Blender Underground

Dan,

Nobody here is going to complain if you rant. Even I did it once...

http://blenderunderground.com/forums/vi ... .php?t=354

Everyone is entitled to vent. At least when you vent here you may get an answer to whatever it is that is heating you up. Dave's tip for example came out of the blue for example.

I know!!

I'm surprised you could decipher it at all, i was pretty much losing hair today... at least the project is so large that i can now concentrate on scenes 6, 7 and 8 instead ...now that the BU guys are on the case.

I forgot to add that the wierdness begins soon after i make a trasnslation to the parent object and decide to undo it - soon after, scale/translation problems relating to the child objects begin and not even an exit and reload can save the file.

Oh and Penix - i love to vent. especially in the current "pressure-cooker" work environment..



Dan.

fantastic rant and a good thread. I'm STILL struggling with particles in 2.45.15 - i can do hair, but i just can't get "static" particles a la 2.45. at all.

ok so i'm having real difficulty accessing a site in order to upload the blend.

Interestingly, i have managed to find a work around for my problem. I've parented the entire group of problem objects to an empty, and simply keyed that.

Problem solved...Kind of.

I'll get the blend uploaded tonight so The Learned Agents can dissect it - and be gentle with me, this "work of art" is supposed to be used in a presentation...
Dan

I refuse to be gentle with you. Your name's Dan. That rhymes with Man. Dan the Man. So be a man, dan, dammit! lol

I'm not kidding Dave - it's fairly horrible.

In order to placate Penix, can you recommend a site other than Rapidshare for me to upload my troublesome file to?

incidentally, and completely off topid, in the course of work today i discovered that uv mapping is now exactly 1 million times easier in version 2.45.15. I'll post the new process, if there's any interest - it really is that easy!

That would be fantastic.

bear in mind then Apollos that all i've been doing so far is uv mapping and editing the faces of a cube!

add an image/uv edit window to your display

add an object - a cube will do for now

hit tab to enter edit mode

hit "ctrl-tab" to select face select mode

select the face you'd like to edit

hit "u"

select unwrap

you can then scale and transform the face/faces in the uv editor window in order to get an image size/shape suitable for your chosen editor. you'll need to ensure that you take the intended dimensions of the face and the image you want to edit into account so that your UV image isn't distorted.

click on the "UV" option in the image editor header and select "scripts" and "save uv face layout"

you'll then be presented with a variety of options, but what you want to do here is select a resolution for your square image. 400 is 400x400 pixels, 600 is 600x600 pixels etc. i use 800 to ensure a good level of detail.

you can also select the path to your default editor here (click the "editor" button and make sure the "edit" button is toggled), so that once you've saved your image Blender opens it for you. I've found that Blender won't actually open the image for you, but at least it'll open the editor!

click "OK" in order to bring up the save .tga dialogue.

open the image in your editor of choice...and edit away!

a good tip next is to add a new layer and turn it's transparency to 50% so you can make sure that your artwork doesn't go over the outlines of the mesh you're editing.

save the image as .tga (just to be safe...) - 32 bit is fine

back in blender, in the UV window header, go to "image" "open" and select your edited image.

it should appear overlaid in the UV editor so you can move your vertices to fit, if you need to.

go to the materials tab for your object (you can still do this in edit mode) and hit the "texface" toggle button

press f12 to render... sit back and enjoy the result!

Let me know if this needs tidying up.

That is still just way too much work simply to slap a picture on a mesh. And people wonder why I hate UV so much.

Anyway, on the RapisShare go ahead and use it. I won't complain much since I already did once. Of course, that still won't stop me from complaining to others about it...

We do know it is all about me right?

You just can't win this. UVs will take over the world. Try as you might to wage you little "anti UV" campaign, I think you can see the handwriting on the wall even now.

@Dan, thanks for posting that! I think the decision to get rid of Face Select mode for UV mapping was the right one. Now if we could get the option to bake Orco to UV, Penix might stop complaining.

Naw....I'll just move on to the next complaint. I believe I hold the complaint title so far anyway. Although the orco bake would be very nice.

can anyone explain this "baking" for me? i have a vague idea that it involves saving data to the mesh..but other than that i have no idea why you would want to do that, unless you want to use the meshes for the game engine?? ESPECIALLY now UV mapping is now so easy!

Generally speaking, baking involves any process that allows you to trade in Memory for CPU.

In other words, baking "cooks" a procedural process and caches it to memory. One example is AO baking. You can UV map an object (another use for which UV mapping is indispensable ) and then bake the AO pass to a texture. This is generally used for game engine applications, but can have more general texturing uses as well. I would rather bake AO and use it as part of a UV mapped texture (in some cases) than have to render that pass ever time.

Normal baking and texture baking have their own applications, providing data you might not otherwise have access to, such as with procedural textures. Baking animations can involve putting keys on every frame, where otherwise procedural interpolation would take place between sparse key frames.

Ultimately baking Orco mapping may seem superfluous, but it would be nice to have the option, as sometimes you have exactly the mapping you want with Orco (such as with a good spherical mapping) but then might want to switch to UV mapping. It seems a shame to start from scratch in this case.

thanks for the baking lesson Apollos... it's gone over my head somewhat, but i'm sure that knowledge should sink in somehow.

I finally got round to uploading the blend. It's been fixed (as in: I'm using empties parented to the cube which is parented to the faces... ) it's in "scene 5". I'm sure there'll be plenty to laugh about when you finally get to have a look at it ...there's a lot of objects in there.

http://rapidshare.com/files/106997289/SLIDE_5_V11.rar.html

let me know when you have it and i'll remove it from Rapidshare - i'm still working on it! deadline is this thursday and i still have to rotoscope every scene into Flash.... who needs sleep, eh?

You're welcome. When you get around to using different baking processes, I'm sure it will make good sense.



I don't see anything to laugh about, I think it's quite a fine use of Blender's capabilities. If the final medium is the web, be sure to give us a link when it's done!