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It's a great podcast task. Now that my slack goes off perpetually and I've got a barrage of people checking in what they should be doing any given day, a well justified 'it is actually cost effective for me to handle this' modeling/UV/photo stitching projection task is very well appreciated. However to bonoman's point - the yooth don't give a poo poo about meditative work. They're trying to race to the finish line and are skipping the basics
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Feb 18, 2024 07:26
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cubicle gangster posted:
In my experience, this is equally because management can't project timelines and budgets for poo poo, so production has to get on with it, and fast.
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Feb 18, 2024 19:13
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mutata posted:In my experience, this is equally because management can't project timelines and budgets for poo poo, so production has to get on with it, and fast. Thats definitely a thing but I was talking about people using creative work as an escape. I think there's a generational shift where the modern gen want to make something cool and do music videos for marshmellow, but I came from an era where we were just not very well socially adjusted and used our time in front of a computer to escape from real life. Theres a patience and pace to people who came to this industry as an escape vs those that were sold it as a way to do super cool poo poo for a living. We all wanted to do super cool poo poo for a living but there was a different level of ego to it. We were thankful to be in the room, in awe of all opportunity
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Feb 19, 2024 06:28
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Feb 19, 2024 06:32
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I come at 3d stuff from the game dev side so unwrapping is still important. Most of my work seems to be in the VR / web / mobileish space. I am in charge of the intro to 3d modeling course for games at my college and I recently did a giant revamp of the course. After the first 2 weeks of the course, unwrapping is the major point of the following 4 weeks of the class. They are still modeling during the time, but the major focus is understanding unwrapping from different approaches. Being forced to unwrap your models really helps show you where your meshflow sucks or is messy. PS. Why does Unity have to be so stupid and arbitrary about draw calls? I am fighting it hardcore right now for this one project I am on.
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Feb 19, 2024 15:13
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Alterian posted:I come at 3d stuff from the game dev side so unwrapping is still important. Most of my work seems to be in the VR / web / mobileish space. I am in charge of the intro to 3d modeling course for games at my college and I recently did a giant revamp of the course. After the first 2 weeks of the course, unwrapping is the major point of the following 4 weeks of the class. They are still modeling during the time, but the major focus is understanding unwrapping from different approaches. Being forced to unwrap your models really helps show you where your meshflow sucks or is messy. I was also trained by ex games dudes in UK, moved back to my tiny country and did 3 years of outsource work for AAA games and now I have done work for local VR games for past 6 or so years. I went from completely hating unwrapping and thinking "auto UV does it all anyway, why bother?" to "There are some really neat tricks and optimizations you can do but I only do it cause the company tells me to" to UV unwrapping being one of the things I enjoy the most. I also joined my countries one of the few 3d art courses as a teacher and did that for 3 years after giving up on it cause it was just so bad and nobody but me gave a drat. Now my ex student is carrying on the torch and seems to be doing well.
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Feb 25, 2024 15:12
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Anyone have tips to share / preferred tools / favorite tutorials for unwrapping? I just use Blender with the UV Squares (for evenly aligning to a grid) and Texel Density (unifying sizes) addons. I can do better than the auto unwrappers I've used but I'd hardly call my skills boastworthy, but this is a topic that seems to come up in CG circles sometimes so I've always been kind of curious what noteworthily special UV unwrapping ends up looking like.
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Feb 25, 2024 15:51
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Koramei posted:Anyone have tips to share / preferred tools / favorite tutorials for unwrapping? Good UV unwrap utilizes the absolute maximum of the space and has texel density adjusted to give slightly more texel density to areas that need it and give less to those that don't. When doing modular stuff or environment you also make entire UV atlasses and trim sheets where you may use one UV map for normal texture and another for albedo, met, rough info. There's just a lot of tricks and optimizations you can do considering uv maps loop infinetly and you don't have to use square formats. They're all mostly to do with optimization and time saving tho. http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments This has some info on it.
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Feb 25, 2024 16:08
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Koramei posted:Anyone have tips to share / preferred tools / favorite tutorials for unwrapping? TexTools for blender is a great add-on to use, and if you have the cash zen uv adds a ton of nice features. Off the top of my head: - stacking and reusing as much as you can to make use of the space. - gridding out circles so that you don't get aliasing on angles etc. - there are some really good auto packere that will get you most of the way there once you've got your seams on the right places, zenuv has integrations for them so have a look (ones free ones paid) - depending on what texturing technique your going to use, slicing up larger islands so that texel density and packing makes use of as much space as possible. - something to watch/listen to whilst you go through the motions.
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Feb 25, 2024 16:29
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Not in blender but I talk about the theory of unwrapping here for my students specifically about sticking to UV space. Unwrapping for tileables and trim sheets is a different lesson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjEmp-ty_BI quote:Off the top of my head: Except don't stack if you are taking it over to substance painter!
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Feb 25, 2024 17:40
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Yeah there's some really crazy stuff you can do with effective use of "trim sheet" or "texture atlas" textures with really wonkily stretched and distorted UVs lol. They're typically vertical or horizontal repeating instead of all sides. A combination of tileable, trim, and unique textures is a pretty common workflow for efficient poo poo. It can also really speed up the low poly process since you're focused most of your time on the (fairly) few repeating high poly elements. I've sculpted trim sheets in ZBrush or modelled Sci-Fi ones in Maya before, you just straight up bake textures to a plane for a lot of details (this even works well for more handpainted/low poly environments). Here's a good writeup on 80lv that's cool: https://80.lv/articles/001agt-chinese-ship-modeling-and-procedural-materials/  I really hope people still get taught these fundamentals and it's not just like "just throw some megascan bullshit in there, gently caress draw calls"... these techniques are all still very valid and great for almost every game engine and platform.
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Feb 26, 2024 05:31
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I am curious. For those of you that like a good unwrap session, did you also like / still like jigsaw puzzles? I still love me a good puzzle when I'm stressed.
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Feb 29, 2024 15:17
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I hadn't thought about it like that before but yes, I do very much enjoy a good jigsaw puzzle.
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Feb 29, 2024 18:26
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I feel like if you're not the kind of person to enjoy a puzzle, you're probably not going to be able to find satisfaction in many of the parts of being a 3d artist that laypeople may find tedious. The methodical, meditative parts of the job are the reason I'll never change career.
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Feb 29, 2024 20:31
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I don't like puzzles and I'm not very good at lateral thinking and planning. If it weren't for ZBrush (and to a lesser extent max's sorely under exploited graphite tools) I would be doing something else by now. I don't mind an unwrap session here and there though 
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Feb 29, 2024 21:07
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Welp I finally started the notorious Blender donut tutorial, coming from a traditional art background a lot of the 3DCG workflow males my brain angry. I think I'm mostly getting it, I'll post the final result when I get done tomorrow probably.
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Mar 1, 2024 06:56
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I've met blender donut guy, he lives in my city
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Mar 1, 2024 07:07
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EoinCannon posted:I've met blender donut guy, he lives in my city oh. sorry about that. 
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Mar 1, 2024 09:14
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lol
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Mar 1, 2024 14:34
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I didn't realize this guy was the donut guy cause I've used this video for years in one of my classes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qj1FK8n7WgY
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Mar 1, 2024 16:44
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He gives off mild chud energy to me.
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Mar 1, 2024 16:58
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He definitely got milkshake ducked over something awhile back, yeah.
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Mar 1, 2024 17:19
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If anyone has any other great videos that talk about color harmonies like that I'd be greatful. I don't want to have to put one together myself. Also, interested if you have info about the milkshake ducking.
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Mar 1, 2024 17:27
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A quick googling turns up accusations of alt-right viewpoints, homophobia, support of fascism, etc...but it's entirely discussion about the controversy, I wasn't able to find actual substance with 2 minutes of research.
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Mar 1, 2024 17:56
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i think i remember watching some tutorial of his where he made an offhand "more options in this toolbox than an sjw has gender identities" type of comment. but i couldn't tell you which one
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Mar 1, 2024 18:36
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He made a flag tutorial long time ago where toward the end he said he was suprised that he didn't use the F-slur (drop the L from flag) accidentally during the tutorial. Instead he said it on purpose for whatever reason. Also he was way into NFTs a few years ago.
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Mar 1, 2024 20:26
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Alterian posted:If anyone has any other great videos that talk about color harmonies like that I'd be greatful. I don't want to have to put one together myself. Also, interested if you have info about the milkshake ducking. It's not a video but everyone doing CG professionally should read this book cover to cover. https://chrisbrejon.com/cg-cinematography/chapter-2-color-theory/ It's got SO much incredible knowledge stored in it.
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Mar 1, 2024 20:39
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I think people who make tutorials should avoid trying to incorporate their "humor" and personality into it. I've also noticed when professional artists get big followings it can go to their head so fast. They don't conduct themselves carefully. Recently there was that very popular hard surface guy who posted many great tips and decided to just go full on racist and sexist on twitter one day.
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Mar 1, 2024 21:17
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Sourdough Sam posted:I think people who make tutorials should avoid trying to incorporate their "humor" and personality into it. Counterpoint: effective humor is a great way to hold attention and keep people learning. The real problem here is people being shitstains.
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Mar 1, 2024 21:29
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Sourdough Sam posted:I think people who make tutorials should avoid trying to incorporate their "humor" and personality into it. I've also noticed when professional artists get big followings it can go to their head so fast. They don't conduct themselves carefully. Recently there was that very popular hard surface guy who posted many great tips and decided to just go full on racist and sexist on twitter one day. They should incorporate their personality into it, so it's clear if they are a piece of poo poo or not. Is the popular hard surface guy from Blender Bros? The stuff about them is 
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Mar 1, 2024 22:30
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Sourdough Sam posted:I think people who make tutorials should avoid trying to incorporate their "humor" and personality into it. I've also noticed when professional artists get big followings it can go to their head so fast. They don't conduct themselves carefully. Recently there was that very popular hard surface guy who posted many great tips and decided to just go full on racist and sexist on twitter one day. If you're making tutorials the most important thing is to master "I'm going to go ahead and..." Also important to forget how to type and have to backspace constantly while naming "test_cylinder_01" Also I have no knowledge of donut guy's beliefs. I watched the donut tutorial to help get started in blender but haven't watched any of his other stuff. We didn't hang out or anything, just met him at a thing EoinCannon fucked around with this message at 23:11 on Mar 1, 2024 |
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Mar 1, 2024 23:09
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Donut is the new fire hydrant. I keep trying to get into Blender but despite mastering ZBrush/Max/Maya that's apparently not enough to get around it's clunky rear end UI/UX experience. Seriously this keyboard shortcut poo poo is worse than anything ZBrush did. You really gonna try to tie every functionality to the letter key it starts with in the English language? I don't wanna look at my fuckin keyboard for every function Blender, why can't you just be contextual and make logical sense based on what I click on? Just venting about my disdain for learning it, because it doesn't feel any more or less intuitive compared to when I tried it 8+ years ago. I'd rather have Maya crash daily at least then I can keep my hand on the left side of my keyboard and not pay attention. Hell, even ZBrush maintains that mentality. For every good feature I see come out of Blender and it's community, there's 10 other things I have an issue with for a production workflow. dopesilly fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Mar 1, 2024 |
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Mar 1, 2024 23:17
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I sometimes get asked to put together renders of things we might be making at work that are basically bedazzled/rhinestoned, and I'm wondering if there's a sane way of doing that. I've made an IMM brush in ZBrush of a basic 'gem' shape and used it in various ways in the past to underwhelming degrees of success. Here's a quick example -  I might start with something like this, and my immediate hunch is to ditch all of the polygroups except the back facing and then try to ZRemesh it down to something lower resolution so I can use nanomesh to place the gems. This doesn't really work because even with adaptive sizes set to zero it still doesn't have an even placement density.   I have done a low-resolution Dynamesh before because Dynamesh keeps mostly square polys, which did get me here:  However, that kind of approach doesn't always work either, and usually involves the rhinestones clipping or behaving weirdly at the edges of the 'tray'. Plus, if I then get a request for 'hey, make the rhinestones bigger/smaller' or something along those lines it can be a real pain in the rear end to go back in and try and revise it, because I'm basically just rolling the dice until I get a mesh density that does what I need it to. Often I just end up trying to place these by hand instead with the IMM brush, which is its own sort of hell. Is there a better way to do this kind of thing? It has come up enough times that I'm sure there's a good solution out there and I'd love to track it down.
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Mar 2, 2024 00:34
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cubicle gangster posted:It's not a video but everyone doing CG professionally should read this book cover to cover. Thanks so much for posting this, I've been needing a good one stop source that covers all this content after dying the death of a thousand cuts on youtube etc, trying to piece together a nugget here and a nugget there from dozens of different sources. On the topic of things that have been a thorn in my side recently, I don't suppose anyone knows how to get Exoside Quadremesher 1.3 installed in Houdini 20? The Labs node keeps reinstalling 1.2 and I can't find where it's putting the .hda to override it.
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Mar 2, 2024 01:09
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Harvey Baldman posted:Is there a better way to do this kind of thing? It has come up enough times that I'm sure there's a good solution out there and I'd love to track it down. my brain just goes 'hell yea blender geometry nodes time!' for this these days.
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Mar 2, 2024 02:23
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Harvey Baldman posted:Is there a better way to do this kind of thing? It has come up enough times that I'm sure there's a good solution out there and I'd love to track it down. As said above, ZBrush is never going to be great at that kind of thing. I would set it up in max but blender is free and geometry nodes is perfect for it.
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Mar 2, 2024 07:34
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:A quick googling turns up accusations of alt-right viewpoints, homophobia, support of fascism, etc...but it's entirely discussion about the controversy, I wasn't able to find actual substance with 2 minutes of research. There was a minor storm of stuff a couple of years back that I followed vaguely... as I recall there was nothing individually insane (unlike Blender Bros, holy poo poo) but a whole lot of the sorts of remarks that might have been passable on SA back in 2002 but feel pretty at odds with someone that's one of the main faces of the usually welcoming Blender community. Beyond that what kind of did him in for me was an open recruiting call for AAA-quality modelers for his company where he was proudly offering minimum wage as the compensation. I followed a lot of his stuff pretty actively for a while (his podcast interviewing various top artists is unfortunately a really good resource) and I think accusations of fascism or being alt-right are hyperbolic, but he does come off as a little bit of a dipshit. dopesilly posted:I keep trying to get into Blender but despite mastering ZBrush/Max/Maya that's apparently not enough to get around it's clunky rear end UI/UX experience. Seriously this keyboard shortcut poo poo is worse than anything ZBrush did. You really gonna try to tie every functionality to the letter key it starts with in the English language? I don't wanna look at my fuckin keyboard for every function Blender, why can't you just be contextual and make logical sense based on what I click on? Just venting about my disdain for learning it, because it doesn't feel any more or less intuitive compared to when I tried it 8+ years ago. I mean, it's just muscle memory like any other program, I don't spend any time actively thinking about what keys I'm using. I agree it was a weird choice (and Blender's founder is peculiarly stubborn sometimes) and frustrating at first coming from the industry standard, but the keys aren't any more awkwardly placed -- the main ones are all on the left side within finger's reach. If I were having to use a modeling program like Maya with functionality similar enough to get confusing regularly it might be different, but I never have any issues switching between Blender/Unity/Substance and so on and my hands remembering where to be. Also what's wrong with the UI? Since they overhauled it in v2.8 back in 2019 Blender's UI is just fine. I never did enough Maya/Max to compare but I like it a heck of a lot better than ZBrush's abomination, and it's lightning fast compared to Unity or basically anything Adobe puts out.
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Mar 2, 2024 08:36
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dopesilly posted:You really gonna try to tie every functionality to the letter key it starts with in the English language? I don't wanna look at my fuckin keyboard for every function Blender If it is not visible by default, you can enable the toolbar from the view menu.
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Mar 2, 2024 08:47
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I can completely hide Maya's UI and still use 95% of the tools with like 3-4 keys without moving my left hand (especially space bar) and I don't need to "Search" for functions by typing them out. It's like everything is 2-3 more clicks for me or 2-3 more keypresses than it needs to be for me in Blender. I will give Blender the upper hand on the functions being somewhat predictable and stable, but yeah the default hotkeys and default UX experience is still rear end imo. It's like the software never heard of contextual editing or something, so it just breaks a buncha poo poo into different tabs unnecessarily.
dopesilly fucked around with this message at 17:36 on Mar 2, 2024 |
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Mar 2, 2024 17:34
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Arguing about whether Maya or Blender has a better interface isn't even a pot/kettle situation. It's just two pots having a slapfight. Every professional 3D modeling program has a gargantuan unwieldy interface unlike anything else, and the only reason Maya seems intuitive to you is because you've used it before. Blender's UI is perfectly fine and plenty fast to use once you know what you're doing, just like Maya or c4d or rhino or SolidWorks or whatever. Like ffs I don't think any of the major 3D modeling programs even share the same viewport navigation controls. Imagine if every text editor you used had a different way of moving the cursor around (looking at you, vim). That's where the field is at
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Mar 2, 2024 19:24
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