Layer masks work differently across our favourite 2D apps, which can be a little – shall we say – infuriating at times. In Photoshop for example, I’m used to drawing on Layer Masks to hide/reveal something underneath the current layer. Black hides (masks) the current layer, white reveal what’s underneath it, and as such it …
I wanted to setup some portrait lights the way I’m used to doing it in Blender and DAZ Studio. In those apps, we usually have a way to point a light source at an object so that when we move either of them around, the other one follows. The above GIF is a good example …
The Tick Event is a somewhat special event that is called every time a frame is drawn in Unreal Engine. Many actions are derived from it in a running project. Sometimes we may need to drive things while we’re editing a project though, without being able to press play. Sadly we can’t use the Tick …
EPIC have recently introduced something called the Movie Render Queue to aide us in exporting stills and animations from Unreal Engine. The previous method (Movie Scene Capture) was a tad clunky, and is – as we live in such dramatically fast times – already being deprecated. Although Movie Render Queue is working great, it’s not …
I’m currently importing large amounts of OBJ files into DAZ Studio. I was thinking of making my life a little more streamlined and came across a super handy script by the very prolific and talented Jaques aka mcasual. He has something called Load Many OBJ, which does exactly what I need. Once installed, the script …
Blender has a handy script built-in that lets us export multiple selected objects in our scene as separate objects. I remember mentioning this principle in a beefy article focussing on Unreal Engine workflow, but thought it would be neat to turn it into its own article. Here it is! Let’s assume we have several objects …
In this article I’ll show you how to combine various UV islands that are spread across multiple UDIMs onto a single texture set. Blender has this capability built-in, but an add-on called SimpleBake makes our job even easier. For this example I’m using the the base Character Creator model. Many thanks to Brian for showing …
I really like Substance Painter and the way we can texture and get creative with materials. Although it’s not an easy app to learn, it brings a lot of value to 3D models, both new and old. What’s not well handled is material zones on export. If a mesh has 5 zones, we get a …
It’s a tad difficult to see in the screenshot, but our mission is to combine both legs of my character into the same polygroup. It’s an extremely simple task, but pretty much impossible to figure out in ZBrush if you apply logic. There doesn’t seem to me a menu option either, so by piecing together …
I’ve had a bit of a computer mishap recently that required me to install Corel Painter seemingly on more computers than I actually own. In use are my Mac and my main PC, but due to hard drive switching and frequent re-installations, Corel’s automated license authentication system thought I was using it on more machines. …
PaintShop Pro is trying to help new users by giving them lots of choices when the app launches. This gets old fast, especially when you’re being peppered with sales nag screens every time you open the programme. Thankfully there are ways to configure this behaviour, albeit somewhat hidden. Let me show you where. Removing the …
I’ve recently tried my hand at using ParticleShop with Photoshop, and it worked out of the box after installation. This was not the case with PaintShop Pro though, where an additional step is required (but they don’t exactly tell you this in the installation). Here’s what we need to do to make it work: Head …
The Vignette option has been slightly hidden in Canva recently. Here’s how you can find it: select the background layer of your image click Edit Image under Adjust, select see all a long list of options opens up, one of which is the Vignette Here’s an example of what a Vignette can do for your …
I’ve recently picked up a fantastic deal on Corel Painter 2021 through Humble Bundle. If you’re fast you might still be able to pick it up yourself from here. Among the many goodies were various brushes and paper packs that can be installed. While the papers had an automatic installer for Windows, it was different …
Every few years I end up with having to re-create my favourite workspace configuration in Photoshop. Without fail, I forget where some settings are hidden that I’ve grown rather fond of. Here’s a quick refresher about how to change those. Hide those scroll bars By default, the document is surrounded by scroll bars. It’s clutter …
I’m currently evaluating a seriously exciting app called R3DS Wrap, also known as The Russian 3D Scanner. It does something rather difficult: it takes the existing geometry of a base mesh and wraps it around another one with a different topology. Imagine wrapping a sphere around a cone, a jacket around a figure or a …
Ah yes ZBrush. The app that makes difficult things easy, and the basics almost impossible. Here’s one such example of ingenious software design: the simple act of importing OBJ files, let alone multiple ones. There’s no File – Import dialogue like on literally every other 3D app. Instead we use the import option in the …
In this video I’m explaining how to apply random animations to otherwise static objects. This is a physics effect that’s applied to a shell around the object and is really neat to animate anything from wind to bounce to complex geometry. I’ve always meant to write the steps down and never found the time when …
I was wondering if I could use Blender to make my Substance Painter selections a little easier. I wanted to avoid importing the material zones into Substance, while retaining this information at the same time. Turns out there is a way to do this, but it needs a little manual labour. Josh explains it in …
I’ve been investigating Substance Painter and how to best select parts of a model. One such option is by using an ID Map, essentially a flood-fill of random colours per material zone. Wendy very kindly brought this to my attention in a recent stream (thanks, Wendy!), and before I forget, here’s how to do it. …
I remember making notes on the projection painting tool in ZBrush back in 2013, it’s called Spotlight. It’s very powerful and yet another fun way for us to project textures onto 3D objects. Last night I found the above excellent tutorial by Kevvfx and thought I’d take some notes on how to get started with …
One of my supporters had a great tip on how to convert Genesis 3 clothing to Genesis 8. He’s made a German video about the process and asked if I could make an English version. It’s coming soon, in the meantime here are the written instructions. This works for converting both genders in both ways …
Being the artistic tool ZBrush is, it often felt vague to me when it comes to accurate values. I had no idea how to rotate a model to exactly 45 degrees for example, until I came across this video by Joseph Drust earlier today. Turns out all we need to do is hold down the …
Texturing 3D objects is surprisingly easy in Blender. Essentially we’re using a 2D image that will be gently rubbed onto the surface of a 3D object, thereby creating a texture. Let me show you how to do it. Let’s use Blender’s default cube and any image of your choice. If you no longer have him …
Blender allows us to project regular images onto 3D objects from any angle onto a temporary UV space, from which we can then transfer such projections onto the “real” UV space. If this sounds like science fiction, bear with me – it’s a tad complicated and I thought I’d take some notes while the process …
When you work a lot with certain figures in DAZ Studio, it may be helpful to launch them from custom icons in the toolbar rather than having to find them your Content Library every time. There are two parts to the process. Let me show you how to set those up in this article. Setting …
Premiere Pro has an interesting feature I’ve just discovered: applying effects to source clips. This is helpful if every sequence you’ve created needs an overall colour correction and you’ve forgotten to apply it during editing. Rather than fix 20 clips that reference the same footage, we can fix the footage and the effect will be …
Joint Corrective Morphs (or JCMs) is the principle of driving morph sliders if a particular joint rotation reaches a certain value. Say a bicep muscle that needs to flex when an arm is bent 90 degrees in one direction. It’s a bit like an “if this then that” statement, interpolated depending on what value is …
As part of the DAZ Season Pass, we have a dedicated section on the DAZ Forum that’s only accessible for members. I hang out there freuqently and answer questions, but becasue it’s been a while since I’ve frequented the forums, I had completely forgotten how to upload an image and present it inline. It’s a …
I’ve made myself an animated walking Slinky last week! I thought it would be nice to have him join the other figures on my stream overlay. It seems a simple-ish feat to do, but since I’ve built him from scratch in Blender, then rigged and animated him in DAZ Studio, there were quite a few …