I implemented basic vertex pinning -as you already know it from the UV-editor- into Blender’s Edit Mode, here’s a little demonstration:

You can access it by hotkey (currently Return +Alt and/or Shift for unpinning and inverting), the w-menu, the mesh menu in Edit Mode and of course the toolbox (just search for “pin”).

This tool is available in the Blender 2.5 bmesh branch (check www.graphicall.org if you don’t build yourself) but as all the serious work still has to be done in Blender 2.49 there’s also a patch for that. It looks a bit different and can only be accessed by hotkey, but the functionality is the same. You have to build it on your own though but if that doesn’t stop you here’s the link: PinVerts_2.49.patch

For future versions I have a couple of things planned, such as smooth falloff and limiting the effect to certain axes. I’ll keep you updated if there’s any progress.

Have fun trying it out and please report any problems or suggestions to me!

Yours,
Fabian

When I create textures I sometimes don’t have any/enough padding around the UV islands which might end in nasty seams on the 3D model. This tool is able to extrude the island borders by a given value in order to overcome this issue.

All the bakers out there offer this functionality but in situations where you don’t want to or can’t rebake this software might come in handy.
(You will want to take a look at the Readme.txt first though. )

Download: TexPadder_v0.1.zip

Currently there’s only a Windows version available but the code is platform independent so  let me know if there’s demand for Linux/Mac versions.

Here’s a little speedmodelling update!

(Click on the image.)

This is a christmas present I made for my sister. It’s a case in the shape of a ball with the life sculpting that I made a while ago incorporated in the upper shell. As long as there’s something relatively heavy inside you can roll it around and it keeps its orientation.

The German Digital Art Forum put together an artbook consisting of almost 50 full color pages wrapped into a solid hardcover and  featuring works of the community. There are photographs, digital as well as traditional paintings/drawings (even good old pixelart) and 3D images in it. As you might already have guessed my Digital World image sneaked in as well!

As far as I’m concerned the majority of the copies (if not all) are already sold so all I can give you for now are a couple of pages:

Thanks again to everybody who made this possible, onto the next one!

Lately I’ve been working on a script for Blender which performs some checks in order to highlight areas of a model that might need to be changed to obtain optimal results.

Currently there are functions to check the following:

• Quad torsion (extremely useful for lowpoly modelling and that’s what initially made me write the script)
• Stretching of faces
• Silhouette
• Average face area

There’s detailed information on each one of those in the script and I’d suggest you to check it out before using it.

Images of the GUI and how a result might look like (area check in this case):

Download: KLICK

A few weeks ago I participated in a contest held by the 3D printing company Shapeways and as a result Gas Guy got printed and was exhibited on this year’s Siggraph in LA. Here’s a photograph of the ~20cm tall model which is now decorating my table:

As you can see the model itself also changed a bit in the meantime, here’s where I am right now:

It’s at 7934 tris (excluding the pedestal) with 2k maps for the body and 1k for the gun

My (unfortunately not yet completely finished) entry for the DomWarIII

(click the image to view the album)

The “Gas Guy” is a pretty random Dominance War exercise, meaning I just started sculpting without really having any clue of what will be the result. I had a lot of fun working on this one and along the way I also got my workflow for realtime models sorted out, even though I didn’t get it finished in time.

When the competition is over I’ll have some time to get it done but until then this is what I got (click the image to view the album):

Specs:
5666 tris for the body and about 2.1k for the weapon.
2k col, nor and spec map for the body (and most likely 1k maps for the weapon).

Software used:
Blender (modelling and baking)
ZBrush (sculpting and some painting)
Photoshop (textures)

The material I used for the highpoly shot can be downloaded here.
And thanks for the great sculping basemesh, Andrei Cirdu.

Fabian

A ZBrush MatCap-material (handpainted though):

Download: fr_metallic_1

Here’s the situation:
We have a deep cut or something like that and want to “fill” it without destroying what’s around it. The clay brush would just work fine for that but especially if it’s a rather complex shape or probably a lot of such cuts you will have to spend quite some time working carefully on each of those.
But in fact you can make this a bit easier by using the smooth brush… yes I mean it, the smooth brush.
It may sound a bit crazy at first to use the smooth brush when it comes to detail preserving techniques but by altering it a bit even that works rather well.

All you have to do to get things like that working is to play with the “BrushMod” slider:
If you want to do what I just described above you have to move it way up to 100. (or less, that depends entirely on what exactly you want to archieve)
It won’t fill the crack completely and you will have to slightly tweak it with the clay and/or the standard smooth brush but it will make the initial step of filling deep cuts a lot easier and cleaner.

On the other hand, if you use negative values it will of course preserve the opposite, which is at least just as useful.

I just felt like digging out an old model and rework the concept a bit so here you go:

(klick image for more views)

I’m now going to start off with the environment and props for the Cubehead so hopefully I can present you some progress on that soon.

Fabian

Finally I managed to put some of my stuff together and go online. Now then, a warm welcome and enjoy the ride!

From now on you can follow my work a litte since I’m going to constantly (hopefully) post updates of my projects here and keep you up to date about what’s going on. As a start you’ll get to see some older projects as well as some of my current building lots.

The first piece to go is a contribution for a small contest on the German Blender forums (www.blendpolis.de) which I fortunately won a while back. The 3D part was completely made with Blender to get to know about its sculpting abilities and just to comply with the rules, too. The topic was to create an image that deals with “digital worlds” and I decided to create something rather abstract that can be interpreted in many different ways. I’m pretty happy with the conceptional to semi realistic result and I hope so are you:

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My most current WiP doesn’t need a whole lot of explanations, it’s a personal project with a little story attached:

“It’s the night before the deadline.
Your head is empty,
too empty.
But back in your head there’s something
something distracting…
Is it the deadline?”

(Yeah, I really somewhat made that experience when I came up with the idea for the project…)

That’s it for now and thanks for stopping by,

Fabian

Since I do quite a lot of doodling and sketching in the meantime that in my opinion is worth showing, I’ll just drop that here from now on.

This first one is a still rather speedish designsculpt which I already started retopologizing, so it’s to be displayed in the Artwork section soon:

Now we go down some levels of detail to this rough sketch:

You like cartoon style? Maybe I got something for you:

Turntable ahead:

Oh, and for the cessation: Life sculpting rocks!
(used a reference for the pose)

Yours,

Fabian