Who said Blender was hard?

Mendoman

bluejaunte said:

When I played around a bit recently I noticed that the viewport cannot be navigated while a tool is active. Is that true? You can't change the view while extruding a face for example?

That still seems to be there. My solution has been to split the screen, and set the angles I think I need, and then model in one window and use the other windows to see what it looks like from different angles. I know it's not the most elegant solution, but maybe it helps.

bluejaunte

To make things worse, I have a 3d mouse that is also completely disabled while a tool is active...

nonesuch00

j cade said:

Mendoman said:

Wow, those renders look amazing j cade. I especially love the hair. Any chance you'd be willing to share your node setups?

The hair shader setup is taken by someone far cleverer than I. Specifically this thread on blenderartists. only thing I've really added to it is plugging the hair strand intercept into a color ramp and using that to make the roots a bit darker its less visible here, but on lighter hair can really make a difference (for long hair it can also help to make the hair underneath, that doesn't get as much sun, darker as well)

Other hair tips: use a scull cap to grow your hair from, if for no other reason than it makes it way easier to recycle your hair onto other characters. I generally only use 2 hair groups: a main one that gets me 99% of the way, with children set to interpolated and then one other group to clean up parts and the hairline, with a slightly thinner strand thickness, children set to simple and all strands for this group placed manually. But 90+% of the work is just brushing the hair around as a whole unit. There are multiple sliders that add some randomness helpfully labled "random" and they are the best things. There's one under the render heading that randomized the lengths of the strands so that everything isn't uniform and one under the children heading that also has a threshold slider that you can basically use to control how much of the hair conforms to the clumping, this is the greatest thing ever. I find a lot of strand hair in renders ends up looking off because its too smooth and perfect

The skin is actually super simple I used to have a super complex 3 layer shaderwith all sorts of bells and whistles (that I built myself, even) but this is so much easier to set up

 

nonesuch00 said:

Mendoman said:

I hope it's ok to revive this old thread, but there's already so much blender stuff collected in this thread, and it's nice to keep it all in the same place.

Recently I've been playing with Eevee, and personally I really like the changes they have made, and for Iray users it's speed is just mind-boggling. This pic took about 2-3 seconds to render

 

I'm still experimenting with skin/eyes/hair etc. shaders, but for normal materials like metals/plastic and stuff like that, normal principled shader seems to work really nicely. Also I've been unable to find anti-aliasing settings, so pic is little "edgy". I'm still struggling with shadows, but contact shadows seem to help some. I hope devs are still working with shadows more, since I think that at least HDRI shadows are still missing ( or I just haven't figured out how to get those to work ). Also I think mesh lights do not really work yet, but it's still early days, so I'm not really that worried. I have briefly tried light probes and irradiance volumes, but still need to experiment more with those. Ambient occlusion and bloom effects out of the box are really nice, and I still haven't even tried DOF or motion blur, but Eevee is still so much fun to play with.

 

All and all, I think new Eevee is the next big thing, and I haven't been this hyped since I found Daz Studio and Iray couple of years ago. Has anybody else still had time to play with it, and what do you think?

Maybe by the time it adds all those missing features it's as slow as iRay? 

I read the blog entry from the main Blender founder guy, a Dutch guy be the name of Tom I think, and he said Blender 2.80, which includes Eevee, is supposed to be ready by July 1 for stable official release. It doesn't sound like it to me from what you just said.

Your render does look really good though.

 

Ton. And it's the first *beta* by July. To one of the other points, Eevee is a realtime pbr engine (think modern game graphics) although since it isn't actually for games there is some consideration for also doing some near-realtime (ie .5 fps vs 30 fps). And given that their main render engine Cycles is already *definitely* faster than Iray....

OK, I misread the Tom fellow's blog interview then. I like cycles but I'll be very glad for a straight up PBR engine that has functional parity with other PBR engines out there. I'll wait though til the 1st of July to install a beta. Their betas can be betas for months.

So, I saw from the credits of the video you posted the fellow's name is Ton.

kyoto kid

...the background looks pretty good (though I do see a slight bit of grain) however not wild about the skin textures.  I imagine given more adjustment (more time) like SSS, transparency, translucency, & such, she would look much better.  Not sure if that would impact render time like it does with other engines.

But then true, for 2 - 3 seconds, not bad at all. I can't even get a 3DL render to finish in that amount of time (and I'm impressed when a large detailed scene takes 9 minutes).

Mendoman

kyoto kid said:

...the background looks pretty good (though I do see a slight bit of grain) however not wild about the skin textures.  I imagine given more adjustment (more time) like SSS, transparency, translucency, & such, she would look much better.  Not sure if that would impact render time like it does with other engines.

But then true, for 2 - 3 seconds, not bad at all. I can't even get a 3DL render to finish in that amount of time (and I'm impressed when a large detailed scene takes 9 minutes).

Yep, skin/hair is still a work in progress, but I think if user wants, it's possible to build multi level SSS ( Eevee can use most of Cycles shaders like subsurface scattering, and it's possible to chain them ) and all the eye candy with node setups. Also there's also material blend modes similar to Unity ( like opaque, alpha blend, multiply, additive ) but I have no idea how to use those, so I'm sure in right hands it's possible to build really nice skin shaders with Eevee too. Oh well, back to work 

Artini

Mendoman said:

Heh, they sure have to mess up big time if they somehow make it as slow as Iray. Current couple of seconds renders are just freaking amazing, and I'd rather have bland shadows than wait several hours for indoors renders to finish.....but yeah, there's still some problems and missing features like it's expected from a beta release, but I'm not really that concerned. Also like I said, some of my problems might already be there, and I just didn't know how to use the new engine. Anyways, to me even current beta build looks really good already ( mine's like a week old ), and if they still have over 2 months developing time left, can't wait to see the final version.

@Artini Moving Daz characters ( even entire scenes ) is super easy with mCasual's script/plugin. Support thread here in Daz forums is https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/2877/mcjteleblender-daz-studio-scenes-animations-w-blender-s-cycles-engine. I'm using teleblender 3, and it seems to work just fine with 2.79. I haven't tested if it works for 2.8 yet, but current beta release still have some problems in arrays etc. modifiers, so it's easier to build scene in 2.79. apply modifiers and then move to 2.8.

Thanks a lot for the tips about importing Daz characters to Blender.

I have tested importing Daz items to Blender 2.8, as .obj, .fbx and collada,

but get only an error and nothing get imported at all.

Will try your suggestion to build the scene in Blender 2.79 and then open such scene in 2.8.

 

kyoto kid

Mendoman said:

kyoto kid said:

...the background looks pretty good (though I do see a slight bit of grain) however not wild about the skin textures.  I imagine given more adjustment (more time) like SSS, transparency, translucency, & such, she would look much better.  Not sure if that would impact render time like it does with other engines.

But then true, for 2 - 3 seconds, not bad at all. I can't even get a 3DL render to finish in that amount of time (and I'm impressed when a large detailed scene takes 9 minutes).

Yep, skin/hair is still a work in progress, but I think if user wants, it's possible to build multi level SSS ( Eevee can use most of Cycles shaders like subsurface scattering, and it's possible to chain them ) and all the eye candy with node setups. Also there's also material blend modes similar to Unity ( like opaque, alpha blend, multiply, additive ) but I have no idea how to use those, so I'm sure in right hands it's possible to build really nice skin shaders with Eevee too. Oh well, back to work 

...indeed, it would be interesting to see.

MarkIsSleepy

bluejaunte said:

When I played around a bit recently I noticed that the viewport cannot be navigated while a tool is active. Is that true? You can't change the view while extruding a face for example?

Wait - there are programs where you can rotate the view in the middle of extruding something? Wouldn't that just make your extrusion go crazy since the spot/direction you were extruding in just moved?

Honest question here, because my modeling experience is limited to Carrara, Hexagon and Blender and I can't even conceive of how that would work since in all three of those the same controls (either keyboard or mouse) are used for both functions, so I'm having a really difficult time picturing the process or even seeing why you would need to do that.

I know you mean more generally than just extruding, my brain is just stuck on that one. 

bluejaunte

MDO2010 said:

bluejaunte said:

When I played around a bit recently I noticed that the viewport cannot be navigated while a tool is active. Is that true? You can't change the view while extruding a face for example?

Wait - there are programs where you can rotate the view in the middle of extruding something? Wouldn't that just make your extrusion go crazy since the spot/direction you were extruding in just moved?

Honest question here, because my modeling experience is limited to Carrara, Hexagon and Blender and I can't even conceive of how that would work since in all three of those the same controls (either keyboard or mouse) are used for both functions, so I'm having a really difficult time picturing the process or even seeing why you would need to do that.

I know you mean more generally than just extruding, my brain is just stuck on that one. 

Any modeller I've ever used. The tool and tool handle simpy stay active while you rotate the view. The direction of the extrusion is controlled by the tool not the view. Varying axis, world or local or what have you. I mean, there is also a view axis usually, that one would simply keep itself aligned to your view even if you move around.

Some random Maya extrusion video:

MarkIsSleepy

bluejaunte said:

MDO2010 said:

bluejaunte said:

When I played around a bit recently I noticed that the viewport cannot be navigated while a tool is active. Is that true? You can't change the view while extruding a face for example?

Wait - there are programs where you can rotate the view in the middle of extruding something? Wouldn't that just make your extrusion go crazy since the spot/direction you were extruding in just moved?

Honest question here, because my modeling experience is limited to Carrara, Hexagon and Blender and I can't even conceive of how that would work since in all three of those the same controls (either keyboard or mouse) are used for both functions, so I'm having a really difficult time picturing the process or even seeing why you would need to do that.

I know you mean more generally than just extruding, my brain is just stuck on that one. 

Any modeller I've ever used. The tool and tool handle simpy stay active while you rotate the view. The direction of the extrusion is controlled by the tool not the view. Varying axis, world or local or what have you. I mean, there is also a view axis usually, that one would simply keep itself aligned to your view even if you move around.

Some random Maya extrusion video:

 

I'm either missing it entirely or just completely misunderstanding you (or maybe both). I watched that video and they don't ever extrude and rotate/pan the view at the same time. They extrude, then rotate, then extrude some more, and so on. That's exactly how it works in Blender.

RorrKonn

ah don't think any human has cared if you can model and rotate at excat same time. .maybe a AI would care but for us humans ,we don't care.

 video games use a real time render engine.xbox ,sony,.unreal ,unity etc etc

I would bet realtime engines will replace all other engines .sooner or later.

 

bluejaunte

MDO2010 said:

bluejaunte said:

MDO2010 said:

bluejaunte said:

When I played around a bit recently I noticed that the viewport cannot be navigated while a tool is active. Is that true? You can't change the view while extruding a face for example?

Wait - there are programs where you can rotate the view in the middle of extruding something? Wouldn't that just make your extrusion go crazy since the spot/direction you were extruding in just moved?

Honest question here, because my modeling experience is limited to Carrara, Hexagon and Blender and I can't even conceive of how that would work since in all three of those the same controls (either keyboard or mouse) are used for both functions, so I'm having a really difficult time picturing the process or even seeing why you would need to do that.

I know you mean more generally than just extruding, my brain is just stuck on that one. 

Any modeller I've ever used. The tool and tool handle simpy stay active while you rotate the view. The direction of the extrusion is controlled by the tool not the view. Varying axis, world or local or what have you. I mean, there is also a view axis usually, that one would simply keep itself aligned to your view even if you move around.

Some random Maya extrusion video:

 

I'm either missing it entirely or just completely misunderstanding you (or maybe both). I watched that video and they don't ever extrude and rotate/pan the view at the same time. They extrude, then rotate, then extrude some more, and so on. That's exactly how it works in Blender.b

Ah, I see what causes confusion. I didn't mean literally at the same time (athough with a 3d mouse this actually works). What I meant I guess is rotate the view while the tool is active. In Blender persumably you have to drop the tool every time you wanna rotate the viewport?

MarkIsSleepy

I think I see now.

Blender doesn't really have "tools" in exactly the way you mean (based on what was going on in the video), I don't think. It's sort of a one-shot function.

I would hit "e" for extrude and by default it will go out in whatever direction the cursor moves (along the world, normal, view or custom axis depending on what is currently set), then rotate/pan/zoom as needed, then hit "e" and extrude again, repeat. So for each extrusion I need to hit "e" again (or tap the extrude button in the tools shelf, I guess, but that's too much mouse movement for someone as lazy as me ). It doesn't lose the selection, but it does stop extruding when I do something else. If I need to scale or rotate the extrusion or move it in a different direction I'd have to do that separately.

If I don't need to scale the extruded bit I could just control-click in the viewport and each time I did that the selected faces/edges/verts would extrude to where I clicked, which is a lot faster, but if you are going to rotate or scale your extrusion, then the Maya way might be a bit faster (I'm not 100% convinced of that, but possibly just because I'm used to Blender's way of doing it ).

bluejaunte

Hmm yeah maybe it's just a misunderstanding on my part. I'll try again sometime. I did notice it though, and it seemed bewildering. Anything blocking viewport navigation seems counter-productive.

RorrKonn

 

Think it might be what your using and what your settings are.

j cade

Bringing this back because I've been playing in eevee and well finished renders aren't realtime for me currently, but, hey, 30 seconds for SSS, bounce light, DOF, the eyes reflecing things in the scene, and some very heavy meshes (eevee doesnt do strands yet so the hair is strands converted to curves, that much geometry would slow down DS' viewport even when not rendering)

And most of that time rendering is one time things like loading the geometry or recalculating light probes, so i can zoom around the scene in realtime

 

 

It may not be 100% physically accurate but cmon soomng around in realtime with bounce light and SSS? <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

 

nonesuch00

Looks awesome...I've been waiting for animation to be integrated into 2.80

themidget

My main difficulty with Blender is finding the right menus.  Often a tutorial will say "In the xxx menu, select yyy" but not tell you where the xxx menu is located.  It took me about half an hour to find the menu for exrtruding curves into tubes.Other than that, as everybody else has said, it's a masterpiece of software design.  I'm starting to get used to it quite quickly now, especially since I have learned to use the keyboard more than the buttons.

marble

Just happened across this. May be of interest to anyone who wants to export animations to Blender. I'm thinking that might be very desireable once Eevee is live. Which brings a question to mind: this video uses Cory 6 as an example and I'm guessing that was not IRay materials. In the video he fixes a problem with alpha transparency after transfer to Blender. Would it be a different procedure for IRay?

 

https://youtu.be/g0haZU74UgA

 

Sorry - don't know how to insert a video in this forum. 

Artini

If you put a direct link to video on YouTube, then it inserts the picture of it and link itself.

Thanks for the link.

 

 

PedroC

Blender 2.8 news (Spanish): Icons and tools. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeG2sfOzinQ

RorrKonn

There's a new version of Gimp

Lotharen

Any advise for getting rid of poke through? I have an image I'm working on now. Everything looks fine in Daz, export it useing teleblender and there are spots in the leggings that have skin showing though. For the life of me I can't seem to find a way to hide the skin. I've tried masking, even using a shrinkwrap modifier, all with no luck. 

Any ideas?

RorrKonn

Lotharen said:

Any advise for getting rid of poke through? I have an image I'm working on now. Everything looks fine in Daz, export it useing teleblender and there are spots in the leggings that have skin showing though. For the life of me I can't seem to find a way to hide the skin. I've tried masking, even using a shrinkwrap modifier, all with no luck. 

Any ideas?

Delet the mesh

hyteckit

Blender is hard because the menus and navigation is confusing. They need to fix the GUI.

Midnight_stories

How do you put a custom self or toolbar in it. And put up icons for the individual tool. I'm having trouble finding it?

3WC

hyteckit said:

Blender is hard because the menus and navigation is confusing. They need to fix the GUI.

Blender 2.8 should fix that.

MarkIsSleepy

hyteckit said:

Blender is hard because the menus and navigation is confusing. They need to fix the GUI.

Counterpoint: Blender is easy because once you understand the logic of it (which takes under an hour just watching any of the dozens of YouTube videos explaining it for beginners) it is brilliantly constructed with one of the best, most flexible interfaces out there.

Like every piece of software ever, it's personal taste and how you use it. Lots of people love Hexagon, but in 10 years of trying I have never been able to get comfortable with it. Blender looked intimidating at first, but so does every program with that many options in it, and it genuinely only took me an hour to learn once I found a good intro video and started playing with it. Heck, DAZ Studio has an intimidating interface, but lots of people do just fine with it.

RorrKonn

MDO2010 said:

hyteckit said:

Blender is hard because the menus and navigation is confusing. They need to fix the GUI.

Counterpoint: Blender is easy because once you understand the logic of it (which takes under an hour just watching any of the dozens of YouTube videos explaining it for beginners) it is brilliantly constructed with one of the best, most flexible interfaces out there.

Like every piece of software ever, it's personal taste and how you use it. Lots of people love Hexagon, but in 10 years of trying I have never been able to get comfortable with it. Blender looked intimidating at first, but so does every program with that many options in it, and it genuinely only took me an hour to learn once I found a good intro video and started playing with it. Heck, DAZ Studio has an intimidating interface, but lots of people do just fine with it.

lets look at the facts
1998 softimage rules .2018 softimage is dead R,I,P,hotkey driven.
​1998 LW is doing killer.2018 facing extinction. hotkey driven.
​1998 very very few use blender.belenders facing extinction. 2002 blender made free n open sorce.
The UI is a all out hot key driven nightmare.at some point a new beyyer UI.2018 Blender is doing better.

Eather make a user friendly UI or just don't wast are time.I HATE beyound words hot key driven app's .refuse to use them.pray to the CGI Gods that all hot key driven app's die violently and are erased from memory like they never bloody exsisted..are you getting how bad we hate hot key driven app's ?

C4D has a 100% customizable UI.Can make C4D UI look like DAZ ,Maya,Blender etc etc

 

 

 

 

nonesuch00

What I like about Blender is the being hotkey & number driven it will be easy to set up to be voice driven if one was interested and needed to.