Friday 20 July 2012

WIP. Dreadnought.


Based on Warhammer 40000 imperial dreadnought look and feel.
Adding mesh details - finishing stage (only small changes and details). Totally less than 10k quads.
Rigging - finished.
Animation - in process.
UV mapping and texturing - not yet done.

Saturday 14 July 2012

WebGL services to show your 3D models on.

Do you want to share you models with friends? Show your WIP and let spectators to view your model with different angles and in close details? You need only WebGL compatible browser*. I think you like it.

p3d.in
- 3D models in Wavefront (.obj) format
- diffuse, specular and normal (doesn't like bump maps) textures in jpg format not more than 1024x1024px
Sketchfab
- 3D models in Blender (.blend), Collada (.dae), Wavefront (.obj), OpenSceneGraph (.osg, osgt, osgb, ive), 3DS (.3ds), Lightwave (.lwo | .lws), Polygon File Format (.ply), Virtual Reality Modeling Language (.wrl), Open Inventor (.iv), Shape (.shp), Standard Tessellation Language (.stl), Biovision Hierarchy (.bvh), Open Flight (.flt), ac3d (.ac), DirectX (.x), Designer Workbench (.dw), 3DC point cloud (.3dc), carbon graphics Inc (.geo), Generic Tagged Arrays (.gta)

The quick summary - you can post your models in 3D, share it with friends and others. But all models should be prepared and engines renders models with sometimes seen artifacts. Do you know any other free WebGL services like those two? Please let me know in comments.

* Best results I met with Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome browsers. Opera 12 isn't quite stable with WebGL.

Wednesday 11 July 2012

WIP. Blender add-on - copy/paste UV islands. Some theory behind.

Here it is example of simple mesh unwrap. As you can see we have 3 pairs of identical UV islands. In most of the cases we can pack each pair in the same UV space thus increasing texture space used for other details.
In 3d-Coat process look like selecting one UV island, pressing Ctrl-C (copy), then selecting similar island and pressing Ctrl-V (paste). Both islands at this moment using the same texture space. If we have more then two islands we can pack them one by one.
The main problem is that we need to find "symmetrical" vertexes for both islands and copy UV coordinates from one vertex to "paired" one.
So how can we do it. After some meditation I found that we need to iteratively compare border loops for both islands vertex by vertex and find shortest path between them - pair with shortest path should be "symmetrical". This concept needs poof code - so I return to this theme as soon as I write simple prototype for future add-on.

WIP. Blender add-on - copy/paste UV islands. Stacking of symmetrical geometry.

There is nice piece of software called 3D-Coat. Studying tutorials I found nice feature it used - namely copy/paste of UV islands. I found lack of this feature in Blender. Following link you can find more details about this, here I quote only essentials.
Stacking of symmetrical geometry - often times geometry that is exactly the same we will want to use the same image/texture data to save memory however, aligning the uv islands so they exactly overlap can be tedious. This would allow automatic alignment of UV islands for mirrored/symmetrical geometry.
I think it can be realized by add-on, and here I will post my WIP on this project.
P.S. for Russian speaking friends I also placed post here.