Pheewww...almost done!! Can't wait to finish this dogdamn rig and start animating her!
This interhsip is realy tiresome and it's tough keepng track of personal project.-_-
Anyway,here ya go, my first very first project inside of Blender.
Some probably followed the evolution of this thing since a few pages now haha.
You may find the model is off-shape or anatomically incorrect, that's normal, I'm not character modeller, nor a modeler at all.:D
I do have a good modeling friend which pointed some flagrant anatomy and design flaws.
Basically, to learn the Blender software properly, I wanted to use my knowledge of Maya and see what i could do inside of Blender.
After a tons of video tutorials and figuring out stuff, this baby came out.
I've tried to make the rig as simple as possible using only joints and shapes jsut in case I wanna export her into a game engine.:)
The rig features for now:
iK-FK switch
Stretchy limbs + cartoon bend controls (something I had never done before in Maya)!
An elbow/knee lock system ( kinda buggy but still does the job in most situation, this is a pain to do in Maya)
Foot roll options and such
Animatable cape and accesories and hair ( I wanted to put a dynamic option which is something pretty easy to set up in Maya with joints but with Blender, it's all a freaking pain)..
On my end I am starting to dabble into Blender rigging and posing in the hope of soon getting into animation (I will probably maintain a thread of noob questions on that topic on BA). Now that you took the process from start to finish, could you maybe list an exhaustive (but not redundant) list of learning materials/videos that made it possible for you to get there ? This could be helpful for a lot of people starting out.
Anyone here use Blender for sculpting? Or in particular did sculpting in both Zbrush and Blender?
I have always been sculpting in Zbrush, but thought I'd try it out in Blender, seeing as I use it for practically everything else. One thing bugs me A LOT though. My eyes can't seem to get the right feedback for any sculpting I do on the model. So basically I can't 'feel' the depth, so I'll make a change, and if I rotate the model, the changes are extreme and ridiculous.
I tried playing with the lens angle, various matcaps, but it just seems like it doesn't make much difference.
Has anyone had the same issue? And in that case, know of a solution? Maybe I just underestimate the complexity of that feedback, and have been taking it for granted in Zbrush.
Not sure if it's still the case as I've changed mine a little but by default blender has(had?) two standard sculpt brushes "Brush" and "SculptDraw". I used to accidentally toggle between them with the hotkey but they had different setting so would often do something I wasn't expecting like you described, making huge changes to the surface form.
If it's still a problem you can get rid of brush by shift selecting it and shift clicking the X below the picture of it then save and restart blender. Can even do that then file>save startup file and it will be gone in the default scene every time you start blender
@derphouse - Do you have the ambient occlusion option on (in the "n-panel" around where the matcap option is)? I usually have to fiddle with the settings a bit, but it makes it a lot easier to see the bumps and things while sculpting.
Derphouse : this is very interesting ... because for me it is actually the opposite. As in, I find it near impossible to get a good feel for the volume and surface qualities of a model in Zbrush, whereas the Blender viewport (and any regular 3D program for that matter) provide me with very accurate visual information.
That being said, the default lighting in the Blender viewport is quite awful, so you might want to play with that first and foremost. One thing that helps a lot too is to set a shortcut for "Center View to Cursor". This allows you to make the camera rotate precisely around the point where the 3D cursor is located, which in turn greatly improves depth perception. As shown here :
@Frankie: I don't think that's exactly what's happening, anyways I'm using the clay brush..
@xrg: Thanks! That actually helped quite a lot. Still not 'perfect' with smooth shading, but it definetely gave some more depth. - Awesome tutorial with the dagger by the way, just watched it last night.
@pior: I feel fine navigating, but I'll keep that in mind
On my end I am starting to dabble into Blender rigging and posing in the hope of soon getting into animation (I will probably maintain a thread of noob questions on that topic on BA). Now that you took the process from start to finish, could you maybe list an exhaustive (but not redundant) list of learning materials/videos that made it possible for you to get there ? This could be helpful for a lot of people starting out.
Hey pior, if you're looking to get into Blender's rigging and animation I highly recommend checking out the following two tutorial series. They do a great job of covering the fundamentals in a clear and systematic way and then they build on top of that. I got both of them and it really helped me to improve my skills.
Thanks a ton for the links Mongrelman, Gmanx and Lamoot ! I really like what I see in the Blenderguru one, especially the simplicity of creating custom bone shape controllers as demonstrated at the end of part3, very cool stuff. I definitely need to watch all these.
So far I have been going through this introduction to Rigify, and that too was surprisingly simple.
It's pretty great to see how well this rig behaves, even when driving a model with mere automatic weights :
Only downside is that this control rig doesn't seem to be able to seamlessly transition between IK and FK without killing the pose of the limb being worked on. Or maybe I am just missing something ...
Regardless, can't wait to learn more ! And another question in passing : is there a reliable Onion Skin feature (or add-on) available somewhere ?
Anyone here use Blender for sculpting? Or in particular did sculpting in both Zbrush and Blender?
I have always been sculpting in Zbrush, but thought I'd try it out in Blender, seeing as I use it for practically everything else. One thing bugs me A LOT though. My eyes can't seem to get the right feedback for any sculpting I do on the model. So basically I can't 'feel' the depth, so I'll make a change, and if I rotate the model, the changes are extreme and ridiculous.
I tried playing with the lens angle, various matcaps, but it just seems like it doesn't make much difference.
Has anyone had the same issue? And in that case, know of a solution? Maybe I just underestimate the complexity of that feedback, and have been taking it for granted in Zbrush.
Yeah. I solved it way back when I was working in Blender for sculpting by messing around with the "solid OpenGL lights" under the tab in the preferences panel. There was a suggestion on how to do it from someone in this thread or another Blender thread on Polycount. Problem is I can't for the life of me find the post even though I've looked. It was night and day though, and at the time I thought it should've been the default way of setting up the lighting. You might be able to get something similar by messing around with the lights.
Edit: Found it by using Google instead of default Polycount search.
Hey Pior, if you bring up the n panel (right hand side in the 3d view) and go down to rig main properties you can snap IK to FK pose or FK to IK pose then keyframe the bones of the inactive mode so when you switch the pose is identical.
Rigify rig is really nice but because its so complicated it's hard to retroactively tweak and it also uses more bones that the game might need. If I use rigify I turn off deform on all the DEF bones and turn it on for all the ORG bones in the last layer. I think you can do it by selecting all the ORG or DEF bones in edit mode, finding the deform button in the bone properties, toggling it on or off then right clicking it and doing "copy to selected".
@Dashiva hey thanks a lot! Changing the lighting actually made a lot of difference. I'm playing a bit with the matcaps as well. So far, no matcap and one light directly from above works pretty well.
@pior I see what you meant about the default lighting now
EDIT:
@MmAaXx thanks! Yeah I agree I'm liking the control of lighting much more. Tbh, I love using Zbrush, but just like the integration of Mudbox into Maya, I imagine it won't be many years before Blender is at a high level with sculpting (Just looking at the increase in viewport performance now). And that's really my only problem with Zbrush; It has TONS of great sculpting tools, but I really only end up using about 5% of them, which means if I could quickly be switching between tasks in one app like blender, I'd be a happy man! I never really got into using ZModeler, so I can't really say much about that tool, but I haven't heard much about its use since release?
Frankie, thanks, I got it now ! I was aware of these context-sensitive FK/IK switch buttons ... but it turns out that it was their labelling that was confusing me, and you led me on the right path.
So basically, when currently working in IK and wishing to switch to FK (IK to FK), one has to click the "Snap FK to IK" button. It actually makes sense now that I think of it, I suppose I was just reading it too fast And there doesn't seem to be a need to even create a keyframe for that to work, so, it's all good ! Very solid stuff. My only gripe with the system is the way the foot and hand IK and FK controllers are of exactly the same shape, which makes selecting them awkward. I wish there were grouped and could be intuitively selected without having to think much about it. But that's a minor issue.
Other animation tips I have are;
-motion paths are great, https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1693140/game/motionpath.gif
-alt+scroll wheel for changing frames
-set up a custom hotkey for shift+alt+scroll wheel to skip to next keyframe
-set up a custom hotkey to delete keyframe of selected object only in the 3d view (this was hard to do for some reason), its "anim.keyframe_delete" in 3d view > pose
-you can delete the custom shapes and blender keeps the mesh data, get them back with "bpy.context.scene.objects.link(bpy.data.objects)" where WGT-shoulder.L is whatever you want to recover (or make a new scene and link all the custom objects there then delete from main scene)
-latest version of blender makes you load the NLA editor to delete actions as it puts them in there to stop them getting accidentally deleted when they have no users.
-paste mirror keyframe in 3d view is great but also now works in the action editor so you can mirror whole sections of animation, you need to select the objects in the object summary on the left for it to work though
-set up a custom hotkey to delete keyframe of selected object only in the 3d view (this was hard to do for some reason), its "anim.keyframe_delete" in 3d view > pose
This is precisely what I am having trouble with. If I use this command I am getting a "No active keying set" error ; and in general I am having trouble removing a specific keyframe from a specific bone. More precisely :
Let's say I have a character with a large number of keyframes already, on 1-6-12-18-24. But then I am not satisfied with the keyframe for the wrist on frame 6. What is the process for quickly deleting this keyframe from the wrist bone (location and rotation), without affecting the other keyframes established at frame 6 for other objects? (all that without having to fiddle with the dope sheet or the graph editor, because having to select the bone I want to affect in these panels is redundant as I already have it selected in the 3D view). This is kind of driving me crazy
[edit] Ha, nevermind ! Instead of recreating the shortcut I simply edited it, and it works fine now. Also stumbled on your original BA post on the subject It's so much better that way !!
Other animation tips I have are;
-motion paths are great, https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1693140/game/motionpath.gif
-alt+scroll wheel for changing frames
-set up a custom hotkey for shift+alt+scroll wheel to skip to next keyframe
-set up a custom hotkey to delete keyframe of selected object only in the 3d view (this was hard to do for some reason), its "anim.keyframe_delete" in 3d view > pose
-you can delete the custom shapes and blender keeps the mesh data, get them back with "bpy.context.scene.objects.link(bpy.data.objects)" where WGT-shoulder.L is whatever you want to recover (or make a new scene and link all the custom objects there then delete from main scene)
-latest version of blender makes you load the NLA editor to delete actions as it puts them in there to stop them getting accidentally deleted when they have no users.
-paste mirror keyframe in 3d view is great but also now works in the action editor so you can mirror whole sections of animation, you need to select the objects in the object summary on the left for it to work though
You are fantastic!
There's an animation channel on the Slack now.. ahem.. if that sparks any interest
Amazing Timelapse by Yusuf Umar with great use of all the features in Blender : poly modeling, modifier stack, sculpts, viewport features... a must see for sure !
Glad it was useful! Happy to give any more tips or answer questions but will be really really slow replying for the next few weeks sorry, probably be that slow checking out the slack group too.
uurgh, Sincerely, it's not that great and I'm not totally happy with the result but at least it's done and I've learned a fking lot during the process about the software.
Now I will start animating it.
By the way, Pior, sorry I haven't posed my tutorials links yet, I was quite busy. I'm uploading them now.
Yadoob, that's a fantastic set of videos, thanks for sharing ! I learned a few things already by merely skipping through them. Very nice
Blond - no worries !
I wish I could rig, at least with basic bones to pose my characters for the presentation in my portfolio. But the process always stops at weight painting. That's just, so hard and frustrating...
Well, even though we have automatic weights in Blender, that's not always perfect. It always needs some fixing in weights... and I hate badly deforming areas.
I wish I could rig, at least with basic bones to pose my characters for the presentation in my portfolio. But the process always stops at weight painting. That's just, so hard and frustrating...
Well, even though we have automatic weights in Blender, that's not always perfect. It always needs some fixing in weights... and I hate badly deforming areas.
After automatic weights, you could give the mesh a corrective smooth modifier on top of the armature modifier. Mind though, this method is only for use within Blender, it wouldn't work with deformations in game engines and such. http://www.blender.org/manual/modifiers/deform/corrective_smooth.html
After automatic weights, you could give the mesh a corrective smooth modifier on top of the armature modifier. Mind though, this method is only for use within Blender, it wouldn't work with deformations in game engines and such. http://www.blender.org/manual/modifiers/deform/corrective_smooth.html
Well, I guess one could apply the correction as a shapekey to use on game engines, but I wonder how much this would affect game performance.
Am I the only one which is kind of disappointed there aren't more Animation or motion Artists within the Blender community?
I mean, I've been lurking on the Blender Artists forum and been seeing their galleries for a couple of months. I even know the big names of the artists using them.
However, of all the best and interesting stuff I see, it's always static renders (they're beautiful)...
I'm still waiting for they day I'll see more convincing animations from the Blender community (I'm trying to do my part here but it looks like a harsh road).
The only goond ones I've were the Blender short films one.
If anyone of you even been to 11secondclub, you'll see most of the entries are done with or Maya (and sometimes Max)..
Never with Blender. That must also be caused by the few number of (good) rigs available...
For those who are interested in Webgl developement, you probably heard about Blend4Web, a blender add-on that allows you to create html page from your Blender scene.
I've made some tutorials for absolute beginners. You can see the result here : https://t.co/z2y6ywl4ET
Quite impressed with this update, it put blender's sculpting tools on the map for me. The wrap mode plus improved UI speed really brings it to life, did this in 5 minutes
Is there any exemple file available showcasing the increased viewport performance ? I think I am seing a little bit of a boost on heavy models, but nothing drastic. I am not quite sure what to look for - for instance, there is no mention of which viewport mode is supposed to be affected, and so on.
Personally, I'm more excited to have a real snap to grid available in addition to the snap to increment. That and flatten ngons seem pretty nice and useful. Perhaps I will make use of the tiling thingy someday but right now my CPU is too weak to sculpt a typical tiling plane at a reasonable resolution, so I will have to stick with Zbrush or Krita.
I have mixed feelings about the viewport performance.
They seem to have focused on improving the subsurf modifier, which is useful,
but I see no improvement in raw meshes and Blender is ages behind Modo in this respect.
It's a very fragmentary solution, hope there's more to come in terms of the viewport.
If I remember correctly, there was some improvements on Multires (for people using OpenGL 3.2 capable GPUs) performance as well, but I'm not sure if these changes are already in master.
And what do you guys mean by new skin modifier? I didn't see it anywhere . Skin modifier is one of the things I really wish where improved in Blender (it behaves a little too unpredictably). Don't give me false hopes
And I totally agree with Yadoob, if you guys want to support Blender, donate some money (even 5€ helps a ton) to Blender dev fund or BlenderCloud (beware that this is more focused on the production of their short movies, so first see if what they're planning to do / develop during the production of the movie would be useful for your pipeline).
Also just as a FYI : another way to support Blender financially (as well as Polycount, Marmoset, Xnormal and Handplane too !) is through Steam Workshop revenue sharing. In short : a fraction of what Valve earns on item sales can be redirected to approved third parties, if the item creator so choses.
Regarding viewport performance : I will try to test it furhter, but I am a little puzzled that this video shows an example under Blender Render viewport, which is noticeably slower than Cycles Viewport (why it is the case I have no idea, but there is a definite difference). Can't wait to dig into this a little further.
Replies
Pheewww...almost done!! Can't wait to finish this dogdamn rig and start animating her!
This interhsip is realy tiresome and it's tough keepng track of personal project.-_-
Anyway,here ya go, my first very first project inside of Blender.
Some probably followed the evolution of this thing since a few pages now haha.
You may find the model is off-shape or anatomically incorrect, that's normal, I'm not character modeller, nor a modeler at all.:D
I do have a good modeling friend which pointed some flagrant anatomy and design flaws.
Basically, to learn the Blender software properly, I wanted to use my knowledge of Maya and see what i could do inside of Blender.
After a tons of video tutorials and figuring out stuff, this baby came out.
I've tried to make the rig as simple as possible using only joints and shapes jsut in case I wanna export her into a game engine.:)
The rig features for now:
iK-FK switch
Stretchy limbs + cartoon bend controls (something I had never done before in Maya)!
An elbow/knee lock system ( kinda buggy but still does the job in most situation, this is a pain to do in Maya)
Foot roll options and such
Animatable cape and accesories and hair ( I wanted to put a dynamic option which is something pretty easy to set up in Maya with joints but with Blender, it's all a freaking pain)..
Facial rig...
Anyone wanna test it when it'll be ready?:D
On my end I am starting to dabble into Blender rigging and posing in the hope of soon getting into animation (I will probably maintain a thread of noob questions on that topic on BA). Now that you took the process from start to finish, could you maybe list an exhaustive (but not redundant) list of learning materials/videos that made it possible for you to get there ? This could be helpful for a lot of people starting out.
I bought it a couple of years ago and watched through it, there was lots of good stuff in there.
http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-to-rigging/
Probably out of date by now in a lot of areas - but very well set out with the basics explained.
I have always been sculpting in Zbrush, but thought I'd try it out in Blender, seeing as I use it for practically everything else. One thing bugs me A LOT though. My eyes can't seem to get the right feedback for any sculpting I do on the model. So basically I can't 'feel' the depth, so I'll make a change, and if I rotate the model, the changes are extreme and ridiculous.
I tried playing with the lens angle, various matcaps, but it just seems like it doesn't make much difference.
Has anyone had the same issue? And in that case, know of a solution? Maybe I just underestimate the complexity of that feedback, and have been taking it for granted in Zbrush.
If it's still a problem you can get rid of brush by shift selecting it and shift clicking the X below the picture of it then save and restart blender. Can even do that then file>save startup file and it will be gone in the default scene every time you start blender
That being said, the default lighting in the Blender viewport is quite awful, so you might want to play with that first and foremost. One thing that helps a lot too is to set a shortcut for "Center View to Cursor". This allows you to make the camera rotate precisely around the point where the 3D cursor is located, which in turn greatly improves depth perception. As shown here :
[ame]
@xrg: Thanks! That actually helped quite a lot. Still not 'perfect' with smooth shading, but it definetely gave some more depth. - Awesome tutorial with the dagger by the way, just watched it last night.
@pior: I feel fine navigating, but I'll keep that in mind
By the way, xrg, thank you for your video tuts on UV's and texturing. They were my reference for making this whole thing.
Hey pior, if you're looking to get into Blender's rigging and animation I highly recommend checking out the following two tutorial series. They do a great job of covering the fundamentals in a clear and systematic way and then they build on top of that. I got both of them and it really helped me to improve my skills.
Humane Rigging
https://cloud.blender.org/training/humane-rigging/
Blender Animation Fundamentals
https://cgcookie.com/course/blender-animation-fundamentals/
So far I have been going through this introduction to Rigify, and that too was surprisingly simple.
[ame]
It's pretty great to see how well this rig behaves, even when driving a model with mere automatic weights :
Only downside is that this control rig doesn't seem to be able to seamlessly transition between IK and FK without killing the pose of the limb being worked on. Or maybe I am just missing something ...
Regardless, can't wait to learn more ! And another question in passing : is there a reliable Onion Skin feature (or add-on) available somewhere ?
Yeah. I solved it way back when I was working in Blender for sculpting by messing around with the "solid OpenGL lights" under the tab in the preferences panel. There was a suggestion on how to do it from someone in this thread or another Blender thread on Polycount. Problem is I can't for the life of me find the post even though I've looked. It was night and day though, and at the time I thought it should've been the default way of setting up the lighting. You might be able to get something similar by messing around with the lights.
Edit: Found it by using Google instead of default Polycount search.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1588727&postcount=76
is what I originally did.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/3D_interaction/QuickPrefs is an addon that has multiple presets to fix this.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=137986
is another approach.
yes, I use it a lot but not for detailed sculpt for that Zbrush is THE BEST
I'm not a big fan of matcap in blender, my suggestion is to use this script to have a better viewport↓↓
DOWNLOAD LINK
Rigify rig is really nice but because its so complicated it's hard to retroactively tweak and it also uses more bones that the game might need. If I use rigify I turn off deform on all the DEF bones and turn it on for all the ORG bones in the last layer. I think you can do it by selecting all the ORG or DEF bones in edit mode, finding the deform button in the bone properties, toggling it on or off then right clicking it and doing "copy to selected".
@pior I see what you meant about the default lighting now
EDIT:
@MmAaXx thanks! Yeah I agree I'm liking the control of lighting much more. Tbh, I love using Zbrush, but just like the integration of Mudbox into Maya, I imagine it won't be many years before Blender is at a high level with sculpting (Just looking at the increase in viewport performance now). And that's really my only problem with Zbrush; It has TONS of great sculpting tools, but I really only end up using about 5% of them, which means if I could quickly be switching between tasks in one app like blender, I'd be a happy man! I never really got into using ZModeler, so I can't really say much about that tool, but I haven't heard much about its use since release?
So basically, when currently working in IK and wishing to switch to FK (IK to FK), one has to click the "Snap FK to IK" button. It actually makes sense now that I think of it, I suppose I was just reading it too fast
Other animation tips I have are;
-motion paths are great, https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1693140/game/motionpath.gif
-alt+scroll wheel for changing frames
-set up a custom hotkey for shift+alt+scroll wheel to skip to next keyframe
-set up a custom hotkey to delete keyframe of selected object only in the 3d view (this was hard to do for some reason), its "anim.keyframe_delete" in 3d view > pose
-you can delete the custom shapes and blender keeps the mesh data, get them back with "bpy.context.scene.objects.link(bpy.data.objects)" where WGT-shoulder.L is whatever you want to recover (or make a new scene and link all the custom objects there then delete from main scene)
-latest version of blender makes you load the NLA editor to delete actions as it puts them in there to stop them getting accidentally deleted when they have no users.
-paste mirror keyframe in 3d view is great but also now works in the action editor so you can mirror whole sections of animation, you need to select the objects in the object summary on the left for it to work though
This is precisely what I am having trouble with. If I use this command I am getting a "No active keying set" error ; and in general I am having trouble removing a specific keyframe from a specific bone. More precisely :
Let's say I have a character with a large number of keyframes already, on 1-6-12-18-24. But then I am not satisfied with the keyframe for the wrist on frame 6. What is the process for quickly deleting this keyframe from the wrist bone (location and rotation), without affecting the other keyframes established at frame 6 for other objects? (all that without having to fiddle with the dope sheet or the graph editor, because having to select the bone I want to affect in these panels is redundant as I already have it selected in the 3D view). This is kind of driving me crazy
[edit] Ha, nevermind ! Instead of recreating the shortcut I simply edited it, and it works fine now. Also stumbled on your original BA post on the subject
You are fantastic!
There's an animation channel on the Slack now.. ahem.. if that sparks any interest
[ame]
[ame]
[ame]
uurgh, Sincerely, it's not that great and I'm not totally happy with the result but at least it's done and I've learned a fking lot during the process about the software.
Now I will start animating it.
By the way, Pior, sorry I haven't posed my tutorials links yet, I was quite busy. I'm uploading them now.
Blond - no worries !
Well, even though we have automatic weights in Blender, that's not always perfect. It always needs some fixing in weights... and I hate badly deforming areas.
After automatic weights, you could give the mesh a corrective smooth modifier on top of the armature modifier. Mind though, this method is only for use within Blender, it wouldn't work with deformations in game engines and such.
http://www.blender.org/manual/modifiers/deform/corrective_smooth.html
I mean, I've been lurking on the Blender Artists forum and been seeing their galleries for a couple of months. I even know the big names of the artists using them.
However, of all the best and interesting stuff I see, it's always static renders (they're beautiful)...
I'm still waiting for they day I'll see more convincing animations from the Blender community (I'm trying to do my part here but it looks like a harsh road).
The only goond ones I've were the Blender short films one.
If anyone of you even been to 11secondclub, you'll see most of the entries are done with or Maya (and sometimes Max)..
Never with Blender. That must also be caused by the few number of (good) rigs available...
It seems that the short movie will also focus on some motion graphics
[ame]
Woah..
I've made some tutorials for absolute beginners. You can see the result here : https://t.co/z2y6ywl4ET
Part1 (add-on and html) : https://t.co/5On6pXr42O
Part2 ( SDK and Web Application) : https://t.co/733hceLaOd
Here's the full presentation of the features : http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.76
Quite a lot of worflow improvments with :
- Viewport (huge) Boost
- Warp mode for sculpt (allows to do tiling easily)
- OpenSubdiv
- the absolute grid snapping
- automatic node offset
- the edge offset (without add-on)
- Individual origins transformation for UV editor
- etc.
Also widget project begin to be ready for early tests : http://code.blender.org/2015/09/the-custom-manipulator-project-widget-project/
Can't wait to test it out later today. Thank you Blender Team (or whoever programmed this! HUGE THANKS!)
Also viewport perfomance is super cool !
Can't wait for that custom widget project...
They seem to have focused on improving the subsurf modifier, which is useful,
but I see no improvement in raw meshes and Blender is ages behind Modo in this respect.
It's a very fragmentary solution, hope there's more to come in terms of the viewport.
@fmdbl : I didn't test myself the 2.46 and what exactly are the boost but I've already link test video who shows great perfs (object mode) :
[ame]
So yes, that's the early steps, one of the main task of 2.8 project is to update viewprt (shaders, PBR, perf, widget and stuff).
Also if you want to support Blender developement, you can subscribe (10/Month) to the BlenderCloud to get access tutorials, open movie's files and updates (like the Glass half short currently in progress) : https://cloud.blender.org/
Or directly donate : https://www.blender.org/foundation/donation-payment/
And what do you guys mean by new skin modifier? I didn't see it anywhere
And I totally agree with Yadoob, if you guys want to support Blender, donate some money (even 5€ helps a ton) to Blender dev fund or BlenderCloud (beware that this is more focused on the production of their short movies, so first see if what they're planning to do / develop during the production of the movie would be useful for your pipeline).
Regarding viewport performance : I will try to test it furhter, but I am a little puzzled that this video shows an example under Blender Render viewport, which is noticeably slower than Cycles Viewport (why it is the case I have no idea, but there is a definite difference). Can't wait to dig into this a little further.