Tag: Blender

Node displacement in Blender 2.8

In Blender 2.8, the displacement node in Cycles render-engine was changed from scalar to vector. If you simply connect a black and white height map to the Displace input of the material output node, like in Blender 2.7, it will not give the desired result.

To make the correct node displacement in Blender 2.8 add “CombineXYZ” and “VectorDisplacement” nodes to the material node tree. Connect the height map to the “Y” input of the “CombineXYZ” node and its “Vector” output to the “Vector” input of the “VectorDisplacement” node. After that, connect the “Displacement” output of the “VectorDisplacement” node to the “Displacement” input of the material output node.

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Decorators for node tree updation delay

When we create a field on the add-on interface panel, the value of which changes something in the node tree, each time the user changes the field value the node tree recompiles. If the user changes the value in that field by holding and moving the mouse, too frequent node tree recompilation will cause Blender to hangs.

This problem can be solved using decorators for deferred updating of the node tree.

Code by Skarn.

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Texture pixelization

The simplest way to pixelate texture, procedural or not – get the color from the single pixel and fill the region with required width and height (resolution) with this color.

Here is the gradient texture with red – green – blue colors:

To pixelate it with the first step of resolution we can make some vectors manipulations.

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Quick Instance Add-on: grouping-like workflow

This add-on for Blender 2.8 creates a grouping workflow using Blender 2.7 group style. Add-on doesn’t “brokes” the scene, so you can properly work with groups made with this add-on having no add-on installation.

By Michael Soluyanov.

  • ctrl+g – group selected objects
  • f9 – manage the group name and origin
  • tab – enter/exit group edit mode in separate space

Video with an add-on demonstration:

You can get this add-on at:

Blender Market: https://blendermarket.com/products/quick-instance

Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/l/qinstance

How to protect your add-on from downloading through aggregators

With the Blender popularity growing, the number of add-ons created for it by third-party developers is growing too. A lot of high-quality professional add-ons are written for Blender now. Over time, the number of add-ons is becoming more and more. And on this wave aggregators appeared – programs and services independently searching for add-ons and allowing Blender users to install add-ons quickly, many at once, and bypassing add-on distribution channels selected by their authors. What caused a negative reaction of add-on developers.

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How to detect if Local View is on in 3D View window

The following command returns the 3D View areas list with enabled Local View mode:

 

Where are the icons for managing objects visibility in the Outliner window in Blender 2.8

In the latest Blender 2.80 builds, the visibility control icons are disappeared from the Outliner window.

They were not removed, they are just hidden from the interface by default. To return them to their usual place click the button with the funnel image and mark the icons you need to display.

After closing the dialog box, the icons will appear in their places.

Changing objects visibility in the viewport and while rendering

The easiest way to hide and show rendering objects is to assign animation keys to them. To do this, move the cursor over the eye icon (visibility in the viewport) or camera (visibility when rendering) in the Outliner window, press the “i” key and then manage the created condition in the Graph Editor like the ordinary animation keys.

But this method is not always available. For example, we cannot assign visibility animation keys for collections, Blender will generate errors like:

“hide_viewport” property cannot be animated

or

“hide_render” property can not be animated

However, using the Blender Python API, we can control the visibility of such objects.

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Architectural Debris – DUST

A small spring release from the Architectural Debris series!

Architectural Debris – DUST

The theme of various interior art objects (vases, figurines, candlesticks, mathematical figures) is very popular in the field of interior design, so an attempt was made to create a universal classification of such things in order to get a single semantic rating scale.

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Blender add-on: BIS v. 1.6.4.

BIS (Blender Interplanety Storage) updated to v.1.6.4.

  • Two new modes were introduced to work separately, one for materials (easier to use) and the second – for node groups (for advanced shader making). In the “Material” mode, the entire material is stored and loaded. In the “NodeGroups” mode, everything works without changes, a separate node group is saved and loaded for the convinient creating complex shaders.
  • In the “NodeGroup” mode uploaded node group adds to the current open node group instead of the node tree root as before.
  • Experimental mode can be enabled/disabled in the add-on preferences.

Download

Download

Blender autocomplete modules

Nutti, the author of the “fake-bpy-modules” project, has made the installation of the Blender Python API autocomplete modules through the pip platform. Pip installation is faster and easier, but sometimes we just need to copy the autocomplete modules to our project but now they are not included in the Nutti’s GitHub.

Copies of the autocomplete modules for Blender versions 2.79 and 2.80 can be downloaded directly from here: https://github.com/Korchy/blender_autocomplete