Came across this information video that with all that has gone on 2020 people having to work from home or god forbid have lost their jobs or are considering taking their Blender hobby into making it monetary here is an informational video that may give you that inspiration to make that jump. I hope some will find this useful information.

How to Make Money with Blender

Thanks Lobo! I'll give this a watch :)

Your welcome it was pretty informative on several; levels and gave some options I personally never considered

I tried once to get something on the blender market but they rejected it. I know it wasn't the greatest model but I saw things there that were similar to the quality so I thought i'd give it a shot. I might release them on blendswap or even maybe here instead. The guy on blender market who reviewed my model was pretty blunt in that he didn't like it. he said it was too simple and contained many issues with the modelling. I don't know what those might be because he never told me.

I know Shapeways has opportunities for submitting models for 3D printing there is Artstation and Gumroad and yes here is always a great place to sell items I will say that here at renderosity I am a vendor now I need to build up my store more since currently only have my first ever written tutorial but their staff will help answer questions and if you are interested here is information link for Renderosity

How to become a vendor at Renderosity Marketplace - All the Info you may need!

Interesting video. Following the links, Josh Gambrell says the easiest answer is to get started quickly earning $$ is to make decal packs for decal machine.

Decal Machine... Likely my next add-on purchase. ?

Likely to be my first paid Blender add-on. Looks very impressive!

I own Fluent Power Trip, Hard Ops & Box Cutter, Creative Bundle, and Speed Flow and so far the only one that I have been able to sort of learn how to use is Fluent Power Trip granted have had to watch the creators tutorials several times over and over and slowing them down before I started to get the work flow I got one of Josh Gambrell tutorial packs to hopefully learn Hard Ops because the tutorials by the Hard Ops creators he just moves to fast and I can't grasp the work flow. Speed Flow I think I just flushed money down the drain his teaching style and the fact that english is not his first language I just get lost. I still just fall back to simple box modeling.

Josh is a huge advocate for hard ops & box cutter. He has extensive tuts for them and he talks about them at every opportunity. My concern is for topology. Those things tend to leave lots of n-gons laying around. The decals for the decal maker do too, but apparently the decals operate differently? Not sure. Josh says the topology doesn't matter with them as long as the polys are planar. Aside from seeing that I can probably make some decals and I have use for them in my own work, I'm not sure how what they do to the topology of the finished model. There is also some weirdness with the uv mapping for the decals. If anybody knows, I'd love to hear more. Otherwise, I'll have to do a little more research on that.

Also, Lobo, you have a lot of plug-ins! Thanks for your insight on them :)

I definitely wouldn't want to use any models that was made with booleans unless the mesh was cleaned up after. Ngons and stuff make it real hard to do any editing on the object unless it remains procedural. Sooner or later everything we do in Blender will be procedural anyway. Its going to be 100% node based after version 3, even the modelling. I'm not sure I like that idea, but that's where it's heading. I heard some people saying Blender will soon be like Houdini... all nodes for everything. Extrusions, bevels, insets, everything will be done through nodes just like the materials are. Only sculpting and some character animation will remain hands-on, but most animation will be through nodes too. Not sure I like that idea.

You're talking about the sorcar plugin described in this video? Interesting alternative, but I certainly do not want that to be the primary modeling method. Given Blender's history, though, I don't see them saying "you must use this and only this method." It would suck if they did. I'm sure I despise that idea!

@Lobo I must admit to engaging in a bit of "Add-on Hoarding" in the Post 2.8 era ,particularly the free ones.?

I recently removed alot of the free ones (that looked really useful in the videos) and focused on learning an applying my paid ones to actual projects and, in so doing, produced alot of new clothing for my Iclone /CC3 figures and environments/props for them to interact with.

I love sci fi/future tech and have gotten a good handle on the hard-ops/boxcutter tools so Decal machine will be a useful addtion to my creative toolset and as a former professional Graphic Designer , I would be interested in learning to make my own decals.

Topology is perhaps the biggest question I come up with many of these add-ons especially with the idea of content creation for other software like Poser, Daz and IClone which many of the tutorials do not cover now I know RetopoFlow which was one of the first paid add-ons created by the guys at CG Cookie and from some tutorials has some very interesting tools but is a rather expensive investment now I know Josh has the Topology Handbook available on Blender Market for $1 which might cover more into on handling topology when doing hard surface modeling. Other possible solution to dealing with N-gons which is going to be the biggest issue when modeling content for other other applications there is the Triangulate and Decimate modifiers. Now if you own 3D-Coat there is a bridge tool between Blender and 3D-Coat and I have heard that 3D-Coat has some very good built in tools for retopology and there is also a Bridge for Zbrush which goes by GOB

There are many ways to go about retopo. The need for good retopo is not restricted to Daz, Poser and Iclone. It's really about portability, making the model amenable to subdivision, and getting a good render in whatever target program. At least that's the way I've come to understand it all.

If you are staying in Blender, N-gons apparently matter less. Blender seems quite happy to render and manipulate N-gons all day long - At least for hard-body objects. When you get into figures and clothing, all the matters of topology come back into play.

Even with hard-body objects, I'm amazed the number of tutorials I've watched that advocate building the model poly-by-poly, spline by spline, loop-by-loop to get the best possible topology from the beginning. And then there are techniques for shrink-wrapping an imperfect complex surface (eg a car's air dam with cutouts) to a perfect and less complex surface (same air dam without cutouts) in order to straighten out inevitable, small topological problems. It's an art unto itself.

3D Coat provides decent tools for building the retopo shell as well as an auto-retopo feature. It also has very nice mapping and paint tools. The paradigm for modeling in 3D Coat should also work in Blender. It's a hybrid of sculpting and booleans using highly tesselated primitives. It's expected the end result will be dropped in for retopo. There are some poly modeling tools in the retopo room, but 3D Coat does not include a conventional poly modeler as a primary method for building models.

Let's take a second and fill in some blanks on DecalMachine. The decals sometimes begin as geometry and the plugin bakes them into a texture for parallax mapping. It's a Blender thing. I found a couple of videos about that. It appears to be Blender only. I don't know how that would be exported with reasonable expectation of good results in another program. Do any of you?

I model All of my Character clothing myself, I used to model it for the Daz genesis base Characters However now only for the Iclone CC3 base characters.

I have Zero interest in creating clothing content for sale in the Daz/Poser/Iclone market because the ROI is too low for the labor involved IMHO. In fact I consider the Poser content market a complete dead end at this point for many reasons.

Although I do have a finished set of 10 looping every day animated "Life motions" for the G8 female that I may soon submit to sell here at the RMP (Smooth idles and conversational gesturing motions as Daz studio .duf files)

My survey of the canned animation market , for the G8 female, shows a predictable saturation of sexy strut high heeled walks and booty shaking Dance animations that are of limited use.

On the matter of modeling content in general
Even though my Character clothing will never be available to the general public it still has to be modeled to correctly comform to an Iclone Avatar using their auto weight and rigging tools of CC3 pipeline.

Or a Daz genesis figure for the DS transfer utility

I have a base low poly bodysuit for each gender and use "traditional" modeling techniques where I mostly add edge loops for detailing while mantaining as clean a quad mesh as possible.

Yes I do implement a few of the hard ops tools to bevel and sharpen Rigid Character props like helmets and armor plates etc but for conforming cloth elements I dont use any modeling add-ons that would creat Ngons.

I also do not create high poly sculpts and retopo at any point in my content creation.

I may go into sculpt mode occasionally .to add some detail. but I keep my clothing rather low poly (game engine level) as it ultimately will be rendered on an animated Iclone figure exported from Iclone to Blender where I can add subD/smoothin modfiers at render time.

I am on a bit of a Hiatus until early 2021 but I hope to get my animated Web series in full production and build enough of a following to get some $$Patreon$$ support. I used Blender to create all of assets/environments for the series (Except the Iclone base figures)

If indeed the G8 female motion files sell,I may do a set for the G8 male as well.

....

My potential hope is to create props and Scene files for Poser and maybe once I get a better understanding of IClone maybe props and things like that organic modeling is not in my imagination or skill base I like making the things that you would use fo fill a scene with I do not expect to get rich lol but if a few bucks to continue my hobby great plus I would like to get into more tutorial making I think that is my strength explaining things in at a fundamental level that anyone from a beginner to an advance user can understand and learn from that is one of the reasons I like our forum here I can learn adapt and re-share what I have learned.

That seems like a reasonable goal, Lobo :)

Wolf, I think you have a sound process for developing assets. Your clothing looks very good. It's unfortunate it won't be available for wider sale, but I understand, too. Fitting, rigging and adjusting clothing for Daz or Poser is a lot of work! You can't just handwave it and say "Use dynamics" because those are both resource intensive and a bit fiddly. Yet, there are people making outfits and they at least some of them seem to be doing ok.

@Torquinox

I think being a Daz PA might be worthwhile if you are really prolific or even a content Merchant for Iclone.

However Poser is not a unified Character eco system like Daz or CC3 and does not have any uniform standards for Modern cloth rigging weighting or anyuseful cloth rigging utiliesfor its defacto poser natives LF& LH.

I applaud Bondware for making the effort, but from my perspective Poser is Necro-ware on full life support that likely will never again be competitive in the prefab 3D Character space in light of what is happening with realtime solutions from Reallusion or game engines like UE4& Unity.

I'm exploring options, Wolf. Thanks for your perspective! I hope the best for poser, but you could be right. Time will tell. I think people are doing some interesting and unexpected work with it. I'm a lot more comfortable in DS, Blender, and even Carrara.

I think you guys may have the wrong end of the stick with regards to procedural modelling. My understanding of how Houdini works (I may be wrong) is this. You create a cylinder with 32 sides. You save the file and come back tomorrow and realise that 32 sides is way too low. When you created that cylinder, a node was automatically created for you. You now want your cylinder to have 64 sides. You go to that node and up the count to 64. Now that is powerful modelling. Non-destructive and totally editable until you freeze the mesh.

You have literally described exactly how Blender's Modifiers function.?

I am confident everyone here understands how non destuctve modifiers function

Big difference to a node based workflow. I'm confident you misunderstood my post. Never mind then.

The only difference with using nodes as non destructve modifers is that You have more of a linear graphic representaion of all of the modifiers&settings you have applied to your model in a node tree display as opposed to sperlunking through a massive modifier stack/list.?

I honeslty would love to see the nondestructvie mesh modifiers in a node tree display as I am a big fan of procedural nodes for texturing compositing/VFX etc

I use boring old sequential save to facilitate variations and adjustments, as well as to protect against disaster. Big modifier stacks are their own hassle. They can explode on you, too. I can't speak to what's going on in Houdini, and I don't care about it. It's enough to deal with Blender and the other software I actually use.

Re: Sorcar plugin for Blender. Has anyone used it? Can anyone vouch for what it actually does? I'm guessing no. I watched the video I referenced above. It didn't look like anything I wanted to use. Maybe I missed something.

And what does any of this have to do with making money in Blender? Nothing as far as I can tell. Just navel-gazing.

Torquinox posted at 2:11PM Thu, 07 January 2021 - #4408416

Let's take a second and fill in some blanks on DecalMachine. The decals sometimes begin as geometry and the plugin bakes them into a texture for parallax mapping. It's a Blender thing. I found a couple of videos about that. It appears to be Blender only. I don't know how that would be exported with reasonable expectation of good results in another program. Do any of you?

It's not really a Blender thing, although I'm not entirely sure which technique Blender is using here. Parallax mapping, or relief mapping, is a virtual displacement technique that's been around for quite a while now. It was first introduced all the way back in 2001. There are several algorithms for doing it, but it's a very effective method of creating the illusion of displacement without any additional geometry or subdivisions. When combined with a good normal map, it can appear extremely convincing in real-time render engines with practically no additional GPU or CPU requirements, aside from loading the maps into memory. It's not as good as true displacement because profile/border edges remain flat, but it's still very impressive in most cases.

If you can bake out a parallax map from Blender, just as you would bake a displacement map or normal map, then it can be used in other programs that support relief mapping like this. This could be useful for moving your assets to other real-time game engines like Unity or Unreal engine, both of which do support this technology.

Thanks Luxxeon. They're using parallax mapping in Blender. There is an extensive set of videos from MACHIN3 on YT. I have to make the time to watch them and see how it all works.

Personally, I think Vector Displacement is much better, but I don't know if Eevee supports it yet. Well, it would have to be a variation on the parallax displace anyway in Eevee. Probably some form of parallax occlusion technique through vertex shaders, like in Unreal engine.

I've made decent sales creating Vector Displacement brushes for Zbrush, but Blender doesn't have that yet.

Looks great! Obviously, the decals aren't doing displacement, and the parallax effect fails from some viewing angles. Decals look to me like a variation on normal mapping, but I could be wrong.

Torquinox posted at 11:31PM Thu, 07 January 2021 - #4409687

Looks great! Obviously, the decals aren't doing displacement, and the parallax effect fails from some viewing angles. Decals look to me like a variation on normal mapping, but I could be wrong.

You're correct. What the addon does is simply projecting a conforming plane geometry to an existing model. The plane will contain textures with alpha information or, in the case of 3d mesh decals, a combination of normal maps and parallax mapping to fake the appearance of depth. It's also using modifiers to perform the decal projection onto the faces of your objects. So, if you wanted to actually export that object along with the Decal Machine details, you would need to bake the decals to their parent objects as normal or displacement maps, as a means of export. This is a feature built into Decal Machine, but it's not the greatest process. You need to do your bake at relatively high resolutions, even for simple objects, which is the only way to reproduce the detail of most mesh decals. Blender's support for antialiasing baked details isn't the best. Decal Machine uses supersampling to overcome Blender's antialiasing and ray distance shortcomings while baking, so the process can become very time consuming and resource-intensive.

Personally, I would much rather use Substance Painter for this type of detailing, if the models are going to be sold or potentially used in other software. Decal Machine is great as long as the objects are staying within the Blender ecosystem.

Thank you for all that, Luxxeon. Yes, you confirmed everything I thought as I've been looking into this and you've added to my knowledge. I agree with your conclusions, too. Thanks again!

I'll be honest, at first, I thought Decal Machine was going to be like a plugin script for 3dsmax called Kitbasher. Kitbasher uses actual quad based models as "mesh inserts" and can weld the geometry perfectly into any existing model, as long as it's also made of quads, based on a polygon selection. It's not a 2d projection, it's true subdivision geometry grafting. I've been looking for the equivalent process in Blender, but haven't found it yet.

That would be the kind of thing I'd be interested in creating assets for. I think the reason people are saying it could be lucrative to create assets for Decal Machine is that the process requires a good bit of work to get right. It would require parallax mapping and some very good normal maps. In some cases, you would need to actually model the assets then bake those to a plane, and so on. This could be done much more efficiently in Substance Painter, and that's most likely how the default decal collections were created, so not everyone will have the ability nor the time to do it themselves.

There is Kit Ops for Blender. It's by Chipp Walters. His videos are here. Here's the promo video for Kit Ops 2.

I think these inserts would be the things to make.

Yes, I've seen Kit Ops. Looks like a really great product, but not what I'd be interested in. I will say though that making assets for that product would be much easier than Decal Machine. At least in my workflow.

I see.

I'm a little surprised about how hard surface plugins for Blender throw concern over topology to the wind. It seems like there is this attitude that Blender is fine with n-gons, and it's ok do have a ton of them all over the place. I've seen it in loads of tutorials.

Yet, there are many other tutorials that place good topology at the top of the list for building good models. I tend to think we want good topology in order to prevent weirdness in renders and to enhance portability. But the models built using those plugins look great as long as you don't look too closely at the underlying geometry. It's maddening.

Torquinox posted at 8:28PM Fri, 08 January 2021 - #4409759

I see.

I'm a little surprised about how hard surface plugins for Blender throw concern over topology to the wind. It seems like there is this attitude that Blender is fine with n-gons, and it's ok do have a ton of them all over the place. I've seen it in loads of tutorials.

Yet, there are many other tutorials that place good topology at the top of the list for building good models. I tend to think we want good topology in order to prevent weirdness in renders and to enhance portability. But the models built using those plugins look great as long as you don't look too closely at the underlying geometry. It's maddening.

Yep, I've noticed that ngons have been far more accepted in recent years, even by professionals. I remember when this was absolutely taboo for production models, even for hard surface objects. I sell models on Turbosquid and CGT, and ngons are still typically frowned upon if you sell models there, unless you explicitly mention ttheir use and show wires of the models upfront. Out of the 200+ commercial models I've created over the years, exactly zero have used ngons in the final product. However, that is about to change. I just recently completed a low poly sci-fi building pack for Blender where I used a lot of boolean operations for the creation of about 80 buildings. All of them contain ngons because it allowed me to get through 80+ models in about a week. This will be my first product where ngons were explicitly and intentionally utilized as part of the finished product. The models are intended for use only in Blender as static objects, and using the ngons allowed me to create a lot more detail with minimal polygon count. Each model is less than 100 polygons. It would have been impossible to do using quads.

I will not make this process a habit. I still prefer to use only quads in all my models. Quads are just much cleaner and provide a much more flexible workflow to anyone using the models.

I understand! I agree about quads. I think it's that speed that makes n-gons acceptable, especially for static objects. If they're not bending or flexing and they look good in the render, there is less point to laboring over the model. 80 in a week is impressive!

LuxXeon posted at 3:22PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409772 . . . and using the ngons allowed me to create a lot more detail with minimal polygon count. Each model is less than 100 polygons. It would have been impossible to do using quads.

Eh, maybe? But probably not really. While the "forward facing" poly count might seem lower, the model is almost certainly converted to triangles at render time [I don't know of any render engine that doesn't], and the software itself is still dealing with the same number of vertices, so I'd be dubious of any performance benefit there as well. If anything there might be a small negative impact, as its possible the software is constantly calculating those ngons as tho they were triangles? Obviously, in the case of objects with only 100 polygons, you'd never notice a difference performance wise, but I wonder, if you stacked a significant amount of geometry up, quads/tris in one mesh, and ngons in another with an equal amount of vertices, if you might not see more favorable performance from the quads/tris mesh? Can't deny that the ngons will be likely be more pleasing to the eye while working than a mesh that's triangulated every which way, but I think claiming a "low polycount" on account of ngons is a bit of a trap.

Not saying, "don't use ngons" cause you know what you're doing, just quibbling over how you justify them. ;)

Warlock279 posted at 6:05PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409947

LuxXeon posted at 3:22PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409772 . . . and using the ngons allowed me to create a lot more detail with minimal polygon count. Each model is less than 100 polygons. It would have been impossible to do using quads.

Eh, maybe? But probably not really. While the "forward facing" poly count might seem lower, the model is almost certainly converted to triangles at render time [I don't know of any render engine that doesn't], and the software itself is still dealing with the same number of vertices, so I'd be dubious of any performance benefit there as well. If anything there might be a small negative impact, as its possible the software is constantly calculating those ngons as tho they were triangles? Obviously, in the case of objects with only 100 polygons, you'd never notice a difference performance wise, but I wonder, if you stacked a significant amount of geometry up, quads/tris in one mesh, and ngons in another with an equal amount of vertices, if you might not see more favorable performance from the quads/tris mesh? Can't deny that the ngons will be likely be more pleasing to the eye while working than a mesh that's triangulated every which way, but I think claiming a "low polycount" on account of ngons is a bit of a trap.

Not saying, "don't use ngons" cause you know what you're doing, just quibbling over how you justify them. ;)

Allow me to clarify my position, Warlock279, since I am probably the last person who would justify ngons in 99.9% of modeling workflows. As I mentioned, I currently have over 200+ production models for sale (in other marketplaces), and this will be my first product where ngons were introduced as part of the final model. I usually avoid the rare use of a triangle in my models unless it's used to terminate edge flow, or unless the mathematics of the topology makes it impossible to quadrify without subdivision.

In this particular case, however, the use of ngons in the workflow was almost essential to the look and feel of the final result. Not only did ngons allow me to produce more variety of unique objects in a more efficient way, using ngons actually helped to achieve the final look that I was going for in this package, because it reduced the number of visible edges in the wireframe for each model, and gave me more control over the profile. Here's an example of what I mean...

Had these models been created with standard box modeling techniques, there would have been many more visible edges in the profile of each object. Since these models depend on the wireframe for the final look, it would have required laborious texture painting to get this type of result. Instead, I was able to achieve the result I wanted in a fraction of the time using boolean cutouts and the wireframe modifier for each object. In any other situation, I would have avoided not only ngons, but the use of booleans in general.

You are correct. Behind the scenes, triangles are always being processed by the software for every geometric surface. Not only in the rendering process, but also in the background of the viewport code. As you are well aware, every quad is made up geometrically of two triangles, but the software simply hides the edge between them in the viewport to the user for editing convenience and a more tidy appearance. Evidence of this is quite easy to find. If you take any "quad" model and apply a wireframe node to its shader in the Shader editor, you'll end up with triangles (I wish Blender Foundation would allow you to use the wireframe texture to show quad topology, but that's a discussion for another day). Same thing with ngons, except there are more than just two triangles obviously. So using ngons will definitely add to the processing requirements of an object, but in a timeframe measured only in milliseconds. Texture maps and procedural shaders can take up a significantly more substantial effort of CPU and GPU processing power and system requirements in game engines or real time render engines. In this case, there are no texture maps, although I did unwrap each model with non-overlapping UVs.

LuxXeon posted at 10:30PM Mon, 11 January 2021 - #4409969

Allow me to clarify my position, Warlock279, since I am probably the last person who would justify ngons in 99.9% of modeling workflows. As I mentioned, I currently have over 200+ production models for sale (in other marketplaces), and this will be my first product where ngons were introduced as part of the final model. I usually avoid the rare use of a triangle in my models unless it's used to terminate edge flow, or unless the mathematics of the topology makes it impossible to quadrify without subdivision.

In this particular case, however, the use of ngons in the workflow was almost essential to the look and feel of the final result. Not only did ngons allow me to produce more variety of unique objects in a more efficient way, using ngons actually helped to achieve the final look that I was going for in this package, because it reduced the number of visible edges in the wireframe for each model, and gave me more control over the profile. Here's an example of what I mean...

Had these models been created with standard box modeling techniques, there would have been many more visible edges in the profile of each object. Since these models depend on the wireframe for the final look, it would have required laborious texture painting to get this type of result. Instead, I was able to achieve the result I wanted in a fraction of the time using boolean cutouts and the wireframe modifier for each object. In any other situation, I would have avoided not only ngons, but the use of booleans in general.

You are correct. Behind the scenes, triangles are always being processed by the software for every geometric surface. Not only in the rendering process, but also in the background of the viewport code. As you are well aware, every quad is made up geometrically of two triangles, but the software simply hides the edge between them in the viewport to the user for editing convenience and a more tidy appearance. Evidence of this is quite easy to find. If you take any "quad" model and apply a wireframe node to its shader in the Shader editor, you'll end up with triangles (I wish Blender Foundation would allow you to use the wireframe texture to show quad topology, but that's a discussion for another day). Same thing with ngons, except there are more than just two triangles obviously. So using ngons will definitely add to the processing requirements of an object, but in a timeframe measured only in milliseconds. Texture maps and procedural shaders can take up a significantly more substantial effort of CPU and GPU processing power and system requirements in game engines or real time render engines. In this case, there are no texture maps, although I did unwrap each model with non-overlapping UVs.

I figured you were talking about your retrowave buildings from . . . last summer? Has it been that long already?

Ya, for your use, namely with regard to the edge highlighting in the renders, I'm not sure there'd be a more efficient way to handle it [tho, admittedly, I'm not at all familiar with Blender's render capabilities when it comes to "wire frames" options]. In LightWave you could have assigned a different material/surface to adjacent faces [groups of polygons] wherever you wanted your edge highlights, and set the wire frame options to render "surface borders" which would have given you the same basic result, for a modicum more work.

Interesting you mention that Blender has the triangulation issue with wire frame renders. LightWave used to have the same issue. [for subdivided meshses anyway, hard surface stuff would render fine, but anything subdivided got the triangle edge thru each poly]. Eventually there was a plug-in called ASPolyColor that used the same basis as coloring countries on a map [ie you can assign four or five colors to adjacent masses and never have a color touch itself]. It would go thru your mesh, assign surfaces so that no two surfaces touched, and then you could render with the "surface borders" option I mentioned above to get a usable wire frame render, it meant having to save/keep track of a separate object file for wire frame renders tho. I think they eventually sorted it out natively so you didn't have to all that.

Ya, behind the scenes, its almost always triangles. I'm not sure about some of the nurb or spline/surface type modelers [I don't have any experience with that stuff, outside of CADD maybe 20 years ago], but polygon modeling is triangles thru and thru. I'm cautious with triangles in subdivided meshes [because of issues with pinching and such] but I'll use them [and liberally] in hard-surface and static meshes. I've been doing game models for a long time now, and the only thing that matters there is triangles, so even when a mesh is quads, I'm mentally counting triangles.

Like you said, the textures/shaders and I'd add mesh deformation [but nobody is deforming ngons!] are the biggest hits model wise to game/real-time engine performance, the time it takes to triangulate your ngons, might not even be measurable in milliseconds. So far as static geometry goes, the difference between displaying one thousand polygons and one million polygons for most modern engines running on modern hardware is almost nothing, the draw call for loading the mesh itself will be a bigger performance hit than the difference in the number of polygons [with SSDs and such now, even that's moving toward being almost inconsequential].

@Warlock279 Yeah, I think you're right about last summer. I posted a thread about them in June or July I think. I'm surprised you remembered that. Of course, it didn't take me this long to finish them. They were finished back then, but I put them aside until now to work on other projects.

Creating wireframe renders in Blender is a bit of a workaround really at this point. These buildings, for example, use the wireframe modifier with a unique material ID to create the profile outlines. This is why ngons came in handy. If I had used box modeling here, the wireframe modifier would have introduced a number of extraneous edges that I didn't want to show. There are different ways to mark edges so that modifiers don't affect them, but would have been quite a bit of extra work when it comes to 80 different objects. The only other way around this would have been to create a texture with UV's, but again that would have been extremely painstaking to do for 80 models individually.

Rendering quad wireframes in Blender is surprisingly convoluted compared to what I had been used to in 3dsmax. In Max, the wireframe override texture could be applied to all the objects in a scene at once, and it would render the quad topology, or isoline wires in the case of a subdivision model, with the option to include or exclude the hidden edges. Not so with Blender. The wireframe texture node in Blender has no option to exclude hidden edges, therefore forcing all wireframes to render out as triangulated topology. The only way around this is to use the wireframe modifier, which actually adds more geometry, and change the offset material to black or whatever color you want the wireframes to be.

The wireframe node will always only show the triangulated mesh because, according to the documentation, the functionality of the node is very rudimentary. It functions by blindly retrieving the mesh data from Cycles, and as with any render engine, all geometry is triangulated before being processed by Cycles. The node has no inputs, so there's no way to use math functions to avoid this. I'm sure a new wireframe node could be developed to show only quads, but so far they haven't bothered with creating this internally. I guess Blender users are just very used to creating wireframe previews with the wireframe modifier instead. I'll bet this will change now that more studios seem to have a growing interest in Blender.

Interesting! Luxxeon, Thanks for showing the project. I think in this case, n-gons did what you wanted, allowing you to see only the edges, and the edges are complex.

There is a guy on YT who does low-poly work exclusively and he has a technique for making the edges light up, too. Imphenzia. Apparently his business is making YT videos. He passed 100k subscribers some time last year. Good work if you can get it! :)

LuxXeon posted at 3:49PM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4409992

@Warlock279 Yeah, I think you're right about last summer. I posted a thread about them in June or July I think. I'm surprised you remembered that. Of course, it didn't take me this long to finish them. They were finished back then, but I put them aside until now to work on other projects.

I was on a retro/synthwave kick at the time, and was thinking of doing something in that vein, so it stuck I guess.

Shame Blender doesn't have more robust capabilities when it comes to wire frame renders. As featureful as it is pretty much across the board, I'm surprised its lacking in something, that seems so fundamental to 3D. I've always rendered outside of Blender, used viewport screen grabs from Blender, or been dealing with meshes that a wireframe would be nonsensical [sculpted models], so I'd never looked into wireframe renders from Blender.

Torquinox posted at 4:03PM Tue, 12 January 2021 - #4410025

Interesting! Luxxeon, Thanks for showing the project. I think in this case, n-gons did what you wanted, allowing you to see only the edges, and the edges are complex.

There is a guy on YT who does low-poly work exclusively and he has a technique for making the edges light up, too. Imphenzia. Apparently his business is making YT videos. He passed 100k subscribers some time last year. Good work if you can get it! :)

Just checked out his channel, looks like he's got some interesting stuff. Not an easy market to crack, that's for sure!

I was on a video tutorial Youtube kick for a while. I got the channel up to 24k subs, but there's really no income from views unless your videos go viral or until you have well over 50k subs. I do much better selling models than I ever did with tutorials. Once I started doing Blender tuts, it was easy to get a bigger following, but you really need to upload at least once a week for the Youtube algorithm to notice you, and even then it's a crapshoot. Tutorials get the most views though, regardless.

@Luxxeon 24k subs is good! Pity it's not profitable, but still beats having 24. I'd like to at least try some YT videos at some point. But it only makes sense to do that if I can show something that isn't already done to death. It sounds like you're doing pretty well with models, so cheers to that!

@Warlock279 I agree on both counts :)

It can be profitable if you have lots of time to grow the channel and the patience to update often and with regularity. It could take years for your channel to catch on though.

Same as anything online, I guess. It's as much luck as skill - Maybe more luck than skill..