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Very nice, TJ! You've been doing some really great stuff in Blender.
I don't know but this video series may help sorting out uvmapping, material assignment/slots, and texturing. I found it quit interesting. Darrin Lile (he is listed in the second post under utube videos) does show his low poly and high poly version of his character he created. :)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyelx0TsmSpeQE2LpgM8Qwnco-9mrNG0O
Hi I model My Daz content in C4D as I have used C4D for over ten years and am more comfortable with its modeling tools
For still renders, however, I always send my Daz scenes over to Blender to use its incredible PBR shader nodes.
Here are some recent examples..
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You can put multiple images in one post.
Hi Wolf359,
Thanks for coming to our thread. lx is correct a person can put multply images in one post just click on the browse button until all photos you want to share are uploaded. :)
Just for clarification you model in C4D, set-up a scene in Daz, export to blender to set-up/create your PBR shader nodes, and then back to Daz for rendering? Just wondering because i may have further questions to ask. :)
Well, I have made it through the 1st four videos and have modelled my first very basic house via said tutorials. Honestly, the biggest hurdle for me is simply moving around the screen and learning the hotkeys. As I get more comfortable with that, its become very much less intimidating. And I think this will help me with the modelling in Carrara as well. Those first videos (the set of 10) are extremely helpful in this because it shows his keystrokes at the bottom so you can see what hotkeys he is using. He is very thorough in explaining exactly what to do so for anyone who is a very new beginner like I am they are a great resource. Onward to #5 lol
Personally I think it's a worthwhile idea to learn how to adjust hotkeys and simply change all the movement functions to things you actually like already, especially if you're using multiple 3D programs. While there are times when it's good to become comfortable with how a program does something, there are also times when it's better to just make the program work your way.
I'm using 3 pieces of software all with their own takes on how to move a camera and switching between them was infuriating until I set them all to work the same way.
I haven't really learned enough hotkeys in any one program yet for it to really be an issue or to know what I like the best but I am sure at some point I will find one that is the most comfortable and switch everything over to one thing. I did change the right click to left click though it was indeed driving me nuts lol.
I did that one too. I had some mouse navigating that drove me crazy in Hexagon, because I had gotten use to Blender's and thought it made more sense in the end. :)
That video is a really great starting point, but be prepared for very long calculation times on the fluid sim.
Another thing you might want to look into in combination with the fluid sim is Blender's sculpting tools. They can seem a bit intimidating at first but for somrthing like this you don't need to dive in very deep. Let the fluid sim give you a decent starting place and then you can use the smoothing and draw brushes to clean-up the simulation result and add little extra bits of detail exactly where you want them. I stayed away from sculpting for the longest time but just learning a few very basic things can make your life much easier: the smoothing brush can be used to clean up fluid and cloth sims very quickly, the inflate brush is great for fixing pokethrough, the grab brush can be used to push parts of a mesh around much more intuitively than doing it in edit mode.
Thanks MDO those are very useful tips for sculpting. I have tried sculpting a little myself. The hardest part for me is actually 'seeing' what I am doing to the mesh, which is a bit of a pain for me. I tried sculpting in hexagon and found that a bit easier because I can see the mesh vertices, edges, and faces. :)
If you go to the object properties tab and check "Wire" under display then it will show the wireframe in sculpt mode. Also check out the matcap options under Shading in the properties shelf (the shelf that opens on the right side of the view window when you hit "N") because some of these will show the wireframe better and may sometimes be better to see what you are doing.
How does one save the render to .png or .jpeg in Blender? I can't get it to save to anything but a blender file. Its hard to show off my progress if I can't save the render
After rendering, hit F3 to save as image, or go to the menu at the bottom of the render window and choose Image > Save As Image. The file type options will be on the lower left side of the save screen that opens.
Thank you! I would never ever have found that lol.
Ignore the view I am having a really hard time positioning the camera. That's a project for another day. Ugh and of course, now its not going to upload it. You can see it here in my account at Deviant Art if anyone is interested. Keep in mind that I haven't seriously set foot into Blender and actually been able to use it til now. I'm on day two and video #8. Being slightly familiar with the Carrara interface did help. I made the wall, floor and the stool (cushion & 4 legs) and applied materials and uv mapped them. Very pleased with that first set of videos, and looking forward to continuing down the list. Also excited to see how well I will be able to carry this over into Carrara.
And don't mind the textures lol, my full texture library is on my pc and not on my laptop plus, I couldn't see what the textures were, just the file name. Texture 1 through 20 is not a helpful name to describe what it looks like!
Hi,
first thanks IX, for the tip on uploading multiple images in one post
To clarify I create all of my own Daz content in C4D.
Once it is rigged in Daz studio I send it over to Blender with the free teleblend script that exports& converts Daz scenes to blender for rendering.
This is for stills I never render finals in Daz studio as I find Blender cycles a much more complete PBR than IRay's limited brute force approach to path tracing.
and 3DL does not interest me at all
For my animations I create animation with a combo of DS & Iclone pro.
My finished animations are sent back to C4D for rendering via
.obj /MDD export from Animate 2.
I'm looking for some basic Cycles help.
After far too much hitting buttons and experimentation, I think I finally got transparency to work:
What I had to do was invert the lashes image so that black was 'show' and white 'hide' which is opposite to DS... I think the diffuse shader part might be unnecessary but there were two slots after I finally figured out to press add shader... None of this makes any sense to me. I guess my question for this is basically 'is there a simpler way to do this?' (I don't really want to get involved with plugging around nodes because all I want to do is have it use one transparency map.)
Also on a related note, there don't seem to be any controls for light strength or ambient light the way Blender Render has ... so how do I adjust it.
(I'm asking in this thread in the hope of getting an answer I can understand because google searches are all in alien. Every answer to questions I have seems to be written with technical engineers with 15 years Blender experience in mind.
Looks like a pretty good start to me. :)
Ahhh ok. :) I think if people know a little about how some are using Blender then if there are specific questions like in your case rendering and PBRs then one could get help in those areas. Thanks for sharing.
Somehow I missed this til now, apologies...
"Ignore the view I am having a really hard time positioning the camera."
What I do is move it normally to about the right location (like you would any random object, with its grabby arrow things) and then once it's roughly where I want it to be, (View>Camera, or Numpad 0) to go into the camera view, then Shift+F (I think this is Fly Navigation in View menu but not entirely sure) which will let you move the mouse to 'look around' from the camera and aim it. You can also use WASD to move around. Beware: There are some keys like space bar which do things like teleport which can be hard to aim and screw with things so be careful about pressing extra keys while aiming. Right clicking will cancel out of fly mode without changing anything. Left clicking will save the camera's view and location as you currently have aimed it.
You can do this with your normal views too (I use it to fix everything disappearing in orth view via flying the persp view back in because who designed this garbage it's so stupid.)
Parenting a spot light to a camera then moving the camera to aim the spotlight is a good way to do that too, since you can't view from lights the way you can from DS (afaik.)
I hope someone helps you out. The bolded part is opposite of what I am use to also. Are you planning on rendering the final object/human in Blender?
My plan was to make something simple using only basic material zones (no textures) rendered in Blender to get a feel for the general setup (not attempting any sort of realism.) I understand how to set up a shader in DS for 3DL or Iray, but in Cycles everything is totally beyond my understanding with how to even find the appropriate fields, etc.
Similarly, lights have power settings (for some reason spotlight needs energy in the millions but hemi wants to be like 0.7 to do the same job) but then the Sun light has no power options and the ambient light settings are gone from the Scene/World menu (wherever they were.) I'm sure it's all doable, it's just that nothing works the way I'd expect it to and all the guides I've found are either written to try and impress other experts or wildly out of date.
Until now I've only ever exported back to DS to render, but that seems a bit silly considering there's a renderer just sitting there. It's frustrating me right now, but being able to edit models between renders would be a nice thing to have.
Thanks very much! No worries I haven't had a chance to get back to it since I asked anyway lol.
Hi @lx,
So, for your transparency issue, really what you should be using is a mix shader, not an add shader. Set Surface to Mix, change the first shader to Diffuse BDSF (this will be the color for your eyelashes), the second shader to Transparent with the color set to pure white (this means 100% transparency in Blender as you’ve discovered), and the Factor to Image Texture (this is where you will then put your transparency mask image). For best results change the Image Texture from “color” to “non-color” data. This isn’t any less complex than what you are currently doing, but hopefully makes more logical sense and is more “correct” from what I’ve seen.
What this does is tell Blender to look at the image texture and use whatever is in the top shader (the diffuse) where the image is black and the bottom shader (the 100% transparency) where the image is white and to mix the two together wherever there is any shade of grey.
For light strength there are a few places they might be depending on the type of light:
Since you specifically asked about “ambient” light I believe that the World illumination settings are what you are looking for. Below is a screenshot of where those are at. By default I believe it is set to use a color. When using a color, the lightness of the color will also affect the amount of light. You can also change it from a color to a built-in procedural sky or to an HDRI by changing the dropdown from color to either Sky Texture or Environment Texture (click the little circle next to the color box to see the options).
The strength setting for various lights are:
So for a point lamp (for example) you will need a much higher value, usually in the 100's than a sun lamp or emitter which will need values in the single digits usually. All lights in Blender have physically accurate falloff so real-world distance will make a big difference. The size setting for all lights (or the actual mesh size for emission light sources) affects the shadows - bigger means softer shadows.
You can see in the screenshot below-left that I have my world set to a very dark blue and a strength of only 0.100 - this provides a barely visible amount of light. I keep it at this default while setting up my lights so that the overall lighting doesn't wash them out and then turn it up once my main lights are good.
@MDO2010
Thank you! Thanks to these guidelines I managed to figure out where I was misunderstanding things.
- Where it said Add Shader I thought it meant "add a shader" rather than being a type of shader. The rest seems to be about the same as where I wound up.
- The missing power settings for Sun and World lights appeared after I clicked the "Add nodes" button. I was scared away from that because I don't want to do the complex node pluggy stuff right now but all it did was add the options that are in your screenshots (that were missing from mine.)
Next problem: Trying to replicate the same thing in Blender Render, I can't get transparency to work at all. I add the material and apply it to the appropriate area, Click the transparency radio button, then go to textures tab and add the b/w image and set the influence to Alpha. Same mesh, uvmap, texture, etc. All worked with the Cycles material. What am I missing? (The left part is a render, not viewport.)
Edit: Nevermind I figured it out! All you have to do is enable z transparency on the material and set the alpha and specular to 0, then in the texture settings turn off Use Alpha, and then use the normal w=show b=hide map instead of the inverted Cycles one. Simple! ...
Incidentally, a good way to start getting familiar with how the node editor works without having to dive too deep is to set up your material in the material tab as you did, then change one of the windows to the node editor and see what the nodes Blender auto-setup for those settings look like.
Below I setup the diffuse-transparency material I described above, then I switched my main view window to the node editor. You can see it is doing the same thing, just more visually:
Wow that was way over my head lol. I read it anyway and will come back to it when I get to the point that I need to understand it.