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What would be your dream Applink


haikalle
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Hi!

What would be your dream applink? 

Now when blender applink is in good shape I have time to do something else. I don't promise anything but I would like to have a picture are users happy for applink that already exists 
or do we miss some important applinks still. 

Thanks for your feedback.

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hmmmm... something as LiveLink with Substance Painter ?

It enables the use of Substance materials directly in Unreal Engine 4. 

Real-time updates within the Unreal Engine scene as you texture in Substance Painter.

or may be not unreal engine but eevee ?

 

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5 hours ago, haikalle said:

Hi!

What would be your dream applink? 

Now when blender applink is in good shape I have time to do something else. I don't promise anything but I would like to have a picture are users happy for applink that already exists 
or do we miss some important applinks still. 

Thanks for your feedback.

Yeah, a live link to Blender would be fantastic. Thanks for the hard work you put into the Blender applink, already! :good:

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The possibility to make the texture workflow a two-way exchange with 3D-Coat would be nice.
Imagine you’re managing a large scene with textured objects in Blender/3dsMax/Modo etc. and you’d like to polish existing textures of particular objects in 3D-Coat.
 
I’d like to send them from my Host Application with all its texture layers to 3D-Coat, tweak and refine them, and send them back to the original App. Without manual texture assignment in 3D-Coat.
 
It’s mainly a 3D-Coat API request offering new possibilities for Applinks.
 
The import.txt (or whatever kind of file) built from within the external application could for example serve the following information per texture layer:
  • Target model name/identifier (e.g. "Mesh_Human")
  • Material name (e.g. "mat_body")
  • UV map name (e.g. "uv_body")
  • Kind of effect layer (color, normal, metallic etc.)
  • Channel filter RGB / R / G / B / A
  • (Absolute) path to texture file
Whether material or UV map name applies depends on the user choosing to treat materials as separate textures or not on import.
 
(Currently it seems to be partly possible for some basic maps that import with .obj files, but it doesn’t suffice for all PBR layers - also depending on how the Host exports to obj -, file format independency and channel packing.)
 
I think it could create a pretty unique workflow. 
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2 hours ago, Robert N said:
The possibility to make the texture workflow a two-way exchange with 3D-Coat would be nice.
Imagine you’re managing a large scene with textured objects in Blender/3dsMax/Modo etc. and you’d like to polish existing textures of particular objects in 3D-Coat.
 
I’d like to send them from my Host Application with all its texture layers to 3D-Coat, tweak and refine them, and send them back to the original App. Without manual texture assignment in 3D-Coat.
 
It’s mainly a 3D-Coat API request offering new possibilities for Applinks.
 
The import.txt (or whatever kind of file) built from within the external application could for example serve the following information per texture layer:
  • Target model name/identifier (e.g. "Mesh_Human")
  • Material name (e.g. "mat_body")
  • UV map name (e.g. "uv_body")
  • Kind of effect layer (color, normal, metallic etc.)
  • Channel filter RGB / R / G / B / A
  • (Absolute) path to texture file
Whether material or UV map name applies depends on the user choosing to treat materials as separate textures or not on import.
 
(Currently it seems to be partly possible for some basic maps that import with .obj files, but it doesn’t suffice for all PBR layers - also depending on how the Host exports to obj -, file format independency and channel packing.)
 
I think it could create a pretty unique workflow. 

Interesting idea. I think that making two apps fully interactive to each other may have too difficult task. 3D-coat applinks support baking option to bake textures into 3d-coat. You can bake (diffuse +
metalness + roughne + AO ) in one click.

There was a bug with baking textures from blender into 3d-coat. Baking process is a little bit slow now. I think I can improve it a bit. 

io_coat3D.zip

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@haikalle Thank you for all the hard work you are doing. I wonder how complicated it must be to develop something like what you're doing.
Let me ask you a question.
Is there any kind of boundary between Blender and 3D-Coat?
What I would like to say is how far something done in Blender could be transferred to 3D-Coat?
I work a lot on the Sculpt Room (Surface and Voxels) so many doubts would be related to the sculpting process.

Examples
1 - Character being worked on the 3D-Coat Sculpt Room, transfer this character to the blender, then make Uvs for this Blender sculpture, use the Blender displacement Modifier so that I can use any texture map to detail this character, apply the displacement modifier, return to 3D-Coat. And the detailing results made in Blender are applied to a New Layer in the Sculpt Room (non-destructive process).

2- Is it possible to make a texture shader using the Nodes system in Blender and the result to generate an Alpha / Stencil in their respective Palettes in 3D-Coat? And also a Smart Material (if possible)?

- I would very much like a real-time Blender - 3D-Coat connection.
The real-time use of the EEVEE Render would be fantastic.

- Real-time use of various Blender sculpting and modeling tools appearing in real time in a New Layer in Sculpt Room's surface mode. (non-destructive process).

Sorry if I said something wrong, I have no programming knowledge, and I really do not know if my suggestions would be possible to do.

Thanks for everything

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Sorry for the late reply. I had some fun coding other blender addons and I lost track of time... again :) I'm sorry, I'm not able to give a good answers to your points. I know that it's going to a big project if we want that kind of deep interactive between blender and 3d-coat. I'm more python programmer than c++ so I'm not sure if I'm able to do anything in that area. I have talked with 3d-coat team about making blender livelink and they are excited about it. Soon I get access to 3d-coat code and I will start to explore how livelink could be done. This is for me a nice challenge and I'm not sure if I can create anything that dosen't crash :)

 

Edited by haikalle
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Thank you for answering me ... I understand! :)

I had read an article from a blog saying that it was possible to integrate between Python and C ++ (or was C) I do not remember right ... but if you search in google Python along with C will appear ....
Maybe you can understand what the person said about this integration better than I ... ;)
When I read, I thought there could be this union of the strengths of these 2 programming languages. Blender is fantastic and I was wondering if there would be the possibility of having this Python integration with 3D-Coat. If so, I think a lot of exceptional things would be done.

I will stay in positive thinking so that everything happens well and that you succeed.

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29 minutes ago, Carlosan said:

I asked for python support for plugins development time ago.

I know 3d-coat supports Angel Script.
Maybe because the 3d-coat developers were excited about a possible Live Link with Blender ... I figured there might be a small chance the Python language could be used in conjunction with 3d-coat.

It would be fantastic if that happened, I see fantastic things in Blender through Python ... maybe the developers might reflect a bit on using Python. It seems that there are many programmers who know Python.
Just an innocent thought! :)

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Thanks for the feedback. I will continue with blender applink and try to make it step by step into livelink direction.

Also I'm planning to see if I can improve a houdini applink a little bit. We already have a good houdini applinker, but it misses couple important features, like multiply object transfer
and automatic node creator. Also I'm amazed how good renderman is in houdini so I think that first I try to add renderman support and after that mantra support. If you are interested
to do some alpha testing please PM me. 

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Hi @haikalle,

It's not exactly an applink, but it would be great if we could export to .babylon format and/or gltf/glb.

Also, I'm curious @Andrew Shpagin what would be the possibility of integrating Babylon's render engine into the render room?

https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#EYEPRI#3  (this one takes a little while to load, but worth the wait)

https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#Y3C0HQ#146

Babylon.js is an opensource game engine for the web and it features a web-based render engine that rivals Sketchfab and Marmoset.

 

Maybe an export to a local web directory that you can preview in browser.

Edited by gbball
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2 hours ago, gbball said:

Hi @haikalle,

It's not exactly an applink, but it would be great if we could export to .babylon format and/or gltf/glb.

Also, I'm curious @Andrew Shpagin what would be the possibility of integrating Babylon's render engine into the render room?

https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#EYEPRI#3  (this one takes a little while to load, but worth the wait)

https://www.babylonjs-playground.com/#Y3C0HQ#146

Babylon.js is an opensource game engine for the web and it features a web-based render engine that rivals Sketchfab and Marmoset.

 

Maybe an export to a local web directory that you can preview in browser.

I think the Blender Applink makes Blender the perfect rendering companion for 3DCoat. There is some Vertex Paint functionality for Concept Artists who would want to export straight out of the Sculpt Room w/o UV's....but I don't think Roughness is yet enabled for it. 

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Yeah,

Blender does already do this and it's free.  It will also export to GLTF by default and babylon with a plugin.

So for that reason it's not critical.  But I would really love to have post-processing in the 3D-coat render room.  A simple babylon html export from 3D-coat that you can open in browser would help in that regard though since it already has post-processing setup.

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On 5/18/2019 at 10:04 PM, AbnRanger said:

I think the Blender Applink makes Blender the perfect rendering companion for 3DCoat. There is some Vertex Paint functionality for Concept Artists who would want to export straight out of the Sculpt Room w/o UV's....but I don't think Roughness is yet enabled for it. 

This is how I work most of the time. I save the scene as an FBX ( Blender does not appear to have vertex colours on OBJs) Import into Blender , then I have to "activate" the colours with an attribute node . Its pretty straight forward. ( once I figured it out,that was the hard bit!) but can be time consuming If I need different levels of spec for each part. It would be great just to send the scene there  with all the correct nodes in place.

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How about an app link for Reallusions Character Creator. I currently have licenses for 3D Coat and Character Creator and an app link would be sweet. There is GoZ for zbrush and Character Creator. I prefer to sculpt in 3D Coat of course. Detailing props, assets and clothing for characters in 3D Coat with an App Link would be so nice. We are using it in the pipeline for our current game.

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i have to second the prospect of reallussion. it is amazing the workflow that character creator and zbrush have, and there is nothing more that i would like to have from 3d coat than that same exact functionality. push a figure to zbrush, morph and/or model over it, push back to character creator. the figure keeps the morphs, and the rigging goes straight to the clothing modeled over the character mesh. texture the model, and bake the maps out. i have zbrush and can do this already, but im becoming better with 3dcoat (faster than zbrush), the ui, the ease of use, the learning curve... i just upgraded, got all my presets working and in order... for 3d coat to handle cc3 figures with the same ease as zbrush, would be like Christmas, New Years and the 4th of July in one holiday. the process i use now is clunky chum with pickled beets. using an export doesnt work for cc3 (it does, but is also clumsy), so i have to go from cc3 to zbrush to 3dcoat back to zbrush and then finally in cc3. going straight from cc3 to 3dc and back has scaling issues, and you lose some functionality, not to mention its not as simple a process =/

make it happen and the reallusion and 3dc people will love you forever...

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