Jay Versluis We’ve decided to embark on a little project and let the community submit pictures around a common theme every month. I’m excited to tell you that submissions are now open for the September 2022 WP Guru Community Render Challenge (and yeah, we might want to work on that handful of a name). This month’s theme: …
I had a weird issue that threw me when I was working in ZBrush the other day: flipped normals (not Henrik and Morten, the actually phenomenon of normals facing the wrong way). ZBrush only shows the “right” side of the normals by default, and although it has the option to show both sides, the default …
Sometimes we may need access to occluded parts in Substance Painter. The easiest way to deal with such hidden parts is by making them accessible before importing the model, such as opening the lid of a chest or the mouth of a figure, or even “exploding” an object to make all its surfaces accessible. While …
This week I’ve been playing with the fascinating Warp Projection tools in Substance Painter. This way we can project an image onto a 3D object and add vertices onto the projection grid, with which minute details can be lined up for a perfect fit. I’ve tried it with one of those pre-made head textures and …
I’ve just figured out how to do Projection Painting in Substance Painter, and thought I’d best make a note of it. The magic happens inside a regular Paint Layer. It works in both paint mode and projection mode, but to transfer colour information, we’ll need to switch into Projection Mode. With your paint layer selected, …
Blender can do projection painting with textures that can be used as stencils. It’s super handy when it comes to transferring 2D images onto 3D objects. All we need to do is load in a texture, then rub it onto our objects in either Vertex or Texture Paint mode, as well as the new Sculpt …
One of my supporters was asking if there was a way to use Genesis 8.1 materials on the older Genesis 8 figures, and if the reverse of my character conversion video on the opposite process could be used. It got me thinking and experimenting, and while it’s not a one-click process, I’ve made it work. …
A while ago I watched a nice video by CG Cookie about pouring some coffee into a cup in Blender. It’s a great starter video, even though I found it really tough to follow when I tried it for the first time. I thought I had made some notes on the process back then, but …
We can rig simple figures manually and without the Figure Setup Tool in Daz Studio. It occurred to me that I didn’t know much about this process, until a viewer on Twitch asked me about it. I thought I’d best do some research, make a video and write an article so we won’t forget for …
Blender has this habit of being a little different then perhaps any other 3D app. While it can deal with morph targets, they’re called something different and it’s entirely un-obvious how to bring them in (hint: it’s NOT the import option, nor in Edit Mode). I’ve just figured out how to do it and thought …
Many render engines have the concept of decals. Those are texture projections that can be thrown onto existing objects without having to amend the actual texture files. Footsteps and bullet holes in video games are examples of decals. I’m not sure if Cycles or Eevee have this concept natively, but there’s a relatively easy way …
Importing Mixamo animations into Daz Studio has always been a passion of mine, but the process has never been simple. I’ve previously described how to use the Genesis 1 figure as a workaround, but the hand and finger movements were off and needed some further attention. When Travis from Daz forwarded me a post by …
Timelines are behind a lot of the animation magic in Unreal Engine Blueprints. I’ve been implementing one to make my plants grow on Jay’s Farm, but I needed a functionality that would let me change the duration of my parent timeline with a variable. That way different seeds could grow with different rates. There’s no …
There has been an issue with Premiere Pro with the list of “Recent Files” for many years that I’ve thankfully only experienced recently. It’s that list of recently opened projects that is shown both on the home page and under Files – Recent. On my system, it appears that files I’ve just worked on are …
We had an interesting discussion on my private Discord server the other day, about the difference between changing the frame width and changing the focal length. At first glace, both options appear to do the same in the viewport. However there’s an important difference and implication on other parameters as you setup your scene. The …
I had a great question from a viewer today (hi Doomguy) about what additional tools I use when working with Daz Studio. It’s an often overlooked aspect of the software that Daz Studio by itself can only do so much, and external tools can help build better scenes, work faster or aid in making adjustments …
I forgot how to see the total duration of multiple clips or sequences in Premiere Pro, so I thought I’d best make a note for when I need this feature next time. It’s super easy actually: open the Info Panel and dock it somewhere head over to your Project Panel and select as many clips …
Like everything in Unreal Engine, rendering a subject with a transparent background isn’t a one-click affair. It’s doable though, thanks to a neat tip by Alexzander The Geek on YouTube. In the above screenshot, the background was added in Photoshop, exactly how I like it! Here’s how to do it in principle: enable transparency in …
When I started using the iPad version of Clip Studio Paint it wasn’t exactly obvious to me how to access cloud files from providers other than the CLIP Cloud. Whenever I tried to open a file, all I saw was two options: on my iPad iCloud Drive (Apple Cloud) I’ve just figured out how to …
Depth of Field is extremely difficult to judge in Unreal Engine, at least visually in the preview. It’s also a little intimidating to setup, and I don’t mind telling you that it was very difficult for me to grasp the concept. Yet like so many things in Unreal Engine, there is method behind the madness, …
Photoshop’s Blending Options are so powerful and useful, it’s easy to forget that there are other ways to accomplish the same thing. Case in point: the Stroke Effect, which lets us create an outline around an object. It’s essentially an outline we can apply, which can be used to separate a transparent object from the …
Layer masks work differently across our favourite 2D apps, which can be a little – shall we say – infuriating at times. In Photoshop for example, I’m used to drawing on Layer Masks to hide/reveal something underneath the current layer. Black hides (masks) the current layer, white reveal what’s underneath it, and as such it …
I wanted to setup some portrait lights the way I’m used to doing it in Blender and DAZ Studio. In those apps, we usually have a way to point a light source at an object so that when we move either of them around, the other one follows. The above GIF is a good example …
The Tick Event is a somewhat special event that is called every time a frame is drawn in Unreal Engine. Many actions are derived from it in a running project. Sometimes we may need to drive things while we’re editing a project though, without being able to press play. Sadly we can’t use the Tick …
EPIC have recently introduced something called the Movie Render Queue to aide us in exporting stills and animations from Unreal Engine. The previous method (Movie Scene Capture) was a tad clunky, and is – as we live in such dramatically fast times – already being deprecated. Although Movie Render Queue is working great, it’s not …
I’m currently importing large amounts of OBJ files into DAZ Studio. I was thinking of making my life a little more streamlined and came across a super handy script by the very prolific and talented Jaques aka mcasual. He has something called Load Many OBJ, which does exactly what I need. Once installed, the script …
Blender has a handy script built-in that lets us export multiple selected objects in our scene as separate objects. I remember mentioning this principle in a beefy article focussing on Unreal Engine workflow, but thought it would be neat to turn it into its own article. Here it is! Let’s assume we have several objects …
In this article I’ll show you how to combine various UV islands that are spread across multiple UDIMs onto a single texture set. Blender has this capability built-in, but an add-on called SimpleBake makes our job even easier. For this example I’m using the the base Character Creator model. Many thanks to Brian for showing …
I really like Substance Painter and the way we can texture and get creative with materials. Although it’s not an easy app to learn, it brings a lot of value to 3D models, both new and old. What’s not well handled is material zones on export. If a mesh has 5 zones, we get a …
It’s a tad difficult to see in the screenshot, but our mission is to combine both legs of my character into the same polygroup. It’s an extremely simple task, but pretty much impossible to figure out in ZBrush if you apply logic. There doesn’t seem to me a menu option either, so by piecing together …