Is there any good solution to retopology within blender without paying $80 for Blendercookies toolset?
I tried Retopo MT and I can't stand it. The only alternative I can see is to use Blender's projection snapping with standard modeling tools and shrinkwrap, which is incredibly slow.
For $80 I may as well just buy topogun.
You don't actually have to pay. the license is GPL.
Neat, didn't realize that. Thank you. Edit: Also thank you for the suggestions defunct I will check those out
JEDTHEKRAMPUS What is "Organic Extrude"? Searching the reference manual gives me nothing and Google tells me CTRL LMB is the hotkey for it, but I'm using rSelect and rRMB which override those hotkeys. It's not in the input list in the user prefs, where do I find this tool?
Just wanted to say I managed to get all of this set up (more difficult than I expected, didn't realize there were multiple versions of Wazous retopo tools) and I'm very happy with the results
My previous reply got "moderated", so I think it won't show up, like the last time, anyway; it was another link, probably deprecated (404), this one works.
Organic extrude is just a really quick way to extrude an edge around. By default it should be bound to Ctrl + action mouse, which is just the opposite of the select mouse.
Sorry, another dumb question: How are you guys creating cages to bake in xnormal? Or are you all just baking inside blender? Can't find a push modifier and using extrude along normal creates an interior duplicate of the geometry which makes for a lot of trash to clean up.
Thank you for the tip, you're right the inflate brush woulda helped a lot while I was cleaning up my bake. I ended up just doing a lot of pushing and pulling of faces while going back and forth between xnormal which wasn't particularly fast.
I have another question, hopefully the last one for a while.
(Sorry about the nudity, never got around to finishing all the clothing and I needed a character to test with and this is what I had.)
Problem should be obvious but if not: The mesh is tearing apart. Reason for this is that before I baked, I marked all my UV seams as sharp and used an edge split modifier. Problem is I forgot to triangulate before baking... so I had to reimport the exported obj instead of using my Blender mesh in order to get the correct triangulation to render the normal map correctly, which had collapsed the split edge modifier and left me with a broken up mesh so when rigify went to autoskin it didn't skin past the split edges.
I figure this isn't too big a deal, I think I could just fix this through proper skinning. Would be nice to get the most out of Rigify's automatic skinning though. (Or I think I probably could have gotten away without splitting the edges, but I'm not sure that's a reliable strategy going forward with characters that are actually fully costumed with lower res textures)
So my question is this: What would be your workflow for retopoing, baking, and rigging a character in Blender? Specifically in regards to what your modifier stack looks like before export and how it affects your rigging.
Do you use use triangulate/edge split modifiers? Do you collapse them before export? Is it difficult to rig the triangulated mesh if so?
Thank you guys for all the help, it's been a long time since I actually took a character this far and the last time was in max, years ago. So I've been trying to build up my confidence with Blender. It would have been very painful without you guys.
Never use the edge split modifier just to sharpen edges these days. Instead, go to the vertex attributes tab in the properties editor (it's the one with the triangle on it) and enable Auto Smooth and set the angle to 180 degrees so only edges you mark as sharp will be sharpened. This method doesn't tear apart your mesh and it works well with the .obj and .fbx exporters.
On a side note: IDK if you're doing it this way, but the fastest way to mark seams as sharp is to use the Seams from Islands operator, then check Mark Sharp. It's available in the UV editor menus, or you can just spacebar search it.
That said, you should only mark a seam as sharp if it makes your lowpoly model look more like your highpoly model. If you're baking a highpoly perfect sphere to a low-poly 224-triangle UV sphere, for instance, you should leave the seams smooth, and on a character, especially on one with lots of polygons, you'll run into situations like this pretty often. However, if you're baking something hard surface it's often better to put hard edges on the seams.
It's not all or nothing, either. You can have some of the edges hard and some of them not hard as appropriate.
Here's a normal map of a high poly sphere baked to a lowpoly sphere with no hard edges on the seams.
It's a good, neutral purple throughout. The bake looks like this if you put hard edges on the seams.
Here's the same bake, but with hard edges on the UV seams.
The color changes on the edges indicate that hardening these particular edges was not a good choice. In an unsynced workflow you'd really pay for that, and in a synced workflow you'll just get more compression artifacts.
So, on a character you'll probably want to avoid putting sharp edges on a UV seam that runs from the forehead to the back of the neck (for instance.) The rule of thumb is to make your lowpoly look as similar to the highpoly as possible given the UV seams that make hard edges available.
I'll use autosmooth in the future, thanks. I actually tried searching for an islands->hard edge function but I guess I didn't look hard enough.
re: the normal map, I'll keep this in mind as well. Admittedly I've never worked with unsynced normals before so it's not something I'd have discovered on my own.
How do you deal with triangulating your mesh for baking while ensuring it is stays consistent and clean for rigging?
Keep triangulate as a modifier and put it before the armature modifier on the stack Edit: also, even in a synced workflow, a normal map that has big gradients is more likely to have noticeable banding/compression artifacts. So it's still a good idea to keep gradients to a minimum if it's not too much trouble.
And yeah I'm aware of that much at least, just didn't realize splitting edges on curved surfaces actually created gradients. I'm used to the gradients being caused by lack of split edges. Now that I'm aware I'll be smarter about it in the future.
Stress test of "Edge Patches", from Retopoflow (I heard this may be a paid update, seems like worth it, depending how much they ask for it, since retopoflow was already pretty expensive). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDU34OcUjtI
Has
there been any word on a revised default keymap lately? I know people have
been asking for one for years, but the Blender Foundation seems to just
be too stubborn about maintaining the status quo (last I checked at
least).
Has
there been any word on a revised default keymap lately? I know people have
been asking for one for years, but the Blender Foundation seems to just
be too stubborn about maintaining the status quo (last I checked at
least).
I have made a custom version of Blender able to generate a game asset in one click, will bake all your textures and save them, generate base mesh from sketchs, block-out a high poly in one click, FPS template, new brushes, stencils, palettes, color gradient and tons of other tools. I have made a video:
Hey guys, I'm sensing some bullshit here about Blender cycles rendering faster with GPU than CPU. I've made multiples tests and got no convincing return from the settings...
I'd even say my GPU runs slower than my CPU....
Edit: Aahh.. after research, I think I understand now. People say AMD cards aren't perfect fit yet for Blender... That's why...
Yeah AMD is definitely in a better spot with Cycles than they were before, but especially if you have a midrange AMD consumer GPU like a 260x or something you might not see a speed increase if you also have a monster CPU.
One thing you could try is increasing the tile size to 256x256 or 512x512.
ok, Blender decided to not develop FBX more than the actual stage (that actually is stable enough for me) here is the note from the main developer Bastien Montagne:
"Hi,
So, lately there's been a lot of FBX-related issues reported to our
tracker. Most of those are either:
- Known (half-)broken things (like cameras/lights orientation issues),
over which I do not intend to spend more time, since those are not
critical features to support imho.
- Broken corner-cases in an area that globally works rather well
it doesn't read like a decision has been made as of yet though. anyway i thought the point of having data exchange formats was to be able to exchange data with something else. i'll send them a postcard if i stumble over "gITF" somewhere...
Because AD basically controls the industry, as long as they support FBX I can't see it being abandoned by the industry at large. Blender does not have the sway necessary to kill off / replace FBX, so by discontinuing support they're only hurting their users.
yes it will not go away anytime soon. even if it did - you'd want to be able to exchange with current day applications - not all of them necessarily latest & greatest as far as FBX support is concerned - not wait around for everyone else to hop onto the train in the next few years.
whatever happened to collada btw? i remember dealing with that a good few years back. wasn't it supposed to take over from FBX?
I don't know a ton about FBX (never looked too deep into it), but am I right in assuming that the format/standard itself, not just the different plugins each app uses, changes each year? If the format was solid (like it should) be then updates to the Blender plugin shouldn't be such a big deal...
They thought FBX support was a waste of time so instead they decided to pursue support for a format no one uses?
If FBX is as bad as they say then I hope engine developers will be motivated to follow suit and adopt gITF, but the cynic in me believes that since FBX at least mostly-works already they'll just stick with Blender's partially broken FBX exporter.
@thomasp Re: Collada Looks like one of the Godot developers is offering to adapt their Collada importer to Unreal:
Well, thing is Blender's FBX support is pretty decent right now, it's just that the dev in question doesn't want to continue fixing bugs that seem to happen because other programs have different ideas about saving to FBX. Collada is being worked on: https://developer.blender.org/D1787
And yeah, that Unreal/Godot twitter thread fills me with hope. Open standards are just so darn important, but as the w3c has proven, it really requires that you get the project leads in a room together. (Or you write the importer/exporter and make a lot of noise, like done with OpenExr, OpenSubdiv and Open Color IO)
Just re started using Blender recently and I am liking the new features so far. I still use 3dsmax but as someone who handpaints textures. Unlike 3dsmax Viewport canvas, Blender glsl feature allows me to texture paint with bump/normal map display in viewport and I get good results. Best of all the software is free!! Henhe.
Also played around with the gossebery branch, u can set shape keys for hair and fur particles which is awesome. There are a lot of cool features which autodesk doesn't have right now that Blender has. I still use 3dsmax and Corona of course but adding Blender to my pipeline just made things easier. I see myself doing some projects only in Blender once in a while and I don't believe in software playing a role in how professional your work looks. Like someone here said, tools are irrelevant and this is just a marketing strategy by a lot of companies saying use our software and your work will look like this. Not true at all. I have used only 3dsmax and corona without any other software to create renders. If you are using a app to speed things up, that's okay but if you think it will give you the professional quality you want, you will need to work much harder.
@yadoob Can't speak for mmaaxx but I bought it as well and I think it is great. Only real complaint is that sometimes when I use asset to selection in face mode, my mesh disappears and in rare cases when placing a bunch of inserts, sometimes some of them will be upside down.
I am not entirely sure how useful it is for game development, at least in the types of scenarios they've shown. When you start doing surface detailing with inserts you really need to ask yourself: Is this better than just making a decal or a stamp in quixel/substance? And I think for most types of surface detail the answer is probably no.
It's still useful for previz, but I mainly see it really excelling in situations where you need modeled geometry, especially things that have to be cut into the mesh (such as pretty much any large reasonably complex feature you could attach with booleans, or corner detailing that can't be convincingly normal mapped). Less so for things that can be just baked flat. Maybe that'll change with VR, but I doubt you're going to see anyone modeling screws into their low poly meshes in the near future.
The drivers gif you showed looks really cool, I haven't tried anything that complex yet.
Oh, and a question for anybody who can answer: Is there a way to make edges with bevel weight display highlighted? (Similar to how creased edges show up as red in edit mode?)
@AtticusMars thank you for the feedback, you're right about the way they show the tool, they are not targeting the video game industry but I'm sure there is other way to use it even for none hard surface stuff
As for the beveling, be sure to be in edge edit mode as Jed said and also check if the mesh diplay options are set to show Bevel values.
Replies
Edit: Also thank you for the suggestions defunct I will check those out
JEDTHEKRAMPUS
What is "Organic Extrude"? Searching the reference manual gives me nothing and Google tells me CTRL LMB is the hotkey for it, but I'm using rSelect and rRMB which override those hotkeys. It's not in the input list in the user prefs, where do I find this tool?
Thanks man
Sorry, another dumb question: How are you guys creating cages to bake in xnormal? Or are you all just baking inside blender? Can't find a push modifier and using extrude along normal creates an interior duplicate of the geometry which makes for a lot of trash to clean up.
Shit+D -> Alt+S
or Displace modifier
So, I usually start with the displace modifier to give an even swell (just a little to have less manual work), and then inflate it manually.
also Rigify is fantastic
On a side note: IDK if you're doing it this way, but the fastest way to mark seams as sharp is to use the Seams from Islands operator, then check Mark Sharp. It's available in the UV editor menus, or you can just spacebar search it.
That said, you should only mark a seam as sharp if it makes your lowpoly model look more like your highpoly model. If you're baking a highpoly perfect sphere to a low-poly 224-triangle UV sphere, for instance, you should leave the seams smooth, and on a character, especially on one with lots of polygons, you'll run into situations like this pretty often. However, if you're baking something hard surface it's often better to put hard edges on the seams.
It's not all or nothing, either. You can have some of the edges hard and some of them not hard as appropriate.
Here's a normal map of a high poly sphere baked to a lowpoly sphere with no hard edges on the seams.
It's a good, neutral purple throughout. The bake looks like this if you put hard edges on the seams.
Here's the same bake, but with hard edges on the UV seams.
The color changes on the edges indicate that hardening these particular edges was not a good choice. In an unsynced workflow you'd really pay for that, and in a synced workflow you'll just get more compression artifacts.
So, on a character you'll probably want to avoid putting sharp edges on a UV seam that runs from the forehead to the back of the neck (for instance.) The rule of thumb is to make your lowpoly look as similar to the highpoly as possible given the UV seams that make hard edges available.
Edit: also, even in a synced workflow, a normal map that has big gradients is more likely to have noticeable banding/compression artifacts. So it's still a good idea to keep gradients to a minimum if it's not too much trouble.
And yeah I'm aware of that much at least, just didn't realize splitting edges on curved surfaces actually created gradients. I'm used to the gradients being caused by lack of split edges. Now that I'm aware I'll be smarter about it in the future.
Getting better and better!
I hope they don't take it in consideration for the new one then
I have made a custom version of Blender able to generate a game asset in one click, will bake all your textures and save them, generate base mesh from sketchs, block-out a high poly in one click, FPS template, new brushes, stencils, palettes, color gradient and tons of other tools. I have made a video:
Official topic: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?383624-Dark-Blender-(Official-Thread)-optimized-for-sculpting-and-game-asset-creation
Topic on Polycount: http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2405952
I'd even say my GPU runs slower than my CPU....
Edit: Aahh.. after research, I think I understand now. People say AMD cards aren't perfect fit yet for Blender...
That's why...
But blender does support OpenCL now, and I believe AMD / ATI performance will increase, and has seen a significant increase compared to 2.6
One thing you could try is increasing the tile size to 256x256 or 512x512.
The add-on allows you to create your own asset library : mesh, particules, light setting,... then place your asset easily on your scene :
Get it here ( with a discount for today : 10€) : http://www.pitiwazou.com/asset-management
A big thanks to all the dev team
here is the note from the main developer Bastien Montagne:
http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-committers/2016-February/046630.html
anyway i thought the point of having data exchange formats was to be able to exchange data with something else.
i'll send them a postcard if i stumble over "gITF" somewhere...
even if it did - you'd want to be able to exchange with current day applications - not all of them necessarily latest & greatest as far as FBX support is concerned - not wait around for everyone else to hop onto the train in the next few years.
whatever happened to collada btw? i remember dealing with that a good few years back. wasn't it supposed to take over from FBX?
I really don't like FBX, and I think other companies out of Autodesk are not.
Lets see what happen.
If FBX is as bad as they say then I hope engine developers will be motivated to follow suit and adopt gITF, but the cynic in me believes that since FBX at least mostly-works already they'll just stick with Blender's partially broken FBX exporter.
@thomasp
Re: Collada
Looks like one of the Godot developers is offering to adapt their Collada importer to Unreal:
Hopefully that link works, I hate linking to shit on twitter.
Collada is being worked on: https://developer.blender.org/D1787
And yeah, that Unreal/Godot twitter thread fills me with hope. Open standards are just so darn important, but as the w3c has proven, it really requires that you get the project leads in a room together. (Or you write the importer/exporter and make a lot of noise, like done with OpenExr, OpenSubdiv and Open Color IO)
@mmaaxx : what's your feeling about the add-on?
Also played around with the gossebery branch, u can set shape keys for hair and fur particles which is awesome. There are a lot of cool features which autodesk doesn't have right now that Blender has. I still use 3dsmax and Corona of course but adding Blender to my pipeline just made things easier.
I see myself doing some projects only in Blender once in a while and I don't believe in software playing a role in how professional your work looks. Like someone here said, tools are irrelevant and this is just a marketing strategy by a lot of companies saying use our software and your work will look like this.
Not true at all.
I have used only 3dsmax and corona without any other software to create renders. If you are using a app to speed things up, that's okay but if you think it will give you the professional quality you want, you will need to work much harder.
As for the beveling, be sure to be in edge edit mode as Jed said and also check if the mesh diplay options are set to show Bevel values.