LucasFilm senior concept artist Jama Jurabaev released part one of his Blender tutorial series: Introduction to Blender workflow (Volume One) I think this is just wonderful news because someone of his caliber can influence a lot of people to give Blender a try.
I've been developing a system of quickly modelling and rigging fingers in Blender by modelling a single base finger, then using Array and Mesh Deform modifiers to flexibly adjust them into the different sizes and proportions. As well as generating the finger meshes, this would also have the advantage of copying along vertex weighting and shape keys that you would only have to define once.
The roadblock I'm having with this is that I can't copy and adjust bones in the same way. It's very frustrating. A partial workaround would be to make a 3-line mesh segment that represents the bone positions, and have it follow the Mesh Deform modifier so that the placement is equivalent across the bones.
However, the bone alignment would not be respected. I don't want to arbitrarily define the bone rolls for each finger, but nor do I want to set up a complex system of planes and axes to manually set it up.
Does anyone have any suggestions for replicating bones in a similar to how I'm replicating finger meshes?
I've been developing a system of quickly modelling and rigging fingers in Blender by modelling a single base finger, then using Array and Mesh Deform modifiers to flexibly adjust them into the different sizes and proportions. As well as generating the finger meshes, this would also have the advantage of copying along vertex weighting and shape keys that you would only have to define once.
The roadblock I'm having with this is that I can't copy and adjust bones in the same way. It's very frustrating. A partial workaround would be to make a 3-line mesh segment that represents the bone positions, and have it follow the Mesh Deform modifier so that the placement is equivalent across the bones.
However, the bone alignment would not be respected. I don't want to arbitrarily define the bone rolls for each finger, but nor do I want to set up a complex system of planes and axes to manually set it up.
Does anyone have any suggestions for replicating bones in a similar to how I'm replicating finger meshes?
I think I've solved this- in addition to the aforementioned 3-line mesh segment to represent bone positions, I also extrude another point perpendicular to the finger to represent the bone axis alignment. Then, with that mesh copied and adjusted per the mesh deformer, I use those perpendicular points to recalculate the bone roll ( Ctrl+N, "Cursor").
New bake mode for TexTools "Thickness", uses the new AO cycles node in the 2.8 branch to bake inverted normals AO with inverted color output.
Other improvements include multi island support for the rectify tool inside TexTools. This includes partial selections.
Some personal work I am using TexTools myself for (Texture Mesh wrap tool used here). Its to create sharp vector style borders on a globe model with existing texture mapping I am using the wireframe modifier to generate the line geometry
It's worth reading just for the tiny GIFs explaining the process (what a great way to complement a text tutorial by the way, it makes things much more clear).
Can you do something similar to Zbrush grooming and then converting to alpha sheets in Blender? Can anyone point me to some tutorials please? I want to try create something similar to this guy in Blender without Zbrush.
Can you do something similar to Zbrush grooming and then converting to alpha sheets in Blender? Can anyone point me to some tutorials please? I want to try create something similar to this guy in Blender without Zbrush.
@Panupat you can try the Particle Instance modifier with Create Along Paths option.
You add this modifier on hair card(s) and set the target object as the mesh with the hair particle systems.
It's really powerful.
The only downside of this method is that you need to step out to object mode to see how the cards look after you groom the particles -- while in particle edit mode the hair card instances don't update as you groom the particles.
You can convert it all to mesh later if you're going to put in on Sketchfab etc., you do that by applying the P. Inst. modifiers. But if you keep the modifier there, the hair card instances can follow the mesh as you animate it.
There are a few modelling/workflow addons, namely Speedflow, MeshMachine and HardOps I guess. Can anyone tell me how they stack up?
All of them work great in full screen.
Speedflow does make modifier based modeling very accessible through modals. It's the most general purpose tool of the 3 I'd say.
Hardops is more focused on hard surface and has a more targeted toolset, including various sharpening tools. It's also focusing on modifier based modeling, but mainly around the bevel and boolean modifiers. It also comes with a few mesh modeling tools.
MESHmachine is very focused on just mesh modeling, providing modeling(and normal) tools, Blender (or any other 3d package) just does not have. Check out the recent videos in this playlist. made for documentation purposes. I'm almost done with these, working on the plug videos right now, before pushing out the big 0.6 release.
@MACHIN3 Somewhat expensive tools you got. Can't get any of them with the current budget of mine, unfortunately. I'm basically living from a hand to mouth, haha. Still, nothing has stopped me creating hard surface assets with Blender's native tools for 5+ years so far, so I'm not in trouble, lol.
@MACHIN3 Somewhat expensive tools you got. Can't get any of them with the current budget of mine, unfortunately. I'm basically living from a hand to mouth, haha. Still, nothing has stopped me creating hard surface assets with Blender's native tools for 5+ years so far, so I'm not in trouble, lol.
30 usd is not expensive, esp. considering the amount of tools that are provided, per addon. My addons unlock workflows, they aren't just single tools.
There are 20usd addons on BM, that basically are just a single modeling tool, and I'd say these are perhaps overpriced. But that's not the case for either DM or MM, especially considering the additional amount of effort I put into documentation, which eats a lot of my time == increases addon costs, is a pain to create, and is still ignored by most. Still, I invest in it to decrease the effort I have to put into support over time.
edit:
Coincidentally, MESHmachine has ~30 tools. That's one 1usd per tool.
@MACHIN3 Somewhat expensive tools you got. Can't get any of them with the current budget of mine, unfortunately. I'm basically living from a hand to mouth, haha. Still, nothing has stopped me creating hard surface assets with Blender's native tools for 5+ years so far, so I'm not in trouble, lol.
Not expensive at all. You need to understand that these tools allows you to make more and save time. My tool on blender market costs 13$ and it saves a lot of manual hand work. Machine tools as well as Hardops saved me ton of time already so if you do modelling at least somewhat professionally it costs roughly a few hours of your work which is totally worth it.
@MACHIN3 I appreaciate your breakdown that I'd be paying $30 for 30 tools, with $1 per tool, instead of one tool. That's a lot more understandable that I originally thought. I'd be happy to support your tools and speed up my workflow, but I gotta save up for few months first for that though. I'll come by and tell you when I buy MESHmachine someday in future. Just like how I told radiancef0rge, when I bought his normal map blending shader for Toolbag last year.
frmdbl I could say, all addons work great together, each one is specialized in his workflow even if all have some tools that do the same with some differences.
I made speedflow to work on every kind of modeling, you are not limited and for me, it's really important. I Like to keep everything editable for example, for my work it's the best workflow because I can use booleans, modifiers etc to make my model validated and after I can clean it. The goal is to edit with ease as much as possible. Like that, I can work faster and better. For hardsurface, game assets or characters.
Each addon has his own workflow and depending on what people do in 3D, they will choose one or several and use what they need.
About the price, people have to understand that on blender prices are really small, on Maya, an addon is most of the time at more than 100$. There are some addons like that on Blender, some really useful, some other not really. Our addons are in fact really cheap and with the percentage, sites take and the conversion in €, we need to sell a lot to be able to live with the addons.
I've been having a fun time learning blender although one place it seems to fall short is packing UVs. the default function seems to do a very lazy job - https://i.imgur.com/HCOHNE5.png
Do blender users just manually pack UVs or is there a better solution i'm not aware of?
I've been having a fun time learning blender although one place it seems to fall short is packing UVs. the default function seems to do a very lazy job - https://i.imgur.com/HCOHNE5.png
Do blender users just manually pack UVs or is there a better solution i'm not aware of?
Talked to this guy briefly in Discord some time ago, and he's working on a UV packing addon for Blender:
started to put together the docs and github repo for my set flow addon. Was thinking to sell it but ditched the idea - so before this thing sets dust on on my drive I decided to just push it out.
So if someone wants to give it a spinn go ahead (it probably needs some testing):
@kio : this is looking great, and so simple to use too ! I feel like with this + the volume smoothing/Lapalacian smooth add-on by Bartosz Styperek, all the surface smoothing needs one could have are pretty much covered now.
Now I am wondering : Would there be a way to run an equivalent of Edge Flow, but on loop selection of edges rather than rings ? Being able to evenly spread verts that way would be extremely useful. The default Blender "Smooth Vertex" command does help of course, but it loses the original shape/volume since it is more of a relax than a smooth.
Basically something like this (the first two images are showing what Set Flow already does, for context) :
But maybe there is already a known way to do that using Blender defaults or some existing add-on ?
hmm I think it wouldn't be much of a problem to do this, it's just a matter of collecting the correct verts for the smoothing. Maybe I'll look into it, would be a nice addition.
Pior - you may want to try Mira tools curve stretch. It works on multiple parallel edge loops at once. So you can interpolate with it and smooth the topology.
Well, that does sounds useful but quite different isn't it ? I don't see how that could help with evening out verts along an existing surface loop - as a matter of fact ... that looks pretty much like the opposite
Oh I am not saying that it isn't useful - the Mira tools certainly are powerful, no doubt about that. I am just saying that it is quite different from what was described above The topic is certainly related, but the action is different.
Alternatively select all edge rings along the edge loops you want to correct and run a LoopTools -> Space (or Relax, sometimes they are interchangable)
Anyone know why a couple of verts in my mesh are not deforming properly?
As you can see from the shading, their weight is set to 1 for the selected bone. They have no other bones influencing them.
When I add some tiny weights from the previous bone in the chain the verts will start to play nice by moving with the rest of the hand, but still don't react to their actual bone when I rotate or move it. All the other fingers (and mirrored ones on the right hand) work fine.
I had the same problem last night and couldn't figure it out. So I just rebuilt the finger from scratch and that fixed it. But then when I reopened the file this morning the problem had returned for the new finger.
Edit: I have also tried killing all weights and exporting the hand to an OBJ to get a fresh start, but the problem persists when I reimport and weight the hand.
Edit 2: I deleted the bone and recreated it and that seems to have fixed it. Weird.
I have created a stylized shader for Blender 2.8 that you can use as a base texture, you just have to tweak the sliders for the amount of pointiness, top lighting, AO, SSS, etc. and to tweak the analagous gradient colors (the color values are kept) and a 2k texture is plugged ready to be painted.
I spent the last new days making this, it will be a game object, currently its about 5000k polys, so obviously I will also have to make lower lod versions too. comments welcome.
I spent the last new days making this, it will be a game object, currently its about 5000k polys, so obviously I will also have to make lower lod versions too. comments welcome.
If it's a game object, I'd consider just making it simple box with alpha textures to represent the wire meshing, if you haven't already done so.
(Probably use this mesh to bake the mesh texture, though)
@kio : this is looking great, and so simple to use too ! I feel like with this + the volume smoothing/Lapalacian smooth add-on by Bartosz Styperek, all the surface smoothing needs one could have are pretty much covered now.
Now I am wondering : Would there be a way to run an equivalent of Edge Flow, but on loop selection of edges rather than rings ? Being able to evenly spread verts that way would be extremely useful. The default Blender "Smooth Vertex" command does help of course, but it loses the original shape/volume since it is more of a relax than a smooth.
Basically something like this (the first two images are showing what Set Flow already does, for context) :
But maybe there is already a known way to do that using Blender defaults or some existing add-on ?
I would assume you tried LoopTools - Space already, but it should work fine for that, maybe in combination with Relax depending on the result you are looking for.
I keep getting the "no active image found" error when I try to bake a diffuse map in Blender Cycles, despite implementing the typically-given fix of adding a texture node referencing the file I want to bake to in each material, and having no empty material slots. Are there any other typical causes of this problem?
Showing the Shear Legacy command from Blender. (Kinda Underrated) Most advanced users may already know, but it's worth showcasing a real life example you may need to use it. Cheers!
@Prime8 : Oh, this is fantastic, thanks ! As a matter of fact I was unaware of this Space command - and even though it doesn't do any form smoothing per se, the mere fact that it perfectly evens out edges along a form does pretty much exactly what I was looking for. Very nice.
This is actually really interesting - I assumed that I needed some sort of form interpolation, whereas what I really needed was perfectly even edges, from which a smooth form almost always follows. Carefully and selectively applying it over important loops of a model gives a really nice, almost parametric look. Thanks again !
I have created a stylized shader for Blender 2.8 that you can use as a base texture, you just have to tweak the sliders for the amount of pointiness, top lighting, AO, SSS, etc. and to tweak the analagous gradient colors (the color values are kept) and a 2k texture is plugged ready to be painted.
Great Work man, I'm trying to replicate this in Eevee, but the pointness doesnt seem to work yet. The Bevel shader is also a Cycles exclusive.
Hey guys, with all the goodness showing up in the blender 2.8 alpha I've finally decided to make the leap and get round to learning it. I'm sticking to 2.79 for now though.
I've run into a bit of a hurdle regarding snapping. In Maya with multiple components selected, I can choose to maintain or disregard component spacing, see gif below :
In Blender, I seem to be stuck with maintaining the spacial relationship between components. If there's a way to emulate Maya's "keep spacing (off)" style snapping, I haven't found it. I know you can align verts or edges before the snap, but it feels like an unwanted extra step for an action I use a lot. Any help would be appreciated. Here's the Blender snap below :
I have made a tutorial on how to generate pre-rendered sprites (like Donkey Kong Country) with Blender Cycles and Shadow Catcher and then play those animations in Godot Engine depending on the key input pressed (script included): https://blender.stackexchange.com/a/117394/23134
The result:
Kenub: yes the pointiness doesn't work and I hope it will because it is quick to calculate. The AO node doesn't work too in real time. For the Bevel it's too heavy in calculation it can't be in a real time engine.
Alternatively we have the SSAO to preview the AO and the Screen Space Curvature is coming, you can't bake it but it will allow to preview the curvature while painting (the pointiness looks almost the same with an high polycount). It generates a normal map from the current viewport angle. It has been already implemented in a custom build by Lukas Stockner, it should be officially implemented soon: https://developer.blender.org/D3617
You will have the option to adjust the pixel width for higher screen resolutions. Currently the curvature system in the viewport uses the SSAO and an inverted SSAO for the convex shapes.
A test by Bartosz Moniewski of the Screen Space Curvature in a custom build of Blender 2.8:
CheeseOnToast: the "extra step" to align your vertices is just typing S then the axis name then 0 it is as fast as opening the Maya marking menu to disable "Keep Spacing".
Replies
I think this is just wonderful news because someone of his caliber can influence a lot of people to give Blender a try.
https://gumroad.com/l/xSmGg
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/roExO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwTYTreqO74
The roadblock I'm having with this is that I can't copy and adjust bones in the same way. It's very frustrating. A partial workaround would be to make a 3-line mesh segment that represents the bone positions, and have it follow the Mesh Deform modifier so that the placement is equivalent across the bones.
However, the bone alignment would not be respected. I don't want to arbitrarily define the bone rolls for each finger, but nor do I want to set up a complex system of planes and axes to manually set it up.
Does anyone have any suggestions for replicating bones in a similar to how I'm replicating finger meshes?
Other improvements include multi island support for the rectify tool inside TexTools. This includes partial selections.
Some personal work I am using TexTools myself for (Texture Mesh wrap tool used here). Its to create sharp vector style borders on a globe model with existing texture mapping
I am using the wireframe modifier to generate the line geometry
https://gumroad.com/l/weight_paint_tools
New film from Tangent Animation, made in Blender and rendered in Cycles.
http://www.aendom.com/tuts/junkshop-workflow-en/
He used Blender, Substance and Photoshop.
You can convert it all to mesh later if you're going to put in on Sketchfab etc., you do that by applying the P. Inst. modifiers. But if you keep the modifier there, the hair card instances can follow the mesh as you animate it.
This has been looking super interesting.
There are a few modelling/workflow addons, namely Speedflow, MeshMachine and HardOps I guess.
Can anyone tell me how they stack up?
My tool on blender market costs 13$ and it saves a lot of manual hand work.
Machine tools as well as Hardops saved me ton of time already so if you do modelling at least somewhat professionally it costs roughly a few hours of your work which is totally worth it.
frmdbl I could say, all addons work great together, each one is specialized in his workflow even if all have some tools that do the same with some differences.
I made speedflow to work on every kind of modeling, you are not limited and for me, it's really important.
I Like to keep everything editable for example, for my work it's the best workflow because I can use booleans, modifiers etc to make my model validated and after I can clean it.
The goal is to edit with ease as much as possible.
Like that, I can work faster and better.
For hardsurface, game assets or characters.
Each addon has his own workflow and depending on what people do in 3D, they will choose one or several and use what they need.
About the price, people have to understand that on blender prices are really small, on Maya, an addon is most of the time at more than 100$.
There are some addons like that on Blender, some really useful, some other not really.
Our addons are in fact really cheap and with the percentage, sites take and the conversion in €, we need to sell a lot to be able to live with the addons.
Do blender users just manually pack UVs or is there a better solution i'm not aware of?
https://polycount.com/discussion/182140/border-fill-modelers-dream-come-true/p1
Now I am wondering : Would there be a way to run an equivalent of Edge Flow, but on loop selection of edges rather than rings ? Being able to evenly spread verts that way would be extremely useful. The default Blender "Smooth Vertex" command does help of course, but it loses the original shape/volume since it is more of a relax than a smooth.
Basically something like this (the first two images are showing what Set Flow already does, for context) :
But maybe there is already a known way to do that using Blender defaults or some existing add-on ?
You can then repeat this on loops going perpendicular to even the mesh even more.
@pior have you tried https://gumroad.com/l/vol_smooth
This script is incredibly powerful
Alternatively select all edge rings along the edge loops you want to correct and run a LoopTools -> Space (or Relax, sometimes they are interchangable)
As you can see from the shading, their weight is set to 1 for the selected bone. They have no other bones influencing them.
When I add some tiny weights from the previous bone in the chain the verts will start to play nice by moving with the rest of the hand, but still don't react to their actual bone when I rotate or move it. All the other fingers (and mirrored ones on the right hand) work fine.
I had the same problem last night and couldn't figure it out. So I just rebuilt the finger from scratch and that fixed it. But then when I reopened the file this morning the problem had returned for the new finger.
Edit: I have also tried killing all weights and exporting the hand to an OBJ to get a fresh start, but the problem persists when I reimport and weight the hand.
Edit 2: I deleted the bone and recreated it and that seems to have fixed it. Weird.
(Probably use this mesh to bake the mesh texture, though)
This is actually really interesting - I assumed that I needed some sort of form interpolation, whereas what I really needed was perfectly even edges, from which a smooth form almost always follows. Carefully and selectively applying it over important loops of a model gives a really nice, almost parametric look. Thanks again !