Category Archives: WIP

WIP Add-on: Manage Image Paths

blender-app_2016-03-15_10-51-01

So I started working on this add-on a while back during some freelance work, to help manage a messy production where images were being sourced from several different duplicate locations.

At first it was just a simple list of the images used in the blend file with the file paths displayed, but I soon wanted to be able to edit the paths directly. Then I needed to see which images actually existed, often when opening old projects I found the images had since been moved to a different location. Since many images were in the same location, it helped to add a sort of find & replace feature (the “Replace Source with Target” button) to batch-edit everything. I was also working with some images locally on my own hard drive and needed to copy them to the network drives so other computers could access them, which is what the “Copy Source to Target” button does.

When I started coding this add-on, I didn’t know about the External Data > Find missing files option that already exists in Blender, so I was manually fixing the file paths using this add-on.

Does anyone think this add-on would be useful?
What other features should I add to it?

Some ideas:

  • Display estimate of memory usage for each image
  • Remove duplicates (sometimes you have multiple “images” in blender that are actually the same file)
  • Show when an image has a fake user
  • Show what objects/materials use each image
  • Remove the Source/Target (find & replace) crap since Blender can do that by default

You can download the current version here, it’s still very much a work in progress and was thrown together in a hurry :) It might be quite slow to use, since it scans for the file locations on every redraw (a couple times for each time you move the mouse inside the properties editor), so keep the panel closed if you’re not using it.

Beretta M9 (wip1)

Currently, I’m on a pretty terrible streak of not finishing any personal projects, but hopefully I’ll actually end up finishing this one. Maybe.

So far I’m mostly happy with the modeling, although there are a few finishing touches still to add (like the logo in the center of the grip, and a couple bolts and rivets).

Here’s a rather large wireframe render (click for 3360 x 2160 version):

And just for kicks, the pointiness:

I’ll admit, the modeling was pretty hard on this one. For every new bit I started, I thought to myself, “This has to be the hardest part”… until I started the next bit and realized how horribly wrong I was.

Once I’ve shaded and textured it, would anyone be interested in a thorough making-of?

Metropolis

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I worked on this for a good couple days… it’s not finished, but I suppose it’s slightly usable.

There aren’t many city generators available for blender… in fact I only know of one, which is great but not very versatile. You kinda get what you get. What I wanted was a city generator that was so customizable that you could create any shape city of any layout of any scale on any planet… yeah. Obviously if it demands such vast possibilities, it can’t all be automated.

The plan was to have the user give it a set of buildings, a few images for scale/height maps and terrain stuffs, and even give it the street layout. The automation part is simply the placement of buildings along the streets. Simple. Yeah.

It’s probably the most complex stuff I’ve ever coded, not the hardest, just a lot going on to keep track of and integrate, while still keeping everything very customizable. It’s about 600 lines, which I suppose isn’t all that much to a seasoned coder, but for me it’s much more than anything I’ve done before :P

Placing buildings mostly evenly spaced and along a street is pretty easy, the challenging bit was preventing buildings from being created in the middle of an intersection, and along many curves at once without overlaps.

The solution was to increase the curve’s resolution a lot, convert them to meshes and join them all into one object. Then do a Remove Doubles to weld vertices that are close together. Why? Because this will join the lines together, making a vertex at each intersection that connects to both/all streets. Which means a simple search for verts with more than 2 edges connected will give us the position of the intersections!

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Deleting these intersection verts, separating the object by loose parts and converting it back to curves will give us the perfect set of curves to but the buildings on to make sure no buildings sit in the middle of an intersection.

imageAnd that’s pretty much as far as I got. So it’s functional… just not really useful.

When I next feel like working on this, I’ve got a long list of todo’s… so probably not for a while.

The end goal would be to include a building generator and stuff like that too. I seriously considered turning this into a kickstarter, but at the moment I don’t really have the experience nor the time for something as epic as this.