The last few months has been a rather hectic time, but I’ve found myself diving deeper into Blender and Substance Painter. Blender for me, is one of those scary deep programs that I’ve tried to keep to a minimal use. I’d create a detailed base in Second Life then import it into Blender where I would finish it off by cleaning up and refining the mode. Then I would create the ambient occlusion and finish the texturing in Affinity Photo (a Photoshop alternative).
This meant I was spending most of my model creation in everything BUT Blender, but over the years Blender has gotten more user friendly and little by little I would do extras, until we get to the now. The ‘Now’ has me wanting to dive deeper and create mostly in Blender and the big tipping point was the introduction of PBR (Physics-Based Rendering) materials in Second life. PBR isn’t anything new, just new to Second Life, and with its introduction I figured now would be a good time to get my models/furniture more current.
There was a LOT of reading, and a LOT of software exploration and many a sleepless night with me trying to decide if I wanted to do the PBR materials in Blender or an external software. Now I’m a huge advocate of Adobe alternatives, (I don’t like their subscription models, and not because I’m against subscriptions but because for the hobbyist/me their subscriptions just seem unreasonably priced, but maybe that’s just me). Either way, I worked super hard to find an alternative to Adobe’s Substance Painter, but in the end it was just the easiest software that did everything I wanted. If I was to go an alternative route it would probably be an add-on for Blender.
I went for Substance Painter because it did the texture baking nice and easy, and texturing is also reasonably easy, but the biggest bonus was how similar it was to Photoshop workflows. This has meant getting familiar with Substance Painter has been far quicker and easier meaning less time spent learning something new.
So with the new texturing software I was super stoked to see the end results with my latest creation. The PBR materials were awesome, but even just the standard textures were a huge step up for my models.
I think this made me really realise that it was time to step my game up in Blender as well. So the past few months have had me buying a couple of add-ons to aid my creation style and a LOT of tutorials on hard surface modelling in Blender.
Safe to say my brain has been overloaded but I do feel I’m getting somewhere, I even went right back to the beginning and discovered a much better way of navigating Blender making my workflow even more efficient, well when I get the muscle memory down it will!!
While I have many blender add-ons on my wish list, I purchased Mesh Machine and Construction Lines as my first two introduction add-ons. Now I’m still deciding if Construction Lines is going to help me with my prefab builds as this has been a bit more complicated to find my style within this type of hard surface modelling. Beforehand I’ve always built my prefabs in Second Life and only exported to blender to simply bake the ambient occlusion for texturing in Affinity Photo.
Mesh Machine has been more relevant to my furniture building, but my first big test was not so successful, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it, but out of all my models I chose the most tricky to model because it put many objects on silly angles. This meant I spent most of the time learning how to work on angles and not getting the hang of Mesh Machine. I know this add-on is going to be a very powerful asset to my modelling (I love bevels), but I’m going to have to try it again on an easier model and probably re-watch some tutorials because I’m sure I’ve used it all wrong.
Hard-Ops and Boxcutter was on the top on my wish list, but I’m not wanting to introduce too much too fast but I’ve no doubt it will probably be in the next purchase along with a couple of others.
One of my big issues with learning Blender has been the whole Blender to Second Life thing. Now I’m not familiar with game assets when it comes to unity and other platforms, but for Second Life and using Collada/dae files, I find I run into some problems when trying to keep my furniture low prim/low poly. Now this is more likely a ‘me’ issue, but none the less I’ll do my best to explain it. Because the Collada file uses triangles and I build in quads I can run into trouble with the normals/shading AFTER it’s been exported. Where my problem comes in is the learning how to do the topology correctly so when it converts it will keep the normals/shading as intended and not have an odd, deformed line running through a flat face. I’m sure this is something that will come with experience, but currently it’s frustrating. The problem seems to arise more frequently when I use booleans (again, probably a ‘me’ issue). I’ve been learning the Bool Tool add-on that comes with Blender so I can play around with booleans a little easier and perhaps with practice figure out how to keep my low poly style and not have the problems with normals/shading.
I’m sure with time that these issues will be something I laugh about, but for the moment I wanted to share my journey so far. I might add I’ve had many other issues like wonky UV’s, screwy mesh’s and add-ons that simply drove me nuts. I’ve also no doubt there will be many more issues, but I’m not writing a novel here!
All-in-all learning Blender has been a long time coming, but it’s also been a long time since I was able to learn something so deep. Since getting to the other side of my chronic health issues I’ve found some of that old brain power slowly creeping back, considering in the depths of my illness I didn’t even know my partner’s name at times, I think its safe to say I’ve come a long way.
The purpose of this blog is to explain a little why I’ve not managed to post in the last few months, and while it’s not the only explanation, I’m sure I’ll get to the others at some point!
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