I just noticed Blender has no way to merge two crossing edges by creating a vertex there.
What I want is basically "select two edges that cross each other in the same plane and join them by creating a vertex at the intersection."
Surprising that this simple functionality is not a part of Blender core? I can't be the only user trying to do this? The extended spacebar (IIRC) addon has a cursor snap to edge intersection function which isn't working unfortunately. I think Blender really should be able to do this. Would have saved me a lot of time and a headache.
I'm not 100% sure i understand what you mean but going by the picture in your blog it appears the issue is that you don't terminate or redirect any edge loops to match the number of sides for your outer cylinder so your topology is quite bad to begin with. Your idea of dealing with the situation would create a ton of ngons if i don't misunderstand you so thers probably good reason why this feature isnt high in demand.
Merging the two highlighted edges, resulting in a new vertex, is what I wanted to do.
I believe doing this, and asking for the feature to be included, is completely justified. A quick Google search brings up more users who asked for this feature.
Thanks for the nice crit too, I'll go over the piece again when I have the time.
Gotcha. Misunderstood you then. How did you create this topology? I'm new to blender so maybe i'm missing something here. I get vertices at the intersections both when i connect opposite vertices with j shortcut and when using the knife tool.
Knife tool can subdivide edges but if you want a regular grid or matrix like in my example, it's a little imprecise.
All I wish for is a way to select two edges and create a new vertex in the place where they cross. Given the edges are close enough or in the same plane.
Actually, it turns out I can fill the circle with an ngon and then "join" will work as you describe, but that leaves me with having to delete a lot of faces if I just want the edge grid. It seems "join" only works if there is a face that can be subdivided.
You're modelling with free standing edges here which is a rather unique Blender thing. I love it and it's one of the reasons why i picked up Blender but in this situation i would just use straight poly modeling, fill the cylinder with a face and use j or knife. Not sure what benefits modeling with free standing edges could have in this particular scenario.
Google proves that the need for edge-merging occurs in a number of other scenarios as well, such as overlapping faces in various configurations or intersecting objects. Yes, I can solve my particular issue in other ways, using workarounds, but requesting the feature still doesn't seem unreasonable to me. Workarounds suck.
I wonder if the other 3D modelling packages have this feature.
Yea i get how it could be useful and it's not unreasonable.
In other packages you don't even have the ability to model with free standing edges. In max for instance you only have spline lines and they can't be combined with poly geometry freely without converting/extruding first.
Now if only we could get a great remeshing function! The more freehand approach of Zbrush's Dynamesh hinges on a 'good enough' single-click remeshing solution, and that in combination with Blender's dyntopo would be fantastic.
There's the "Fill details" in dyntopo do to a quick retopo, there's also a remesh modifier but yes, a good remesher would be super nice. There was a GSOC last year but they didn't push it further.
do we know of any blender functionality to scatter/paint (instances of) objects onto a surface, aligned to face normals and orientated in the direction of brushstrokes? 3ds max advanced painter script or the builtin object painter come to mind.
i know about the hairsystem/particle method to populate a surface but would prefer a more artsy approach.
thanks guys. that payware addon looks the most promising so far. i need realtime placement/orientation - i use that kind of technique for painting short hair onto characters. generally speaking fiddling with particles and setups and in particular hair systems just makes my blood boil.
last option: pay a coder to port the relevant subsection of advanced painter over to blender. it does not seem like too complex a job anyway, especially given that blender already has very usable surface snapping and paint tools. unlike some other program ...
Newb question but, is there anyway to bake out normal maps with the green channel flipped? I hate going into photoshop every time and flipping them, there has to be a better way.
I don't think you can with Blender Internal, but if you bake with Cycles you can change the swizzle on normal maps. Baking in Cycles is kind of a wonky workflow for other reasons though.
dang, thanks for the reminder! mifthools is already collecting dust in my pile of scripts to check out. time to bump it to a front row spot.
asset sketcher looks tasty for sure but i suspect it may already be feature overkill for what i'm after from the looks of it. i'd rather have it simple and focused on that one task i want it to do - never used advanced painter in max to it's full capabilities either. physics properties for placement surely looks handy for environment artists though.
played around with DrawClones from the mifth tools today. great stuff! thanks a lot again for the tip. i'm still drowning in tools to check out that i would sure have overlooked this one for some time at least.
I don't think you can with Blender Internal, but if you bake with Cycles you can change the swizzle on normal maps. Baking in Cycles is kind of a wonky workflow for other reasons though.
Just go to the image editor, select your baked normal map and click on Image => Invert => Invert Green Channel.
So I have depended on this forever when unwarping a 3d model. I have the uv editor sycned to the 3d viewport so I can see what I am selecting in the 3d viewport and can selected what I want for the uv editor. Is there an option in blender where you can have this on and it doesn't act all wonky??? Right now if you turn on sync selection in the uv editor, yes I know the button, it only works properly in face mode. So instead of just being able to select an edge or vertex you always have to disable sync. If you do that however you can't see all the uvs in the editor unless they are selected first. and this lame. It's like having hide unselected uvs on all the time. I'm wondering if there is an addon that changes this behavior to what other 3d programs have. Essentially have select entire uv islands seperate from the snyc function. Have a sync viewport to uv editor option seperate, so you can always select form either view and see the texture update...
just wondering if anyone has the inside on how to get feature requests to the attention of blender developers in hopes of having them make it into future releases? is there any official way? i'm on their 'funboard' mailing list but it seems to have about zero traffic. i also know about this site: https://rightclickselect.com/p/ but am not sure how frequented it is?
Does anyone know how to "disable" custom normals on objects once you've modified them? Because this happens:
"Please note that once you have custom normals, the angle threshold of the
“auto smooth” behavior is disabled - all non-sharp-tagged edges will be
considered as smooth, disregarding the angle between their faces."
So I can't add working sharp edges anymore. I've never really used custom normals anyway, so I prefer sharp edges (smoothing groups) instead. But I might start using custom normals if I'll have use for them in future. Blend4Web's add-on has a great normal editor though.
Do you want to use sharp edges by marking them or using the angle threshold of the auto-smooth function? I don't see how the latter could work, but the former you can achieve with data transfer and limiting the affected area by using a vertex group. This will not work in all situations, in the simple example it does though.
@FourtyNights , I think this is what you are looking for :
(I might be misunderstanding you though. If that is the case, a picture showing your problem would help)
That was exactly what I was looking for, thanks pior.
@Prime8 Just using sharp edges by marking them because that way I have a full control all over my mesh. I'll just keep the angle treshold in 180 degrees to keep the automatic calculations off. What comes to custom normals, I'll use them whenever I need them.
Does blender's sculpting have anything like zbrush's morph target brush, where you can avoid a destructive workflow and just erase certain parts back to the basemesh? I'm using multires modifier.
Hey guys, don't know if this monster of a thread is the right place to ask but I'm not having much luck with google on that one. I'm trying to get back to Blender after a couple of years working with Max and the one thing I can't get past is the workflow to weld vertices. Right now it's either move verts to verts and then hit W > Remove double or even worse, Select vert a, select vert b, Alt+M > L (weld at last). That's a lot of steps for something so common in my workflow, I'm pretty sure someone must have developed a Target Weld tool somewhere. Would really appreciate some pointers here.
Select vert a, select vert b, Alt+M > L (weld at last)
A few things to keep in mind here: - The app is very clever when it comes to component selection. You don't have to click exactly on a vertex but rather, just somewhere close to it. This will make you much faster. - The manipulator is not very useful and often gets in the way of selection. I'd recommend you to turn it off, as a vast majority of transform operations can be performed without it. - When welding through a shortcut, the app remembers which merging option you last selected. Therefore after doing it once you don't need to manually select "center/at first/at last/collapse" - you can just press enter and it will proceed.
Now of course there are cases when target weld is preferable to all this. Just some stuff to keep in mind.
Thanks both, good stuff! I had completely forgotten about auto-weld.
@pior Yeah actually I do most of my trans/rot/scale ops with the combo action key + axis + type-in; this is the one feature I mourned for 2 years and always wish I had in Max It's so fast and easy on the wrist.
for target weld i have a key mapped to 'mesh.merge' with type 'at last' checked. then i just click the vertex to be welded and the one at the target position. the difference to max is that there's no connecting line being drawn and that it's not a mode. no need for setting auto weld and using snap and all that.
Mmm Thomas, not sure how I can go about that. Then again customizing shortcuts can be a little bit of a pain in Blender (took me about an hour to figure out how to map vertex, edge and face modes to shortcut last week). Are you doing this directly in User Preferences > Input? I can't seem to figure it out.
Mmm Thomas, not sure how I can go about that. Then again customizing shortcuts can be a little bit of a pain in Blender (took me about an hour to figure out how to map vertex, edge and face modes to shortcut last week). Are you doing this directly in User Preferences > Input? I can't seem to figure it out.
yes, input panel and then add this and assign a key that isn't otherwise used in 'mesh' mode:
If you can find the broader shortcut button for an action I believe you can just right click on the action to set a shortcut. For vertex, edge and face modes its Ctrl+Tab. Then you can right click and select "Change Shortcut"
i usually get the command i want for scripting or hotkey setup from the info / console output you can access by dragging down from the info bar (not the interactive console). then it's just a matter of triggering a command through the GUI and copying it from the output. but lots of stuff has a tooltip containing the python command directly - just not everything.
Hey guys, I've been out of the Blender game for a couple of years. What's the best build to use for animation / keyframing? Any animation add ons you recommend?
Replies
Merging the two highlighted edges, resulting in a new vertex, is what I wanted to do.
I believe doing this, and asking for the feature to be included, is completely justified. A quick Google search brings up more users who asked for this feature.
Thanks for the nice crit too, I'll go over the piece again when I have the time.
Using j doesn't work for me when there is an edge in the way, like here
https://spawnhost.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/edgemerge2.png
j does nothing here.
Knife tool can subdivide edges but if you want a regular grid or matrix like in my example, it's a little imprecise.
All I wish for is a way to select two edges and create a new vertex in the place where they cross. Given the edges are close enough or in the same plane.
Actually, it turns out I can fill the circle with an ngon and then "join" will work as you describe, but that leaves me with having to delete a lot of faces if I just want the edge grid. It seems "join" only works if there is a face that can be subdivided.
I wonder if the other 3D modelling packages have this feature.
In other packages you don't even have the ability to model with free standing edges. In max for instance you only have spline lines and they can't be combined with poly geometry freely without converting/extruding first.
i use it all the time its quite useful although it removes the surrounding faces and leaves just the edges
install the addon: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/mesh_tinyCAD;
select the two edges that intersect;
press w;
select VTX auto in the tinyCAD menu;
done.
PitiWazou has launch a new add-on called Pie Modal to easily create and modify modifier within the viewport :
https://gumroad.com/l/modals_pie_menu
(tubify at 9.40 is great)
i know about the hairsystem/particle method to populate a surface but would prefer a more artsy approach.
It would be a good idea though combined with GreasePencil tool !
You still can do it with duplifaces so it's easier to set-up than particles.
i got a pointer to this: https://www.blender.org/manual/physics/dynamic_paint/introduction.html which is supposed to be usable as well. not tested yet.
last option: pay a coder to port the relevant subsection of advanced painter over to blender. it does not seem like too complex a job anyway, especially given that blender already has very usable surface snapping and paint tools. unlike some other program ...
Asset Sketcher is getting this in an upcoming update, though: http://misc.artbyndee.de/asset_sketcher_physics.gif
asset sketcher looks tasty for sure but i suspect it may already be feature overkill for what i'm after from the looks of it.
i'd rather have it simple and focused on that one task i want it to do - never used advanced painter in max to it's full capabilities either. physics properties for placement surely looks handy for environment artists though.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8tIqa-Qapw&list=TLoqKcXUdQwzYwNTA1MjAxNg
"Please note that once you have custom normals, the angle threshold of the “auto smooth” behavior is disabled - all non-sharp-tagged edges will be considered as smooth, disregarding the angle between their faces."
So I can't add working sharp edges anymore. I've never really used custom normals anyway, so I prefer sharp edges (smoothing groups) instead. But I might start using custom normals if I'll have use for them in future. Blend4Web's add-on has a great normal editor though.
(I might be misunderstanding you though. If that is the case, a picture showing your problem would help)
I don't see how the latter could work, but the former you can achieve with data transfer and limiting the affected area by using a vertex group.
This will not work in all situations, in the simple example it does though.
@Prime8
Just using sharp edges by marking them because that way I have a full control all over my mesh. I'll just keep the angle treshold in 180 degrees to keep the automatic calculations off. What comes to custom normals, I'll use them whenever I need them.
Seems to function similar to ZBrush's NanoMesh except without scatter options. Anyone know of a way to do this in Blender?
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Mesh/Tissue
The improved Bendy Bones system will be in 2.78
Alembic is coming too
https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/733610775122583553
Blender Cloud get a new feature :
Here's a timelapse using Speedflow(http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?395990-Addon-Speedflow), Carver and the Asset Manager(https://cgcookiemarkets.com/all-products/asset-management/ )
A few things to keep in mind here:
- The app is very clever when it comes to component selection. You don't have to click exactly on a vertex but rather, just somewhere close to it. This will make you much faster.
- The manipulator is not very useful and often gets in the way of selection. I'd recommend you to turn it off, as a vast majority of transform operations can be performed without it.
- When welding through a shortcut, the app remembers which merging option you last selected. Therefore after doing it once you don't need to manually select "center/at first/at last/collapse" - you can just press enter and it will proceed.
Now of course there are cases when target weld is preferable to all this. Just some stuff to keep in mind.
@pior
Yeah actually I do most of my trans/rot/scale ops with the combo action key + axis + type-in; this is the one feature I mourned for 2 years and always wish I had in Max
Finding the right call menus for different options is a bit of a pain though...
This page has a small list of some of the menus you can right click on for shortcut options though. https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/3D_interaction/Pie_Menu
Thanks!