Sketchup and Blender
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@dod3r said:
Hi solo,
Can you share story about your journey from SU to blender. I know you mentioned some Cinema4d somewhere.
I think it must be interesting.I am myself was lurking around blender for a long time. It supposed to be a solution for uv mapping absence in SU, but i so far had no time to invest my time into it.
D.
DOD3R, I really have no story, I did try Cinema4D and thought it was great but it was pricey and not as comprehensive as Blender that has everything one could possibly need and free. The thing is when I initially tried to learn Blender in 2005 it was one big mess, the UI was all over the place and short cuts and keys did not match between modeling tools, now with the whole new UI it's a hell of a lot better but still not as polished as say Maya, but certainly getting there fast. The best resource for Blender is Google as I can Google any question and I get a solution or even a YouTube tutorial.
That being said I am also very lazy, and learning new software is like scraping nails across a blackboard, I usually only learn things I need to know relevant to a project. However I decided to find fun stuff to do in Blender and follow tutorials in order to create them, doing so I will learn all the other stuff around them and hopefully by the end of a few cool tutorials I will have the knowledge to try something on my own.
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Is that the new basecamp hat in your avatar?
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Really enjoying this thread solo.
I loaded and unloaded Blender so many times.
Maybe I should give another try. -
When I get time I will play, this time I tackled UV mapping. The globe has got a basic map, a bump map, a specular map and then a larger cloud map.
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great idea Solo, and i see fast developments in this thread, i shall lock it on my speed dials. i also play with Blender once in a while, but nothing worth showing yet.
one thing that comes to mind, is the danger of scattering the information in the thread, perhaps creating a second wiki-like thread, with only the 'working stuff' (which can be updated) and no comments?
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@cadfather said:
one thing that comes to mind, is the danger of scattering the information in the thread, perhaps creating a second wiki-like thread, with only the 'working stuff' (which can be updated) and no comments?
Interesting point - this thread might become like the "D'oh" thread - many good nuggets buried in miles of posts.
[By "good nuggets" I mean: each user will find different things useful - but not everything for everyone...] -
I have found a great resource, an online quick-start course for Blender and it's free, it will take you through modeling a pencil from start to end, teaching you a lot of stuff as you go including UV mapping, face painting, creating bump and specular maps, rigging, posing,the works.
And here is a quick view of what I achieved half assed, something went wrong with my rigging that I need to figure out.
CLICK TO ANIMATE
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This is a great thread
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When I first started using modo I found this short, simple video to be a helpful explanation of sub d modeling:
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Andrew Price from Blender guru created this awesome trailer for the Architecture academy.
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Thanks for sharing that Pete.
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I thought I would post this as "Another Reason I Should Learn Blender"
This gent has developed a 3D printer using the sound card of the computer operating lasers to harden resin. The model needs to be created in blender, and uses an add on software he has developed. Oh and did I mention he plans to market it for around $100. Or you can build it yourself, because he will be posting plans. -
Impressive concept!
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My opinion so far.....
I have dedicated about 3-4 hours for the last 4 days on learning Blender and so far I think I have picked up a lot of the basics and maybe a few things I have absolutely no need to know but was fun to learn.
Remembering the key strokes and location of menus is probably the hardest thing initially but with practice and Google search it can be picked up.
Blender is powerful, it has so many bells and whistles that I doubt anyone knows everything about it as there just are too many things to learn and the development is so fast.Working with Blender is a huge departure from Sketchup which is bad as I was a lazy modeler with SU and in Blender one needs to work a lot harder and smarter to get similar results, if only one could model in SU and export with some sort of re-mesher into Blender to use all the tools SU does not offer.
The good news is that mesh from Blender imports very well into Sketchup see image below of a nurbs model exported into SU.
I do like nurbs and meta modeling in Blender, I am yet to try sculpting and dynotopo.
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Re-mesher?
Can you expand a bit more?
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@rich o brien said:
Re-mesher?
Can you expand a bit more?
Just a term that I made up but essentially what I'd like is some tool in Blender that will take a Sketchup model and redo the entire mesh into quads, almost like what happens when modeling in nurbs and meta whan one presses cntrl C and converts it into normal quad mesh ready for edit.
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@solo said:
[attachment=0:511xn80i]<!-- ia0 -->conversion B to S.jpg<!-- ia0 -->[/attachment:511xn80i]
Man... That's a lot of toolbars !
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You want quad exports from SU into Blender?
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@rich o brien said:
You want quad exports from SU into Blender?
Ideally I'd like to model in SU as I have always done and export to Blender so that I can use the mesh from SU. I have tried converting models in SU to quads but that does not work great and I have tried converting tri's to quads in Blender which also does not work great.
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Can you PM or share a file?
I might have a workflow but since I mostly model in Quads I'd need a dirty mesh to test.
If it's something's with n-gons forget it as that's just a recipe for disaster.
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