michalis
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Posts posted by michalis
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LOL
Good point bisenberger.
Try this BA forum thread
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?267023-Up-to-date-complete-tutorials
I started learning blender seriously, when I joined a blender community in athens. Became a friend to people who are developers of blender parts.
Started camera chats, giving courses on sculpting, talking about art etc etc .
This is all about blender, a democratic community.
Anyway, download latest builds here (not a fast server, unfortunately LOL)
http://builder.blender.org/download/
New real SSS cycles node implementation is just marvelous.
Hair and SSS, n-maps and displacements bumps, a pathtracer supporting CUDA, an interactive render window. Rigging, animations... What else do you need for your presentations?
3dcoat and blender:
two powerful UV editors, two retopology systems, voxels and surf mode on one hand, dynamic topology and multires sculpting on the other.
Wonderful new texture tools implementation in blender, unification of sculpting-painting tools (this is important) , so, two texture systems too.
Time for art.
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Is it possible to export both retopo mesh and hi-res sculpt from 3D-Coat, then somehow rebuild subdivision levels within Blender with those? Then I could gain the advantages of multi res data...
Yes, it is.
Export both meshes one on top of the other.
On the low poly cage:
add a multi res modifier, subdivide as needed. A ~2-5M quad mesh is probably what you need.
add shrinkwrap modifier,
1. under shrinkwrap modifier, select project method, positive negative checked!
2. enter the name of the original hi poly sculpt
Voilà.
Some artifacts may occur on difficult areas (on the back of the ear or mouth by example). Smooth brush will fix it easily. (similar issues are common in zbrush too)
3. Enable alpha based brushes and add pores wrinkles or any detailed sculpting, probably adding another subd level. (if you have enough RAM >8GB)
In the end, you will be able to bake normal, AO, or, displacement 32 bit exr maps from multires data. This is the best way.
Multires modifier in blender needs re working for sure. I keep saying it. It's quite a ram eater, but the worst is:
It performs smoothly (like in 3dc - zbrush) when a less than 3k retopo cage is in use. A 10k cage will kill performance for sure.
A ~500-1000 faces cage makes blender to fly. I was able to smoothly sculpt on a 100 millions faces !!! Zbrush can do this (not really) , on a single mesh I mean.
I keep asking for a rebuild subdivisions modifier too. You're right, it's a very useful tool. (zbrush has it)
IMO, what makes blender an interesting sculpting tool is the ability to have a decent pathtracer in hand as you sculpt. It's not a real time viewport of course but you just hit render any time you sculpt. GI raytraces-pathtracers tend to eat cavity in general. Sometimes you don't know how sculpt will look in a renderer.
This is always my main problem working in zbrush. BPR lies. On the other hand, 3dcoat render room is not a GI renderer but it's a decent preview engine. I hope Andrew will have time one day to improve it.
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he he
Excellent. Better than mine.
BTW, this "... to prove it" goes for sculptris, not 3dcoat.
Now, mine is already retopo-ed and multires sculpted. Meaning that I can bake from multi res data directly (much more accurate), if I have to export it. Otherwise, staying in blender, you don't need baking at all. Animate the low res base and send hires data to the render engine.
Anyway, a wonderful surprise, Timmy.
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MaCrea is an app for constructing matcaps.
We have so many alternative ways to do it, practically, all 3d apps can render a sphere with some material on it.
I don't quite follow the posted question, especially on this forum.
However in 3dcoat, it's very easy to import such a square render and apply it - editing an already existed 3dc shader.
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Indeed. But voxel aren't fake at all. This is on where you sculpt. It's not a surface typical sculpting at all.
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It's in reference to snapping in the Retopo Room....not baking. In 3D Coat, snapping is pure brute force. There is currently no way to finesse it. There is no way to gradually pull vertices toward the underlying (Voxel) object. The best example I can think of, is to refer to a recent new tool in 3ds Max (for Retopo work), called the "Conform Tool." It's very similar to using the BRUSH tool in 3D Coat....but again, the difference is that Max gradually pulls the verts of the (low poly) mesh toward the object beneath. 3D Coat does it in a harsh, absolute fashion.
Thanks Abn. Interesting.
Actually, blender offers two snapping modes. A typical snapping to (obviously we will select faces snapping). A second involving shrinkwrap modifier. This behaves similarly to 3dcoat.
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SNAP SELECTED (progressively with slider)
Such approaches will never work perfectly.
How snap works in 3dcoat? Snaps where? On vertices? On the normal of a face? On a face somehow? What will happen after subdividing the base cage mesh?
Such approaches make sense under a multi resolution editor. Where you can edit-resculpt the mesh, after shrinkwrapping a multi res mesh on your original voxel (or surface) sculpting.
This may explains why MV mode is still problematic.
Let's not try to re invent the wheel here. (MB, Zbrush, blender) (baking from multires)
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I use a Logitech G5 usb mouse. Bought it in 2005 and still works perfectly. I learned Maya with this one LOL, blender, etc etc
Though a full Wacom user I prefer this mouse on a typical 3d edit mode. The best mouse ever used. Designed for righties only.
(The weighting system isn't the only customizable feature of this mouse, you can adjust the resolution of the sensor on the fly, without installing any software 400-2000dpi).
Wacoms are great, but you don't have to work on DTP or on CAD or on audio-video apps with them, right? The wacom mouse isn't that good as the G5.
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Blender is not a tool we would use...ever.
"We"..
Nice, democratic opinion !!
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The render room is fine. And very useful to preview your sculpting.
What is missing (IMO) is a depth map rendering capability.
It's the only way (parallel camera) to bake maps on one single quad.
So, normal map, displ exr 32bit map, AO map anti aliased passes in render room.
BTW, please keep in mind that there may be other professionals among you. Not just VG assets makers.
Illustrators for instance.
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Abn is right.
I played a lot with zbrush fiber mesh. It's good to some, not that good to others.
I mostly prefer the blender hair room. Lot of people believe that it's not that good but they just never worked on it. It's wonderful IMO. Zb, not so...
I asked Andrew about this before and he said the only way Vector displacement will work is if you deform/sculpt the object in the Tweak Room, and that deformation will be reflected in the vector displacement map...but not Voxels to MV.That's interesting. I'll keep saying it. This "tweak room" is the very weak point of 3dcoat. Without multiresolution sculpting don't expect great quality of baked maps.
The reason is obvious. Approximated baking methods should be avoided. Otherwise, not having hair cut room in 3dcoat is not a big deal.
Such new features in zbrush, like fibermesh, hard surfacing loop tools, box modeling like tools, etc, made me lost my interest on this Zb app and concentrate on blender. As this is my basic 3d app. The more I learn it the more I love it. Same goes for the users of all the other major massive 3d apps.
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@abn
And all you guys here,
He asked for some help. Is it so difficult for you to just say, 3dcoat can not do this. Is it?
Why are you talking about retopo and such things anyway?
He asked for baking on a plane. On a single face mesh anyway. Why are you taking your time to give irrelevant answers?
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What you only need is to render via a parallel camera.
You need a 32bit exr or a 16bit tiff at least for good displacement.
So, ask your app to render the depth. (zcamera depth or as it may your app calls it)
You may also apply a shader (a normalmaps colors matcap) and render without shading), so you have your normalmap*.
All these are very easily done in blender/cycles.
3dcoat can't do it.
It's on my wish list anyway.
Such operations should take place in render room, IMHO.
Zbrush users can do this easily. Blender users as well.
It's also possible to bake an AO map this way.
*BTW, it's rather useless to bake a normalmap-tiled pattern.
It will work on a flat wall but you can't wrap it via a UV editor, as replacing - rotating the UV islands on a normal map is against tangent principles. Only wrong results will come after this.
I hope these were helpful.
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2 GB ram is not much.
Actually, this is why all serious renderers are based on CPU and not GPU.
6GB of VRAM costs too much, but it is something. A 24 or 32 GB CPU based engine still looks better.
Just saying.
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Low poly baked versions and curves are not good friends. Such limitations hurt me. Hurt my eyes.
Sorry for this, I tried a tube corridor. I was able to make a very low poly version with excellent results. I just realized that I should avoid the tube solution. You need some decent subdivisions, unfortunately. Else, better avoid it.
On the world of VG curves do not exist.
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Despite how wonderfully you keep working on it, it is obviously not the right way to go. It just can't be.
Your patience is killing me. A real virtue. Something I will never have. Unfortunately.
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$50 isn't much.
Maybe $100 is more appropriate as a donation to the blender foundation.
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On hair,
use the slow one, smoothed curves. Else, you have to add a lot of segments, avoiding straight lines. Smoothed curves will work though. render time x2 unfortunately lol
Box blurred mapping is great but as long as cycles doesn't bake on UV maps... well. We have smoothed box mapping in 3coat and it will be baked (bumps too) on the UV map.
I didi all the time, just constructing shaders.
93 k tris, hey. It's impressive how crisp they work under dyntopo but you could go for at least 200k.
Or, just retopo it, UV unwrap it, bring it into blender on topo of the original, multires and shrinkwrap-project mode positive negative On
You can add hi freq details this way, blender can sculpt and bake up to millions of faces.
I think, this is the best way to use dyntopo. Something similar to the zbrush dynamesh-autopo-multires technique.
A tip David
You can add a second Vpaint set in blender and make it the active one (this camera icon, click it)
Then, under Internal render engine, go to the bake section. Ask for baking AO, there's an option "bake on vertexpainting". No need of UVs, just an active Vpaint set.
It will take a few mins and works surprisingly well. You can use it as a second attributes node to control mixes etc.
Very nice dragon. A real hippy, indeed.
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ha ha
thanks.
Testing beta for months now, I had a lot of fun, that's all.
I love all the sculpting applications. I love to see them all, getting better and better.
In general, under dyntopo, you can have crisp detailed results using 200-500k only.
There is no magic on this. I was (and some more friends) always against the implementation of an auto relaxing code.
I like it better, this way. Some autosmoothing on the brushes properties panel is optional and should be enough.
This is may be possible under cycles, because of the great way "collapseShortEdges" works. Nicholas Bishop did a fine job.
Dyntopo, as it is now, can't go up to millions of poly. Lagging from time to time starts already at ~200k and get's worse at ~1M. Unworkable then. No crashes though.
We may see some great improvement in a few months.
More important is the re working on the multires modifier though. Don't forget. Blender is basically an after retopo, multires sculpting/baking tool.
The booleans modifier works also great on rather dense meshes. This the way too do holes or cuts-splits in blender. Not super but it works alright.
The lack of a posing tool when sculpting is another issue. LOL
Of course, rigging is there, to do what? More complicated than helpful, when sculpting.
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http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/
The official 2.66 release.
Add a cube, subdivide it 4-5 (subsurf modifier) and apply the mod as well.
Jump into sculpt mode / under topology menu/enable dynamic topology
Some instructions here
@Beat
Of course it's a personal matter. Any artistic technique or tools is a personal matter.
IMO, the brushes, the UI on their parameters, even the default behavior, are excellent.
What I mostly like in blender is the ability to sculpt after retopology, multires and projection (shrinkwrap modifier)
This last one is fixed now and works beautifully (like zb projections). You have to use project mode (positive negative On)
Is what I always (we) asking from 3dcoat, a full operative multires sculpt room. How easier and more accurate baking could be then.
A fast 3d sketch ~200-400k (dyntopo), retopology, UVs, and sculpt details-bake on a multires mesh.
What needs a lot of re-working in blender is:
-The multires modifier (old coding-unpredictable performance on less evenly distributed topology)
-the texture painting mode (not so nice performance) (but the tools are good)
-the entire redraw 3d viewport OGL engine.
At this time they're working on these.
Hair - strands under cycles are beautiful
Still, no baking under cycles engine (BI only) but in one case we already baked excellent AO and displ maps (AA)
Still, no real SSS in cycles. Fake sss works though.
A tremendous effort from the developers, a big thank you to them. We may see some eastern eggs soon.
And have fun, a look on an article of Phil Rhodes, describing his love and hate relationship with Blender
http://www.redsharknews.com/business/item/173-blender-love-it-and-or-hate-it
IMO, he's unfair. I wonder if he even dares to make similar critics on zbrush. The blender UI... is his problem now. Whatever.
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But all in one there's still lack of feeling, almost like playing with toothpaste, you can't control the amount
I love you too.
Anyway, it became my favorite way of sculpting. Not zbrush, neither 3dcoat, nor sculptris, just this one.
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@carlosa
You have to prove it.
Dyntopo + multires ~ 5M mesh. Sorry for the terrible hair, just learning, always.
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@Tony Nemo
Octane has still some limitations. Whatever GPU you have. On the other hand, all these octane renders are so lovely! I like this engine.
@Abn
True! I have a 3.5 years macpro (dualXeon 16 threads). Still after all these years is much faster than a modern (logically prized) i7 engine. This doesn't feel natural, regarding CPU development.
Blender 3d 2.66 Dynamic Topology Sculpting Video by Blender Cookie
in CG & Hardware Discussion
Posted
Free sculpting? Do you mean freeware? Why should I think this way? I spent my money on 3dcoat, zbrush, and on some donations to specific blender developers.
Regarding sculptris, it's a dead app already, thanks to pixologic. I hope I'm wrong.
OK, it's only my opinion, but sculpting under a pathtracer-environment, especially after the new wonderful implementation of cycles SSS, is very important to me.
Starting a 3d sculpt-sketch, blender dyn-topology is the more spontaneous tool I ever had. Brushes are excellent, simple and parametric. Great control.
For more than 300k dynamically tessellated mesh, I can jump into 3dcoat for a better performance. Maybe.
Or, on the other hand, I can directly go for re-topology, multiresolution and projection-shrinkwrapping on the original mesh.
Now I can sculpt up to million faces, maintaining great performance. (better than in zbrush if I may say so). The benefits of multires sculpting. Bake down n-maps displacement maps etc from multires. This is the only, the best way for precise maps.
Still, having great previews under SSS GI rendering.
Do you see my point?
Here is a fast test. On how to carve on a piece of marble. SSS and GI eats carving. If you ever tried to carve a piece of marble, you understand what I'm saying. So close to the real thing then.