Thanks Defunct!
I've been poking at it, it's a bit confusing. Managed to half make a context sensitive modal (so shortcuts change when you activate it)delete script, mesh to object name unifyer, hotkey+lmb based 3d viewport timeline scrubber. None of them are very good but can share if you or anyone else would like them.
Struggling with the concept of how to manipulate actions and the data inside via python so I can make a keyframe dragger and bone renamer that dosent break actions.
Script to rename bones and not break actions, always used to be really annoying to me, pretty sure it works. You need to copy it into text editor, update oldbone and newbone manually then press run script.
import bpy
oldbone = "\"foot.L_pole\""
newbone = "\"POLE.foot.L\""
for a in bpy.data.actions:
for fcurve in bpy.data.actions[a.name].fcurves:
b = (str(fcurve.data_path))
if oldbone in b:
rename = (fcurve.data_path.replace(oldbone, newbone))
fcurve.data_path = rename
I don't really know what I'm doing so feel free to offer any advice
Edit:going to update it at some point with a more robust way of replacing bones
Blender 2.5 is truly amazing and they develop a lot faster than commercial products. Blender is the best open source 3D program and if more and more skills come to light hopefully, pixar and all the other animation studios finally realize it is not the program but the skill!
If I remember right, I started with version 2.60-2.63 for the first time when I started learning 3D modeling. Can't remember the exact version, but about since then I've updated frequently to this point.
Also, I tried Blender 2.49b once it was the latest, but I never figured out it, because of its horrible state of user interface.
I guess 2.8 is probably going to be another big development jump since 2.5... or 3.0 at least. Can't wait for UI changes.
Blond you might like this. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1693140/myscipts/r/animscrubber.py
Install and assign anim.scrubber to a hotkey in the 3d view, shift alt lmb works for me. Then click and drag and it scrubs frames in the 3d view!
I'm sure it's badly done so back up everything! I got some tips from someone on irc and plan to make a version that drags keyframes/poses around in the same way.
Frankie, that's pretty damn useful ! Much better than the default alt-wheel. I can see a little glitch when pressing down before dragging, as it seems to first jump to an arbitrary frame before scrubbing as expected. Pretty minor, but I thought I'd mention it.
Oh yeah I see that happening, the problem is I don't really know what I'm doing I'll have a go later, I'm keen to get the keyframe moving working first. I want MMB to either drag the keyframe on the start frame or if there is no keyframe copy the pose anway.
Did you mention wanting a context sensitive delete before? I started to make one but it wasn't as good as I hoped, if you have any ideas I could try and put it in.
This is the first attempt(not even sure if it works) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1693140/myscipts/a/smartdelete.py
you can see in the logic once you press X to activate it waits for new keys, now if you press A (was supposed to be X again but didn't work) it does the last delete type.
if you press S it does a context sensitive delete
then c v b are verts edges faces.
Also a script that renames mesh names to object names, you may have to do it twice if the mesh tries to rename itself to an existing mesh(should probably make the script deal with that). You should be able to edit the middle of the script to change it to operate from all objects in the scene to selected objects. Install and then it appears under space menu as Object and Mesh Name Unification
Blender 2.5 is truly amazing and they develop a lot faster than commercial products. Blender is the best open source 3D program and if more and more skills come to light hopefully, pixar and all the other animation studios finally realize it is not the program but the skill!
If that was the case... Why do Pixar develop their own programs and tools?
The irony here is that several technical solutions that Blender use was originally developed by Pixar developers in the first place. See for example Edwin Catmull and his inventions.
Hey, so how good is the normal map baking solution in Blender? I tried to makes some tests, but from what I see - baking with Blender render doesn't allow you to use cage, and baking with Cycles lets you use a cage but doesn't support antialiasing ... is that it?
"Install and assign anim.scrubber to a hotkey in the 3d view, shift alt lmb works for me. Then click and drag and it scrubs frames in the 3d view" mmb to move keyframes.
Need to look at the flicker next.
Edit: Removed flicker, same link. Was really bad, used to use the mouses current x screen position to set the frame if the mouse hadn't moved so you could end up a thousand frames away
edit: made it actually work! I don't think you could install the previous one. Made it deal with some cases where it would error because you were in the wrong mode.
I put together a few scripts while learning Blender UI. Not sure if these can be replicated somehow using built-in features, but I didn't find any info, so I created these (EDIT: these are my Dropbox links, shortened to fix one on each line):
https://db.tt/997SKjXh -- Delete any component, vert/edge/face using assigned key, without questions asked
These shouldn't override anything, idea is that you just assign a key for each script like in 3ds max.
Inside script file is installation help.
I've assign these like this:
Object modes: to §-3 (§ = first keycap in my keyboard layout) object/face/edge/vert
Transform manipulator modes: Alt+shift+Q/W/E for move/rotate/scale
Delete: Shift+del (so it won't override default delete)
Just a note in passing : while the tools demonstrated in the retopo video above are interesting, I personally find that using that many addons/custom menus is really not necessary. Blender has very solid tools by default which do the job extremely well - especially F2, which by itself makes the retopo process just as much efficient (if not more) than other solutions.
Sorry for digging out this months old posting, but I'm really curious how to set up the display options for your retopo mesh like this. It seems the lowpoly's wire is always visible, no matter what. That's what the X-Ray mode does, but X-Ray also always renders your lowpoly infront of your highpoly, which is not the case in this video.
Put viewport in solid mode, enable xray on lowpoly in object properties, in the N panel enable Hidden Wire under Shading once you've entered edit mode.
To be fair, I never quite managed to find a 100% perfect display setup for retopo in Blender. The closest I could get to it is this :
However it doesn't have any shading and the high is not properly occluding the low.
Topogun is pretty much the gold standard when it comes to this, and I don't think an equivalent display mode is possible in Blender at the moment. That said, it is still quite usable.
Ah that's useful, for some reason I never realized you could use vertex groups to control thickness. I haven't ever been able to figure out how to get the normals to shade like the Guilty Gear Xrd models -- I think I just don't fully understand how the Data Transfer and Normal Edit modifiers work yet though.
That's really neat how you can control the solidify offset with vertex groups. Wish the Shell modifier in Max could do something like that (same for flipping normals).
Interested is seeing how the shading works too but looks like the blend file isn't available just yet.
I often have issues painting weights (i.e. accidentally painting a hand from the other side to... the leg) and I wonder if anyone else here seriously bothers with the painting tool for weights or just assign them by hand through the mesh edit, for some 3000~ish poly mesh.
Also is there a better way than getting bones to IK solve to delayed empties on parents for the jiggles?
@Frankie and @MMAAXX : yes it uses internal softbody system so you have to bake it and clean keys. At first I used it to do details of animation quicker (usefull if you have a lot of animation/character).
@Blond : the link I put is actually an EN/FR tutorial
Leilei : I need to investigate that too, I feel like there is indeed a rather big issue with the brush behavior in weight painting mode. It jumps from the front to the back of a model way too easily and makes it barely useable in my opinion. I'll try to gather some info on it on Blenderartists soon, there might be some hidden option for it somewhere ...
@YADOOB, these jiggle tests look great, can't wait to try it out.
@Yadoob - Cool, i'll check that out. I just hope it bakes fine into MDR form (skeletal format) and game engine ik isn't an option. I have breasts, skirt and a flared armlet to shake
New animated short by the Blender Institute - Glass Half. Le Quack! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqiN98z6Dak And some of the Institute's plans for the near future: Character Department - Oct '15: A new section around the Blenrig character rigging tool, many tutorials and ready to use characters. Caminandes Xmas edition - Dec '15: The Llama is back! And we'll pick up work on Cycles, Asset managing and Shot Management.
Asset Libraries - Dec '15: A huge public domain Texture Library and a CC-BY Character Library, ready to animate.
Blender Development - Blender Institute will host the core team working on the 2.8 Workflow project.
''Worth to mention this is the first open movie fully rendered in Blender's viewport! All the shaders run realtime in the 3D viewport thanks to the magic of material nodes (and the magician Andy Goralczyk ''
That's nice to see know! Super cool animation!
I thought it was in Dutch at first until I realized it has no proper language whatsoever..
Anyone know whats going on for me with cycles? Baking reverts to CPU and viewport performance is down, I was hoping to use bake tools and gpu rendering to more efficiently blast though multiple assets in a modular set I'm working on.
Is your compute device set to the GPU in System tab of user preferences? On the render settings tab of the Properties panel is it set to use the GPU? If you're on Linux have you tried running Blender as root if the compute devices don't show up?
Yeah system is using GPU for cycles in the rest of blender, the cycles baking is more complicated than blender internal and I don't think I have it sussed. Do you think its worth perusing? Should I be getting improved baking speed or is it not worth it and I should stick with internal?
I don't bake with Cycles much. Usually I use xNormal for that stuff (or Knald if I'm feeling fancy--it's GPU-accelerated and seems to work better than Cycles.) It should be using the GPU for the bake but IMO Blender Internal is better suited to baking in general unless you're baking lightmaps, which most of the time it's better to do in the game engine of choice anyway.
I found that the Unigine built-in bakers are also really, really solid if you know how to tweak them (probably the best bakers around that run on Linux) but they aren't exactly straightforward to acquire and they also bake fewer types of maps than Xnormal (just the bare minimum normals, AO, vertex color and object ID.) It always bakes with an averaged projection mesh, whether you provide a cage or not, which I sure wish xNormal would do. Knald baker is the fastest for GPU-accelerated baking and gives quite good quality. When I tried Mightybake out it crashed a lot when I tried to use the GPU baking so I guess I don't recommend it although some other people seem to like it so there must be something good there.
OK thanks for the feedback, I use Xnormal for some bakes but other assets don't feel worth the time taken to export from blender and setup in xnormal. Maybe I can use my new python skills to do something
Since Cycles baking supported cages I started baking only in Blender instead of xNormal. But I'm not too happy with it right and probably switch back again to xNormal. The missing antialiasing is still an issue. Of course you can manually super-sample by rendering in a higher resolution, but that takes time and additional steps as well. Especially since you do the antialiasing after the padding is done in this case.
I'm having trouble figuring out vertex groups. I'll create a group, but its weight appears to be applied uniformly over all vertices within it, even when I change it with only one vertex selected (in edit mode). I'm probably missing something simple here, but I'm not quite sure what to google.
EDIT: Scratch that. I was missing on the fact that the weight showed what would be assigned to the vertex, not what it was.
Replies
I've been poking at it, it's a bit confusing. Managed to half make a context sensitive modal (so shortcuts change when you activate it)delete script, mesh to object name unifyer, hotkey+lmb based 3d viewport timeline scrubber. None of them are very good but can share if you or anyone else would like them.
Struggling with the concept of how to manipulate actions and the data inside via python so I can make a keyframe dragger and bone renamer that dosent break actions.
import bpy oldbone = "\"foot.L_pole\"" newbone = "\"POLE.foot.L\"" for a in bpy.data.actions: for fcurve in bpy.data.actions[a.name].fcurves: b = (str(fcurve.data_path)) if oldbone in b: rename = (fcurve.data_path.replace(oldbone, newbone)) fcurve.data_path = renameI don't really know what I'm doing so feel free to offer any advice
Edit:going to update it at some point with a more robust way of replacing bones
If I remember right, I started with version 2.60-2.63 for the first time when I started learning 3D modeling. Can't remember the exact version, but about since then I've updated frequently to this point.
Also, I tried Blender 2.49b once it was the latest, but I never figured out it, because of its horrible state of user interface.
I guess 2.8 is probably going to be another big development jump since 2.5... or 3.0 at least. Can't wait for UI changes.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1693140/myscipts/r/animscrubber.py
Install and assign anim.scrubber to a hotkey in the 3d view, shift alt lmb works for me. Then click and drag and it scrubs frames in the 3d view!
I'm sure it's badly done so back up everything! I got some tips from someone on irc and plan to make a version that drags keyframes/poses around in the same way.
Did you mention wanting a context sensitive delete before? I started to make one but it wasn't as good as I hoped, if you have any ideas I could try and put it in.
This is the first attempt(not even sure if it works)
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1693140/myscipts/a/smartdelete.py
you can see in the logic once you press X to activate it waits for new keys, now if you press A (was supposed to be X again but didn't work) it does the last delete type.
if you press S it does a context sensitive delete
then c v b are verts edges faces.
Also a script that renames mesh names to object names, you may have to do it twice if the mesh tries to rename itself to an existing mesh(should probably make the script deal with that). You should be able to edit the middle of the script to change it to operate from all objects in the scene to selected objects. Install and then it appears under space menu as Object and Mesh Name Unification
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1693140/myscipts/r/unityobjectandmeshnames.py
The irony here is that several technical solutions that Blender use was originally developed by Pixar developers in the first place. See for example Edwin Catmull and his inventions.
I don't think the Internal render baking supports AA either.
I wouldn't bother with baking in Blender,
it's just very bare bones and there doesn't seem to be much interest in it from the devs.
Meltdown bake tools addon
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?345126-Meltdown-bake-tools&p=2699422&highlight=antialiasing#post2699422
hope it helps.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1693140/myscipts/r/animscrubber.py
"Install and assign anim.scrubber to a hotkey in the 3d view, shift alt lmb works for me. Then click and drag and it scrubs frames in the 3d view" mmb to move keyframes.
Need to look at the flicker next.
Edit: Removed flicker, same link. Was really bad, used to use the mouses current x screen position to set the frame if the mouse hadn't moved so you could end up a thousand frames away
edit: made it actually work! I don't think you could install the previous one. Made it deal with some cases where it would error because you were in the wrong mode.
I've been following this thread - good info.
I put together a few scripts while learning Blender UI. Not sure if these can be replicated somehow using built-in features, but I didn't find any info, so I created these (EDIT: these are my Dropbox links, shortened to fix one on each line):
https://db.tt/997SKjXh -- Delete any component, vert/edge/face using assigned key, without questions asked
https://db.tt/GGYJstdN -- Set manipulator to rotation mode using assigned key
https://db.tt/4JtH6BQt -- Set manipulator to scale mode using assigned key
https://db.tt/ICFDORPJ -- Set manipulator to translate mode using assigned key
https://db.tt/5vWmiZSW -- Set mesh to edge mode using assigned key
https://db.tt/LkBOYEfZ -- Set mesh to face mode using assigned key
https://db.tt/p2JyBzPL -- Set mesh to vert mode using assigned key
https://db.tt/bUhsLlcX -- Set mesh to object mode using assigned key
Feel free to test/use.
So far these have worked OK for me.
These shouldn't override anything, idea is that you just assign a key for each script like in 3ds max.
Inside script file is installation help.
I've assign these like this:
Object modes: to §-3 (§ = first keycap in my keyboard layout) object/face/edge/vert
Transform manipulator modes: Alt+shift+Q/W/E for move/rotate/scale
Delete: Shift+del (so it won't override default delete)
However it doesn't have any shading and the high is not properly occluding the low.
Topogun is pretty much the gold standard when it comes to this, and I don't think an equivalent display mode is possible in Blender at the moment. That said, it is still quite usable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wEWJXpalaQs
Sweet!
I wasn't aware of this one, thanks.
I'm looking forward to try this out.
Tearing addon progress
[ame]
[URL="[url]http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?364478-WIP-Cloth-FX-addon[/url]"]Thread @BA>Addons[/URL]
That's really nice and far better than any X-Ray or half transparent material workarounds, thanks a lot
it changes based on if you are in orthographic or perspective mode.
More videos of the event in BlenderFoundation Youtube channel.
Hope you like
That's a really nice Chibi-Ryu model too.
Wish the Shell modifier in Max could do something like that (same for flipping normals).
Interested is seeing how the shading works too but looks like the blend file isn't available just yet.
HERE THE LINK
Also is there a better way than getting bones to IK solve to delayed empties on parents for the jiggles?
http://blenderlounge.fr/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=1251
http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?376618-Addon-Push-Pull-Face
@Blond : the link I put is actually an EN/FR tutorial
More tests :
@YADOOB, these jiggle tests look great, can't wait to try it out.
Le Quack!
And some of the Institute's plans for the near future:
Character Department - Oct '15: A new section around the Blenrig character rigging tool, many tutorials and ready to use characters.
Caminandes Xmas edition - Dec '15: The Llama is back! And we'll pick up work on Cycles, Asset managing and Shot Management.
Asset Libraries - Dec '15: A huge public domain Texture Library and a CC-BY Character Library, ready to animate.
Blender Development - Blender Institute will host the core team working on the 2.8 Workflow project.
That's nice to see know! Super cool animation!
I thought it was in Dutch at first until I realized it has no proper language whatsoever..
But I'm not too happy with it right and probably switch back again to xNormal.
The missing antialiasing is still an issue. Of course you can manually super-sample by rendering in a higher resolution, but that takes time and additional steps as well. Especially since you do the antialiasing after the padding is done in this case.
EDIT: Scratch that. I was missing on the fact that the weight showed what would be assigned to the vertex, not what it was.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?384600-Addon-Objects-Library-Manager