Category Archives: 3D

My notes on 3D apps I use: ZBrush, Hexagon, DAZ Studio, Poser, Carrara and many others.

How to rotate a HDRI in Blender

3D,

I always forget how to rotate HDRIs in Blender. It’s really not that difficult, but somehow this information doesn’t seem to save in my brain. I’ve given up trying understand why, so I thought I’d write it down for a future visit. At least I know where to look now ๐Ÿ™‚

In the Shading Tab, switch over to World. Add your HDRI image as you usually would (with an Environment Texture).

To make this thing rotate, we need to make ourselves a Texture Coordinate (under Input) and plug that into a Mapping Node (under Vector). Connect the Generated output into the Vector input, then plug the Vector output into the Environment Texture so that we can control the various aspects of our HDRI now.

We’re after the Z rotation, which will make or HDRI rotate horizontally. Here’s the complete node setup (click to enlarge):

How to use TeleBlender 4 by mCasual / Jaques

3D,

Getting characters and scenes from DAZ Studio into Blender is one of the toughest things to get right. It’s an endlessly time consuming, confusion and generally un-fun process. Several scripts exist to make this happen, yet many of them fail to make it a one-click solution. Jacques aka mCasual has been working for years on something called TeleBlender. Steve aka Backdoor 3D recently did a live stream on the process, and I finally had a chance to try it out myself.

In this article I’ll show you the workflow that I found worked best for me. You may know a better way, and perhaps it’s not the intended way of working, but it thought it might come in handy (since usage instructions on the download page of TeleBlender are literally non-existent).

I’m using the following versions, which will probably no longer exist by the time you read this article:

  • Blender 2.83.1 LTS
  • DAZ Studio 4.12.1
  • TeleBlender 4 (Beta 06252020)
Continue reading How to use TeleBlender 4 by mCasual / Jaques →

What is DAZ Central and why should we use it?

3D, ,

You may have seen the announcement about DAZ Central recently, DAZ’s new content management app. I’ve had a look at it as soon as I heard it and I thought I’d give you my impressions and opinions about the new software. I’ll also try to answer the question why it even exists, considering that we can already do what it does with other means.

Note that what I’m telling you in this article is based on observations, opinions and speculation rather than insider knowledge or hard facts. Call it “fan fiction” if you will. It’s more about sharing those thoughts and an attempt at explaining the often mysterious and unexplainable.

Continue reading What is DAZ Central and why should we use it? →

Importing Genesis into Blender via Mixamo

3D, ,

I’ve just been experimenting with uploading a Genesis 1 figure to Mixamo, and importing the animated figure into Blender. There are several trillion options what with the combinations of tick-boxes and values. Thankfully, nothing is documented, just the way I like it.

I thought I’d quickly post a screenshot of what actually works – for the next 10 minutes. We all know how quickly these things change:

Note that I’m doing this in the release version of Blender 2.82, in late May 2020. It’ll probably stop working by the time either of us reads this, but hey – at least I’ve tried.

Why do DAZ Characters take so long to load?

3D, Reader Questions

I’ve had this question twice recently, and it’s another interesting nugget of information I thought I’d share with you: why do DAZ figures take so long to load? Especially the no-frills base figures? And why does this only happen for some users, and not for others?

The two guys who contacted me about this (Richard and Hans-Werner) both had large amounts of content installed on their systems, and the first logical question is, could a different organisation of the content speed up the figure loading process (i.e. move content to another drive, or split content into multiple folders). The answer is: sadly no.

Likewise, a faster drive won’t make much of a difference either, be that an SSD or an even faster M2 drive. Those are great of course, and they will speed up content load times in general, but the root issue of excessive load times with DAZ figures are morph files.

Tell me more

Removing x-translation wobble when converting keyframes to aniBlocks

3D,

When you convert keyframes to an aniBlock, there’s a phenomenon that can happen in that the figure seems to sway left/right. It’s not something that is present in the keyframe animation, and I’m not entirely sure why this happens on conversion. The above shows how Darius 7 does his keyframe funny walk, while the bottom shows what happens after conversion to an aniBlock. In a word: terrible!

aniMate is a powerful tool, and in this article I’ll take a look on how to fix such shenanigans.

Continue reading Removing x-translation wobble when converting keyframes to aniBlocks →

How to apply Mixamo Animations to Genesis 3 and Genesis 8

3D,

If you’ve ever tried to upload a G3 or G8 character to Mixamo, you’ll have noticed that it’s a complete and utter nightmare. Seemingly nothing will work in the plethora of export options, and a ton of time has been wasted globally, leading to anger, depression, frustration and many other feelings we as creatives cannot afford to indulge in (for our wellbeing’s sake).

I’m here to tell you that there is in fact a workaround, but it requires us to “think differently” about how to accomplish our goal of applying Mixamo animations to Genesis 3 and 8 characters. I’ll show you what works for me at this moment in time – technology is fickle, so by the time you read this, the process might very well have stopped working. Let’s think positive and hope it hasn’t ๐Ÿ˜‰

Sadly, as of May 2020, this method is no longer working ๐Ÿ˜ญ๐Ÿ˜ญ๐Ÿ˜ญ

Find out more

Using Non-Linear Animation (NLA Features) in Blender 2.8

3D,

Many animation apps have an exciting feature that lets us re-use a group of keyframes in a more convenient way to build larger and more complex animations. They’re commonly referred to as non-linear editing. A popular example includes setting up an action as keyframes once, and then looping it using an NLA bock of sorts (like a walk cycle). Better yet, animations can be combined and transitioned without interruptions or ugly pops. We can even overlay several actions, such as a walk cycle, an eye blink and a waving hand gesture.

Blender has these features, and while difficult to grasp at first, they’re surprisingly simple to use once you grasp the concept:

  • setup an animation using regular keyframes, or import it from a service like Mixamo
  • turn this group into an Action Strip (that’s what Blender calls an NLA block)
  • add this Action Strip onto an NLA track, repeat it or combine it with other strips
  • add transitions in between blocks to seamless motion
  • add tracks to combine animations

Here’s how it works for me. This might not be 100% accurate, but it’s good enough to build seriously cool animations with ease. I’m using Blender 2.82 for this example, and I’m expanding on principles I’ve briefly touched on in my previous article about looping walk animations.

Continue reading Using Non-Linear Animation (NLA Features) in Blender 2.8 →

Switching between Cameras in Animations with Blender 2.8

3D

If you have multiple cameras in your scene, chances are that you may want to cut to another one during the course of an animation. I’ve often wondered how to do that, but only finding outdated material on the internet, I decided to poke around myself. Half an hour later I had it sussed out – here’s how it works.

I have three cameras in my scene, named Cam 1, Cam 2 and Cam 3. Shorter names are preferred, as Blender will show these names at the bottom of the timeline. All we have to do now is to

  • select the camera we want to switch to
  • position our playhead in the timeline
  • and the hit CTRL + B at the bottom of our timeline.

This will create markers like these:

The trick is to find the spot at which to click. It’s not very intuitive as of Blender 2.82, but essentially the space marked dark grey in the screenshot above is where you need to hover your mouse while pressing CTRL + B. This will create a marker. When you now scrub through the timeline, you’ll see the cameras switch to your choice at the marks you’ve set.

To delete a Camera Marker, select it then press X as usual.

More about Markers

What we’ve setup here are special Camera Markers. Notice the little camera icon next to them. We can create regular markers too, just by hovering anywhere in the timeline and pressing M. Those do not have a camera icon, and we can rename them as we see fit (by selecting them, then hitting CTRL + M). The latter command also works on Camera Markers, but they cannot be renamed.

Regular Markers come in handy for notes and other special places we need to remember.

There’s a special Marker menu in the timeline, from which we can do all kinds of other things to those little gadgets, including jumping and duplicating. This works with both regular and Camera Markers. Sadly there’s no default shortcuts for marker navigation as far as I know.

Final Thoughts

I had always assumed that switching cameras in Blender was a bit of a nightmare, especially if you do a lot of cuts. While that may have been the truth in 2.79 and below, the current implementation couldn’t be easier to use. It’ll open up the door to easy multi-camera animations, as well as static scenes that need to be rendered from various angles.

If you think that setting a Camera Marker should be possible by hovering anywhere in the timeline, rather than only at the un-intuitive bottom 10%, you’re not the only one: it’s a known issue, and the folks are working on it. As of 2.82 this feature is not implemented.

How to render with the current Viewport Shading in Blender

3D

Although I like Eevee, sometimes I’d like something even faster for animatic previews. Eevee still requires lights to be setup, whereas with the regular “material preview” setting in the viewport, we can see things just fine before we bring in our lights. It would be nice if there is a way to use the same shading style for real renders, be that for a quick still image, or a whole animation.

Thankfully there is! Let me show you how to use it.

Rather than picking a render engine as usual in the Rendering Properties tab on the right, head over to the top of your regular 3D Viewport and select View – Viewport Render Image.

This will render an image with image size specified in Render Properties, but it’ll use whatever is currently selected as a shading mode in your viewport. It’s genius really, albeit perhaps not very intuitive (like the rest of Blender).

The same principle can be used for animations, and keyframes of an animation (i.e. you’ll get a single frame at each camera keyframe). It’ll take a fraction of the render time, and more importantly, you’ll get to see how something works before you’ve setup any lights.

Note that all overlays will be present. It’s exactly like what you see in the viewport right now, just at a higher (or lower) resolution. To disable those, use the little dual-circle icon at the top right of your viewport (it says “Show Overlays” when you hover over it).