Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2024 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
This example is of the ceramic shader with 100% translucency and 100% glaze in a natural environment (HDRi.)
On first glance it might appear to not be ceramic anymore, but that is because it is representative of a thin walled fine bone china with a green tint, something we would rarely see in the real world at the moment. We also see that materials can cross into other material types. In this case, it could appear to be colored glass or even perhaps jade. The thing is, these materials can be indistinguishable without picking it up given the right circumstances and lighting (very thin walled bone china vs thicker colored glass vs fine jade...) To make a shader however, it should cover the gamut of what a given material could show and this is on the far end of ceramic whereas if it were a glass or ceramic shader, this would be closer to the center of the shader. For most ceramics, the translucency would be below 50%. In fact a fine bone china would typically be at perhaps 50% of the translucency available on this shader. 100% would be an almost paper thin surface. Since the monkey head itself has no 'thickness' to the surface, it is basically similar to a paper thin surface.
Finally, there is the issue of realism vs artistic freedom. I believe in pushing shaders to their limits and then often, just beyond what is real. This gives the artist breathing room.
Almost forgot to mention, the HDRi in this example is to demonstrate the ability of the shader to go between different lighting environments and maintain it's fidelity. That is the real point of PBR.
The other beginner tutorials I recommend to people is by Darrin Lile:
https://www.youtube.com/user/DarrinLile
Yes, his series is pretty good.
One thing I highly recommend to beginnes is to find on the menus areas that the person doing the tutoral uses shortcuts for, and look at the surrounding items on that menu. It does multiple things. One, it gets people familiar with where things are on the menus for when we can't remember the shortcut. Two, it gets us familair with the menu system in Blender in general. Three, it introduces us to related items.
I would recommend this even for areas that we are sure we are going to use shortcuts for, (or a widget) such as rotate, scale, etc...
Personally, I'd recommend folks try without the widget; it frequently hides what you're looking at and trying to manipulate. At least try it, and it can be turned on and off.
Interested in moving Blender content into WebVR? check out my latest link on my Pinterest "Blender: Add-ons" board
This week in Blender, I discovered that I absolutely hate trying to paint textures in Blender.
Why does the brush just paint black most of the time when fills and other mixes semi work why is the brush always gross and blurry why is it all so annoying
Hmm, haven't had that problem. Have you gone through paint tutorials? I only ask because Blender isn't always intuitive in the way it works. Sometimes it seems like we expect it to work like a normal monkey wrench and it works like a left handed one. I've found tutorials can clear up issues like you are describing for me.
Don't know if this applies to your situation but throwing it out there just in case.
I'm so confused. I repeated my steps from the other day just now (make an object, add UVs, go to texture paint, add a diffuse color slot, start painting) and everything was fine this time, no mysterious only painting black. Now I can only see the texture in "material" view and not "textured" whereas I thought I could before, but maybe I'm misremembering.
I'm definitely going to have to do some tutorials on it because even though it's sort of working I still feel like I'm missing things.
lx:
It's like Gedd said with the monkey wrench analogy, but for me the analogy is car vs airplane; You wish for just inserting the key, turning, and your off, but it's more like flip switch... check, flip switch... check, flip switch... check, and etc. until you are actually up and going.
This was a big irritant for me when I first started 3D painting in Blender, and I was getting nothing but black all the time. At least I don't have to add lights in anymore to get it to work, but there are a few switches you need to set to see your painted textures consistently. If you want to see them under Texture mode I believe you do have to set lights (don't remember exactly - always use Shade mode, and sometimes Shadeless view).
So, what you need to do is remember to go into the Shader Tab in the "N" properties panel and either set Shader to Multitexture, or GLSL shading. There you will find other settings such as Backface Culling (see backside of faces - off/on), and Shadeless (base diffuse color without viewport shadowing). You should be able to see the diffuse painting fine in Shade mode without adding any lighting.
This is where I'm at right now. In Solid (with textured solid on), or Textured, it only displays a white face. Material (with some lighting) or Sculpt Mode display the black texture image with the green circles painted on.
I'm on multitexture and as far as I can figure out I've told it to use the texture map etc. Painting is working perfectly fine in sculpt mode but it isn't translating to object/edit the way I would expect it to normally do. Normally when I'm checking UVs I have no problem displaying a texture in these modes, so I'm guessing there are some more switches hidden under the dashboard somewhere that I'm not completely understanding.
I'm not sure what causes the "can only paint in black but fill works etc." thing I've had a few times but I haven't been able to duplicate it again to figure it out.
lx:
I did some 3D painting testing in 2.71 (my workhorse), and 2.76b. Was going to test on 2.77, but does not work on WidowsXP, and I didn't feel like getting up to go work on the W7 box.
Haven't done any painting in a while, but everything worked as expected, and I could see my diffuse painted texture as I painted in viewport.
I noticed that it did not matter if I had Texture Solid active under Multitexture, or GLSL for shade mode. It seems to work without it now (at least for both versions I tested on my laptop). Also, Texture mode didn't require any lights (none in scene), but seems to be permanently set to shadeless, though I have not set that attribute anywhere. The diffuse texture comes through loud and clear.
Remember how I mentioned about all the switches? Well, there is a bunch of settings that you might need to check to make sure all the correct synced up attributes are working together. Just to give you an example, there are several places where the diffuse texture could be set to something else (on mine, I created a default texture and assigned to mesh in Edit mode, then it was reassigned by Blender by creating a new diffuse layer, and even further muddied by two more different sets created by Blender selectable in Texture Tab. I had to make sure all were set to the one I was actually painting on).
Another thing I noticed was that the UV attribute had to be set again for the mesh part I was working on. The reason I mention this is because from the image you posted above, I can not tell if you have the UV set to your current UV in the Texture Tab you are showing (it's at the very bottom of your screenshot, but the MAP space looks empty).
I wish there was an easy answer for you, but you just need to check all the parameters, and make sure everything is for the same thing.
Having to change things in five different locations to do one task is one of the major issues I have with the current design.* Having poor defaults that are buried is another. Having unrelated scales for parameters (0-1, 1-100, 0-100, 21-57**...) used to be a big one but the Blender team has been addressing that issue over the last few versions.
The first two issues are hard to address without having an easier way to create workflow interfaces since the settings make sense in one location for one workflow, another location for another workflow and so on... the default scaling, lighting, etc.. are all also dependent on what we are doing, so defaults are always a compromise.
It would also be nice if Blender had some built in intelligence so that common problems people ran into would have basic error checking type code which would trigger messages to the user saying something like "It looks like you are trying 'x' if so, you need to do 'y.' etc***... (With the ability to disable the messages of course.) Blender is an involved program and while workflow interfaces could alleviate many issues with complexity, there are some things that will probably always require either a lot of study or preferably, a guiding hand while learning.
* To use an alpha for sculpting for instance we need to load it first in the materials area of the parameters tab, which is totally separate from the sculpting panel. Why? We should have all of the functionality to load the alpha in the sculpting area itself. There are better examples but this is the one that comes to mind at the moment.
** Some scales will go say, 1-100 but the only values that make sense are some small subset or worse, sporadic subsets due to a strange curve that only certain points along make sense. These type of scaling issues could be resolved by simply adding a formula in the background to normalize the scale/curve of the expected input to something that makes sense and is consistent. On shaders we see this where people put in math formulas by multiplying, using power functions, etc... to adjust the user input to something that works in a logical linear way for matching what the shader requires. Unfortunately, the Blender engine itself doesn't do this for some parameters and we are left with trying to figure out 'magic' settings that work.
*** For example, not having scaling/rotation applied when going to do functions that give us problems when it's not applied. Yes, we all had to learn this, but by now it's a known issue that new people shouldn't have to deal with.
The fact that Blender has issues should not discourage people though. Blender is an amazing program. The fact that so many people love it in spite of these issues should say something. It is getting better and many of us are willing to work around the issues it has because it is amazing in so many other ways. Since many of these issues are being addressed, it's a good time to get into using Blender as there will always be a learning curve for any program like this and the program will continue to grow and evolve as we do. :)
The point of the previous post is that if something isn't working, don't get discouraged. It may not be something you are doing but rather something Blender could be doing better. We are lucky that there is such an active community with Blender that are interested in helping each other out.
http://www.blendernation.com/2015/10/15/quick-tip-texture-painting-blender/
I found this to be a good quick reminder of what's needed. Just in case I forget any steps. I don't do it often so need the reminder.
All software has issues; at least with Blender, you're not paying cold hard cash for the issues. :)
Haven't had a chance to test more yet since I've been working on a mesh, but thanks for looking into it, @DaremoK3 and thanks for the link @nicstt I'll give it a watch~
I definitely agree that some things are really fiddly with Blender, but it does also seem that many of them are getting better with each patch, and there is regular development, which is more than some software can say >.> I also don't see it as a problem, because a. it's free, b. it's usually some out of the way feature. Yes, I am thinking painting in Blender might not be ideal, but that doesn't mean I won't use it for everything else. I don't want Zbrush because I already enjoy using Blender's sculpting and am incorporating it more than I used to. I love plain modelling in Blender. The amount of different things you can do or at least explore beyond simple modelling is unreal, especially in a free program.
New question: Substance Designer 5.5 just came out and is announcing that it now has MDL material authoring - is that the step that was missing to get materials made in Designer into Daz Studio? Or is it still a case of just make the material in Designer then manually plug the maps you make into Uber Shader and adjust? I've been watching the beginner tutorials and I really like the look of it - mostly for the noise generators and template files, etc. I am aware that Blender Cycles has node based creation, but from everything I've seen it's not remotely as friendly for those not interested in filling in and looking up every technical detail for PBR material creation (doesn't mean it isn't good just that I'm not as interested in it personally.)
Substance Designer is mostly for creating procedural materials such as the ceramic shader I posted earlier. Substance Painter is for working with textures. The advantage of procedural materials is that often no video card memory is required for textures and anything that doesn't require a texture doesn't need to be uv unwrapped. The downside of procedural materials is that they usually require more intensive calculations for the surface which can cause render times to go up.
The advantage I see for SD materials is that we can create specialized procedural shaders with just the settings needed for the given shader (again as shown in the ceramic shader I posted earlier.) This greatly simplifies applying a shader to a mesh/portion of mesh since the only settings we need to worry about are ones specifically related to the given material.
I am not a fan of uber shaders. They have way to many settings and are too hard to get decent results for most people imo. I prefer specific shaders.
On the issue of getting black when painting, it occurred to me that if you set the blend mode of your brush to 'subtract' it can quickly go to black.
Basically what I want is something that can a. generate noise textures with some level of control so that I don't have to manually photoshop paint everything and get it tiling, etc. and b. something that actually has the PBR values of common materials already in it instead of having to look up IOR tables etc. From what I've seen so far, Designer does both of these really well, whereas on that particular front, Blender is more about putting in every value and creating every image yourself?
I'm curious about Painter too but honestly I'm much more interested in generating steady surfaces and using material zones and modelling to get the detail I want because I just enjoy it more.
re: the painting thing, it was definitely set to Mix (When I tried.. I believe it was Add it did have limited success, but Color didn't work either) and it wasn't a lighting issue: I could see other colours fine when filling etc. but painting would leave only black. I'm sure it was some sort of setting gone wrong, because I haven't been able to duplicate it since.
That has to do with procedural materials vs textures (uv/paint) not the tool per se. Blender does both in it's shader network, just depends on how you set it up. In Substance, it's the difference between Designer and Paint (for the most part, simplifying a little.*)
That is simply presets. Blender is a tool for creating from scratch with no presets built in. Designer has the tools to make from scratch, but the presets are foremost in the interface. For most people who aren't texture artists, they will want neither, but rather finished specialized shaders they can tweak like a box of 256 crayola crayons, except with over 10k, nicely organized, categorized, easy to get to/find and apply. We don't have that yet, but it's not far off. Shaders like those sold in the DAZ store by Mec4D and others are an example of that. As to using premade shaders of that type, the objects need well defined surfaces for applying them and there is one area where the mileage varies. In DAZ Studio, we have the surface definition tool that allows us to redefine surfaces relatively easily and that is very handy.
* One point of clarification here is that people do use Designer to produce textures that then get wired into a shader in another program the same as the output of Paint. What I am referring to here is when one is outputting either a substance from designer for use in the Substance plugin for a program or when creating an mdl. Either of these maintain the procedural aspect whereas outputting a texture looses this.
I couldn't agree with you more, Gedd. Those are definitely some of Blender's greater shortcomings.
lx:
I realized that I was half-assing trying to help you, so I just did some quick painting in 2.77 on my W7 workbox. There is definitely a difference between my two PC environments, and the variable which makes the difference whether I need lights, shadeless, or things all black are my two different video cards. The XP laptop has on-board AMD, and the W7 box is currently using my nVidia card (also has on-board AMD which I switch back and forth through BIOS).
I needed to employ everything I remembered how painting in Blender was on the W7 PC, but not on the laptop. Also, it didn't appear that not having the UV set in Mapping is any kind of issue. My previous example was because I literally created an add-on mesh part to the original existing UV's, and Blender needed me to set it to tie in with the other stacked Islands (on DAZ Asian Dragon).
Here are some screenshots below showing Blender 2.77 painting, and example of getting black in Texture Shaded mode with no lights (sans shadeless). Also, I included the 2D painting just in case you were not already aware of it, or others who might not know that are following along. You can paint 3D/2D in tandem.
Solid Shade Mode:
Texture Shade Mode:
Texture Shade Mode - Shadeless:
2D Paint:
Thanks for going through it again - I didn't know you could paint in 2D too.
Okay so I redid my steps from scratch, made mesh, unwrapped UVs, then this time I added material, then added a diffuse texture manually (instead of letting texture paint make it when asked) and now I can see the texture in edit mode (I could always see it in paint mode) I don't use shadeless (which wouldn't work anyway because Edit Mode doesn't have a shadeless option) but leave the display on Solid and use Textured Solid and that doesn't require any lighting either.
So as far as I can figure out the problem was that letting Blender create the image when it asked to must have screwed up something... somewhere.. that let me see it in paint mode but NOT in object/edit mode, even though it was the only assigned texture in the texture menu...
I'm glad I got painting figured out in Blender, but I still think I'm going to try out Substance for the wealth of presets (which I really like) and the possible functionality? of the new MDL export.
lx:
I just read your comment about not being able to reproduce the issue, and that it might have been a setting not set/gone wrong. If so, and not remotely like the screenshots above, then please disregard last post.
The black areas in the Texture Shaded mode without lighting, or shadeless view is what I was imagining your issue was. We used to not have shadeless view, and lights were always required to paint (I used to always add a Hemi light).
Glad you got it sorted.
...the only way I will ever look into it again is if it has a fully pointer/menu driven UI like Hexagon's or Carrara's where I don't have to use any hotkey shortcuts (or deal with python scripting) out of the box and is compatible with trackball devices as well. Modelling has a steep enough learning curve on it's own (as is apparently mapping/surfacing from the last few posts here).
Who said shaders are hard? But seriously, this is interesting as it's mostly procedural except for a scratch map and a scratch/grunge map. Mike Pan did a nice job of laying out the shader with labeled frames in this somewhat involved shader. And, it's all Blender. ;)
The mdl feature is really the only reason I would be interested in Substance Designer I think. Not that Substance isn't a good tool, but rather that Blender is very capable, just no tie in to producing shaders for an IRay/DAZ Studio environment.
Has anyone worked with Zero Brush? My understanding is it only works with Blender Sensei and I'm not sure I'm ready to make that jump.
IMHO there is no reason for Blender to be able to produce
Shaders for other environments.
The cycles engine is as good as Iray,LUX or even the mighty Vray interms of still image quality at least.
(OK it Cant compete with Vray's Speed for flicker free GI animation renders)
But Cycles toon/line options make it more versatile IMHO
and I can confirm that cycles is an order magnitude FASTER
Than Iray or LUX on lower spec hardware ,like laptops as Cycles is not really wedded to a particular GPU manufacturer and seems much more forgiving for those rendering on CPU only.
It does change a number of things about the ui including shortcuts but the nice thing about Blender is that since it is self contained we can copy the Blender folder, make whatever changes we want to the copy and run two versions side-by-side without them effecting each other, so trying something like this out is pretty safe.
But to answer your question directly here's a quote from the author:
I did not know you could do that! I was wanting to try a setup I found that looked good, but I didn't want to mess up what I was just learning how to use. Being able to just copy a folder and change the copy sounds great.
Yes, the reason we can do this is because Blender is totally self contained inside it's folder. It doesn't install anything in the registry or any other areas outside it's own folder.
It used to be that storage space was not inexpensive, so sharing resources among applications made a lot of sense. Now though, that's no longer the case for the most part. Even with SSD's space isn't terribly expensive and data it ends up takes up more storage then the actual applications often. For this reason, it would be nice if applications went back to storing everything inside it's own folder since it would simplify a great many things as well as be more secure of an environment. The current tangled mess we have not only makes the system more fragile but the interdependencies contribute a great deal to the insecurities we have in the computing environment as many hacks attack these interdependencies. However, changing the way the industry does things, such as writing applications is like changing the course of a behemoth ship. It's not likely to happen without massive effort, or more likely, some outside force presenting itself that pretty much requires a change in direction. Even then it often requires some catastrophe on the scale of the sinking of the Titanic to actually initiate change.