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What does it all mean?
It's worth a try. My experience with BlenderArtists was that they will patronize you, but they will answer your question.
Ambient Occlusion bakes a sort of shadows onto the mesh that are not necessarily dependent on scene lights (especially not if you delete all the scene lights first). Then I save that out to a .png to use as a layer. This is a good way to get a uniform shade and/or "grit" depending on your GIMP or PhotoShop layer mode, which can give your clothing an especially real appearance.
Baking normals in this case means baking the object normals to the UV map. The reason this is useful is because I can create two versions of the mesh - the normal low-rez version and a high-rez version - and sculpt more detailed wrinkles etc. on the high-rez one. Then I bake out the high-rez normals, save to a .png, and decompose the rainbow-colored result to channels in GIMP. This lets me then composite those channels together to create a displacement map. It's what I did on this outfit that is now in the store:
http://www.daz3d.com/security-genesis-2-male-s
This is a way to simulate higher-resolution geometry without having million-polygon outfits so it's very apropos to our market.
Your object is white in cycles because you didn't customize the material for the Cycle Engine. For each engine you must always redefine the material which means assigning a shader and assign textures if you have some
Simple way if you just want to see the diffuse map is to click on the object, then go to the material menu and assign a diffuse bsdf shader to the object surface, then for the color, choose "image map" and finally assign your texture in the diffuse channel. See below for an example of what you should get
Another way is to get the automatic Cycles material converter addon (see this thread http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?247271-Cycles-Automatic-Material-Textures-Node/)
With that addon you can automatically convert blender basic materials to Cycle nodes in one click.
That can be helpfull some times. However I recommend to play a bit with Cycles node material and editor. It is very flexible and it is a good thing to know in order to build your own custom shaders with the node system
...regarding all the keyboarding required to perform camera moves and framing, I can do all that with just my trackball in Hexagon.
I have difficulty understanding why anyone would feel Blender's approach to this is better when it requires far more effort to do something so simple.
When has anyone claimed that?
The benefit of Blender over Hex will never be the interface. It's the feature list.
You can't do precise complex camera tracking and movement with your trackball. Blender's camera system is designed for animation and you can enter values in the 3D transform panel to do that or do some tracking on real footage and in these cases you don't need to place the camera by hand. Plus you don't always want the camera to move when you're moving around in the 3D view so you don't always need to lock the camera to the view either
@franontheedge : if you want it to follow something with the camera, you can use a track-to constraint on the camera . Just select the camera and assign the constraint. Example below where I selected the cube for tracking. You must specify the object/vertex group you want to track and choose -Z and Y up
...I'm not into animation, I just need a stable modelling pogramme. In that respect, being able to move the camera about freely to work on and inspect a mesh is a valuable asset.
Blender primarily used to be a modelling application. This is the issue I have with full featured "all in one" programmes in that individual functions must be "compromised" to accommodate all of the other features.
I stick with my go to app which is Silo. There hasn't been updates in a long time but it's very stable compared to other apps. Very user friendly and an easy completely customizable UI. This is how I have mine set up. All the right hand buttons are the most common things I use.
....that looks nice and clean. My only concerns are support and any future development.
You don't need to place the camera to do modeling and you can customize blender's orbit style to trackball. Why bothering doing something you don't even need to do?
I think Blender is not for you as it doesn't seem to be what you're looking for and you don't seem to want to accept the way it works. I told you once that it could be that you don't use the right tool and I don't think you're looking at the right direction. You may have better luck with Carrara/Silo/Wings3D/Metasequoia/Moray/ArtofIllusion/Anim8or etc...
You also seem to stick on your need for an application that would have further development. I rather think you should begin somewhere with a tool that more or less satisfies your need so that you can gain experience with modeling then switch to an other app later
...I'm not into spending any more hard earned Zlotys on my meager budget for something that is a a dead end . I already did that with Hexagon and totally regret it.
Blender doesn't need to be this bleedin' cumbersome.
Both WIngs 3D and Anim8or are free, Silo is periodically cheap via Steam (I paid £15 for it the other week when I bought B2M).
The only reason I ever need a camera when modeling or simply placing objects in Blender is due to scene complexity. When you need to see in solid or textured view, and the objects or parts that you need to see are obscured in the basic perspective view, then you can create a camera to get that look 'inside.' Otherwise when sculpting or modeling, there's just no need at all for a camera. You can delete the default camera and Blender won't complain unless you decide to render. Even that's not a worry if you just want to turn on viewport rendering to get familiar with your materials and lighting.
I've watched tutorials on programs like Wings3d and Hexagon. In my simple opinion, they take way too many mouse clicks to perform the most simple interface and modeling operations. In fact I find the DS interface to be quite clunky even though I have set up the viewport navigation mouse clicks and modifier keys to do similar to Blender. (MMB, CTRL, and SHIFT) The reality is that people who make money doing this stuff want to get it done as fast as possible, because time is money.
A few years ago, when Blender 2.49 was still widely used and 2.5 was in development, I started learning Blender using tutorial videos by Paul Caggegi in his Process Diary blog. Unfortunately, I don't see any of those old videos available anymore. I have a few that I downloaded for reviewing at my leisure, though. Watching Paul navigate and model in Blender was truly inspiring and pretty much sealed the deal with me as to the potential for creating things even in the relatively more difficult old Blender interface. You really have to see a master at work sometimes to appreciate the value of his tools.
Edit - Basic Blender interface video by Paul Caggegi: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgkK5sTlXq4
...the lack of contrast in Wings (too much grey on grey) makes it difficult to look at which is why I don't use it.
As I mentioned in other threads, not into working with cloud based services. If I do get Silo, I'll purchase it from Nevercenter. directly.
I don't know why Daz is just letting Hexagon wither. How long would it take to make it more stable so it stops crashing and freezing up, as well as upgrade it to 64 bit support (which could solve any memory based issues)? How can they keep selling what amounts to a broken piece of software, even at less than 20% of what it originally cost?
Edited. NM
..."all in one" apps usually are compromises. A dedicated application (in this case modelling), would focus more on that particular task and therefore deal with it more "in depth" thus making it a more powerful tool for the job.
A Swiss Army Knife may be nice in a pinch, but a set of screwdrivers or socket wrenches is a lot more useful for tackling the specific job they are made for.
Oo Nice price I need to find sales like that ;) I assume its over now.
did you try this free one -
http://meshlab.sourceforge.net/
...this looks more like it is for reprocessing and cleaning up meshes from scanned objects or created from reference photos (though the Arc3D service in the link) rather than building polygon meshes from scratch.
Wing is a nice applicaton. If you're going to stop without even trying to cutomize the UI colors you won't go far. See below
About "all-in-one" tool, I assume you would then prefer to box/vertex model in one app, sculpt in a second, uvmap in a third, texture in a fourth, rig in a fith, animate in a sixth then render in a seventh application? (not even talking about particles, fluid, physics, crowd, compositing, etc)
One of the force of Blender is that you don't have to use another app and fiddle with file format conversion which allows faster workflow. That is one of the base concept of Blender, which explains it's success so far.
@Bigh : Meshlab is not a modeling tool
...all I need is a polygon modelling application with a good UV mapping tool, and yes, it would be nice to have sculpting too.
I don't need it to also do rendering, animation, game development, surfacing, or rigging (the latter two which need to be done in the application where I intend to use the models anyway since I have to import them as .objs).
Unless they changed a few things in Wings3D from the last time I tried to work with it, I was unable to get much if any contrast between the the text and background on the tool palettes.
Edit->Preferences->User Interface
http://www.ppmodeler.com/features.php
http://openfx.org/index.html
http://www.anim8or.com/
Just want to say that there is a sneak peak of what will come up as a first change in the interface. I personally love it and I am impatient to get that in the trunk.
But I don't think beginners will really find it helpful to use Blender
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1ik0rlJuK4&hd=1
Just wanted to thank those for all this great information in this thread.
...interesting in that this was one of Andrew's proposals that was shot down during the conference.
Since the Steam version of Modo turned out to be an expensive piece of crippleware, I had another look at 3DCoat. The non-commercial version of 3DC is on sale for $70 through Steam right now. The full version is on sale from Pilgway directly for $278 on sale right now.
There is an applink for 3DC in Blender, so I think it would be a nice complement to Blender's rendering and animation features. Of course, the demo can be downloaded for free. However, I always have a problem actually learning enough about a program to do anything useful within a trial period. The demo comes with a manual, and there are some well made tutorial videos on YouTube. I'm not sure how well it would integrate with DS, but the non-commercial version doesn't seem to have polygon export limits and can export .obj format (which is the reason I won't touch Modo SE).
@Kyoto : You may not see the subtle difference between having organized addon tabs and having everything tabbed per "activity" but there is one. That is quite different from Andrew's proposal albeit the fact of having tabs. I doubt you could have the modeling tool addons, the node editor, Layer management, modifiers/constraint properties at the same time with Andrew's mock up. The pinning function is a nice idea to get many addons of different type always on screen
@daveleitz68 : At that price, 3D coat is a good alternative to Zbrush for sculpting and 3D painting but not really an alternative to Modo. It has PTEX support which could be used in DS, even if no artist seem to use that feature. I also read once it has some good retopo tools. So worth buying in my opinion if you have time to devote to learn it (like for any app). I downloaded the demo once but like you, I didn't have time to do anything with it. For integration in DS I guess the good old Obj export/import should be good
There is someone over at PFD forums that tried to get us to give Blender a shot and I must say, this thread has been very helpful. That Wiki (which you can also get in pdf and download) is going to be a big help once I start reading it.
Thanks for all the helpful info everyone and keep it up...I believe Blender is an amazing program once you can figure it out.
You can get the HOme/Educational version for 84 directly from the site (a little cheaper through stream if it is at 70) and there is a person in the Carrara forums that uses it and exports as obj and does some very nice things so it should import into DS.
This has been an interesting and informative discussion. Thank you, everyone. I finally started working with Wings and have been working quite successfully with it. Budget being what it is, Zbrush, Modo and the like are probably forever off the table. Silo, maybe. Blender looks like my next challenge, after learning the basics.