GOZ for Blender 2.8

Today I updated goz plugin for blender 2.8. You can grab it from here (press download in top right).

The plugin supports exporting:
-polygroups (aka. vert weights)
-polypaint (aka. vertex colors)
-uv

After installation use those buttons to  import, export files to zbrush:

If you have problems with setup, it may be that your zbrush GOZ installation is broken.

You can re-install GoZ, make sure ZBrush and Blender are closed. Now you go to your ZBrush folder:

C:\Program Files\Pixologic\ZBrush 2018\Troubleshoot Help\

In there should be a file called “GoZ_for_ZBrush_Installer_WIN.exe”, right click and run with admin rights, follow the installer through.

If you haven’t, go can now install GOZ for blender now by following readme in goz for blender zip file.

Now open ZBrush, go to Preferences – GoZ – force reinstall. Locate your Blender 2.8 path.

Locked ability to buy addons

Update 2: And it is done. Addons are online, and I have working business in UK 🙂

I’m moving business to UK, and there are some problems with setting up Gumroad for that, so until I manage to fix it option to buy Hair Tool will be locked.
Sorry for inconvenience.

 

Update: I still deal with the legal stuff, and how to make UK business work with Gumroad, but I unlocked ability to buy the addons.

Weight Paint Tools

Weight Paint Tools is new addon for blender containing tools for simplifying workflow in blender weight paint mode. Useful for riggers, animators and character artist but not only.

• easy menu for applying weights to vertices – with properly working symmetry and auto normalization
• mirroring weights
• symmetrize vertex groups
• easy picking/copying vertex weights
• mixing vertex weights – add, replace, multiply.
• improved smoothing, levels  – with properly working symmetry and auto normalization

Video Guide:

As a bonus you can also get ‘Draw Weights’ addon for displaying all vertex groups with different color. It is useful for debugging problems with vertex weights, for example if color of vertex is too dark/bright it means weights assigned to it are not properly normalized (they are too low/ too high).

Example of custom gradient tool added in WPT 1.1:

Volume Preserving smoothing for Blender

VPS – Volume Preserving Smoothing is new addon for smoothing meshes while trying to maintain object shape.

• smooth mesh while maintaining main object shape
• border mesh vertices will slide together with rest of the mesh, to get nice even distribution, or they can be frozen
• mirror modifier aware = center vertices wont move away from symmetry line
• ability to define sliding rail edges (marked as sharp) – vertices will move only along those rail edges.
• three edge tension methods (Uniform, Proportional to edge length, Inverse to edge length)
• optimized with NUMPY

There are 3 algorithms – some are better in specific cases – eg.

• Infalte smooth works ok for round convex meshes.
• Vol smooth is often best but bit slow
• Laplace smooth is usually ok.

Video with examples how this addon works:

Render bevel – new blender addon

Render Bevel – is simple blender addon, for making variable bevel size for round corner cycles shader. It works with boolean object too, perfect for non destructive workflow.

Script requires blender 2.79 daily build, aka 2.79a from here
Render Bevel panel is located in3d View -> Tool shelf -> Tools tab -> Render Bevel panel.
Get it from here (gumroad)
or here (dropbox link)
Simple video with example of how this works

Hair tool – video tutorials

UPDATE:
Newest video about latest features can be seen here.

Tutorial about using this Hair Tool addon, with some tips and tricks, problem solving and stuff: https://youtu.be/WE0aBe8SNls
Video about hair shader: https://vimeo.com/229043427
Video about creating texture: https://vimeo.com/228873075

Hope you find them useful.

Hair tool – Blender addon ($)

I developed Hair Tool addon for blender to simplify creation process of low/medium poly hair models
This addon will help you generate hair mesh ribbons with uv’s from bezier/nurbs curves. It is how most current games are doing hairs for characters.

Hair Tool workflow

Some features:

• ability to generate and interactively  comb hair ribbons based on blender particle hairs (since 1.8 version)
• generating hair ribbons from guide mesh surface
• ability to uv unwrap and preview textures on hair curve ribbons
• easy and convenient switching back and forth between curve ribbons and mesh mesh, while preserving uv’s
• ability to adjust ribbons radius profile over strand length to taper the ribbons shape
• ability to convert stuff eg: Grease Pencil strokes to Particle Hair or Curves ribbons, Curves to Particle Hair, Particle Hair to curve ribbons
• generating randomized ribbons UV’s (you can draw multiple uv boxes, that will be randomly picked for each ribbon strand).
• Curve Resampling – increase, decrease curve/ribbon points amount, while preserving it’s tilt and radius.
• Generating vertex color/weights gradients for ribbons.
• And More!

Video tutorial mostly about generating curves from mesh surface, with some tips and tricks, problem solving and stuff.
Video showing: creating particle hair from grease pencil, generating curve ribbons from parent particle hair with children, resampling curve ribbons and other stuff.
Videos showing  interactive hair ribbons combing :First, Second (includes new curve clumping)
Video showing material material setup on curve ribbons, and new modeling tool for curve ribbons- ‘Linear deformer‘ – tool can be found on github here.
Old Video about hair shader: https://vimeo.com/229043427
Old Video about creating texture: https://vimeo.com/228873075

Link to discord server where you can report bugs.

Basic workflow for generating curves from mesh surface:

First step is to generate base shape of hair. For that use grid mesh, created only of quads. Mark one border of this mesh with sharp edges – those will become roots of hair splines:

Press ‘Curves from surface‘ button located in left Tool Shelf -> Tools, to generate curves from selected object. Generated curve settings can be modified using ‘F6‘ hotkey. You can adjust stuff like hair amount, length, add some noise etc. Or you can do some manual tweaking here going into curve ‘Edit mode’.

To add ribbons profile to generated curves, press ‘Generate Ribbons’ button. There are some settings to play with under ‘F6’ hotkey. Use ‘Align tilt’ to align curves rotation to source mesh (head)

You can now uv map curve ribbons by going into UV editor and search for ‘Hair UV’ operator under spacebar. Left click and draw rectangular shape, in uv Editor, to define the uv bounds for hair strands. If you assign material to curve ribbons, use ‘Curve Ribbons UV refresh‘ to update material uv mapping. You can convert curve hair to mesh ribbons by using ‘Curve ribbons to mesh ribbons‘ – now they can be exported to game engine. Any time you want, you can go back to curve ribbons by using ‘Mesh ribbons to Curve ribbons‘.

Curve Ribbon operations:

Curve Simplify- Allows to reduce point count. Good for reducing polycount on hairs .

Resample Curve. Allows to increase/decrease number of points each curve is made of. It keeps the original strand radius and tilt.

Smooth Curve – smooth strand points (eg. to reduce noise)

Smooth Tilt

Taper Curve – change strands radius over length

Align Curve tilt – lets you align cure tilt to target object surface.

Randomize Curve Tilt – change curve tilt over its length

Select Tips/Roots – lets you select first/last points on curves. There is randomize option under F6 properties.

Mesh Ribbon operations:

Add Ribbon Vertex Color – create black and white color gradient from strand root to tip

Add Ribbon Weights – create vertex weight gradient from strand root to tip

UV hair operator (found under spacebar) – Left click and draw multiple rectangular shapes, in uv Editor, to define the uv bounds for hair strands. Press enter to confirm.

Interactive hair combing:

Interactive Hair Combing – panel is displayed in left Tool Shelf, when combing Blender particle hair. Enabling it will generate interactively updated curve hair ribbons. In that panel you will have option for smoothing, embedding, aligning tilt etc. of generated strands.

Convert operations – let you convert Particle Hair to (ribbon curves), curves to Particle hair, Grease Pencil to Curves etc.:

Ribbon to Curves/ Curves to Ribbon – allow for switching between ribbon curve and ribbon mesh state. Usually you will want to do hair modeling in curve state, and then do UV in ribbon mesh state.

Particle Hairs to Curve – generate curve ribbons from Particle hair.  Align their tilt to head with ‘Align Tilt’ checkbox, and embed hair roots deeper into the scull using ‘Embed Roots’ parameter.

Particle Hair from Curves (this can be used to convert zbrush fibermesh to blender Particle Hair system). Select curves and target mesh (that will receive Particle Hair) and use ‘Particle Hair from Curves‘ to convert curves object to blenders Hair system.

‘Ribbons from particle hair with children‘ – gives more evenly distributed result compared to build-in child particles . Great for short Hair.

‘Particle Hair From Grease Pencil‘ strokes painted with grease pencil, can be converted to particle hair (with some options available under f6). Checkbox next to this button, describes if you want to use Scene GPencil data (when enabled), or Object GP data (when disabled).

• ‘Flip UV’ option in preferences – if enabled random strands will have uv’s flipped in X-axis.

Grease Pencil to curve – quickly sketch gprease pencil guides, that will be converted to curve ribbons. Use F6 for options. If you run this operation with curve hair selected, it will add new curves to it. If you run it with mesh selected, then it will be used for as target for ribbons aligning and offset.

Braids from curve – just select Source curve, and run ‘Generate Braids’ on it. As usual there are some options under the F6 button. After you are finish, original Source curve can influences the generated braid so you can twist it (ctrl +T), scale radius (alt+s) to change the sape of braid.

Hair Tool examples:

Improvements to uvSquares and Matalogue addons

EDIT: Matalogude developer included support for GroupPro into master branch. You can grab his addon from Matalogue.

Matalogue is great addon for managing materials. In my fork I added support for working with Group instances (so it works with GroupPro). Added support for Group Instances = when selecting group instance object (empty with duplication set to group), Matalogue will now show materials for objects that are inside this group. Previously it would show ‘no material’ message.

 

Another great addon is uvSquares. This time I added ability to work on multiple islands with one click. You can grab fork from here:

Hopefully autors of those addon will agree to merge those changes into master branches! Keep the thumbs up.

Whats new in Batchtool Baker 1.11

Quite some time passed since I described what is new in Batchtools 1.03 version. Right now Batchtool Baker is in version 1.11, so wanted to describe new features.

• baking presets – lets your save your most used setups for baking:
  
• quick texture preview (in blender internal glsl mode – TODO: add Cycles support) – assign all baked maps to material of lowpoly object:
  
• Added Helper icon – ‘Duplicate passes’ – duplicates current bake job, with all render passes setting – saves time when creating new bake job.
• added support for Substance Batchtools 6 series this includes (you need to go to addon preferences and select Substance batchtools version 6 in menu):
  • ability to bake non square maps
  • ability to bake 8k textures

New blender addon – Transform Utils

By default some blender operations do not work very well with instances. Mainly I speak about ‘Apply  transformation‘ and setting ‘Origin to 3D cursor’.  Apply  transformation – won’t work at all with instanced object and setting ‘Origin to 3D cursor’ won’t preserve position of instances. I made python version of these, that work with instances and are preserving positions of instanced objects. The math behind that was bit complicated, but I managed to make i work. The ‘Transform Utils‘ also has some other tools that I developed while working with blender.

• Add Transform Orientation – quick way to align gizmo (add temporary Transform Orientation) to selection. Gizmo will be aligned to  selected object, face, vertex or edge.
• Align To Transformation  – Sets current object rotation to match the gizmo transform orientation (created with previous command).
• Apply Transformation – lets you apply location, rotation, scale even on object with instances. Instances positions will be maintained.
• Origin to 3D cursor – same as default blender operator, but all instances positions are preserved.
• Store position – let’s you save current object location, rotation, scale. Position can be restored with ‘Restore position’ button.

In image below I demo the ‘Apply Transformation’ operator. Build in apply loc, rot, scale operator won’t work on object with instances. The addon version works ok, and it is maintaining original position of all instances.

Grab addon from gumroad