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Blender Mega Thread

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  • SonicBlue
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    SonicBlue polycounter lvl 10
    HpWJDSZ.png

    This is self explanatory, but, there is a way to proper snap on Edges?
  • Fuiosg
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    Fuiosg polycounter lvl 5
    Turn on edge snapping, next to the magnet on the bottom.
    7593f42c83.png

    Leave the magnet on or off (I keep it off, holding cntrl activates it) then press G and the axis you want to snap to.
  • SonicBlue
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    SonicBlue polycounter lvl 10
    That's what I was trying to do :D

    I think I've found a bug, probably it's the version I'm using (2.74 - 2015-05-09), because if I lock an axis, the snap does this:

    AW6Gd6o.gif

    if I only press G and move it to the edge, it snaps.


    Just to not double post.

    There is a way to do something like this in Blender?

    rHmDOGx.gif

    Set a custom position for the pivot and align the selection to a set point
  • Frankie
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    Frankie polycounter lvl 19
    can you do the last one if you change "pivot center" to active element and "transformation orientation" to normal? and make sure the face you want to align to is selected last so it is active selection
  • Fuiosg
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    Fuiosg polycounter lvl 5
    You would place the 3d cursor where you want it to pivot, change the transformation orientation to normal, select which edges you want aligned, then press Z + Z (or YY etc) then Scale 0.

    At least that's how I would do it.
  • Yadoob
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    Yadoob polycounter lvl 7
    Those solutions doesn't seems to work. On that specific case I would do a cut trough with axis snapping then delete the vertices I don't want.
    AMGuUln.png
    But I agree that the normal behavior should be G,G with vertex snapping !
  • SonicBlue
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    SonicBlue polycounter lvl 10
    Frankie wrote: »
    can you do the last one if you change "pivot center" to active element and "transformation orientation" to normal? and make sure the face you want to align to is selected last so it is active selection

    Thanks this works for the alignment part of the faces, but I have still to figure out how to align the vertex while keeping the correct direction.
    Fuiosg wrote: »
    You would place the 3d cursor where you want it to pivot, change the transformation orientation to normal, select which edges you want aligned, then press Z + Z (or YY etc) then Scale 0.

    At least that's how I would do it.

    This doesn't work, because as you add selections to what you set previously, it will update the pivot orientation (don't know why, since it's set to 3D cursor, that in theory has a fixed position).

    Yadoob wrote: »
    Those solutions doesn't seems to work. On that specific case I would do a cut trough with axis snapping then delete the vertices I don't want.
    AMGuUln.png
    But I agree that the normal behavior should be G,G with vertex snapping !

    This is the only workaround that works, I've also tried the vertex slide without much success, the vertex snap turns on incremental snap.
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    Weird, I've made an alpha layer and yet, I don't see any transparency on my mesh when I paint.
  • JedTheKrampus
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    JedTheKrampus polycounter lvl 8
    SonicBlue wrote: »
    This doesn't work, because as you add selections to what you set previously, it will update the pivot orientation (don't know why, since it's set to 3D cursor, that in theory has a fixed position).

    The pivot orientation gets updated because it's set to Normal. The cursor only affects the pivot location. If you need a custom pivot you can get one with Ctrl+Alt+Space that's aligned to your selection, then you can pick that orientation from the menu and it won't get updated with additional selections.

    You can give these mnemonic names, but I usually call mine Jon. If you need to delete the orientation later you can get to that operator easily with the spacebar menu.
  • JedTheKrampus
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    JedTheKrampus polycounter lvl 8
    Blond: make sure that transparency is checked in material settings and set to Z transparency. Make sure viewport shading mode is Material and that the texture has rgb to intensity checked and dvar 1. Then make sure that alpha and specularity are set to 0 under the material properties so that when you paint white, the mesh will be opaque.
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    Thx Jed, worked like a charm.

    Although, I have to admit painting in Blender is quite wonky, I sometimes have some weird glitch going on, the brush profiles are really limited. I give props t those who manage to get great hand painting textures out of it.
  • SonicBlue
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    SonicBlue polycounter lvl 10
    The pivot orientation gets updated because it's set to Normal. The cursor only affects the pivot location. If you need a custom pivot you can get one with Ctrl+Alt+Space that's aligned to your selection, then you can pick that orientation from the menu and it won't get updated with additional selections.

    You can give these mnemonic names, but I usually call mine Jon. If you need to delete the orientation later you can get to that operator easily with the spacebar menu.

    Thanks that's really helpful, I think I've to wait till they fix the snapping with constrained axis to get a proper solution to this kind of situations.
  • JedTheKrampus
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    JedTheKrampus polycounter lvl 8
    SonicBlue wrote: »
    Thanks that's really helpful, I think I've to wait till they fix the snapping with constrained axis to get a proper solution to this kind of situations.

    Yeah, and in the meantime if you just try to put your mouse on the edge where the vertex will intersect it you can still usually get a pretty good (albeit not perfect) result.

    Blond I agree that there's some odd stuff about the painting in Blender that could stand to be improved or fixed. The projection especially seems a little glitchy to me too, but I'm not really sure how to fix it.
  • SnowInChina
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    Pfiuh..learning a new software is really exhausting! I'm so slooow.

    When I was working on my student short within Maya, I modeled-textured my character in one week...

    I hope to be one day as fast in Blender. I've started learning it since April.

    My project started like this, testing the sculpt features :

    1431827425-go2.png


    And now, I'm testing facial deofrmation to make sure, she looks decent when I'll rig her..

    1431827431-go.png


    I'm mostly an animator and not a modeler (which is why the modeling work aint that good) so I don't feel any thrill or interest in this project really (yet). I'm really looking forward to bring life to her, ANIMATION BABY!!

    Something tells me riggin inside of Blender will be painful though.X(



    EDIT: Note that the hardest part of this, is that I wanna export her within Unreal so no fancy rig or blendshape.
  • JedTheKrampus
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    JedTheKrampus polycounter lvl 8
    You can get blendshapes into Unreal from Blender, and even blendshape animation. You have to uncheck "apply modifiers" in the FBX exporter though. Figured I'd tell you about that before you spent an hour or two trying to figure out why your blendshapes didn't export (or didn't try to export them at all.)
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    Oh man, jed if that is true, i'tll make my job much more easier YAY! :D

    However, I heard they're quite heavy?
  • JedTheKrampus
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    JedTheKrampus polycounter lvl 8
    They're heavier than bones to be sure but if all you're doing is rendering out an animation with a few characters the time it saves you is well worth the cost. Epic used a blend shape rig with their kite demo and it was basically fine. If you want to make sure that it's super optimized you could potentially split the head off so that the blendshape calculation doesn't go through so many polys, but you probably aren't going to run into performance problems. (At least that's the impression that I get--if your computer can run UE4 it should be able to run UE4+blendshapes too.)
  • SonicBlue
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    SonicBlue polycounter lvl 10
    in the meantime you could also use something like this

    http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/mesh_tinyCAD

    If only I could figure out how it works :D
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    I know this is a Blender thread but still, better safe than sorry before starting rigging:

    Does Unreal supports joints scale? Or at lest joints translation?

    Are we obliged to have a root bone or i can leave my bones floaty and separated?
  • JedTheKrampus
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    JedTheKrampus polycounter lvl 8
    I believe that Unreal supports joint scale. Not sure about translation. You need to have a root bone if you're using the mesh for gameplay of any kind, but I think it's not necessary otherwise, though I am honestly not sure as I've never tried not having a root bone. If you have a root bone it should be at the origin, of course, and it doesn't necessarily have to be displayed as an ordinary octahedral bone--you can change it to that circle-with-arrows curve or any type of custom curve that you want to model. (Extra objects for curves addon has some handy curve shapes available that you can create quickly rather than having to model simple quad controls for all your bones.)

    I guess that what I'm saying is that I recommend having a root bone and that rigging isn't particularly my area of expertise so I hope that someone who knows something can chime in.
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    1431978630-untitled.png


    Finally managed to complete my first bake (AO) within Blender.
  • MmAaXx
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    MmAaXx polycounter lvl 10
    looks like a promising PBR shader is coming to Blender..
    (I don't know how to embed a video in this forum)


    https://vimeo.com/127949223
  • pior
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    pior grand marshal polycounter
    Nice, it's looking full featured already ! Can't wait to play with it. With this and the Cycles node setup by Jed, Blender might soon be the first package to ever have both realtime and offline rendering PBR support at the same time. Fantastic stuff.
  • cookedpeanut
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    cookedpeanut polycounter lvl 13
    You can actually download an older test for Blender PBR. It's from last December so no idea what it'll be like but here.

    https://www.dropbox.com/s/yy1p3bq886tr8mo/Blender-PBR_win64.zip?dl=0

    Test scene:
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/z7nrf6c9ca22vs9/pbr.blend
  • JustMeSR
  • pior
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    pior grand marshal polycounter
    Cooked : Yeah, I actually tried that build a few weeks ago but for some reason I couldn't quite get it to work as shown in the example screenshots. I will give it another go later ...
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    Sincerely, I am starting to wonder:

    Why aren't more indie using Blender?

    Between Blender and Maya LT, I'm really wondering why people would prefer LT. I can understand big studios have already settled their pipeline so it's hard to change software on the go but I think move indie game dev (as in serious ones) should use it.
  • MmAaXx
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    MmAaXx polycounter lvl 10
    @blond do you have stats to worry about that?
    I'm pretty sure that a lot of small/mid studios using Blender, I already know someone.
  • JustMeSR
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    JustMeSR polycounter lvl 4
    Yay there is a video on how the "PBR" setup was made.

    I am gonna try to merge it with this series of videos on more accurate PBR and hopefully get results good enough so that I can ditch the old already mentioned PBR build that I currently use:
    e2D4ZNT.png
    7DTct9f.png

    Changing HDRs and getting the right roughness might still be a painful though.
  • JedTheKrampus
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    JedTheKrampus polycounter lvl 8
    Unfortunately that's still pretty far off from PBR. The specularity isn't normalized and since there's no slot to change specular power on a material in the node editor there's really no good way to implement a roughness texture in the Blender viewport right now.

    It looks pretty decent, but I think it's a little disingenuous to call it PBR as the shader basically has none of the practical advantages that PBR gives you (i.e. accurate translation from a roughness texture to both the blurriness of the cubemap, and the specular power and intensity.)

    Edit: I see that he put PBR in quotes on the video, which I guess is good enough to placate me.
  • antweiler
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    antweiler polycounter lvl 8
    Does Unreal supports joints scale? Or at lest joints translation?
    Are we obliged to have a root bone or i can leave my bones floaty and separated?
    -Yes, UE4 supports joints scale. However, its character retargeting uses translation (its good!)
    -Root Bone: You dont have to, but i would strongly recommend it. Have a look at the free assets from epic, you can export them from the engine into Blender with fbx.
  • JustMeSR
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    JustMeSR polycounter lvl 4
    Edit: I see that he put PBR in quotes on the video, which I guess is good enough to placate me.

    He also stated: "By "PBR" I just mean the prettiest shader I could muster in Blender's viewport ;)"

    Specular transition is easy to implement, roughness...not so much. Another things missing are energy conversation and the way reflections behave (you know all that flipping and stretching) [I could be wrong on this one].

    I am gonna upload here a file with built on improvements (middle bluriness map for better roughness, energy conversation with better fresnel and Albedo, metalness, roughness, AO and normal inputs) as soon as I figure out how to get normal maps working with this.
  • MmAaXx
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    MmAaXx polycounter lvl 10
    wait, there are also some builds with the correct PBR shader... but everything is still under development.
  • JustMeSR
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    JustMeSR polycounter lvl 4
    MmAaXx wrote: »
    wait, there are also some builds with the correct PBR shader... but everything is still under development.

    Looking forward to it/ them. :)

    Couldn't get normal maps to work, but here is the file if someone wants to play with "PBR".
  • Chev
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    Chev polycounter lvl 11
    Quick question: in the material node editor I can get the value of a specific channel from a texture by using a RGB separator node, but is there a way to get the value of the alpha channel of a texture?
  • JustMeSR
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    JustMeSR polycounter lvl 4
    Chev wrote: »
    Quick question: in the material node editor I can get the value of a specific channel from a texture by using a RGB separator node, but is there a way to get the value of the alpha channel of a texture?

    In BGE I would use 2nd texture, in Cycles' nodes there are 2 "outputs" 1 for color and 1 for alpha channel.
  • Chev
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    Chev polycounter lvl 11
    It's actually directly for real time use in the viewport, using GLSL. The goal is to use the provided textures as is, ideally, which means separating the alpha channel into its own image is outside the scope of the project. But maybe I can get around that by using python to create that extra texture directly inside Blender.
  • Blond
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    Blond polycounter lvl 9
    Finally finished my character.

    Time to rig her now..

    Anyone of you ever gave a try to the rig system inside Blender?
  • xrg
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    xrg polycounter lvl 10
    I've rigged a few things, but I'm not an expert on it. Here are some good resources for it though:

    - Humane Rigging
    - BlenderGuru (Lee Salvemini guest series)
    - CGMasters (Rigging, Animation, and various others)
  • Shadownami92
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    Shadownami92 polycounter lvl 7
    Blond wrote: »
    Finally finished my character.

    Time to rig her now..

    Anyone of you ever gave a try to the rig system inside Blender?

    I've used it a bit. Overall it's not too bad, I felt it was a bit similar to the way I did things in Maya though I feel like I prefer Blender's weight painting tools a little better than Mayas.

    For mechanical stuff though some of the constraints can have their quirks, but for organics I found it to be pretty straightforward. I believe there is a pretty good plugin floating around for setting up a Unreal 4 rig similar to the official tools out for max and maya.
  • iadagraca
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    iadagraca polycounter lvl 5
    Look up rigify, it's all i use the vast, majority of the time.

    [ame]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYiAd_08-0k[/ame]
  • Gmanx
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    Gmanx polycounter lvl 19

    Just a quick note to add an entry to 'games that use Blender in their pipelines'.

    I've been reading the Gamasutra Post-mortem on USC Games's 'Vanishing Point' and Blender is there in the software list:

    "Software Used: Unreal 4, Autodesk Maya, MotionBuilder, Fraps, Microsoft Visual Studio, Blender, Audacity."



    http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/KevinWong/20150520/243620/Vanishing_Point_Postmortem.php

  • AtticusMars
  • GweLof
    I am not enough of an expert to say exactly how sound the methods presented in [ame="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiNCMY58foA"]this[/ame] video series are, but I've been using the PBR shader I made from the series to plan out and test general ideas about my materials before I send my models to Substance.
  • AtticusMars
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    AtticusMars greentooth
    Is there anything similar in blender to the 'pinch' slider in 3ds max for adding and positioning loop cuts?
  • SnowInChina
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    SnowInChina interpolator
    Is there anything similar in blender to the 'pinch' slider in 3ds max for adding and positioning loop cuts?

    press f6 after inserting a loopcut
  • AtticusMars
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    AtticusMars greentooth
    Not sure what I'm looking for here, none of these options behave like 3dsm's pinch slider.

    Video of the functionality for anyone who hasn't used Max before:

    https://youtu.be/pjolNzkYbSA?t=1m11s

    At 1:11, you see the pinch slider in the connect dialog
  • JedTheKrampus
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    JedTheKrampus polycounter lvl 8
    Well it's not a great alternative, but you could increase the number of segments with the mousewheel, deselect the ones on the end with Alt+Shift+Selection mouse, and delete the edge loops in the middle with XG (Delete->Edge Loops). Or you could do two cuts and some edge slides, or do one cut at a time and just put it where you want it straight away. But the XG way is going to be a little more accurate.
  • Defunct
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    Defunct polycounter lvl 10
    Maybe use inset (I) with the edge rail setting enabled.http://i.imgur.com/QejrYW4.gifv
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