New Blender Modelling/Retopo Functions

ralusek

Lately there's been a huge amount of new modelling/retopo tools added to blender "under the hood," so I thought i'd mention a few of them here.

first of all, intersect functions (so helpful for architecture and mechanical modelling i can't even begin to tell you. anything hard surface/precision based):

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-mQ-BRhy9I&feature=player_embedded[/ame]

i'll be making a few videos in the coming weeks illustrating the other functions, but i highly recommend you download a recent version from graphicall.org with all addons and play around for yourself.

First of all, there is now grease pencil retopology. Very much like 3d coat "strokes" retopo, you can simply sketch the topology on the surface of a mesh and make a mesh from it.

Combine that with B-surfaces GPL addition, and you can retopo a mesh as easily or faster than any other package. B-surfaces let's you guide extrusions of any number of edges using the grease pencil, and you set the amount of cross-sections to extrude by in the control tab. if you set your grease pencil to draw on the surface of the mesh, your extrusion will follow. when done, simply shrinkwrap to make sure all vertices are exactly where desired.

Then, there is the straighten patch, which lets you straighten all vertices along an edge loop as defined by the two end points.

finally, Looptools was an old script you could enter, but has been a sneaky little addon for a while now. when enabled, it allows you to define curved surfaces with only a few vertices as control points. it also allows you to loft very complicated shapes, bride, turn loops into perfect circles, flatten faces, etc.

i'll try to cover all of these, but i strongly suggest you just play with them yourself

Cremuss

Blender is starting to become a very very powerful 3d app, I use it daily and the improvement made with the new 2.5 and so on are just awesome

I'm still a bit disappointed by the 3d real time preview, I'd like something like marmoset render because the actual glsl shader preview is a little poor...

Actually a new render engine based on GPU cycle rendering is made. It's still in WIP but it's already working quite good.

ralusek

ya, if you're talking about cycles renderer (i think you are), that's a viewport renderer and soon to replace blender's internal renderer. it's basically the same as octane renderer built in to blender.

it's not only GPU though, it also has the option for CPU now. unfortunately, the only GPU support is through CUDA now, so until they do OpenCL then you're going to need an Nvidia card to use GPU.

Dim

Hey man, I'd love to see more of these videos showcasing the modeling stuff, and I'm particularly interested in the retopo method you outlined. The last couple of months I've been out of the loop on Blender as I migrate to Max (though I still use it in my day to day).

Also, I really hope Cycles doesn't completely replace the scanline renderer, since, as a game developer, I really need that because it's close(ish) to real time engines.

Ace-Angel

Anytime for us to get a Shader node based system a la Mental Mill or ShaderFX?

Dim

Not sure what you mean, Blender has a shader node system built right in. The same system is also used for compositing and creating textures.

Ace-Angel

Oh, I mean something like this:
[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGnJNx2_kfc&feature=related[/ame]

Dim

Yeah, it has a system like that, though not quite as robust. Just enable node editing on your material, then open the node window and go to town.