Forum: 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

Lobo3433

Blender Maya & 3D Forum Moderator

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

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

Lobo3433

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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.

Lobo3433

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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

Lobo3433

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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.

odst wire frame.JPG

.... UNSC GREY2.png

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.

Lobo3433

Blender Maya & 3D Forum Moderator

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. ;)

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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.

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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].

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@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.

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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!

Core i7 950@3.02GHz | 12GB Corsair Dominator Ram@1600mHz | 2GB Geforce GTX 660

Lightwave | Blender | Marmoset | GIMP | Krita

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.

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@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.

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

The most successful professional youtubers are the ones who have extrmely high quality production values and a minimum of one upload per week

The competition for views is feirce and your videos should look as polished as anything coming from a major TV network..because that is who are are competing with to a certain extent as people tune into Streaming services like Disney every week there is this merging of online based content ,in the minds of many, so your content better be top notch as well as your knowledge of the subject and even your intro graphics and how your presentation is edited and your sound.

There are so...SO many people doing videos on every aspect of Blender and some of them have Patreon accounts and offer shaders/models etc to monthly supporters who commit to certain monthly ammounts.

The higher quality Channels IMHO seem to be the ones who assume thier target audience prefers to work entirely within the Blender eco-system. ( Use keyboard shortcuts)

I see very few channels for example,that focus on importing and exporting to other apps Like Poser,Daz or Iclone.

Just a few personal observations

wolf359 posted at 9:56PM Fri, 15 January 2021 - #4410416

The most successful professional youtubers are the ones who have extremely high quality production values and a minimum of one upload per week

The competition for views is feirce and your videos should look as polished as anything coming from a major TV network..because that is who are are competing with to a certain extent as people tune into Streaming services like Disney every week there is this merging of online based content ,in the minds of many, so your content better be top notch as well as your knowledge of the subject and even your intro graphics and how your presentation is edited and your sound.

There are so...SO many people doing videos on every aspect of Blender and some of them have Patreon accounts and offer shaders/models etc to monthly supporters who commit to certain monthly ammounts.

The higher quality Channels IMHO seem to be the ones who assume thier target audience prefers to work entirely within the Blender eco-system. ( Use keyboard shortcuts)

I see very few channels for example,that focus on importing and exporting to other apps Like Poser,Daz or Iclone.

Just a few personal observations

My experience has been that subscribers aren't really the hard part, as long as you're patient. "Build it and they will come", as long as you are giving out some good tips. Tutorials will almost always gain subscribers much faster and easier than other types of videos. The real challenge with making a successful tutorial channel isn't so much the fancy graphics and flashy intros. In fact, people seem to complain if you give them an intro longer than 5 to 10 seconds, no matter how "cool" or professional it is. The real challenge is coming up with new ideas every week. Also, people looking for tutorials really want high-quality audio narration, professional-sounding voice narration when it comes to video tutelage. I learned that early on with my channel. Give them quality narration with professional audio and decent content and you will get subscribers. I would definitely recommend investing in a really good mic if you're serious about doing tutorials for a living. Tutorials are subscriber magnets, but it won't come easy.

The problem is to keep the views coming, you need to keep uploading. And uploading. And uploading. You need a new video at least every week, so you'd better have a lot of things to say and a lot of ideas to show, or that's going to be extremely difficult to pull off. Not to mention, you need to edit your videos. More than graphics or intros, the quality of the editing and audio need to be on point, and that means you need to do a lot more than simply screencap your workflow and upload it as a raw video. So it becomes extremely time consuming.

Since video ads only make you less than 1 cent per view, you'll definitely need other means of income. Patreon site or a marketplace where you sell models or something to compliment your tutelage is a good idea. Youtube doesn't let people monetize now until they've got over 1000 subscribers and/or 4000 hours of watch time in the last 12 months. That's not really a big deal, but it could seem like forever to reach that first 1000 subs, especially if you're updating once a week! It's a full time job.

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Indeed it is a full time job!!

Interesting. If you're doing the 3D work and can record as you go along, the YT videos - more broadly, making video content - could become a natural outgrowth of what you're already doing. Then, you're content becomes sort of a journal of what you're doing and that could be narrated into a tutorial or demo. It could be less of a slog that way because everything plays well together. I've been watching some paid tutorials where people show how they make things that they're actually selling. That's pretty cool and is informing my thinking here.

Well, I finally bought a new 2TB external hard drive to replace my older 5TB drive that died right after I finished my animated film in April 2020.

Bought Decal machine yesterday and downloaded a couple of tutorials to get me started and Ordered a new pair of eyeglasses to replace my badly scratched lenses.

so its time to get serious about starting my animated web series "HALO reclaimer"

command bridge 15b jan.jpg

PELICANINTERIOR 15 jan.jpg

@wolf359 Now that looks really interesting. An animated web series based on something popular could be a real winner. I'll keep an eye out for that.

@Torquinox Yeah, that's kind of how I got started with my tutorial channel. I would show how to model the objects I had been creating anyway for sale. Then I would see those same models for sale, competing against my own, in the markets I sell in. haha. Again, the problem is more than just recording your work. Unless you're doing live streams on Twitch or Youtube, pre-recorded footage will often need lots of editing and some artistic input to help it catch on. You'll also need to keep talking while you're working and have a good mic to explain your process as you go (if you do it live). If you narrate over your work, then that once again requires post editing.

Workflow walkthroughs are cool, but people prefer to watch those live. The most successful tutorials rarely last longer than 10 minutes, because it's mostly showing how to do one or two things. A walkthrough, like you are watching, is a little different, and not quite as many people will sit through hours of a workflow.

Just for a little perspective, my longest video is about a half-hour long. Still, the average watch times on my videos, according to analytics, are just a few minutes. People usually skip the parts they already know and look for the parts they're interested in. That's why it's a popular trend now to add timecodes to your videos so people can jump right to the parts they have the most interest in. There's also a trend now where people blast through an entire scene creation in just a minute or so, and that's the actual hook of the whole thing. "Create this scene in five minutes or less" is a popular trend now. Obviously, not intended for absolute beginners but surprisingly popular.

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LuxXeon posted at 5:01PM Sat, 16 January 2021 - #4410477

@wolf359 Now that looks really interesting. An animated web series based on something popular could be a real winner. I'll keep an eye out for that.

@Torquinox Yeah, that's kind of how I got started with my tutorial channel. I would show how to model the objects I had been creating anyway for sale. Then I would see those same models for sale, competing against my own, in the markets I sell in. haha. Again, the problem is more than just recording your work. Unless you're doing live streams on Twitch or Youtube, pre-recorded footage will often need lots of editing and some artistic input to help it catch on. You'll also need to keep talking while you're working and have a good mic to explain your process as you go (if you do it live). If you narrate over your work, then that once again requires post editing.

Workflow walkthroughs are cool, but people prefer to watch those live. The most successful tutorials rarely last longer than 10 minutes, because it's mostly showing how to do one or two things. A walkthrough, like you are watching, is a little different, and not quite as many people will sit through hours of a workflow.

Just for a little perspective, my longest video is about a half-hour long. Still, the average watch times on my videos, according to analytics, are just a few minutes. People usually skip the parts they already know and look for the parts they're interested in. That's why it's a popular trend now to add timecodes to your videos so people can jump right to the parts they have the most interest in. There's also a trend now where people blast through an entire scene creation in just a minute or so, and that's the actual hook of the whole thing. "Create this scene in five minutes or less" is a popular trend now. Obviously, not intended for absolute beginners but surprisingly popular.

I agree, a web series could be very good! Best wishes with all that, Wolf!

Thanks Luxxeon! You answered a lot of questions I didn't ask yet :D That's very unethical, people selling copies of your demo model. I would hope they at least changed it up a bit! >_> Post-editing and narrating the finished video could be a drag, but that still might work out better for me than posting my lightly-edited live work - at least in the beginning. Your thoughts on recording length timecodes, etc are very helpful! Thanks again!

Thanks LuxXeon,

There are alot of HALO based channels that discuss HALO lore and post screen recorded game play etc but AFAIK only one guy is making his own animated series and is using the "Source filmaker" game engine.

My plan is to produce short (max 3 minute) high quality episodes In the style of "The Mandlorian".

Ive created ALOT of content and sets already and will likely create more using Decal machine going forward.

The Characters will all be animated In Iclone of course.

When video tutorials first became a thing that "everyone" was doing, I couldn't stand them, I much preferred written tutorials. I was at a point, I didn't need hand holding and walking thru the basic stuff, I just needed the one or two key points that I was missing/not familiar enough with. Information I could have skimmed out of a written tutorial in about 30 seconds was buried in 43 minutes of someone stumbling, muttering, and backtracking thru stuff I was already familiar with for the 2 minutes I was actually interested in, ugh. I still haven't entirely warmed to video tutorials, as @LuxXeon says, time codes help immensely, as does the trend toward shorter/focused tutorials, but I'm still lukewarm on the idea.

Its absolutely a full time job. Production is tantamount, and anyone making a real go of youtube, usually has VERY high production values. The market is too competitive now, gone are the days you could get by with having audio so low people had to max their speakers to hear half of what you've said, followed by your next video with audio so loud you're clipping your mic half the time. Narration after the fact, seems to almost always be the better option than trying to talk and demonstrate at the same time. Beyond just recording and editing the content, if you're going to be successful you need to have/be "promoting" on multiple platforms, and you have to have a level engagement/interaction with your subscriber base.

I can't really wrap my head around the whole concept of live streams. If I have the time to sit watching someone do something [or watching them play a game?!] I'd rather be doing that something myself [playing the game myself!]. Its clearly incredibly popular right now, and growing. I've tried to watch some of the twitch "creative" streams while I'm working, but it always ends up becoming background noise as I inevitably shift my focus almost entirely to what I'm doing, or enough so, that I'm not really learning anything from the stream.

LuxXeon posted at 7:05PM Sat, 16 January 2021 - #4410477

There's also a trend now where people blast through an entire scene creation in just a minute or so, and that's the actual hook of the whole thing. "Create this scene in five minutes or less" is a popular trend now. Obviously, not intended for absolute beginners but surprisingly popular.

I think, I'm more inclined toward watching that kind of thing [or even time lapsed stuff], than step by steps. Very few step by step videos seem to be paced right for me. A quick over view of the entire process however can often highlight areas that would have been potential pitfalls. As you said tho, definitely not the most "beginner friendly" of content.

LuxXeon posted at 7:23PM Sat, 16 January 2021 - #4410421

In fact, people seem to complain if you give them an intro longer than 5 to 10 seconds, no matter how "cool" or professional it is.

That's nothing new. That goes for short animations too. The amount of times I've seen a a 20+ second flashy title sequence tagged onto a 10 second animation, [nevermind the 30 second credit roll at the end when ONLY ONE person worked on the short!] boggles the mind! Not saying I haven't ever been over zealous with a title sequence or two myself, but most of the time, less is more for sure. It can be especially grating if you go thru half a dozen of someone's videos in a row, and they're all set up the same way . . .

10-15 second clip[s] of what's in the video --> 20 second title sequence --> 2 minutes of actual content --> 30 seconds of end credits

. . . you've just wasted as much time as there was actual content.

Core i7 950@3.02GHz | 12GB Corsair Dominator Ram@1600mHz | 2GB Geforce GTX 660

Lightwave | Blender | Marmoset | GIMP | Krita

Yeah, a lot of people will do everything they can to extend the length of a video because midroll ads can't be displayed until a video is 8 minutes long. Used to be 10 minutes until recently. So if a person only has 5 minutes of actual content and they want to squeeze some money out of it, they'll use a bunch of filler to extend the run time. I personally never saw a need to do that, because I tend to talk too much and overexplain everything anyway.

My channel was growing pretty fast back in 2017. I was seeing a daily average of 100 new subscribers for a period of a few months, and that's when I started taking things more seriously. I added a short intro to all my uploads, I developed a "brand" style appearance to every intro, and actually invested in some better audio equipment to help improve the narrations. Things were moving so fast, I just couldn't keep up with it. I found that updating more than once a month was not something I could do, and that just wasn't going to be good enough to keep the algorithm happy. Not to mention, I had gained most of my subscriber base prior to Youtube adding things like the notifications bell, which means only a fraction of my subscriber base would see my new videos through notification. This meant that new uploads would not gain traction quickly unless I promoted them through social media, but that just isn't enough. You need it to show up in recommendations, and the algorithm favors trending videos.

I haven't added a new tutorial in about a year now, and I don't know when or if I'll add new tutorials. I have a secondary channel where I upload animations but I doubt it will ever grow as much as the tutorial channel did.

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@Warlock279 What you described seems almost standard practice in the Poser/Daz communities

a 30 second opening title sequence with music

10 seconds of a Daz/poser girl performing some sexy strut cat walk or typical "booty shaking" dance and at teast one minute of credits naming all of the merchant products they used from the eye lash morphs down to the toe nail textures.?

As for tutorials, I have a Massive video archive of tutorials on Blender/Iclone covering subjects that I expect to have to learn to use in the future.

Perhaps I am a bit of an outlier but I am an OBJECTIVE based learner.

Meaning I dont really partake in "general education" but wait until I need to know how to perfrom some specific function in an actual project I am producing then I watch a specific tutorial on how to do that one thing and move on.

This is why I like The guys who do the short focused videos on specific functions.

Of course I also like the longer videos that cover all of the aspects of Complex plugins Like Hardops/boxcutter and Decal machine.