Thanks for this - it is really awesome.

In case you are curious it all loads and renders in Carrara too, although both the DAZ specific and general OBJ files import at seemingly random scales and locations - this is almost certainly a purely Carrara issue, so I wouldn't worry about it.

DaremoK3 posted at 5:51AM Wed, 23 September 2015 - #4230213

Lobo, I respectfully disagree [edited] (with first sentence only). I agree with the rest of your post (sorry, I did not read fully, was in a hurry). Definitely watch LuxXeons tutorials to help with Blender learning. [edited]

While I wholeheartedly agree that there are many avenues to reach the same conclusions in modeling, and the tutorial shows one I have been employing for years. But, the author is performing that particular technique incorrectly, and worse yet, he is directing this towards beginners who might not know any better.

Like I said before, you can get away with it, but it is just not good practice, and possibilities for future issues with mesh may arise. I'm not the creator of the technique, or the know-all, end-all master of the technique, but I am a big proponent of it who has been using the technique for several years in mesh modeling.

So, in layman's terms; Yes, use the CTRL + R (Edge loop-n-slide), but do not send your control/support loops all the way to 100% (1.0). Depending on how "razor edge" you need your edges, generally you will go 50% to 90% on your edge sliding. Going from 90% - 99% only when absolutely necessary (sword edge, razor blade, etc.).

Someone said it best at this Blender_StackExchange page ("There are almost no razor sharp edges in nature") located here : http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/247/how-can-i-make-sharp-geometric-3d-models-look-more-realistic

There is a lot of good info related to hard surface modeling on that page.

Here is a good example that was part of the material that I learned years ago on the mech-beveling technique. It is from the Wings3D community where I cut my teeth modeling since 2001 by one of the more prolific users there. It's not a tutorial, but can be more thought of as a primer. Find it here : http://www.wings3d.com/paulthepuzzles/spoiler.html

And here is a beginners Maya tutorial on the mech-bevel/hard surface technique. Ignore the actual Maya tool selections (though, they do have counterparts in Blender), and focus on the technique he is teaching and the whys of the technique. Look at the differences between the three cubes in the beginning of the tut, and then pay attention to the loop-cut/slides to create the control/support loops around the 7:15 minute mark. The tut is here : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=554L6ycWPo8

Thank you - I will check out those links. And thank you for showing some examples as well. For a beginner, trying to learn mostly on my own, there is sometimes conflicting information on best practices - I imagine it's as much art (literally) as science and may be situation specific, and more experienced people probably make a lot of calls on technique based on that experience but it's nice to have some guidelines and examples when just starting out.

DaremoK3 posted at 6:28PM Tue, 22 September 2015 - #4229915

Hope all is well with you Lobo. Thanks for the heads-up/link to the tut.

But...

That tutorial is horrible. I had to turn it off when he couldn't figure out why he was getting artifacting on his power-box. That tut is a how not to Mech-bevel model a non-organic mesh model. He could have substituted setting all hard edges for his compounding coincident vertices/edges that wreak havoc on facets, UV-mapping, and any future morph work (if needed/desired). Especially if only to be used within Blender, and not exported to other software.

As a mech-bevel polygonal modeler for years it made me cringe every time he introduced another full edge loop at coincident 0,0 on top of an already coincident edge loop, even when only needing a localized loop. For mech-bevel (hard-edges defined by "support" loops) modeling, one only has to go within a tolerance of main loop for complete hardness without introducing coincident edge loops. I usually work within 20 - 1% (0.80 - 0.99) depending on the size of the mesh within the default world space from grid center. Default average usually being 10% (0.90).

For straight polygonal meshing, the tolerance is tighter. For Sub-D meshing, looser, due to iterations closing the gaps on main loops.

If you are a beginner modeler, take heed with his technique. Other than that, he demonstrates things well, has nice pacing, and shows a couple of good shortcuts for selections.

Take care all...

Ken

LOL - as someone who is very much a beginning modeler, I have to say I did not understand one single word of your post. I'd love to learn from someone with your experience but is there any way to dumb that down for me? Are you talking about they way he seemed to be sliding edges right on top of one another to make them sharper?

There were a lot of great entries last year - I really wish you could vote for more than just one. I also wish they opened up the contest gallery so people could go in and comment on entries after the voting is done... mostly for selfish reasons because I worked really hard on my entry last year and have no idea if anyone even clicked on it, :)

If anyone is curious I think I managed to sort this out. I was overthinking it - using a glass node gave me both the shininess I wanted and the translucency so I didn't need the confusing mix of nodes I was originally trying to use.

Now I just need to finish modeling the slimey tentacle monster it's meant to go on. I made a rough version in Sculptris Alpha but I want to try and create it entirely in Blender, so I'm off to watch some videos on dynamic topology sculpting. :)

Oops - you are right! There is actually a normal map in the second image texture node, it's not just a duplicate of the diffuse texture, and I completely forgot to change it to non-color data because I was so focused on the getting the the rest of it to work the way I see it in my head. I wondered why the normal map didn't seem to be doing anything! Thank you.

Whoops, sorry, I posted the wrong screen-shot of my material and apparently I can no longer edit my post. Here's the correct material setup:

As someone who has also recently started seriously trying to learn Blender and has tried off an on for a couple years, I highly recommend starting with BlenderForNoobs "Learn Blender in an Hour" video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vp1sH6Cm1ww - it is very basic but will introduce you to and get you comfortable with the layout in literally an hour. From there you can tackle any other videos more experienced people recommend, but as a total beginner myself, I was lost until I followed along with this video. After it I was familiar enough with the layout that I could follow other videos without feeling like I had to be constantly pausing them and squinting to see where they were clicking. He has a series of basic modeling videos that go through some very simple tasks and get you familiar with the most common editing features too - at a very basic level, but they are the simple tools that everyone else's videos seem to assume you already know. :)

Nice! I'm running it through Calibre to convert it to Kindle format right now. Something new to read at lunch at work. :)

Glad to hear that you got them back! :)

That's funny - I subscribe to that YouTube channel too and just watched and followed along with that one yesterday. :)

Three possibilities come to mind:

1. Those tools are undockable and you might have accidentally dragged them elsewhere
2. They got dragged further up the left side bar somewhere - I've done this and flipped them with the other controls on that bar by accident before.
3. They got hidden somehow

For the first two I'm not sure what you can do... look around your 3D viewport and see if they are somewhere else on-screen maybe?
For the second, try right-clicking on the left hand menu bar and see if "Image Tools" is checked - if it isn't, it should be. If it is, try un-checking it and then re-checking it and maybe they will come back.

An anthromorphic fly throwing his hands in the air to welcome us to the party, while behind him four duck-headed people are dancing (two right behind him and two further back under red light) while cat-people descend on ropes.

(Most of this I had to think about and squint a bit to see, but the fly-guy with his hands up in the front is definitely there. :) )

I'm going in the other direction - I've been using Carrara and am currently learning Blender. :) Cycles render engine is definitely more powerful and potentially more realistic, but Carrara's is surprisingly good considering how long it's been since it was last updated and I personally find the tree based shader system easier to work with than the node based one in Blender (that might just be what I'm used to though).

A couple things to be aware of - Carrara does use DAZ content natively, but it tends to lose bump maps and add unnecessary color multipliers to the diffuse on loading, so you have to find them and manually add them back in, so if something has both a poser version and a DS version, it's usually best to try and load the Poser version, except for Genesis/Genesis 2 characters and items (use the DS version for those). Carrara also currently does not work with the latest generation of DAZ characters - nothing after Genesis 2 Male/Female.

Also, I second manleystanley's note about the advantages of using Carrara's replicators. I think you'll find that Carrara's replicators are not quite as versatile as instancing in Blender, but are much more memory efficient. I regularly see people crashing Blender in tutorials on a number of replications that Carrara could handle easily (I have a Carrara scene with over 1,000,000 replicated trees and about 500,000 other replicated objects in it and the view slows down a lot but the memory use isn't too much more than just a dozen actual trees would be - I'm not sure you could do that in Blender).

Exporting Carrara's trees might be more trouble than it is worth - it works fine, but they make for crazy high poly OBJs. If your intent is to end up in Blender then have you tried playing with Blender's sapling generator? It's an included add-on, you just need to turn it on. Here's a nice video showing someone using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WlRF5S0aHwU

Thank you!