freelancing with blender?
greentooth
I'd like to start doing some freelance character modeling work in the future but I can't afford commercial licenses to 3dsmax or Maya so I was thinking of using blender.
For those of you who freelance do you think it would be a big obstacle for clients seeing as how they probably would not be able to work with your project file?
For those of you who freelance do you think it would be a big obstacle for clients seeing as how they probably would not be able to work with your project file?
Replies
But if you are asked for rigging, MR shading or Vray shading, etc. the thing changes.
the app is cool for small jobs.
The good news is that you can deduct software purchases from your taxes.
And while I agree you should think about tax deductions, make sure you're able to bill and receive payments which cover your expenses. That's part of running your business. And, yeah, get used to the world of subscription if you want the cheapest way to stay current with Autodesk. You may not even need the features in the upgrade, but if you have to open a X 2014 using X 2010, you're screwed. You definitely want to budget for both software and hardware upgrades as you'll likely need to deal with both.
Yeah, maybe a bit of a tangent but, when you're figuring out your rate as a freelancer you need to consider:
A. What your need to live on (base rate)
B. Hardware cost
C. Software cost
D. Taxes
E. Retirement
F. Health insurance
G. Downtime
So all that factors into what you need to charge a client for work.
I hadn't thought about taxes but that makes sense
And yeah I'm trying to figure out all my costs and needs still
:poly127:
Best I can do is $40.
For indie development, the Unity game engine can work around this a bit since it can import .blend files directly. But lots of studios I don't think really have that sort of focus on Blender compatibility.
Isn't blender obj export messed up with regard to smoothing groups/ hard edges in the fact that it splits the mesh where you have a hard edge ? So when if say your client imports your blender obj it will have to weld them ? Now if you have hard edges to uv islands for baked stuff your client would have to not only weld them but run his script as well (uv islands to hard edges)
There's nothing wrong with the exporter. Blender doesn't do smoothing groups. It only allows one normal per vertex, just like game engines.
EDIT: Piracy is not cool man. Pay your way.
Then you don't use edge split when exporting to other 3D software. Blender doesn't support multiple vertex normals, so it can't do smoothing groups, but Max/Maya do. However, game engines don't support multiple vertex normals either. Why are smoothing groups so important? They just add unnecessary vertices. You get better hard edges with normal maps.
Exporting both of these should just work, so all of the work someone does in Blender carries over into whatever other software.
And your statement that normal maps somehow replace hard edges/smoothing groups is so illogical I don't even know where to begin. Hard edges can be used to help normal-map bakes for one, but also in the case of no normal maps hard edges are very important.
It's one thing to tell me I'm wrong, I can accept that given you can back it up with facts. It's quite another to insult me in the process. You could have phrased that without the attitude. Saying that my statement is idiotic or illogical beyond description is just poor social discourse and hurts your credibility. It's hard to take you seriously when you accuse me of being idiotic and illogical. It makes you look irrational and your argument weak because you resorted to negative comments about the speaker.
Now, just because Blender doesn't do things the way Max and Maya do it doesn't make Blender wrong or inferior, it's just different. You can also still have hard edges on objects, but it gets split on export. Also, instead of using smoothing groups in Max and Maya, you could just do a detach to element as well. It gets the same results as a smoothing group and it can then be exported to applications that don't support smooth groups without losing your work. The nice thing about edge split in Blender is that it works a lot like SG while the modifier is active at the bottom of the stack and it splits your edges for you on export.
yes blender can just spilt on export, but think about collaboration, what if someone with Maya has to edit soar mesh? well they will have to fuck about with splits which can he a pain in the ass, or they will have to merg the spilt verts, which would average the 2 normals out loseing the data.
So yes I would say multiple vertex normals is a needed feature, expecially when collaborating with others on work, and something that blender is just inferior at.
thats not the point of this conversation.
Yes, you could do many things that would work out perfectly fine. But the point is, most clients use max or maya and want a file perfectly compatible with their workflow.
He was calling Blender idiotic, not you...
And I would have to agree with him. If Blender seriously exports detached faces to other software... well... that would be idiotic
Maya does seem quite good at merging the vertices's, at spilt edges into 1 vert with multiple vertex normals though, just using the basic merge tool, with a low threshold.
Still stupid to have to do so, blender should be able to support multiple vertex normals, even if it doesn't do it internally since it uses tagged edges, and a modifier, it should be able to figure it all out on export, and use multiple vertex normals at export.
also i might be missing something but it also seems impossible to edit vertex normal facings in blender also, which this kinda makes it impossible to do foliage, and other things that require edited normals, and even some things such as giving the verts around large faces all 1 normal facing so they bake better etc.
If blender dosnt want to change the root of the issue here, the lack of support for multiple vertex normals, and normal editing, they could at least fix it at the export stage, with a export that creates data on overlapping verts for a vert with multiple normals.
even with the little i know about the Maya api, it would be pretty easy to write a obj importer that does this too for obj's incoming from blender.
Unfortunately everything wrote is true. There's no way to export smoothing groups with ANY exporter in Blender.
I've talked about [smoothing groups/hard edges] import/export numerous times on BA.org forum with no satisfying response.
Like here, the answer was usually 'the Blender way is better', very little recognition of the compatibility issues.
There's no way to have multiple normals nor edit them per vertex.
Edit: There's a script apparently that let's you edit normals per vertex and stores them.
Otherwise Blender resets normals when you get into edit mode.Still impossible to have multiple ones.
Most importantly to me, there is no intention from Blender core devs
to make Blender more suited for game art workflow.
I think it was directly expressed by Ton Roosendaal.
Other than that in terms of game art, the viewport performance is terrible so modelling real high poly might be impossible. (at least on the newer NVIDIA cards).
http://www.blendernetwork.org/
Good luck!
Well, that sucks. It would be nice if you could edit the normals and it would nice if Blender supported multiple vertex normals. Maybe if more people in the game industry spoke up about it to the dev team, it might get more recognition? Petition, perhaps?
@Andreas
I don't think the Blender team really intends for people to export edge split to other software, but they aren't going to make an effort to stop you if that's what you want to do.
Now someone correct me I'm wrong, but don't smoothing groups cause errors in normal baking? You're essentially creating overlapping and diverging rays that will leave seams and doubling in the bake.
I'm sorry, you're right. It was the absolute way in which you phrased yourself that set my teeth on edge. Either way, apologies.
I just run into the 'The Blender way is the only way' attitude very often, not in the least from their lead developer, and it rubs me the wrong way. I use Blender (our current pipeline revolves around it), and the constant anti-game shit really annoys me. Since a few versions I can't load psd's anymore because of open-source politics, for example.
I model in other software for the most part and use Blender to bring it into the engine, but I recognise the need for it to export ngons and hard edges natively.
There are ways around it, but this isn't a case of blender doing something "different", it straight up does not support common industry standards for file information, which is unarguably worse, not "different". It doesn't support proper vertex normals on file export, there are no benefits or good reasons not to supporting something basic like vertex normals, so the "different" card doesn't apply.
Andy Davies can probably pop in here and give some good tips for getting around the issue, like creating a "cage" mesh in Blender that is pushed/expanded enough that you don't need to create a cage in your baking app. I wont try to explain it further because I don't understand it as well as he does.
At the end of the day, Blender isn't really supported or used in the games industry like Max, Maya, or even XSI is. So if you plan on freelancing, its not really viable to do all of your work in Blender, unless you can find some small blender specific studios willing to give you steady work, or you're OK with turning down work from studios that use Max/Maya/XSI(in other words 98% of studios). Working for smaller studios that allow you to use blender only may be a valid option until you can afford to purchase licenses of Max and/or Maya as well.
That isn't to say Blender is useless or anything, you can probably do all/most of your modeling and uving in blender (I do all my high, low and UV work in Modo and have yet to have an issue with freelancing) but you're probably going to do all of your vertex normal setup(hard edges/smoothing groups), baking, final scene setup and asset delivery in Max, Maya or XSI.
Going blender only will also make it near impossible to work with an art outsourcing studio as well, as outsourcing studios will expect you to have your own license of whatever common software they are going to encounter when working with a large variety of clients. This generally means you will need Photoshop, Max, Maya, Zbrush and Mudbox. Yes, all of them, as a wide variety of clients means you need to cover all the common apps. Telling an art studio/client/etc that you can't open a file they send you to work on because you "can't afford anything but blender" isn't really going to fly.
Out of curiosity, what was the anti-game stuff about?
- Add the Triangulate modifier to your LP mesh.
- Make a duplicate of your LP mesh & add the Edge Split modifier (active but not applied).
- Add a solidify modifier to it and move it above the edge split modifier in the stack.
- Uncheck "Fill Rim" and check "Even Thickness" and "High Quality Normals"
- Change the "Thickness" into a minus number, so that it covers your HP mesh entirely
- Apply the Solidify modifier
- Go into Edit mode and select one of the faces of the outer most mesh
- Invert the selection and delete the inner mesh
- Go back into Object mode and apply the Edge split modifier
- Export the mesh with UV's, Normals and Keep Vertex Order checked.
- Done!
That should export a perfect cage mesh, with all the smoothing groups/hard edges intact.Brecht has promised me that he is going to try and add cages before the next BConf, so fingers crossed.
As for split vert. normals, this is also only an export issue and just isn't supported atm. Apparently it is easy enough to do, but there isn't much call for it it seems (relatively). If everyone in the thread posted on the Blender mailing list asking for support, it would be added and pretty quickly at that.
The problem with Blender development is that its features are designed for Blenders internal workflow and not for exporting for other applications. This is why split vert. normals are not supported & why there is no cage support etc.
The vast majority of Blender users don't require these features as they are pretty specific to game development and the game art user base is much smaller than viz/offline rendering, so most resources get used in that direction.
As an example of this, until 2.57b, Blenders swizzle for normal maps was X-Y-Z+ and was only changed once Morten got involved and added mikktspace. It sounds super crazy to us, but for Blender to Blender it worked perfectly for most people so there was no real need to change it.
You can get freelance work using Blender but I will echo what others have said previously that you will be expected to have access to Max/Maya for the final asset unless they dont mind getting an obj, fbx or they are working in Unity. Very few game studios work in Blender and though that is changing slowly, the sad fact is that you will have to get Max/Maya if you want regular work.
Though your explanation puts it into perspective. Those damn VIS guys out number us game artists on every software.
I'm also having trouble getting a proper ambient occlusion map bake from Xnormal with a model exported out of Blender, could the vertex splits be the problem with that too?
Since Blender is expandable with Python I wonder how hard it would be to make something for similar smooth group functions as other software then, since this discussion seems to be leaning towards the conclusion that smooth groups are the biggest deciding factor on how useful Blender is for Freelance 3d art (at least for the modeling aspect).
yes, you will get a perfect, seamless result
sounds like a lot of things to do, but its more like 2mins of work
and to get back to the matter of freelancing.
unity has a commercial section where you can offer your services and look for potential clients
you could also make stuff and sell it on the unity asset store
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?251402-Addon-Recalc-Vertex-Normals
To each there own, personally i hate the max smoothing group system and prefer doing things by setting edges hard or soft maya style.
Yeah honestly the max system is pretty strange and convoluted. In maya you can simply select an edge loop and set it to hard. Max you have to make a face selection, and then assign it to the weird smooth group system thing. If you want to do something more complex like have a hard edge transition from hard to soft abruptly, its easier to do in Maya, simply select the edges you want hard and click harden edge, in max you've gotta make two separate smoothing groups, and then select the faces bordering your the area you want soft and make sure those faces are on both smoothing groups(while remembering which group each is on), barf.
In Max you can do some really powerful stuff with the stack and smoothing groups, however, I personally like Maya's straight forward hard edge system. Though honestly, I spend very, very little time manually setting up smoothing in Max or Maya, instead I use scripts to set smoothing based on uvs.
Another thing that is a cool about Maya's hard edge system, you can select the UV boarders and set all of those edges to hard edge with a simple script. In Max, because of the weird smoothing group system, you can only really script it to separate UV islands into smoothing groups, which is lame if say, you have two islands connected by one or two edges, all of the boarder edges will remain soft.
ya i got 2 main scripts i use for settings hard edges, and normal directions, one does uv border edges to hard edges, and the other i use on large faces that aren't baking very well. what it does is gives the vertex normals around the selected face the same normal as the face.
im sure there is prolly a script by no for max to emulate the maya way of doing smoothing?
It's not the fact that Blender has or doesn't have smoothing groups really. It's that Blender physically breaks the geometry where hard edges are assigned that is causing headaches.
Blenders hard edge system (called sharp edges in Blender) is very flexible and similar to Maya in that you select an edge and mark it as sharp/hard, allowing for a very versatile workflow that isn't constrained by the regular smoothing group method that Max has. Blender also has built in functionality to mark the boundaries of each UV island as hard (UV/Image Editor> UVs>Seams From Islands> Mark Sharp), so we are all good there.
What is needed is the ability to export hard edges as smoothing groups while keeping geometry contiguous by splitting the vert. normals, rather than implementing an actual way to add smoothing groups.
http://www.katsbits.com/tools/#ase
The problem with blender is not getting your models into an engine. That works just fine.
See thread: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?284736-Normals-Editing-in-Blender
Video demonstration for manual rotation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ceNkQ6UNn1I
Copy and Paste of original thread for easy reading. Author's name is FelixSchl
Another thread with some similarities, includes addon for tweaking normals.
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?259554-Addon-EditNormals-Transfer-Vertex-Normals
Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=FrxWAo5isB0#!
Furthermore, some users on their forums recommend toggling the include normals option when exporting. I havent tested this yet so I cant vouch for any of this exporting properly as of yet.
That and what EQ said, studios that want the deliverable in their application's native format.