one with Ctrl+Alt+Space that's aligned to your selection, then you can pick that orientation from the menu and it won't get updated with additional selections.
You can give these mnemonic names, but I usually call mine Jon. If you need to delete the orientation later you can get to that operator easily with the spacebar menu.
Blond: make sure that transparency is checked in material settings and set to Z transparency. Make sure viewport shading mode is Material and that the texture has rgb to intensity checked and dvar 1. Then make sure that alpha and specularity are set to 0 under the material properties so that when you paint white, the mesh will be opaque.
Although, I have to admit painting in Blender is quite wonky, I sometimes have some weird glitch going on, the brush profiles are really limited. I give props t those who manage to get great hand painting textures out of it.
The pivot orientation gets updated because it's set to Normal. The cursor only affects the pivot location. If you need a custom pivot you can get one with Ctrl+Alt+Space that's aligned to your selection, then you can pick that orientation from the menu and it won't get updated with additional selections.
You can give these mnemonic names, but I usually call mine Jon. If you need to delete the orientation later you can get to that operator easily with the spacebar menu.
Thanks that's really helpful, I think I've to wait till they fix the snapping with constrained axis to get a proper solution to this kind of situations.
Thanks that's really helpful, I think I've to wait till they fix the snapping with constrained axis to get a proper solution to this kind of situations.
Yeah, and in the meantime if you just try to put your mouse on the edge where the vertex will intersect it you can still usually get a pretty good (albeit not perfect) result.
Blond I agree that there's some odd stuff about the painting in Blender that could stand to be improved or fixed. The projection especially seems a little glitchy to me too, but I'm not really sure how to fix it.
Pfiuh..learning a new software is really exhausting! I'm so slooow.
When I was working on my student short within Maya, I modeled-textured my character in one week...
I hope to be one day as fast in Blender. I've started learning it since April.
My project started like this, testing the sculpt features :
And now, I'm testing facial deofrmation to make sure, she looks decent when I'll rig her..
I'm mostly an animator and not a modeler (which is why the modeling work aint that good) so I don't feel any thrill or interest in this project really (yet). I'm really looking forward to bring life to her, ANIMATION BABY!!
Something tells me riggin inside of Blender will be painful though.X(
EDIT: Note that the hardest part of this, is that I wanna export her within Unreal so no fancy rig or blendshape.
You can get blendshapes into Unreal from Blender, and even blendshape animation. You have to uncheck "apply modifiers" in the FBX exporter though. Figured I'd tell you about that before you spent an hour or two trying to figure out why your blendshapes didn't export (or didn't try to export them at all.)
They're heavier than bones to be sure but if all you're doing is rendering out an animation with a few characters the time it saves you is well worth the cost. Epic used a blend shape rig with their kite demo and it was basically fine. If you want to make sure that it's super optimized you could potentially split the head off so that the blendshape calculation doesn't go through so many polys, but you probably aren't going to run into performance problems. (At least that's the impression that I get--if your computer can run UE4 it should be able to run UE4+blendshapes too.)
I believe that Unreal supports joint scale. Not sure about translation. You need to have a root bone if you're using the mesh for gameplay of any kind, but I think it's not necessary otherwise, though I am honestly not sure as I've never tried not having a root bone. If you have a root bone it should be at the origin, of course, and it doesn't necessarily have to be displayed as an ordinary octahedral bone--you can change it to that circle-with-arrows curve or any type of custom curve that you want to model. (Extra objects for curves addon has some handy curve shapes available that you can create quickly rather than having to model simple quad controls for all your bones.)
I guess that what I'm saying is that I recommend having a root bone and that rigging isn't particularly my area of expertise so I hope that someone who knows something can chime in.
Nice, it's looking full featured already ! Can't wait to play with it. With this and the Cycles node setup by Jed, Blender might soon be the first package to ever have both realtime and offline rendering PBR support at the same time. Fantastic stuff.
Cooked : Yeah, I actually tried that build a few weeks ago but for some reason I couldn't quite get it to work as shown in the example screenshots. I will give it another go later ...
Between Blender and Maya LT, I'm really wondering why people would prefer LT. I can understand big studios have already settled their pipeline so it's hard to change software on the go but I think move indie game dev (as in serious ones) should use it.
Yay there is a video on how the "PBR" setup was made.
I am gonna try to merge it with this series of videos on more accurate PBR and hopefully get results good enough so that I can ditch the old already mentioned PBR build that I currently use:
Changing HDRs and getting the right roughness might still be a painful though.
Unfortunately that's still pretty far off from PBR. The specularity isn't normalized and since there's no slot to change specular power on a material in the node editor there's really no good way to implement a roughness texture in the Blender viewport right now.
It looks pretty decent, but I think it's a little disingenuous to call it PBR as the shader basically has none of the practical advantages that PBR gives you (i.e. accurate translation from a roughness texture to both the blurriness of the cubemap, and the specular power and intensity.)
Edit: I see that he put PBR in quotes on the video, which I guess is good enough to placate me.
Does Unreal supports joints scale? Or at lest joints translation?
Are we obliged to have a root bone or i can leave my bones floaty and separated?
-Yes, UE4 supports joints scale. However, its character retargeting uses translation (its good!)
-Root Bone: You dont have to, but i would strongly recommend it. Have a look at the free assets from epic, you can export them from the engine into Blender with fbx.
Edit: I see that he put PBR in quotes on the video, which I guess is good enough to placate me.
He also stated: "By "PBR" I just mean the prettiest shader I could muster in Blender's viewport "
Specular transition is easy to implement, roughness...not so much. Another things missing are energy conversation and the way reflections behave (you know all that flipping and stretching) [I could be wrong on this one].
I am gonna upload here a file with built on improvements (middle bluriness map for better roughness, energy conversation with better fresnel and Albedo, metalness, roughness, AO and normal inputs) as soon as I figure out how to get normal maps working with this.
Quick question: in the material node editor I can get the value of a specific channel from a texture by using a RGB separator node, but is there a way to get the value of the alpha channel of a texture?
Quick question: in the material node editor I can get the value of a specific channel from a texture by using a RGB separator node, but is there a way to get the value of the alpha channel of a texture?
In BGE I would use 2nd texture, in Cycles' nodes there are 2 "outputs" 1 for color and 1 for alpha channel.
It's actually directly for real time use in the viewport, using GLSL. The goal is to use the provided textures as is, ideally, which means separating the alpha channel into its own image is outside the scope of the project. But maybe I can get around that by using python to create that extra texture directly inside Blender.
Anyone of you ever gave a try to the rig system inside Blender?
I've used it a bit. Overall it's not too bad, I felt it was a bit similar to the way I did things in Maya though I feel like I prefer Blender's weight painting tools a little better than Mayas.
For mechanical stuff though some of the constraints can have their quirks, but for organics I found it to be pretty straightforward. I believe there is a pretty good plugin floating around for setting up a Unreal 4 rig similar to the official tools out for max and maya.
Just a quick note to add an entry to 'games that use Blender in their pipelines'.
I've been reading the Gamasutra Post-mortem on USC Games's 'Vanishing Point' and Blender is there in the software list:
"Software Used: Unreal 4, Autodesk Maya, MotionBuilder, Fraps, Microsoft Visual Studio, Blender, Audacity."
I am not enough of an expert to say exactly how sound the methods presented in [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiNCMY58foA"]this[/ame] video series are, but I've been using the PBR shader I made from the series to plan out and test general ideas about my materials before I send my models to Substance.
Well it's not a great alternative, but you could increase the number of segments with the mousewheel, deselect the ones on the end with Alt+Shift+Selection mouse, and delete the edge loops in the middle with XG (Delete->Edge Loops). Or you could do two cuts and some edge slides, or do one cut at a time and just put it where you want it straight away. But the XG way is going to be a little more accurate.
Replies
This is self explanatory, but, there is a way to proper snap on Edges?
Leave the magnet on or off (I keep it off, holding cntrl activates it) then press G and the axis you want to snap to.
I think I've found a bug, probably it's the version I'm using (2.74 - 2015-05-09), because if I lock an axis, the snap does this:
if I only press G and move it to the edge, it snaps.
Just to not double post.
There is a way to do something like this in Blender?
Set a custom position for the pivot and align the selection to a set point
At least that's how I would do it.
But I agree that the normal behavior should be G,G with vertex snapping !
Thanks this works for the alignment part of the faces, but I have still to figure out how to align the vertex while keeping the correct direction.
This doesn't work, because as you add selections to what you set previously, it will update the pivot orientation (don't know why, since it's set to 3D cursor, that in theory has a fixed position).
This is the only workaround that works, I've also tried the vertex slide without much success, the vertex snap turns on incremental snap.
The pivot orientation gets updated because it's set to Normal. The cursor only affects the pivot location. If you need a custom pivot you can get one with Ctrl+Alt+Space that's aligned to your selection, then you can pick that orientation from the menu and it won't get updated with additional selections.
You can give these mnemonic names, but I usually call mine Jon. If you need to delete the orientation later you can get to that operator easily with the spacebar menu.
Although, I have to admit painting in Blender is quite wonky, I sometimes have some weird glitch going on, the brush profiles are really limited. I give props t those who manage to get great hand painting textures out of it.
Thanks that's really helpful, I think I've to wait till they fix the snapping with constrained axis to get a proper solution to this kind of situations.
Yeah, and in the meantime if you just try to put your mouse on the edge where the vertex will intersect it you can still usually get a pretty good (albeit not perfect) result.
Blond I agree that there's some odd stuff about the painting in Blender that could stand to be improved or fixed. The projection especially seems a little glitchy to me too, but I'm not really sure how to fix it.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/mesh_tinyCAD
When I was working on my student short within Maya, I modeled-textured my character in one week...
I hope to be one day as fast in Blender. I've started learning it since April.
My project started like this, testing the sculpt features :
And now, I'm testing facial deofrmation to make sure, she looks decent when I'll rig her..
I'm mostly an animator and not a modeler (which is why the modeling work aint that good) so I don't feel any thrill or interest in this project really (yet). I'm really looking forward to bring life to her, ANIMATION BABY!!
Something tells me riggin inside of Blender will be painful though.X(
EDIT: Note that the hardest part of this, is that I wanna export her within Unreal so no fancy rig or blendshape.
However, I heard they're quite heavy?
If only I could figure out how it works
Does Unreal supports joints scale? Or at lest joints translation?
Are we obliged to have a root bone or i can leave my bones floaty and separated?
I guess that what I'm saying is that I recommend having a root bone and that rigging isn't particularly my area of expertise so I hope that someone who knows something can chime in.
Finally managed to complete my first bake (AO) within Blender.
(I don't know how to embed a video in this forum)
https://vimeo.com/127949223
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yy1p3bq886tr8mo/Blender-PBR_win64.zip?dl=0
Test scene:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z7nrf6c9ca22vs9/pbr.blend
Yes!
Why aren't more indie using Blender?
Between Blender and Maya LT, I'm really wondering why people would prefer LT. I can understand big studios have already settled their pipeline so it's hard to change software on the go but I think move indie game dev (as in serious ones) should use it.
I'm pretty sure that a lot of small/mid studios using Blender, I already know someone.
I am gonna try to merge it with this series of videos on more accurate PBR and hopefully get results good enough so that I can ditch the old already mentioned PBR build that I currently use:
Changing HDRs and getting the right roughness might still be a painful though.
It looks pretty decent, but I think it's a little disingenuous to call it PBR as the shader basically has none of the practical advantages that PBR gives you (i.e. accurate translation from a roughness texture to both the blurriness of the cubemap, and the specular power and intensity.)
Edit: I see that he put PBR in quotes on the video, which I guess is good enough to placate me.
-Root Bone: You dont have to, but i would strongly recommend it. Have a look at the free assets from epic, you can export them from the engine into Blender with fbx.
He also stated: "By "PBR" I just mean the prettiest shader I could muster in Blender's viewport
Specular transition is easy to implement, roughness...not so much. Another things missing are energy conversation and the way reflections behave (you know all that flipping and stretching) [I could be wrong on this one].
I am gonna upload here a file with built on improvements (middle bluriness map for better roughness, energy conversation with better fresnel and Albedo, metalness, roughness, AO and normal inputs) as soon as I figure out how to get normal maps working with this.
Looking forward to it/ them.
Couldn't get normal maps to work, but here is the file if someone wants to play with "PBR".
In BGE I would use 2nd texture, in Cycles' nodes there are 2 "outputs" 1 for color and 1 for alpha channel.
Time to rig her now..
Anyone of you ever gave a try to the rig system inside Blender?
- Humane Rigging
- BlenderGuru (Lee Salvemini guest series)
- CGMasters (Rigging, Animation, and various others)
I've used it a bit. Overall it's not too bad, I felt it was a bit similar to the way I did things in Maya though I feel like I prefer Blender's weight painting tools a little better than Mayas.
For mechanical stuff though some of the constraints can have their quirks, but for organics I found it to be pretty straightforward. I believe there is a pretty good plugin floating around for setting up a Unreal 4 rig similar to the official tools out for max and maya.
[ame]
Just a quick note to add an entry to 'games that use Blender in their pipelines'.
I've been reading the Gamasutra Post-mortem on USC Games's 'Vanishing Point' and Blender is there in the software list:
"Software Used: Unreal 4, Autodesk Maya, MotionBuilder, Fraps, Microsoft Visual Studio, Blender, Audacity."
http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KevinWong/20150520/243620/Vanishing_Point_Postmortem.php
press f6 after inserting a loopcut
Video of the functionality for anyone who hasn't used Max before:
https://youtu.be/pjolNzkYbSA?t=1m11s
At 1:11, you see the pinch slider in the connect dialog