DireWolf : as mentionned earlier the "Introduction to Blender for Zbrush Users" Gumroad video by Jerry Perkins covers all the basics, with the added benefit of being practical rather than theorical.
The tone is informal, but that doesn't diminish the quality of the information in any way. This is the single video that I used to get started with Blender, and from there I was able to work on my own in no time.
Thanks Pior I'm checking it out Already I'm loving manipulating hotkeys. How you ca nswitch between global and local axis at light speed. So very nice.
I just noticed that Blender's file browser allows me to create a new folder, but not to move files into it. I'm surprised that something as basic as this isn't possible. I'm working on a game and have a lot of .blend files, some by contributors, and would like to sort them, ideally using previews.
I can certainly use the OS file manager, but I thought something so basic as moving a file between folders was pretty much expected from any file browser.
Yeah, I've managed to do it loads of times but mostly between meshes that are nearly identical except from UVs. What's the problem that you're running into?
I meant objects with non identical topology. I thought it's what Data transfer was designed for . Like Attribute transfer in Maya, Projection modifier in Max or Gator in XSI
It should work OK if topology is slightly different but the overall shapes are similar. I think the normal transfer might be a teeny-tiny bit more robust than the UV transfer because that's the main thing we nagged them about. Are you having trouble getting UV transfer to work?
For anyone interested in retopo in Blender, here's a Pitiwazou's workflow video (in French) using some of the new tools from the MiraTools addon that have been added recently and other addons such as RetopoMT, Surface Constraint Tools, Ice Tools, and maybe another I don't remember.
I don't know about the latest version, but in a fairly recent one they finally fixed importing bones with FBX files so maybe the scale adjustment happened at the same time as that?
Just a note in passing : while the tools demonstrated in the retopo video above are interesting, I personally find that using that many addons/custom menus is really not necessary. Blender has very solid tools by default which do the job extremely well - especially F2, which by itself makes the retopo process just as much efficient (if not more) than other solutions.
While not necessary I think they greatly improve retopo. I still use F2 alongside with them, but the other tools contribute greatly for my workflow, specially when I'm retopoing organic stuff.
The 2.75 did get changes to the scaling/unit conversion and how it's applied when exporting FBX and I too can confirm that UE4 now accepts the file with no complaints with 1x scale. This also fixes armatures and sockets scaling weirdly from what I've tested so...it's finally working (fingers crossed)
FullSynch, what do you mean ? As far as I am aware OBJ is a scale and units-agnostic format, with 1 generic Blender unit = 1 OBJ unit. Or maybe there is something very specific about a given pipeline, requiring scaling ?
TBHO : Yup, I agree, some of these tools are pretty sweet ! It's just that I personally do not find them to be that much faster than regular snapping and F2 ... That being said, whenever I have something really complex to retopo I end up using Topogun anyways, and that's a bit of a different story of course. At the end of the day I am glad there there is so much possibilities in Blender
I really hope than I can keep using Blender when landing on my first game industry job after graduation in spring 2016. We use 3DS Max in my school, but after using Blender for years, it feels stiff, bug ridden and heavy. Even our school is confused which version to use between 2012-2015. And I'm very slow and unexperienced with Max, and I personally don't like the user interface and the way it behaves when trying to do something with it. And, I have zero experience with Maya or Modo. I tried Mudbox once, and I didn't like it either.
Kinda funny that ZBrush is an only industry standard I use, and I love it, and I'm very comfortable with it. Pixologic and Blender Foundation both seem to make things just right. Besides, both of them work together fabulously.
it will most likely depend on what you are doing, but it wouldnt hurt to get comfortable with max either
usually it should not be a problem to do any modelling in blender and import your models to max afterwards, and take it from there if need be
but you are lowering your chances on landing a job with only beeing able to work with blender efficiently
I just test a bit the Blend4Web exporter for Blender which export your scene into a Html page with WebGL. It works quite well, especially for NPR stuff :
Is anyone using blender for animation? The latest update keeps adding and locking actions to the NLA editor making it more annoying than it should be to remove unwanted ones, anyone know if there's a way to delete them easily just from the action editor?
This patch changes the way we draw meshes by introducing
indexed drawing. This makes it possible to easily
upload and rearrange faces ad lib according to any criteria.
Currently we use material sorting but textured sorting and
hiding will be added to optimize textured drawing and skip
per face testing.
It also adds support for vertex buffers for subsurf
modifiers (Except from GLSL drawing), making drawing of
subsurf much faster without need for bogus modifiers.
Tests show that we gain approximately 20-25% performance
by that for solid mode drawing with up to 50% gains for
material drawing. Textured drawing should also have a
small performance gain, but more substantial optimizations
are possible there.
A heads up that the latest builds on https://builder.blender.org/download/ contains the above commit, that makes my viewport roughly 3x faster (tested with 128 cubes, subdiv modifier x5 applied:) But others have reported even higher gains, so I suppose it depends on your hardware. And Antonis claims more optimization is coming up for textured mode. Good times ahead!
A heads up that the latest builds on https://builder.blender.org/download/ contains the above commit, that makes my viewport roughly 3x faster (tested with 128 cubes, subdiv modifier x5 applied:) But others have reported even higher gains, so I suppose it depends on your hardware. And Antonis claims more optimization is coming up for textured mode. Good times ahead!
As someone with slow computer I can hardly express how happy and excited I am about performance increase. :thumbup:
Edit: Also countdown when exporting for non-SSD people.
I can pan the viewport in a smooth 60fps with a 6.2 million polygon scene with Outline Selected turned off on this build with one OpenGL light in solid mode. Material mode with one light handles about 400000 polys at around 30 fps. Old Blender starts to lose its responsiveness in a scene with about 400000 polys in solid mode with one OpenGL light. Basically this is a really handy update! It's very helpful for making accurate baking cages, and it's really nice to see Blender starting to move towards rendering that's a little more modern.
I accustomed to use Blender nodes to construct realtime shader prototypes.
Still I know pretty little about real math beneath them.
Is it possible to see somewhere what actual calculations are ? How Factor input work for example for color blending variants of two inputs.
Or how Zcombine node works ?
Just so I could suggest to a programmer what to do.
I need more exact info about math operations involved, not just an explanation what node does for artists. For some blending modes manual have only few words at all.
Maybe it's somewhere is the source code? If and how can I see it ?
Interesting plans for the upcoming year and 2.8 version. Rather than doing the usual bi-monthly releases, Blender 2.8 would take a year to finish, with more focus and greater changes (like it was done with the 2.5 that brought the new UI). http://code.blender.org/2015/07/blender-2-8-the-workflow-release/
This is a proposal for work focus on blender.org for the coming year. Ive written this because we keep missing bigger development targets we dont have enough time for larger projects. Instead too much time goes to releases, bug fixing, reviews, maintenance and support topics. The bug and patch tracker duties are keeping the best of our developers away from their own targets. As a result we then dont have time for design docs, for planning, logs and in-depth sessions with the module teams, and have no time for the artists who are involved to make sure were well aligned and know what to do. I think everyone has noticed that were floating too much, things are not clear. Where are we heading? Who does what, and how do we decide on things?
So its time to act and gather the troops to refocus and get back energy, to maximize involvement from everyone whos active in blender.org and make sure Blender can survive for many more years.
I can pan the viewport in a smooth 60fps with a 6.2 million polygon scene with Outline Selected turned off on this build with one OpenGL light in solid mode. Material mode with one light handles about 400000 polys at around 30 fps. Old Blender starts to lose its responsiveness in a scene with about 400000 polys in solid mode with one OpenGL light. Basically this is a really handy update! It's very helpful for making accurate baking cages, and it's really nice to see Blender starting to move towards rendering that's a little more modern.
good to know, I yet to try out, does it help sculpting then?
Sculpting is more dependent on the CPU and my CPU is pretty weak compared to my GPU. On a multiresolution sculpt I start to get quite a bit of stroke lag at around 1.5 mil points. With dyntopo on I have around the same amount of stroke lag at around 700,000 points. So sculpt mode still has its old problems but is still plenty workable if you don't need lots of fiddly tiny details or those silly brush alphas.
Did yo started from a cube? the initial polycount matter a lot in Blender, the suggestion is to start from a base mesh of 2~10k polygons to achive better performace.
Yeah I did, but it shouldn't matter much for dyntopo, should it? (I also did a detail flood fill before starting to sculpt)
Edit: Yeah, it does go a lot faster in multires if you start at around the 10k mark. Sculpting is actually pretty smooth for me up to the 25-ish million polygon mark, which really isn't bad at all! Switching between levels at the 25 mil mark is pretty slow though... I wonder if they ever fixed that bug where multires meshes got really spiky if you switched levels too much, too.
That actually looks pretty cool. It doesn't seem like it would be great for a production environment. Definitely would be useful for concepting and design work though. Blender is looking more and more appealing these days. The first time I tried it probably 10 years ago it was very very clunky.
Anyone know what's up with the actions in the latest blender? It keeps adding them to the NLA editor then wont letting me delete them from the action editor.
@Frankie: I was experiencing the same. Thought I was just doing something wrong, but regardless of no user and restarting blender, I could not remove actions.
On a different note. What's the big difference between bool tool in blender, and MeshFusion in Modo? Is it simply the fact that The Foundry did tons of marketing on MeshFusion to make it seem more grand? It just seems like the most general uses can be found in both.
Replies
[ame]
Really like what this guy have, excellent introduction. Too bad there's only 6 videos
https://gumroad.com/masterxeon1001
The tone is informal, but that doesn't diminish the quality of the information in any way. This is the single video that I used to get started with Blender, and from there I was able to work on my own in no time.
How good is this Udemy course?
I can certainly use the OS file manager, but I thought something so basic as moving a file between folders was pretty much expected from any file browser.
It would be nice if this was added sometime.
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=2320645
There's this Copy and Paste UV addon, haven't tried it myself yet.
I remember the Modifier being a bit buggy, could be wrong.
I know the Tool version works decent.
(Object Mode) Toolbar > Edit > Data Transfer : Data > Face Corner Data : UVs
The tool has a lot of options with varied results.
You can find some of the settings that worked for me in this test thread.
I hoped to use it for dynameshed things from Zbrush ( not very complex) and to fix UV after geometry editing. Can't get it work reliably.
[ame]
Time for an update.
Here's a clip from a Jerry Perkins video on the subject :
http://i.imgur.com/FBvVIb7.gifv
TBHO : Yup, I agree, some of these tools are pretty sweet ! It's just that I personally do not find them to be that much faster than regular snapping and F2 ... That being said, whenever I have something really complex to retopo I end up using Topogun anyways, and that's a bit of a different story of course. At the end of the day I am glad there there is so much possibilities in Blender
Kinda funny that ZBrush is an only industry standard I use, and I love it, and I'm very comfortable with it.
usually it should not be a problem to do any modelling in blender and import your models to max afterwards, and take it from there if need be
but you are lowering your chances on landing a job with only beeing able to work with blender efficiently
A room
An animated character
The add on is still a bit young, but it develops really fast!
EDIT : forget the link
also hopefully it's a future-proof solution.
As someone with slow computer I can hardly express how happy and excited I am about performance increase. :thumbup:
Edit: Also countdown when exporting for non-SSD people.
Still I know pretty little about real math beneath them.
Is it possible to see somewhere what actual calculations are ? How Factor input work for example for color blending variants of two inputs.
Or how Zcombine node works ?
Just so I could suggest to a programmer what to do.
https://www.blender.org/manual/composite_nodes/types/color/z-combine.html
Maybe it's somewhere is the source code? If and how can I see it ?
source/blender/gpu/shaders/gpu_shader_material.glsl
source/blender/compositor/nodes/COM_ZCombineNode.cpp
source/blender/compositor/nodes/COM_MixNode.cpp
[ame]
More info here.
http://code.blender.org/2015/07/blender-2-8-the-workflow-release/
good to know, I yet to try out, does it help sculpting then?
Did yo started from a cube? the initial polycount matter a lot in Blender, the suggestion is to start from a base mesh of 2~10k polygons to achive better performace.
Edit: Yeah, it does go a lot faster in multires if you start at around the 10k mark. Sculpting is actually pretty smooth for me up to the 25-ish million polygon mark, which really isn't bad at all! Switching between levels at the 25 mil mark is pretty slow though... I wonder if they ever fixed that bug where multires meshes got really spiky if you switched levels too much, too.
[ame]
What function is this?
Looks like the rounded edge shader in Modo.
edit: Also noticing the hard black edge in the smoothed version...doesn't seem right.
On a different note. What's the big difference between bool tool in blender, and MeshFusion in Modo? Is it simply the fact that The Foundry did tons of marketing on MeshFusion to make it seem more grand? It just seems like the most general uses can be found in both.