Anyone try out the new Blender 2.48 yet?

I just made my first sculpt test in it.

An exciting new feature is the Shrink Wrap Modifier, I forget where I saw it it was in some thread somewhere a guy mentioned it as a quick method of modeling sculpties. As I understand it you have a target mesh and a mesh that wraps around it. The one that wraps is the one you bake into your sculptie.

Getting ready to try that once I figure it out. The interface has some slight changes to it.
One thing I noticed is that the "select uv faces" in the mode tab is gone. I just went straight to
upwrap uv's in the mesh tab. And it worked so that is cool.

This link is to the features page, the shrink wrap modifier is on the left towards the bottom of the page. The download button is on the top right. Clothes designers that use blender will like this feature as well. There is an example of a skirt with the waist band edge selected then it shrinks to fit the waist of the model. Similar for a clunky shirt that shrunk to conform to the models upper torso. There are a bunch of other features as well.

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-248/

Tell us what you think.

i am using the prerelease candidates since a few weeks and i like it there is even a bugfix included for a bug related to UV-unwrapping, which we found a couple of weeks ago. So i have to recreate my "sculpties for the blender purist" tutorial soon. Now i can show, how to use blender for sculpty making without use of any scripts. Which does not mean, that i have abandoned Domino's scripts It is still my preferred way to go, but i just wanted to see, if blender can do it out of the box... and now it can including seemless multires support


concerning the shrink wrap modifier: I am a bit unhappy with it, because it seems
NOT to shrink wrap, but to simply map the mesh points on the surface using the normals (am i saying this in the correct way?).

Well the effect is, that if a base object shows occlusions, then the shrinkwrapped object will loose all occluded areas. You can see this best, when you try to shrinkwrap an avatar's head. The result is more than ugly and i did not yet find any good workaround.

The best would be, if shrink wrap really would do what the name says. But apparently it doesn't

Maybe someone knows it better and i simply missed to setup the correct parameters ...


concerning multires: I have the strong feeling, that blender now behaves much more predictable than before, but maybe its only me, who has now a better understanding, how multires is supposed to work

It seems to me in particular, that the mesh modifications due to multires level changes are now more as expected. previous blender versions gave me a headache whenever i had to go back one level for adjustments, then my mesh was significantly changed after i hop back to a higher multires level... (to be verified though)

I knew I'd seen something interesting a couple of weeks ago. Afterwards, I wanted to try it, I searched for hours as I couldn't remember the name. "Shrinkwrap Modifier".

One thing, probably as it's a new feature, it will be improved on in new versions.

I've been playing with the shrinkwrap modifier most of the way through it's development. It's far from ideal for making sculpties. Generally you'll get the best results by working similarly to a normal sculptie. Do a low res sculptie and roughly adjust to the target mesh (adjust so nearest surface point or normals shrinkwrap gives good results), apply shrinkwrap. Then repeat subdivide, adjust, apply shrinkwrap, until the sculptie mesh is high enough face count.

So basically it's still easier to do sculpties from scratch

There are a lot of nice new features in this release though. Colored shadows will be useful for texture baking and GLSL materials will make life a lot easier when texturing http://www.vimeo.com/1377005

The python api for adding shapes to empties will also be handy for my avatar scripts.

Me again, Domino.
I've been playing with the shrinkwrap and getting iffy results with lots of faces scrunched up and sometimes even inverted (?) at any sharp corners in the target object.


Can you explain your comment in a bit more detail, please?
If I use a sculptie mesh to begin with - say 8 x 8 face with 2 multirez levels, which is the normal setup, what do you mean by using the subdivide process until the face count is 'high enough'? Or are you saying start with a lower face count sculpt mesh and then subdivide to get to the 1024 face resolution? Or - third alternative - do you make sculpties from sculpt mesh with higher face counts than the 1024?
Thanks.
Drifter

Well, lets say you wanted one sculptie to represent a car. Looking at the car mesh, you can count key vertex positions around it's side silouhette . Say 2 for the nose, 4 for windows and roof and 2 for tail. On the underside each wheel needs a minimum of 3. Repeating this for the front view gives 4 per wheel plus 4 for the body. So we need a 12 (front) x 10 (side +2 for poles) minimum sculptie. So in this case I'd use a 16 x 16 base sculptie with 0 multires (or just use 12 x 10 with Clean LODs on my dev scripts). I'd roughly model the low poly version of the car then shrinkwrap. Then subdivide to give 32 x 32 faces. This would be the highest where every mesh point was represented on the sculptie map, so after shrinkwrapping this size I'd probably bake and reimport for final tidy up.

Domino,
OK - think I'm with you most of the way..........

So if I start with one of your Sculptie meshes, subdividing to achieve the ultimate of 32 x 32 faces will not screw up the vertex/face ordering/sequence - which I gathered to be critical and what made a sculptie mesh special by comparison with an equivalent 'ordinary' mesh shape? This was the reason I have been staying away from subdivision to achieve greater resolution/detail.

Re. your scripts in development on your website where you refer to Clean LODs, I looked at and downloaded 'Git' to try accessing them from the repository you menton, but got lost after that. Can you please explain in smallish words how I run the appropriate command from where the Blender scripts are stored? (In my case, C:\Documents and Settings\******\Application Data\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts).
It's either get access to them via 'Git' or otherwise cool my impatience and wait until they're out of development phase and available through the more regular downlaod process.

See this learning curve??? Frickin' steep!!!!

Cheers
Drifter

http://dominodesigns.info/downloads/blender/add_mesh_sculpt_mesh.py

Just replace the current release one with that in the scripts directory. I will be doing better instructions for using my git repository at some point. Remember this version does VWR-9384 style maps so you'll need to replace the image the sculpt map is on with a 64 x 64 one before baking.

Be gentle, Dom - I may call you Dom??
Your last remark just confounded me again!



Explain, please??

Drifter

Sure, I answer to Dom

https://jira.secondlife.com/browse/VWR-9384 is a proposed change to the viewer that will allow a whole range of sculpt map sizes from 8 x 8 to 64 x 128. As the right number of faces and LOD levels to use for a particular size needs a lot of work to figure out, I've made the scripts do it for me. So if you asked for a 4 x 8 face mesh with 0 multires, it will create a 8 x 16 image to bake to. As these sizes aren't currently supported you would have to create a 64 x 64 image and assign it to the "sculptie" uv map before baking if you wanted to upload your sculptie.

Dom - the saga continues!!!
I'm floundering now.

I tried the shrinkwrap/subdivide process and seem to be screwing up somewhere.
I started with a cylinder at 4 x 4 face/0 multirez - gave me 256 faces to work with. No prob there, and after I manipulated the shape then did the sculpty bake I got the multicoloured square with a 16 cell grid overlaid on it (when in edit mode with all the vertices selected).
However when I used the subdivide command to get to 1024 faces I immediately got distortion on the expected 32 x 32 grid with random vertices way outside the sculptmap boundary.
If I start with the 8 x 8 face mesh there is no distortion if I do the shrinkwrap.
Am I missing something fundamental or does the subdivide process screw with the sculptmap. Or is this to do with your last advice about replacing the image the sculptmap has to go on with a 64 x 64 grid?
This self teaching is somewhat slow to sink into my non-tech brain and once again accept my apologies if I'm asking silly questions.
Thanks.
Drift

Adding multires or a subsurf modifier works correctly, but subdivision from the menu is not giving the expected results on the UV map. I'm not sure why.

Edit: I've had a better look at this now and think it's a bug. I've reported it at http://projects.blender.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=17885&group_id=9&atid=125

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