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Learning and Working in the Newest Blender Version

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
Modeled this little cookie guy today in 3DSMAX, grouped in Modo, and rigged in Poser. I saw a guy making one for Blender, and I wanted to do one too, but for Poser. He's about 1K faces (all quads), very low poly. It was amusing to rig when the arms are twisted forwards in this unusual cookie cutter way. It was a good exercise to remind me of every single step to create a new Poser figure from scratch. Building a PHI saved a lot of time placing bones and setting rotation orders, but Poser puts the joints at all the wrong places. I want to make some basic expressions to give him some personality. ^___^

GingerbreadManWalk.gif
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
Yes, I've done a lot of LuxXeon's tutorials for Blender. I remember this one, but it's not one I've attempted yet.

However, Lux also does tutorials for 3DSMax,, so you might want to check out his Chanel at YouTube, if you haven't already done so.
 

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
Yes, I've done a lot of LuxXeon's tutorials for Blender. I remember this one, but it's not one I've attempted yet.

However, Lux also does tutorials for 3DSMax,, so you might want to check out his Chanel at YouTube, if you haven't already done so.

Yeah, I was going to do it in Blender because I need to practice, but then... I can do it so much faster in MAX! But then comes the grouping part, where MAX (like Poser) doesn't support unimesh. Ended up grouping in Modo. I made a mistake on the grouping, where I forgot Poser does not allow a group to have a direct single border with more than one group at a time. The unimesh version will eliminate this, but for now, have to remember that! After fixing the grouping, I ended up having to rig it all over again, but this time it worked. UV mapping a flat character was a no-brainer. LOL

I have built a PHI file to auto-place the bones and set the joint rotations automatically in Poser. This is so much faster than doing by hand in the Setup Room, which tends to be rather unforgiving and a bit unstable. When loading the PHI file in Poser, though, it places some of the joints at the wrong places, and it also doesn't align them, but that's easy to fix. Just did the left side, and mirrored to the right. Besides painting weights, the most tedious part tends to be renaming the rotation dials (3 per joint).

Of course, the biggest joy is to see the finished character walking around. :D
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
Don't do animation in Blender until you're more comfortable with the software. I'm still trying to get used to the new UI that came out with 2.8, and then 2.9. I'm so used to the older versions of Blender, that I'm still trying to find things I don't even have to think about in 2.79 and earlier, so I know what you mean about doing it in 3DSMax.

You're right about the Unimesh issue with Blender as well. We can group, and then bring into Poser to finish rigging, because rigging in Blender won't work in Poser. In fact, I'm not sure you can even bring it into Poser.
 

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
Looks like you are more familiarized with Blender than me. When I first tried, I couldn't make heads from tail. It was throwing everything on us at once, quite overwhelming. The new interface made it more approachable, but the pipeline is still cumbersome to me. I have modeled a number of things in Blender, but I don't use it often enough to get used to it. Maybe it's because I am coming from MAX, but in comparison, everything seems more laborious to get done in Blender. If we want to move a vertex in MAX, we just select it and move it. In Blender, we first need to switch to edit mode, and moving things requires switching brains - it's usually not how you think it is. Blender tends to favor keyboard shortcuts, and takes that to extremes. Don't get me wrong, I love keyboard shortcuts, but I think Blender pushes it too far. Shortcuts are mixed between how it was before, and how it is now, making it hard to find tutorials where they work.

Blender is one of the VERY few programs that work with unimesh, and that's the main reason I wanted to switch to it. I WANT to like it, but it's a rocky path.
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
Blender is one of the VERY few programs that work with unimesh, and that's the main reason I wanted to switch to it. I WANT to like it, but it's a rocky path.
I started with Blender 2.45 about 12-15 years ago, and I know what you mean, because back then the UI, if that's what you wanted to call it, wasn't anything like what we see today. I stuck with it, and finally with 2.5x they came out with a UI that was more professional looking.

The one thing I had to keep in mind over the years was, Blender was "put together" by a group of people who had never done this sort of thing before. There were always "new faces" to the group over time, each bringing something new and interesting, but even with the large number of folks working on the Blender core over the years, it took a long time to become, at least to me, easier to use.

You mentioned the new UI made it more approachable, and that's exactly why they did it. Too many folks were complaining they couldn't get used to the 2.79 (or earlier) UI. I'm not saying the new 2.93 I'm now playing with is really harder to work with, it's just a matter of finding what I didn't have to think about on the old UI, on the newer UI. I'll stick with it, because Blender is my favorite, go-to, modeling app. I'm just not giving up on 2.79 . . . yet.
 

Ken1171

Esteemed
Contributing Artist
@Miss B Well, I bought the courses, and I am committed to switch to Blender for my own sake. Maybe I haven't found the course that gets into what I like doing. And every time I go back to MAX, I keep asking "why can't blender's workflow be THIS efficient"? I've put into my head that I am thinking like that because I don't know Blender good enough, and maybe I am not doing things right. There is no future in MAX without unimesh, but it's still a heck of a firepower. If not for unimesh, I wouldn't give Blender a second look, but that's my best option at the moment.
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
One thing I've learned over the years, and several members of a group of students taking classes (not all Blender) at Udemy always mention it, there's always more than one way to get something accomplished.

The instructor who originally wrote the Blender class I'm retaking with the newer version of Blender, often gave you a list of things he wanted you to try to get something accomplished, and then you stopped the video and tried it out. Then when you went back to the video he'd ask how it went, and then showed you how he would like you to try it out. As I progressed through the course, I was often doing it on my own almost exactly the way he then showed us how to do it. That didn't mean I couldn't have gotten it done another way. I'm sure you could accomplish projects in Max doing it in more than one method. Once you've been working with a piece of software for quite a while, you get used to doing it how it best works for you.
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
Anyway, I've taken our 8 posts out of the I Just Wanted to Post a Render thread, and moved it here to the Blender forum so we don't take over that thread with posts no one else will necessarily be interested in.
 
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