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Set UV island texel density
Today I needed to enforce certain texel density for my procedurally generated meshes in Houdini. I found this tool, but unfortunately supplied HDA did not work on my Indie license and it was locked, so I had to recreate this myself. Nothing complicated, but It is actually a very useful tool to have when dealing with procedurally generated meshes. Basic idea: First for each primitive you measure its area in world space and in UV space. Then you multiply world space area with target texel density (how many pixels you want per square meter) Multiply UV space area by texture pixel count […] -
Blender Multi Render script
If you are doing any kind of product visualization work, you have probably met with a situation where you need to render multiple camera angles of a product with multiple material variations on it. Doing it by hand can be quite tedious – especially if each render takes longer time. You must wait when the render finishes, change camera or material, change output path.. render again. Not exactly a fun activity and also with high probability of human error. Lucikly blender has few very useful python callback functions: bpy.app.handlers.render_pre bpy.app.handlers.render_post bpy.app.handlers.render_cancel You can register your own functions there, and they will be called before render […] -
Procedural subdivision surface in VEX, Houdini
For whatever reason I decided to create procedural subdivision surface effect in pure VEX. Probably quite useless, but It was a good exercise in how to generate and manipulate geometry in VEX. Usually you run vex over points or primitives, but because I needed to actually generate new points and primitives (in subdivision step), I had to run VEX in Detail mode – run once and process geometry manually. It was also a bit tricky due to how houdini handles edges (half-edges). Code is split into two wrangle nodes – one does subdivides the geometry and other does the smoothing. Everything is in […] -
Procedural volumetric clouds in Blender Eevee and Cycles
As Blender 2.8 reached it’s completion, I was seeing more and more people exploring volumetric shaders in Eevee. Historically volumes have been very slow to render on CPU and even GPU render engines. But with Eevee and it’s almost real time rendering speeds, now you can experiment with volume shaders much easier than before. Seeing people create clouds and nebulas, I wanted to do some experiments and come up with my own solution on how to create fully procedural clouds. What’s cool is that the same shaders also work in Cycles. Slower of course, but producing much higher quality output […] -
Promote Take overrides in Cinema 4D
You know the situation – working with takes, doing your thing. Only when after 300 hours of super productive hustling, you realize that Auto Take button was on and you have been working in wrong Take! Well, I find myself in this situation at least 400 times a day, so here is a little tool to help with this! It works by promoting selected objects overrides (moving up to parent Take). This allows moving your changes out of the take easily without loosing them or manual labor. How to use: Select take you want to promote parameters from Select Objects in take […] -
C4D Freeze Scale Hierarchical
Sometimes, when importing fbx scenes from other DCC apps, you get large scale values on objects. For me this always happens when importing from Blender. It’s quite annoying to fix this in C4D as you have to do this manually for each object in Axis mode. To help with this, I created this small utility script, that quickly goes through whole hirachy (starting from top selected object) and resets scale to 1,1,1, while preserving all other transformations. Only case where it does not work correctly is if there are some shearing transformations from non uniform scale + rotation combo. But this […] -
Tiles transition shader in Blender
Based on ideas in my old hexagon tiles Blender shader, I created this animated, topology independant, cubic tiles shader effect. Generated cubes are fully 3d and if you render with Cycles, you can even have some “filling” with volumetric shading. Everything is 100% procedural and based on just basic math nodes. Tiles are calculated in world space, so local object rotation will not have any effect. Awesome thing is that the shader works both in Cycles and Eevee without any modifications. But unfortunatly Eevee does not support fully shader based volumetric rendering at this moment. There are two issues with it. […] -
Run python command in Blender from 3D view
Are you tired of getting the “RuntimeError: context is incorrect” error when trying to run python commands in Blender?!? Of course you are!! But sweat no more – thanks to this new and super useful Blender addon, You can run your Python commands directly from any 3D view and get the correct context – always! This is a solution to dreadful blender context is incorrect problem You have been waiting for! But wait!!! There is more! You can run either a single line or even execute whole script documents! So forget about writing custom operators or doing complex context copy operations just to […] -
KTools for C4D
Utility plugin for Cinema 4D that quickly cleans scene objects from empty selection tags and materials assigned to empty selections (assigned to nothing). This is sometimes useful when importing scenes from other DCC apps. File download: ktools_v012.zip -
Procedural N-Gon Blender shader
Recently I saw that someone was selling procedural hexagon tiles Blender shader. I became very curious about how this was achieved and spent couple days trying to figure this out on my own. Turns out you don’t need much more than just a bunch of math nodes and UV coordinates as an input. The rest is just basic geometry and basic math. No OSL. Works on GPU and in the viewport! Updated!: Recently I updated this to Blender 2.8 and was pleasantly surprised that It also compiles and works in Eeevee exactly as in Cycles. That’s crazy awesome, if you ask […]
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