Blender

My wife uses Blender but bakes textures in Substance Painter. However, we no longer want to use Adobe products.

Can anyone recommend an alternative?

She tried baking directly in Blender but found the process quite challenging. Are there any addons you'd recommend for it?

She also gave ArmorPaint a try but didn't like it either.

Ignore everything after this. I was stupid and did not notice my brush strength was zero.

I've been working on a rig for a model, and I've gotten to the weight painting stage. Given that I'm relatively new to rigging, I've had to restart the process a few times. My most recent weight painting endevour is the farthest I've gotten, but the tools suddenly stopped working.

What can cause a properly parented and posable model and rig to no longer accept weight changes?

I've tried selecting all the vertices. The vertex groups are unlocked. Accumulation has been turned on and off several times. Subdivision is off.

[Update 1]

So blur, average and smear work, but the main paint brush simply refuses.

The new link should be a .mkv file in Google Drive

I'll share the node setup in the comments

Just started a course from CGboost, I've learned quite a bit. I've been obsessed with adaptive subdivision, making displacements in the shader editor is so addictive NGL.

So you want to learn Blender? Read this.

11 months ago, I posted this: I wanted to get into 3D-printing, so I figured I'd dust off my old CAD modeling skills and learn Blender as well, because while they're not the same, the two are somewhat related, and both are useful for 3D-printing. And I always wanted to get into Blender anyway, because I always felt this is a tool I should know and add to my belt.

So I taught myself FreeCAD. That was easy, I knew CAD before. But of course, like everything that looks easy, it took me months to get really good at it 🙂

And with the models I made in FreeCAD, I taught myself 3D-printing. That also took a good long while. And crucially, the need to get better at 3D-printing is what drove me to get better at FreeCAD, because to get the models I wanted to print, I needed to know how to model them.

And then I hit a roadblock: I needed to make a really complex model in FreeCAD - a special shoe if you're wondering - and I couldn't. I mean I could, but it was exceedingly painful and it ended up looking very edgy and blocky, because FreeCAD isn't all that great at letting you control complex lofts.

SolidWorks could have done it much better, but I want to stick with FOSS software and FreeCAD just won't cut this one. I did learn a lot more about FreeCAD trying to model the shoe mind you, so it wasn't for nothing. But ultimately I was unhappy with the FreeCAD shoe.

I knew there was only one tool that could do what I wanted: Blender.

So I took the plunge.

And it was hard!

So the shoe was my first Blender model. Not exactly an easy tutorial... But here's the clincher: I needed it.

11 months ago when I started learning FreeCAD, I tried learning Blender alongside it and I went nowhere. I tried following tutorials, got bored stiff and gave up. I tried modeling something on my desk and I gave up because I'm not interested in pencils or scotch tape dispensers. Very quickly, I concentrated on FreeCAD - which did what I needed to do - and gave up on Blender altogether.

But here, I need those special shoes. I'm interested in 3D-printing them, it's a fun project and Blender is the tool I really need. Just like getting better at 3D-printing drove me to get better at FreeCAD, the need to print this shoe drove me to get better at Blender.

In short, you need a purpose! You won't learn something with as steep a learning curve as Blender without a purpose.

Am I good at it? No.
Am I fast? Hell no.
Do I know it well? Not a tenth of one percent of it.

But here's the thing: I'm good enough with Blender that I now naturally turn to it for certain jobs. For instance, I needed to illustrate something for someone yesterday and I automatically reached for Blender. And while I was modeling what I wanted to illustrate, I automatically reached for the right tools and used the right methodology.

That's the mark of a tool you've internalized: Blender is now part of my toolbelt, and that's what I wanted all along.

So as a newly-minted Blenderer, here's my advice if you want to learn it:

• Find a purpose. A real purpose! Don't make it up. Whether it's learning something for your job or moving forward in your pet project, you need Blender to serve a true need you have.

  If you don't truly need it, you won't keep at it and get over the steep beginning of the learning curve. Without a real purpose, my advice is, don't even bother.

• Forget all tutorials but one: the donut tutorial part 1 and 2.

  The problem with tutorials is, they pretty much all assume you know some Blender, or they're too fast, or they're just not very good from an educational point of view. The donut tutorial is VERY good and it starts you from absolute zero slowly and correctly.

  Once you know how to drive blender, you'll be able to get useful information out the other parts of the donut tutorial if you want, or other tutorials even if they're not great. But for the love of all that's holy, use the beginning of the donut tutorial to get going.

• Forget keyboard shortcuts.

  Honestly, this must be the singlemost common mistake in most tutorials. They all tell you "type Ctrl-this, Shift-Alt-that. Numpad-something" and the shortcuts all do something the tutorial wants you to do, but they totally fail to show you why you should be doing this.

  Force yourself to use the menus: just by hunting for the things you want in the menus, you'll organically grasp the structure of the menus, why the thing you need is there and not somewhere else, and you'll get a much deeper understanding of how this whole thing works.The shortcuts don't give you that insight.

  Don't worry, you'll end up using the shortcuts too eventually, when you're tired of clicking the same sub-sub-submenu item for the millionth time. But you'll know what the shortcut cuts short, which is surprisingly important.

• Check which version of Blender you use and dismiss tutorials or tips you find online that don't pertain to that version, or that are too old.

  Blender evolves constantly, and most of what you'll find online don't really apply directly to newer versions anymore. You can waste a lot of time realizing that this menu item that someone is refering to doesn't exist anymore or has moved someplace else. It's silly really, but that's an easy trap to fall into.

• Do the drudgery. Yes, sometimes it's a PITA to move thousands of invidual vertices or clean up faces manually. And more often than not, if you feel a need to do something in a smarter way, chances are someone else did too before you and there's a clever tool for that you'll probably find easily online. But when you do the drudgery, you build up muscle memory and reflexes. So at least at the beginning, don't shy away from low-level editing.

So that's my advice to get into Blender. It's not an easy tool to learn but it's an important one, and that's how I got into it. Hopefully you'll find my limited experience worth your while.

It is hard to get models out of Blender (correctly and without loosing half the work).

Gamedev relevant open-source projects should come together to create a new 3D interchange format. More in the Right-Click Select post.

I've submitted this proposal to other open source projects as well:

• Godot: https://github.com/godotengine/godot-proposals/discussions/11283
• Bevy: https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/discussions/16632

I'm trying to learn blender for making tandril studio-like animations (the UI animations usually published by Microsoft when announcing something new like here with Copilot).

I know that's a big goal, but I still wanna do it...

I have an object and points (point cloud). I would like to modify the named attribute of the nearest vertex to each point. How to do this?

I tried using the "sample nearest" node, but I couldn't make a selection out of the output. Then I tried it with the "sample index" node, and it seemed like it was modifying the named attribute for all vertices for each point, or the "sample nearest" node used the source object's location instead of the point cloud.

I would appreciate some help

cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/18243654

Up until I saw the person I couldn't even tell this was 3d which is saying something because the vast majority of 3d trying to emulate 2d I have seen has a weird plastic look to them.

This is a simple shader node group that breaks up the visual repetition of tiled textures. It uses a Voronoi texture's cell colors to apply a random translation and/or rotation to an image texture's vector input to produce an irregular pattern.

I primarily made it for landscape materials. The cells' borders are still sharp, so certain materials, like bricks, wood, or fabric, will not look good.

I recently came across a Japanese animation and love the way it looks and want to replicate the shader style and animation style

Recently I've been planning on designing some optics, nothing fancy just for a projector system that I'm messing around with. Anyway I got this idea that I could basically model the optics in blender using lux core to simulate the light path as it bounces the mirrors and passes through the lenses.

So I am able to create lenses and parts of any kind O can think of but I would love to be able to control the parts after I've created them via parameters like radius of curvature for example for a mirror.

Is that possible using a python script? Like somehow keep the script that created the geometry somehow linked to the geometry in such a way that I can come back to the script and change it later or maybe even change it using the timeline and key frames?

Hi

So, the thing I want to accomplish is to add .png images, compile them and then transform the compiled montrosity (move/scale, etc).

But the thing is, if I “alphaover” the images with some offset, for example:

the image laid over the other cuts off, as the overlay can’t reach outside the dimensions of the underlaying one.

I know I can just:

• use eg. gimp and combine the images there, but I’d rather have my workflow entirely in blender.
• add transparent padding for ~billion pixels around the decal as a workaround, but that sounds silly and “bruteforcing” the concept.

How would I go about getting all overlaid images to display in full in such case? I’ve tried different options on the “alpha over” and “color mix” -nodes without results, but entirely possible that I just missed some critical combination.

So, thoughts?

This is a remake of one of my first nature scenes; it's always so satisfying to look back and see how far I've come since then. All made in Blender, rendered with Cycles.

Let me know what you think!

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/24674915

Sourced from this article about Blender's history, which interviews Ton Roosendaal, the creator.

I personally find this addon quite innovative. To me it looks like a 2d drawing toolset inside of 3d program that is more powerful and has unique 2d drawing features absent in actual state-of-art 2d drawing programs like CSP and Krita!

(also; an album: https://imgur.com/a/H4EZCdV - changed the topic link to show the render, for obvious visibility. Album includes node-setups for geonodes and the gist of what I use for most materials)

Hi all, I'm an on/off blender hobbyist, started this "project" as a friend of mine baited me a bit to this, so I went with it. The idea is to make a "music video" of sorts. Gloomy music, camera fly/walkhrough of a spoopy house, all that cheesy stuff.

It started basically with the geonodes (as shown in the imgur album) - basically it's a simple thing that generates walls/floorlists around a floor-mesh and applies given materials to them, nothing fancy but it allows me to quickly prototype the building layout.

The scene uses some assets from blendswap:

• https://blendswap.com/blend/14139 - furniture, redid the materials as they were way too bright for the direction I intended to go. But the modeling on the furniture is top notch, if a bit lowpoly but nothing a subsurf mod. can't fix.
• https://blendswap.com/blend/25115 - the dinner on the table. Also tweaked the material quite a bit, the initial one was way too shiny and lacked SSS.

Thanks to the authors of these blendswaps <3

edit: the images on paintings on the wall are some spooky paintings I found on google image search, but damn it I can't recall the search term to give props. I'm a failure.

The source for the wall/floor textures are lost to time, I've had these like a decade on my stash. Wish I could make these on my own :/