I havent used Blender in quite some while but is there a way to enable semi-transparency just in edit mode? When I apply a halftransparent material I can no longer check shading in object mode without reapplying a diffuse material and that is slow ofc.
The question to me is more, what do you do after the boolean?
I'm pretty biased, but I think MESHmachine offers some cool things in that regard, that no other tool does, see my latest video posted above.
rest assured, I know of your addons and if I was doing hard surface work the choice would be a no brainer. in my case it's for parts of an outfit made from soft materials. i'm not concerned about very clean bevels for this one and will export the model to zbrush to give it a more organic look in the end.
i was just looking for the most convenient interface to do the boolean part in.
in my case it's for parts of an outfit made from soft materials. i'm not concerned about very clean bevels for this one and will export the model to zbrush to give it a more organic look in the end.
i was just looking for the most convenient interface to do the boolean part in.
I see, in that case, BoolTools alone is probably sufficient and is quite convenient, if you have a numpad. It's default mappings are CTRL combined with +, -, * and /.
Slowly moving forward to make things work. Short demo with some features(drawing strokes with polyedges and creating face patches similar to NURBS, with ability to edit subdivisions) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1zdnbsyJbA
@RaphaelBarros great to know that animated armature deformation is now supported in 2.8's Eevee!
Yep, and it's even greater to see there's not much a drop of performance by doing it directly in Eevee. Also, one extra update, better hair in Eevee! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHs9u3P_X1I
@MACHIN3 This is looking awesome, I have already bought mesh machine and have been playing around it, and can't wait for these new features in the next release. I just had a thought that might might be impossible or might be a good idea I'll let you decide. Anyway it's if you own mesh machine and decal machine it would be great to be able to have these objects as both polystein plugs and decals. If in the future it's possible to create a doodad and save it as a decal and plug at the same time that would be awesome.
@MACHIN3 This is looking awesome, I have already bought mesh machine and have been playing around it, and can't wait for these new features in the next release. I just had a thought that might might be impossible or might be a good idea I'll let you decide. Anyway it's if you own mesh machine and decal machine it would be great to be able to have these objects as both polystein plugs and decals. If in the future it's possible to create a doodad and save it as a decal and plug at the same time that would be awesome.
Yes, great point. I've been thinking about it as well Thanks for your support!
Maybe you could also turn projected decals into embedded plugs and - less likely but probably not impossible - turn embedded plugs into projected decals. I'll start thinking about these things some more after the MM 0.6 and the DM 1.5 release.
Anyone know of an addon/quick way that allows you to offset selected UV islands out of the 0:1 space e.g. +1 X then later on I can move them back again -1 X (i.e. so they return to their original position)?
Yes it will change, if you create 1024 texture the uv space will be 1024. If you are doing this with unwrapping and object to have multiple UDIMs a good trick is that you can multiply this number to move the UV. If you type G X * 256*2 it will move 512 across on X and so on for other multiples. You can see how far you are moving it in the corner.
This weekend, Nintendo tweeted a gif of Peach face animations [...] Has anyone here done a rig like this in Blender?
The traditional way to do that in Blender is by making those widgets \ controls as actual bones in your armature. You can create them in a 'control' armature that moves a separate 'deform' armature (by means of Copy Transforms or other constraints), or use custom shapes directly in the deform armature if you just need something quick for yourself.
1) You create a bone that's going to control other bones or be used as a driver.
2) Set its custom shape to a mesh you created. Optionally, you create a child bone to that control bone and use the "At" option on the bone Display panel to set the child bone as the origin of the custom shape (so you can use the child bone to place and orient the mesh shape where you want it, but still let the shape refer to and select the control bone and not the child).
3) Create a driver for something (like facial shape keys), and add a variable from some transform channel of the control bone like its position, rotation or scale (usually in Local Space).
4) If you want a more intuitive rig you can add Restrict Location\Rotation\Scale constraints on the control bone so it has physical limits where you can move it, like a finite range of movement. You can also lock its unused transform channels on the interface, so pressing something like G will only move it on one axis (without you having to additionally press X, Y or Z to do that).
EDIT: and obviously, in that GIF the facial controls are beside the mesh, but most rigs I've seen prefer to place each control near the areas that they control. Maybe they did it like that in that GIF so it looked more appealing (so you could see the character mesh without the rig in front of it).
I have been working on smoothing algorithms for meshes in blender. You can define sharp edges as rails that will be used by verts to slide on. Volume is more or less preserved.
Use this to show a list of vertex groups from your mesh and pick one to make it active. Useful if you like weight painting on fullscreen area mode (Ctrl + Up).
Install the PY file and access from View3D (Weight Paint) > Weights > Popup Vertex Group List or create a shortcut to operator paint.popup_vertex_group_list.
Hey guys. I just published my rigid body simulation bake addon on blendermarket, cubebrush and gumroad to bake and use rigid body simulations in realtime applications such as UE4, Unity, etc.
I'm looking for people who are interested in creating plug libraries for MESHmachine. You can sell these, I want you to, but it's your decision of course.
Get in touch viamesh@machin3.io You will receive a pre-release version of MESHmachine and docs about plug creation.
- "Relevant Groups" submenu: shows only the groups that have weights for the current vertex selection. If you select one or more vertices, that menu will show all the groups that have weights for them. - Adjustable multicolumn layout (in the addon preferences): set the number of items per column that you want, for a more convenient popup size.
Loooong-time Max user starting to gradually dip my toes into Blender. I have the UI and Nav nicely setup(I found a way to have Maya nav without f$$king up the default hotkeys) One thing that is bothering me is the way the viewport keeps jumping out of ortho mode into perspective mode if I use Alt+RMB. If I use the MMB scroll wheel it doesn't happen. Could this be a side effect of my Maya nav setup?(please, please, please say no!) Or is there some setting I'm missing? I thought it might be the 'Auto Perspective' setting in preferences, but that seems to have its own issue:(and does nothing for my problem)
I'm using 2.8 and have front ortho added to my favourites menu. Now if I enable Auto Perspective my front ortho quicksave works as expected and jumps me to an ortho front view. However, if I disable Auto Perspective my quicksave no longer jumps to an ortho front view, it jumps to a perspective front view?
Cheers. This thread is pretty mindblowing! The sheer amount of addons that seem to do EVERYTHING I might want if I made a full switch from Max is making my head spin.
- "Auto perspective" can be useful, but regardless : I can confirm that it is not related to your issue. - I can also confirm that it is 100% possible to have a Maya-style navigation without the alt-RMB conflict you are running into. I personally set mine up by first following this guide, and then made a a few more tweaks (zoom instead of dolly, IIRC):
Set the filter to Key-Binding and type in "alt right mouse". It will filter out all the commands called by this input for all contexts. If you have everything set up properly you'll find your manually defined, Maya-style Zoom View command and input within the "3D View" category :
You'll also be able to find the other conflicting input (the one that makes you jump out of perspective mode) somewhere in the filtered list too. Once you find it, do not delete it altogether (that is to say : do not press the X button next to it on the right) - just disable it by unticking the box on the left. That way it will still be in your keymap, just commented out.
To put things differently : If you are at the point when you are wanting to change any input setting away from its default, you should take a little bit of time to get fully familiar with the Input tab. Its behavior can be confusing at times (for instance, if you create a new entry while a filter is active, this new entry will seemingly disappear instantly, because ... it will naturally be filtered out ) but it is extremely powerful, probably because it doesn't attempt to hide anything from the user.
I thought it might be the 'Auto Perspective' setting in preferences, but that seems to have its own issue:(and does nothing for my problem)
I'm pretty sure this should be the solution.
I'm using 2.8
However I suspect, this may be the reason it doesn't work. Could you try on 2.79?
Thanks man, but no. This had no effect. I've also been using 2.79b with the same issue.
@pior That's great, thanks. This has fixed it completely. I did actually use that same video originally to set this up and changing Dolly to Zoom, as you advised, was the solution. The only thing that concerned me was the fact that there are 9 entries for 'Zoom View' in the 3D views rollout. I just disabled them all and set the first one to Alt+RMB. Thanks again. Blender seems very user friendly in its customisation approach.
Indidentally, the fact that you can natively snap to ortho views by just hitting Alt mid-orbit(exact same as Zbrush) is such a great feature. I have this through a script in Max and I find it hard to live without.
I am really enjoying blender but there's one thing that is really driving me nuts : smoothing groups.
The way Blender handles smoothing is really poor, lots of weird shading issues etc. I have to resort to export my meshes to Maya in order to obtain correct basic smoothing...
@joebount there's a Blender version floating around with a weighted normals modifier, if that's what you're looking for. Hopefully it'll be integrated into 2.8 before it goes out, but right now you'll need a custom version of 2.79 to use it. Just search for 'weighted normals' on Blender Artists and you should be able to find it, the latest version is a bit buggy though.
@joebount there's a Blender version floating around with a weighted normals modifier, if that's what you're looking for. Hopefully it'll be integrated into 2.8 before it goes out, but right now you'll need a custom version of 2.79 to use it. Just search for 'weighted normals' on Blender Artists and you should be able to find it, the latest version is a bit buggy though.
@joebount there's a Blender version floating around with a weighted normals modifier
No, weighted normals is something different. Just regular smoothing groups(hard/soft edges) So for instance, in Max, there are 2 ways of doing it:
1 - select edges and set them as either hard or soft.
2 - select faces and assign a smoothing group(where smoothing groups change between faces the surface shading is 'hardened'. This can also be done globally by Auto-smoothing with a predetermined angle threshold.
I think I read it from @FourtyNights, in order to use auto-smooth to manually set sharp edges you need to use a 180 angle in the slider, like your image shows. The reason we do that is so the entire object gets set as smooth (except where you manually marked those sharp edges).
Yes, I saw that method, but it still seems a bit hacky. I thought there might have been an addon toolkit for this, similar to the vertex toolkit in Modo.
I think that all of 3ds max smoothing group actions can be pretty easily done in Blender too.
First of all there's select similar coplanar under your chosen angle, then you can select boundary edges and mark them as sharp.
Let's say that you want to select a "smoothing group" you can do that pretty easily as well by selecting linked and under T menu options choosing limiting by sharp edges
Finally there's turbosmooth and subdividing according to smoothing groups. You do that by selecting all sharp edges in edit mode by select -> sharp edges and then assigning a crease value of 1.
It sounds pretty complicated and it sure is but once you get used to it + have your own shortcuts it's just a couple of clicks really.
Tell me if there's something more, I don't usually use max much
Yes, I saw that method, but it still seems a bit hacky. I thought there might have been an addon toolkit for this, similar to the vertex toolkit in Modo.
Also, in case you don't know, you can select an edge with a sharp angle in Blender, hit CTRL+G for Select Similar, choose face angles and select most if not all of the edges you'd want hard via the slider in the toolbar. I usually just set Autosmooth to 60 or 70 and mark the rest of the edges manually, never really been much of a problem.
@Mad_Llama thanks, but the tabs from the T menu are gone now in 2.8. All I found under the Face dropdown are Shade Smooth/Flat. I haven't had much time at all looking into this but I'll definitely go deeper as I put more time into testing Blender.
I have messed around in Hardops and there is smoothing tools in there, but I was looking for something more dedicated to the task.
@musashidan t menu isn't gone in 2.8. the t options menu is elsewhere, you can still hit f6 to bring it up .
What you're looking for isn't face options., It's edge options, you can access those with ctrl + e which stands for edges also ctrl + f gives you the face menu and ctrl +v gives you vertex menu.
If you don't like shortcuts you can find these menus on the... Mesh tab in the bottom I believe.
I personally think that learning those shortcuts which correspond to first letter of action is just as simple or hard as learning where to find the menu for it.
@Mad_Llama Yes, but the tabs are gone from the T menu in 2.8. Thanks, I have been using those shortcuts(I'm a hotkey fanatic, my Max is hotkeyed to the eyeballs!) Those ones are very clever.
However, there's nothing in the Edge floater. I can only find it in Mesh>Shading>Smooth/Sharp edges. Mesh tab from the bottom is now a dropdown at the top in 2.8.
@musashidan oh! Got it. Well 2.8 is still far from done. They're still making pretty big changes daily. I'm using 2.79 for production, just playing around with 2.8, last week it crashed for me everytime I created a material or started rendering...
Anyways hopefully you get used to it, also try mapping select more to Alt + Mouse wheel up and select less to Alt + wheel down, that's probably my number one most beloved change, after I freed up the + and - buttons I assigned them to boundary select and select checker deselect, it's super useful
Hello fellow blender users! I am pretty new to CG - I was learning CG for about half a year and learned maya. But I think about to switch to blender when 2.8 will come out. I was just wondering about - will the new 2.8 version support old addons? And what addons for blender are essential?
Sorry for offtipic thou, I saw some pretty pixelized style piuctures on artstation where some person used PyxelEdit program - is it worth it?
@Mad_Llama Thanks again. I have 2.79b installed and initially decided to start learning as I bought Hardops/boxcutter, but I've just today seen the Speedflow addon videos and it blew me away. Blender seems to be the only DCC capable of dynamic beveling while boolean modeling. From a lot of what I've seen lately of Blender I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that the modeling workflow is fast becoming the best of all the DCCs. And I don't say that lightly. I've been using Max for many, many years and am proficient in modeling in Maya and Modo also.
As for Alt.............I have Blender set up with Maya nav so Alt is taken.
Replies
in the past i played around with bool tool, fast carve, probably others - but it's not normally my field so just looking for some options.
When I apply a halftransparent material I can no longer check shading in object mode without reapplying a diffuse material and that is slow ofc.
They seem to compliment eachother nicely.
in my case it's for parts of an outfit made from soft materials. i'm not concerned about very clean bevels for this one and will export the model to zbrush to give it a more organic look in the end.
i was just looking for the most convenient interface to do the boolean part in.
https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/VCbbbc/pinning-detaching-and-layout-improvements-for-popo
Short demo with some features(drawing strokes with polyedges and creating face patches similar to NURBS, with ability to edit subdivisions)
Also, one extra update, better hair in Eevee!
I'll start thinking about these things some more after the MM 0.6 and the DM 1.5 release.
I've seen clips of rigs like this in the past, but always in Maya. Has anyone here done a rig like this in Blender?
1) You create a bone that's going to control other bones or be used as a driver.
2) Set its custom shape to a mesh you created. Optionally, you create a child bone to that control bone and use the "At" option on the bone Display panel to set the child bone as the origin of the custom shape (so you can use the child bone to place and orient the mesh shape where you want it, but still let the shape refer to and select the control bone and not the child).
3) Create a driver for something (like facial shape keys), and add a variable from some transform channel of the control bone like its position, rotation or scale (usually in Local Space).
4) If you want a more intuitive rig you can add Restrict Location\Rotation\Scale constraints on the control bone so it has physical limits where you can move it, like a finite range of movement. You can also lock its unused transform channels on the interface, so pressing something like G will only move it on one axis (without you having to additionally press X, Y or Z to do that).
EDIT: and obviously, in that GIF the facial controls are beside the mesh, but most rigs I've seen prefer to place each control near the areas that they control. Maybe they did it like that in that GIF so it looked more appealing (so you could see the character mesh without the rig in front of it).
http://www.kjartantysdal.com/scripts/
Volume is more or less preserved.
Use this to show a list of vertex groups from your mesh and pick one to make it active.
Useful if you like weight painting on fullscreen area mode (Ctrl + Up).
Download:
https://gum.com/popup_vertex_group_list (0+)
Install the PY file and access from View3D (Weight Paint) > Weights > Popup Vertex Group List or create a shortcut to operator paint.popup_vertex_group_list.
to bake and use rigid body simulations in realtime applications such as UE4, Unity, etc.
Here's generated armature in Blender
And here's exported result in UE4
Sup!
I added a couple more features to that popup vertex group list addon:
- "Relevant Groups" submenu: shows only the groups that have weights for the current vertex selection. If you select one or more vertices, that menu will show all the groups that have weights for them.
- Adjustable multicolumn layout (in the addon preferences): set the number of items per column that you want, for a more convenient popup size.
- "Auto perspective" can be useful, but regardless : I can confirm that it is not related to your issue.
- I can also confirm that it is 100% possible to have a Maya-style navigation without the alt-RMB conflict you are running into. I personally set mine up by first following this guide, and then made a a few more tweaks (zoom instead of dolly, IIRC):
What you should do is to get fully familiar with the Input tab of User Preferences, and debug from there.
Set the filter to Key-Binding and type in "alt right mouse". It will filter out all the commands called by this input for all contexts. If you have everything set up properly you'll find your manually defined, Maya-style Zoom View command and input within the "3D View" category :
You'll also be able to find the other conflicting input (the one that makes you jump out of perspective mode) somewhere in the filtered list too. Once you find it, do not delete it altogether (that is to say : do not press the X button next to it on the right) - just disable it by unticking the box on the left. That way it will still be in your keymap, just commented out.
To put things differently : If you are at the point when you are wanting to change any input setting away from its default, you should take a little bit of time to get fully familiar with the Input tab. Its behavior can be confusing at times (for instance, if you create a new entry while a filter is active, this new entry will seemingly disappear instantly, because ... it will naturally be filtered out
Good Luck !
The reason we do that is so the entire object gets set as smooth (except where you manually marked those sharp edges).
First of all there's select similar coplanar under your chosen angle, then you can select boundary edges and mark them as sharp.
Let's say that you want to select a "smoothing group" you can do that pretty easily as well by selecting linked and under T menu options choosing limiting by sharp edges
Finally there's turbosmooth and subdividing according to smoothing groups. You do that by selecting all sharp edges in edit mode by select -> sharp edges and then assigning a crease value of 1.
It sounds pretty complicated and it sure is but once you get used to it + have your own shortcuts it's just a couple of clicks really.
Tell me if there's something more, I don't usually use max much
What you're looking for isn't face options., It's edge options, you can access those with ctrl + e which stands for edges
If you don't like shortcuts you can find these menus on the... Mesh tab in the bottom I believe.
I personally think that learning those shortcuts which correspond to first letter of action is just as simple or hard as learning where to find the menu for it.
Anyways hopefully you get used to it, also try mapping select more to Alt + Mouse wheel up and select less to Alt + wheel down, that's probably my number one most beloved change, after I freed up the + and - buttons I assigned them to boundary select and select checker deselect, it's super useful
I am pretty new to CG - I was learning CG for about half a year and learned maya. But I think about to switch to blender when 2.8 will come out.
I was just wondering about - will the new 2.8 version support old addons?
And what addons for blender are essential?
Sorry for offtipic thou, I saw some pretty pixelized style piuctures on artstation where some person used PyxelEdit program - is it worth it?
Thank very one for answers in advance!