I’ve actually been working on this on and off for a little while, and find it to be super helpful to manage large scenes…
All it is is a list of materials (and lights and compositing trees) in the toolbar of the Node Editor.
Clicking on an item will switch the Node Editor to that material/lamp/compositing tree.
Yep, that’s it :)
Ever wanted to randomly position a bunch of objects? Of course you have, and like me, you probably resorted to using Proportional Edit’s random falloff. Such cavemen we are. Or maybe it’s just me.
Turns out, there’s a function just for this, and it’s been around for years.
What does it do? Yep, you guessed it! It randomizes the transforms!
When you click it, it may seem like it doesn’t do anything. This is simply because the default settings are all on 0, so you just need to press F6 to show all the options.
Ok, so this isn’t actually a “commonly ignored” feature as such because it was only added yesterday, but it’s the sort of feature that may be forgotten in future so I thought I’d give it some attention :)
Committed by Campbell (3d503ea):
UI: Eyedropper for view-depth
Currently this is mainly useful for picking camera DOF depth.
- EKey over a distance field prompts you to pick a depth from the camera.
- WKey (Specials menu) to pick from the 3D view (when the active camera’s selected).
Since it was only added yesterday, you’ll need to get a build off builder.blender.org, or follow Gaia’s excellent build-it-yourself guide for windows (which I did the other day, it’s so easy). Or, you know, wait until 2.74 comes out.
Just a little tool that lets you pick the distance for the camera depth of field :)
There are two ways:
If you click and drag (like I did in that gif), it’ll sample the average of all the points you moved your mouse over (not the last one!)
I know this has been in blender for eons, but I didn’t realize how nice it was until a few weeks ago.
It basically saves you the trouble of re-unwrapping every time you move a pinned vert around. Sure you would just have to press E, but not pressing anything at all is even nicer :) Continue Reading…
Last weekend’s challenge on BA was themed Conciliate – which is basically the root word for reconcile – and means to stop someone being angry, or make them a friend.
I had something a bit more ambitious in mind, but I worked all day Saturday and Sunday and could only get this far. So, I’ll continue this later when I have some more time!
This is actually the second time I’ve modeled a Companion Cube… no idea what happened to the other one, but it probably had crap topology anyway :P I’ll upload this one (and the cake) to blendswap sometime soon.
There’s an uncanny resemblance to my last Saturdoodle here… I seem to have a weakness for lonely medieval structures.
I found a random image on Saturday morning, which seems to be a 3d model for sale, and decided it could be fun to recreate. After a couple hours of modeling, the fun slowly wore off and once again I felt like I was actually working. I was however looking forward to texturing it, so I pushed on and eventually (after UV unwrapping it about 4 times) enjoyed the last part of the modeling and then stretched those old Cycles muscles I felt like I haven’t used for so long.
As you can see, the bricks are not modeled in, but in fact a displacement. Modeling them by hand would be painful, but it nearly came to that.
Instead, I created the displacement map by “modeling” each brick in 2D, tracing over a CGTextures image, and giving them a random value. A little tweaking to make sure it’s tileable, render that, blur it a bit, and you have yourself a displacement map for randomly jutting-out bricks.
Take this texture as CC-0 :) use it as you please – it goes with BrickOldRounded_0236 from CGTextures. After all, the tiny statue in the center of the front wall was sculpted by Ben Simonds and released as CC-0.
Crits and comments are welcome as always.
Hope you all had a nice relaxing weekend :)