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: Let’s take a …
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 …
I’ve had a bit of a computer mishap recently that required me to install Corel Painter seemingly on more computers than I actually own. In use are my Mac and my main PC, but due to hard drive switching and frequent re-installations, Corel’s automated license authentication system thought I was using it on more machines. …
PaintShop Pro is trying to help new users by giving them lots of choices when the app launches. This gets old fast, especially when you’re being peppered with sales nag screens every time you open the programme. Thankfully there are ways to configure this behaviour, albeit somewhat hidden. Let me show you where. Removing the …
I’ve recently tried my hand at using ParticleShop with Photoshop, and it worked out of the box after installation. This was not the case with PaintShop Pro though, where an additional step is required (but they don’t exactly tell you this in the installation). Here’s what we need to do to make it work: Head …
The Vignette option has been slightly hidden in Canva recently. Here’s how you can find it: select the background layer of your image click Edit Image under Adjust, select see all a long list of options opens up, one of which is the Vignette Here’s an example of what a Vignette can do for your …
I’ve recently picked up a fantastic deal on Corel Painter 2021 through Humble Bundle. If you’re fast you might still be able to pick it up yourself from here. Among the many goodies were various brushes and paper packs that can be installed. While the papers had an automatic installer for Windows, it was different …
Every few years I end up with having to re-create my favourite workspace configuration in Photoshop. Without fail, I forget where some settings are hidden that I’ve grown rather fond of. Here’s a quick refresher about how to change those. Hide those scroll bars By default, the document is surrounded by scroll bars. It’s clutter …
I’m currently evaluating a seriously exciting app called R3DS Wrap, also known as The Russian 3D Scanner. It does something rather difficult: it takes the existing geometry of a base mesh and wraps it around another one with a different topology. Imagine wrapping a sphere around a cone, a jacket around a figure or a …
Ah yes ZBrush. The app that makes difficult things easy, and the basics almost impossible. Here’s one such example of ingenious software design: the simple act of importing OBJ files, let alone multiple ones. There’s no File – Import dialogue like on literally every other 3D app. Instead we use the import option in the …
In this video I’m explaining how to apply random animations to otherwise static objects. This is a physics effect that’s applied to a shell around the object and is really neat to animate anything from wind to bounce to complex geometry. I’ve always meant to write the steps down and never found the time when …
I was wondering if I could use Blender to make my Substance Painter selections a little easier. I wanted to avoid importing the material zones into Substance, while retaining this information at the same time. Turns out there is a way to do this, but it needs a little manual labour. Josh explains it in …