Image Re-Projection
on March 7th, 2010, by ideasman42Its been a while since we had a development post and while we’re always busy with blender much of it is work in progress.
Most of my time is spent on physics and bug fixes at the moment but seeing as it was my birthday on Friday, I took some time to work on something more fun :D. Enjoy!
– Campbell
Update:
- Image editor can be selected in the user preferences ‘File’ section.
- Save as PNG rather then TARGA to workaround reported problem with adobe photoshop not saving alpha.
- Render to an off-screen buffer rather then grabbing the view, removes view text and allows images editing images bigger then the view.
- Added option to capture high resolution images rather then using the viewport size.
March 7th, 2010 at 1:46 am
OMG!
This is amazing! I don’t know if this featurs can replace the uv export for texture mapping, but this is awsome!
Eccelent work guys
March 7th, 2010 at 1:48 am
That is just amazing, !!!! Very powerful tool!
March 7th, 2010 at 1:57 am
Sweet!
One of the annoying things about Blender has bean its limited texturing capability, I will have to try this out.
March 7th, 2010 at 1:57 am
happy birtdhay!
the feature looks just awesome. I was already amazed when projection painting was integrated and this is a real great addition to texturing workflow.
March 7th, 2010 at 2:03 am
Totally unrelated to the awesomeness of the function itself:
What application do you use to record these videos?
March 7th, 2010 at 2:08 am
Talk about awesome. Campbell has a birthday and he gives all of us a gift.
March 7th, 2010 at 2:09 am
working even on your birthday?! you’re a slave driver… to yourself!
impressive work and thank you =D
March 7th, 2010 at 2:14 am
OOuuh! That looks liek the best feature yet! WOW! Is is possible to change which painting application to use? I, for an example use Photoshop and Mypaint.
March 7th, 2010 at 2:16 am
Oh Yeah ! It’s very very useful !
March 7th, 2010 at 2:21 am
At first… happy birthday!
Then… cool cool stuff!
Only one question: is the image-editing application choos-able? I mean, gimp, photoshop, or whatelse?
March 7th, 2010 at 2:24 am
Sintel with war paint…
March 7th, 2010 at 2:24 am
looks great!… in this example, does it export and import the skin of Sintel or only the black strokes? If exports the skin too, does it always export big images to keep the resolution or the size varies depending on the resolution of the original skin texture?
Congrats Campbell!
March 7th, 2010 at 2:30 am
Campbell your incredible as always man. Great Work. I think this will be a massive benefit to the artists in the community and to your film.
I was curious if there would be any of the hard surface brushes they have in ZBrush 3.5 added to Blender for the film production?
Also incredible work on the procedural rigging system. I was wondering if you implemented procedural animation transfer as that really cuts down on the amount of animation work the artists have to do by re-targeting the same animations from one rig to the other rigs in the production to cut down on having to do say walk cycles for each character?
Instead, an artist can create one walk cycle and then procedurally re-target it to the other rigs and bam you have that walk cycle for all the other characters. Its pretty cool and its something you can do once you go through all of the trouble you went through for creating procedural rigging tools. 🙂 😉 Keep up the good work. I’m cheering for your guys.
Cheers,
Nate Nesler
March 7th, 2010 at 2:31 am
Wow, if this is what you call a birthday present, I will make sure to come up with a bunch of feature requests for your Christmas gift 😛
Happy Birthday!
March 7th, 2010 at 2:35 am
WOW indeed…
…not a small feature, this could indeed change the way we paint textures today!
Thanks Campbell!
March 7th, 2010 at 2:40 am
Happy Bday cambo,
LetterRip
March 7th, 2010 at 2:59 am
Happy birthday, I think this shows you could use it for making UV maps for the sub-dermal, epidermal and specular, and reflections if you noticed it copied exactly what we do in gimp, but as you say only 2d areas where it saves time with renders ..its awesome.wicked wicked wicked!
March 7th, 2010 at 3:06 am
Wow, this makes it so much fun! I guess I’m going to have to get up to speed with the GIMP after all. 🙂
March 7th, 2010 at 3:26 am
Very nice!
Don’t know quite how to accomplish this but I think it would be much more useful though if the ‘must paint on a new layer’ was solved. Having to make new layers can be awkward to work with, and very limiting in terms of what you can do – for example if you just want to clean up some seams using clone/smudge/etc tools or using more sophisticated warping tools (like PS’s liquify) it becomes a lot more difficult.
Not sure how to solve this, disabling the axes/text etc when it makes the screenshot would be a start, as well as making a high res screenshot. Anyone know how zbrush does it?
March 7th, 2010 at 3:27 am
Oh, wow. My eyes are currently trying to convince my brain that what they just saw is actually possible!
You mentioned that the current view angle was stored in the file, does this mean that with certain file formats like the Gimp native format, or can this info be temporarily stored somewhere else instead?
March 7th, 2010 at 3:29 am
nice little video for re painting!
i saw some other little videos too and was wondering
if there are some tutorial video or not on how to do theses effects
i like that one for teleporation effect
very clean and fast too
keep up the good work and hope to see other special effects in Durian
happy 2.5
March 7th, 2010 at 3:44 am
<3 <3 <3
Can't wait to use it!
March 7th, 2010 at 3:47 am
Just awesome. This is how in BodyPaint 3D, painting on models works. I had seen it just once.. but I think that is it..
Great work ideasman42 🙂
March 7th, 2010 at 4:04 am
Amazing feature! This should be very useful when doing camera projection/adding fake depth to images.
March 7th, 2010 at 4:14 am
That’s one awesome developer. One giant leap for texture painting. 😀
Sintel’s diffuse map looks gorgeous. 🙂
March 7th, 2010 at 4:26 am
Incredible! That would be a very useful feature.
March 7th, 2010 at 5:11 am
Happy Birthday – and thanks for the feature!
March 7th, 2010 at 5:25 am
WOW! that is great work!
March 7th, 2010 at 6:44 am
Nice work as usual mate. I have a build and want to know how to associate the workflow with a painting app.
I can’t work it out. 🙁
Oh, and happy birthday.
~Glenn
March 7th, 2010 at 6:54 am
Fantastic work Campbell , that tool will proof extremely useful 😀
March 7th, 2010 at 7:44 am
ok, this is a DREAM !!
awesome work!
March 7th, 2010 at 8:25 am
!!!! Thank you Campbell, and Happy Birthday to you!!!(and us too 😉
March 7th, 2010 at 8:37 am
Happy Birthday Campbell. That is an awsome tool you worked up!! It is super amazing. I am asuming that this could also export to any paint program, even photoshop if you wanted to. Is that correct? Sorry I mentioned something closed souce!! don’t stone me. 😉 great work!
March 7th, 2010 at 10:00 am
Really cool stuff Campbell. And happy Getting Older Day to you!
March 7th, 2010 at 10:49 am
I wouldn’t worry to much peeps. While right now it seems hardcoded to only work with the gimp, but from looking at the commits it’s obvious that in the future you will be able to set your editor of choice as a user preference.
March 7th, 2010 at 11:23 am
Amazing feature!!
… and yea, Ubuntu!
March 7th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Hi all, glad you seem to find this interesting, ofcourse its yet-to-be seen how it works in production :), will test this week.
@Lasse R. Bruntse: Image editor can now be selected in the user preferences: build (r27310), on windows and mac it should open with the default application if the preference isn’t set, but I couldn’t test if this worked.
@Rovanion: recordmydesktop, fullshots must be enabled.
@JGpuon: it literally takes a screenshot at the resolution your viewing the image at. this has pros and cons, It will always project back into the high resolution texture, so if you want you can just scale the screenshot up before adding your own edits, then these will be high resolution too.
The active camera can also be used to project renders back in from the “Project Image” button however the workflow for this is a low slower.
@MatrixNAN: I’m not familiar with the ZBrush flat brushes, I think we’re using the same metarig for all humans so I’d guess actions could be shared between, even if proportions differ, may still need cleaning up after to fit the character.
Nevertheless animation re-targeting would be great to have, but its not planned short term. Nathan is now maintaining ‘rigify’ so he could better answer this.
Since we have 2 developers 3-4 animators I think we might solve with grunt work 🙂
@Matt: Your right about using alpha overlay being problematic. When adding this I was thinking of ways we could paint onto mountain ranges and caves. David and Ben sometimes take 3D renders and do paint-overs to work on composition so I was thinking of an “apply paintover” tool.
The problem is you end up loosing quality when rendering an image and projecting it back in. the higher resolution the less quality but its a bit like resizing an image a lot makes it become blurry. Could use some tricks to workaround, like only apply the pixels that changed from the original or apply the change in color as a delta to the high resolution colors so as not to overwrite detail when adjusting colors.
@Rudiger: The view matrix + bounds are stored as metadata in the image datablock (in blender). could try store it in PNG metadata too.
@Satish ‘iluvblender’ Goda: This is something I heard about but never saw, Id be interested to know how other apps deal with degrading quality from too many re-projections. Perhaps just edit very high resolution projections.
March 7th, 2010 at 12:37 pm
Campbell you are the best 😀
March 7th, 2010 at 1:31 pm
ideasman42
in the r27310 build we can use photoshop? i can not find the r27310 on graphiccall
March 7th, 2010 at 1:32 pm
hey guys – amazing thing must say!
i was wondering if there is possibility to create a tool that allows painter to load multiple reference photos into 2d image editor within blender – uv image editor, and, having opened 3d viewport and uv image editor – painter could set CLONE and clone FROM flat photo in uv editor ONTO 3d model in viewport – just as simple as cloning within 2d app but within blender….this could sped up painting tex from ref images, photos, etc SOOO quickly!!!
the next thing i was thinking of was something like applying decals easily – drag’n drop png with alpha into blender onto your mesh – u see this png as a plane with flat mapped image with alpha, then u can reposition, scale, rotate and such – having the png-plane always aligned flat to the view- then when having it ready – press the (place/bake/apply) button and BOOM your decal have just been placed right into the texture on your mesh…
sounds reasonable?
have a great weekend guys – u do the amazing job!
March 7th, 2010 at 1:39 pm
@MatrixNAN: Regarding retargeting of animations….
I agree it could be useful for some things, but the truth is I wouldn’t use it. Every character walks differently, and their walk will change depending on the situation. I personally never use walk cycles. Animating a walk is something every animator should know how to do, and is not difficult enough a task to warrant any automation.
Not that I want to hijack the thread, of course…
Back to worshiping Campbell the Amazing…
March 7th, 2010 at 1:39 pm
Happy Birthday Campbell! and thank you for the hard work and magic. 🙂
March 7th, 2010 at 1:51 pm
Big Impact 🙂
March 7th, 2010 at 1:53 pm
tried recent build and despite configuring shop as image editor – blender still wont open/export image for painting…what can i be doing wrong?
March 7th, 2010 at 1:55 pm
gorgeous feature 😀
and happy birthday too 😀
March 7th, 2010 at 2:44 pm
That is a dream becoming true!!!
I was so jealous when I saw something like that in autodesks programs that were linked to photoshop.
now you could say, that blender has all the painting tools and filters implemented, that you have in GIMP 😀
That is awesome
next thing blender needs, is the possibility to make all layers visible with alpha channel, so you could paint on a new layer and see the underlying layers at the same time
March 7th, 2010 at 3:02 pm
As a photoshop user, and someone who dislikes gimp (not because its not like PS) i find it strange to say that i’d rather use this feature with gimp, gimp has a lot of short comings for me personally but the best thing about gimp vs photoshop is startup speed, this feature would be a nag waiting for photoshop to open if it isnt already! that said I’m curious as a mac user will gimp work with this feature as we still have to run gimp through X11, but anyways excellent feature, very functional I can see myself using this alot
March 7th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
is this the kind of thing you did with this revision “python api function for rna objects: object.as_pointer()” ?
March 7th, 2010 at 3:09 pm
Cool feature. How about making it apply only the difference between the original and modified image?
March 7th, 2010 at 5:06 pm
WOW!
Thank you so much!!This is simply Amazing!
and Happy Birthday!!!!
March 7th, 2010 at 6:29 pm
This is awesome. But I have to say, it’s go going to be difficult to resolve some of those resolution issues. I was thinking of the way PTex handles up scaling texels and auto integrates them seamlessly. Then I was thinking, wait wouldn’t integrating PTex just be easier? Not necessarily a plug for PTex…but seriously, wouldn’t it?
March 7th, 2010 at 6:37 pm
Happy Birthday Campbell! 😀
March 7th, 2010 at 7:00 pm
Amazing! You should have birthdays more often 😉
March 7th, 2010 at 7:18 pm
Hey Campbell,
I think grunt work sounds good given your artist to developer layout and will probably make for a good solution. Maybe next production the team can build on rigify some more and add additional features. I was amazed at how fast you work with your coding. Your awesome man. Matter of a fact I think the whole team is really kicking butt. 🙂 😉
Solid Brushes ZBrush 3.5:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=078030
UV Map Painting:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=082643
Overview Of Some Of The New Features: Might want to fast forward through beginning marketing hype.
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=077864
I suspect the UV Map Painting could be done even better with the open source software released from Disney with their new UV system. I suspect you guys will have no time for any UV work or any of these suggestions. I suspect you have a very tight deadline that will well laid out and you have to stay the course, but just in case any of this stuff would be useful and parallels some of the work you have to do for the production, I thought I would post these up.
Oh and Happy Birthday to you I hope you got to break away for some fun at some point or another. 🙂 😉
Cheers,
Nate Nesler
March 7th, 2010 at 7:28 pm
Hey Beorn,
Well a walk cycle was just an example rather it could be a great number of animations like say 100 or 1000 animations etc. So it would not be just for a walk cycle. I agree otherwise if thats all it would be for then it would be pretty useless but you can use it for any animation. I agree with you that every character walks differently, but after say the walk cycle is re-tageted to another character you could make adjustments to that characters walk cycle to make it different and for that character alone without having to re-animate the entire character for the walk cycle from scratch. Like I said though it does not have to be a walk cycle it could be climbing a rope, doing flips, jump reverse crescent kicks, etc, etc, etc. This technique is used in major film and game productions.
Cheers,
Nate Nesler
March 7th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
when i save the image out from photoshop, ie save over the targa file blender generates, it just flattens it…
so you get your new painting over a constant white.
any ideas re: alphas with targa files?
March 7th, 2010 at 7:34 pm
@MatrixNAN:
Animation re-targeting would be a totally separate feature from procedural rigging. I don’t have any specific plans to tackle it myself.
But you can get 90% of the way there just by reusing actions, as long as the characters are of similar size.
March 7th, 2010 at 8:27 pm
Happy Birthday, Campbell!!!
Awesome feature, should really make painting terrain and buildings very quick, just like you said. Simply amazing !
March 7th, 2010 at 10:19 pm
You’re great Campbell. Blender 2.5 has a great future. Thank you very much and Happy Birthday to you!
March 7th, 2010 at 10:22 pm
Wow! This is kinda like deep paint 3d. Thanks for adding my favorite feature to date!
March 7th, 2010 at 10:30 pm
where is the perference to change it to photoshop?
March 7th, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Great, thanks Campell. You are the man!
March 7th, 2010 at 10:57 pm
Update:
* Image editor can be selected in the user preferences ‘File’ section.
* Save as PNG rather then TAGA to workaround reported problem with adobe photoshop not saving alpha.
thanks
March 7th, 2010 at 11:08 pm
Hey Campbell!
Happy birthday! Hope you guys are not having too much of a hard time with Durian.
Take care!
Kemeros
March 7th, 2010 at 11:19 pm
OMG! That’s really really really cool!
March 8th, 2010 at 2:27 am
Great!! This feature is very cool 😀
Happy birthday to you Campbell!! 😉
March 8th, 2010 at 3:07 am
Tool is way awesome.
March 8th, 2010 at 4:08 am
@BMN
If you want to save alpa channel you have to create it in the “channel” tab.
March 8th, 2010 at 4:26 am
Where do you change the .tga default to .png? I have set photoshop as my default but can’t see where the file type is set. Agh! Such a noobie.
March 8th, 2010 at 7:28 am
This is cool! Later maybe GIMP could use blender as a plugin to edit textures in 3D just as Photoshop CS4 does.
Great job!
March 8th, 2010 at 8:51 am
@Tobin: applications all handle this differently but once an image editors open it could use the same session to open new images rather then loading a new instance of the application each time. not sure how photoshop works but gimp does this kind of session management.
@francoisgfx, struct.as_pointer() is a way we can pass blender internal data to other libraries, its not used at the moment, only for future API development, (It means you could access ANY data via pythons ctypes and write your own API’s).
@Flo: applying only the difference between the original and the edited could be added. it only needs to hold the buffer, reload the image and set the alpha on any pixels that differ. probably 40 lines of code or so.
Great thing about this is not worrying about alpha overlays and you can edit the original texture directly as matt pointed out.
Drawback is the original texture cant be resized for better quality editing, else the diff wont work. So… You would want to be able to capture a high resolution image initially, perhaps have a multiplier option which then renders the image into an offscreen openGL buffer, 2-8x the screen resolution or so – could be worth adding just to get rid of the overlay text which gets in the way.
Will discuss with artists if its useful to have this.
@Paul: The projection painting function basically converts UV textures into a 2D point-cloud by initializing tiles as you paint over them, If we had PTex support I think this could be added to the painting system without too much trouble.
@Glenn Melenhorst: It only saves PNG’s since r27318, it could be made an option or use the render output format but I like to try not add too many options, PNG’s should be editable anywhere.
March 8th, 2010 at 10:14 am
hi
campbell – could u comment on these ideas?
i was wondering if there is possibility to create a tool that allows painter to load multiple reference photos into 2d image editor within blender – uv image editor, and, having opened 3d viewport and uv image editor – painter could set CLONE and clone FROM flat photo in uv editor ONTO 3d model in viewport – just as simple as cloning within 2d app but within blender….this could sped up painting tex from ref images, photos, etc SOOO quickly!!!
the next thing i was thinking of was something like applying decals easily – drag’n drop png with alpha into blender onto your mesh – u see this png as a plane with flat mapped image with alpha, then u can reposition, scale, rotate and such – having the png-plane always aligned flat to the view- then when having it ready – press the (place/bake/apply) button and BOOM your decal have just been placed right into the texture on your mesh…
sounds reasonable?
have a good day!
March 8th, 2010 at 10:14 am
thank you so much Campbell, already workarounds for photoshop 🙂
would love to see the physics stuff you’ve been working on!!!
March 8th, 2010 at 10:39 am
Just amazing! all the power of painting tools in 3d. good job man, i really apreciate your efforts.
take care
March 8th, 2010 at 10:55 am
Projection paint is coooool, but did anyopne notice MICRO-POLY DISPLACEMENT?! Aren’t those simple words enough to inspire awe? Or do we need a pretty video…
Thanks Devs, all… and Happy belated birthday.
March 8th, 2010 at 11:10 am
nice tool for painting some background geometry! THANK YOU!
March 8th, 2010 at 11:10 am
ADOBE PHOTOSHOP SAVE ALPHA!!
but you have to create it manually! by the channels palette.
March 8th, 2010 at 3:50 pm
Awesome feature. I have just a tiny request:
when painting on a symmetrical model and projecting in ortho it would be nice to have the re-projection going through so both sides get the same.
Unless thats already possible.
argh thinking while typing.
I guess I’ll have to try that for myself now.
March 8th, 2010 at 4:51 pm
Haha! Watching this on Youtube with the audio transcribed is hilarious.
March 8th, 2010 at 9:18 pm
I’m not sure I understand correctly what MatrixNAN was talking about, but I could definitely see an advantage to brushes that sculpt *and* paint on to your texture at the same time.
March 9th, 2010 at 12:06 am
ideasman42: If it turns out that it is to difficult to capture a high resolution image then you could scale the image in blender before passing it to the image editor.
March 9th, 2010 at 12:37 am
@pxl666, at the moment blender devs are discussing how to replace background images with something more flexible (perhaps attach images to empty objects), these could be used as a clone source or overlay to paint from. this functionality is defiantly needed.
@wayne, I think we should be a development post about some of the less interesting stuff brecht and I spend time on, some of its mundane but still apart of whats needed to get blender working in production.
@3pointedit, you need a pretty video :D, I poked brecht to make one today but he’s not done with it yet.
@Max Puliero, I couldnt tell if this was a photoshop bug or not from the reports, users just complained it didnt work, though apparently you just need to enable it somewhere.
@testscreenings, I planned mirror painting from the start, so re-project and normal painting could do this, its not that hard have 2 project painting instances running concurrently in different threads painting from different angles. Not planned short term but will probably add sometime.
@Cory, what the heck?, it took me a while to work out it wasnt a joke (I hope) :S, “missus campbell of the killings” lol.
@wraybowling, this would be cool but isn’t easy with the current paint system since it assumes the mesh is frozen.
@Flo, Added an option to capture high res images (you can select a resolution to use)
March 9th, 2010 at 1:52 am
Blender is looking better and better every day to me. As a person who started in 3DS Max, then moved to XSI, Blender at first was very foreign to me, but now with the 2.5 release, I am finding it easier to use. At this point I am considering switching to learning Blender when the final 2.5 release is out. Financially, and with the vast community, it just seems like the smarter choice, especially since it’s possible to run it as portable! I love what is going on with this whole project, the film and the software. Keep it up! Soon, you’ll have Autodesk bowing down before you!
March 9th, 2010 at 4:10 am
“Added option to capture high resolution images rather then using the viewport size.”
thi is very cool! thanks 🙂
March 9th, 2010 at 6:45 am
This is a great tool. It would be great to be able to integrate all of these tools into blender. You could use Gimp right within Blender and have all of the tools of both at your disposal.
March 9th, 2010 at 6:47 am
The above kind of means replacing the current UV image editor with gimp.
March 9th, 2010 at 9:06 am
Yahoo! Geat, great, great!!!!!!!)
Campbell, skilled craftsman! 🙂
March 9th, 2010 at 9:24 am
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct9hHT6_264
this can be done entirely in blender
March 9th, 2010 at 10:25 am
What could i say that others have not said. That really an amewome tool. Just can’t wait to try it. You guys a creating a monster thats gonna blow everything around it :D.
March 9th, 2010 at 11:27 am
Actually I prefer just a link, beacuse I know gimp but I love photoshop and so I can work with photoshop in blender! 🙂
March 9th, 2010 at 11:34 am
This tool is absolutely awesome!
Would it be possible to use the “capture” part to output z-depth of the current view for sculpting? ie capture the z-buffer of the screen to an image at the resolution specified then assign that as a new brush texture?
(like z-brush “capture doc”)
March 9th, 2010 at 12:53 pm
brilliant updates, what a sweet feature 🙂
March 9th, 2010 at 3:15 pm
Any possibility to adding equal function buttons to the unwraped texture view of model.
These are not the real time view of using a server between the applications. But for most usages good enough.
Simple integration with tools to rework things will make blender more functional.
March 9th, 2010 at 3:31 pm
Very handy tool! Simple and clever idea. These are signs of the best things! 😉 Thanks!
March 9th, 2010 at 4:57 pm
What can I say beyond…EXCELLENT!!!
March 9th, 2010 at 6:33 pm
This is fantastic.
But I can’t get it to work.
I hope it’s just something wrong with the build I’ve downloaded.
I hope there’s a new release soon in that case.
March 9th, 2010 at 6:34 pm
That just made me think of something else.
Do I need a specific version of the GIMP?
March 9th, 2010 at 6:47 pm
You need to enter the executable of the editor in Image Editor under File preferences and you also need to save a blend, otherwise there is a message that image creation has failed.
I’m using the latest stable gimp without incident.
Did I say that I love it?
March 9th, 2010 at 7:16 pm
Yes! No special paint editors required. Works with Photoshop too. Just a little imperfection is, that you need to save the image in PNG before you can apply it. It means you need to throw out the initial screenshot too. So it is not very fluent if you need to continue with painting from the same projection. It is possible, but needs to do some little needlessness.
Or maybe I missed something. 🙂
In any case this feature makes me very happy!
I can easily get rid of a lot of ugly things from my textures like seems and various distortions and greatly improve them in editor I know well.
Gorgeous!
One more cheer for Campbell!
March 9th, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Ugh.
Well I entered the location of the version of gimp I am using.
Everything seems to work fine. I can open it and edit in the gimp, but after I save it out and click apply, nothing happens.
Maybe it’s a 64 bit blender issue?
March 9th, 2010 at 10:08 pm
I just made a quick test with this feature (just a cube). It was so easy and worked so well… just wanted say that 🙂
March 10th, 2010 at 11:07 am
@Michael w, capturing the Z buffer is easy but you’d want to save it as a high bit-depth image (OpenEXR or HDR), though if its only for making a brush texture the Z depth could be normalized and made into a brush directly.
@oiaohm, if you mean quick ways to edit and save the UV texture from the UV mapping window, yes, we’ll do this.
@Psy-Fi, it works on an unsaved blend file for me, but others reported not so Ill try workaround this.
@4museman, saving before applying cant be avoided unless we integrate with a single application or protocol like verse. where the data is exchanged over a network interface or something. This would probably end up being more trouble then its worth, and saving isn’t so bad?
@Todd A McCullough, any image editor should work and we’re using all 64bit blender here, probably something else :S
March 10th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
I have some trouble here on 64bit snow leopard.
Clicking the button: “View Edit” opens up the external image editor (photoshop or gimp) but doesn’t open the image. I have to open it up manually. Am I doing something wrong?
It doesn’t work on 32bit Blender Build neither.
March 10th, 2010 at 4:21 pm
@mcreamsurfer, ive found that if i go into the .app then contents then Mac OS (Gimp.app/contents/MacOs/Gimp) it will start the app but it wont load the image. this is with both Photoshop and Gimp on 64bit on leopard.
March 10th, 2010 at 8:06 pm
I think I’m going to cry…
It won’t apply for me and I’m not sure why.
🙁
March 10th, 2010 at 8:29 pm
This is an awesome feature, not sure how much I’ll use it in this context though. What would it take to implement something like this in the VSE so that we can have live, or next to live titling/labeling? (using flat 3d text in the scene as a strip is too slow at output time, but does work).
March 10th, 2010 at 8:39 pm
@tobin: right, that’s exactly what my problem is. Just opening the application but no image. it’s stored on the harddrive and I can open it manually, but that’s – depending on where you keep the file – quite a lot of clicking. so – am I doing something wrong.
March 10th, 2010 at 8:53 pm
ha i somehow got mixed up when writing that thinking we had the opposite problem ( i was in work and should have been working!), i’ve very limited programming knowledge but from what i can tell the problem is it doesn’t recognise .app as an executable and can’t load the image in when you have the route going to the MacOS folder inside the .app, but thats a just a guess, is that the same file path you have for your editor (../[imageeditor].app/contents/MacOS/[imageeditor])
March 10th, 2010 at 9:27 pm
@tobin: yep. But how could I do it differently?! I mean, that’s the path for the executable of the program and it works for playback with DJV (maybe commandline thing?!?) – which is loading the images.
March 10th, 2010 at 9:35 pm
I dont think its something we can fix on our side, for example rightclick your PS.app and show package contents and get to the same executable and then try and drop an image on it to open it, it won’t work, but if you drop it on the .app it will, i think its just a difference in the way it would work on linux or windows, in that as far as i know with windows the .exe is the actual executable. but again, this is just from what i know i could be completely wrong, things where simpler in os9 🙂
March 11th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
@tobin: thanks for your thoughts then anyway. I am sure there will be something worked out in the nearby future…maybe I’ll do a short bug report on this in the OSX related category (here’s propably not a good place to post this – since it’s the durian blog – but first I wanted to make sure I am doing everything right on my side).
March 12th, 2010 at 6:39 am
I’m very frustrated with this and feel very Dim.
Obviously I’m missing something.
I can’t get it working on my Ubuntu system nor could I get it working on the win7 partition. Image Editor was selected in each, the image was sent to the gimp and then edited and then saved out, layers being merged.
When I hit apply in blender however, nothing happens.
Is there a naming convention I am missing?
God, I’d love to use this.
March 12th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
@Todd A McCullough:
Try this:
1. Ready your model with a texture attached to faces in UV editor.
2. Save your scene to disk.
3. Enter Texture Paint Mode, pick your view and press View Edit button.
4. After opening of the screenshot in bitmap editor make a new layer.
5. Paint anything.
6. Delete your base layer (screenshot), so only one layer remains.
7. Save the bitmap.
8. Switch to Blender (now you have the chance to change some settings like Occlude, Cull, Normal, Bleed…) and press the Apply button.
It should work. 😉
March 12th, 2010 at 2:45 pm
Well, I can’t get it to work for me. Every time I click view edit, blender crashes. I’ve even saved the file and selected my gimp binary in the user preferences. Of course, my blender also crashes every time I open the user preferences in a new window (from the file menu), so it might be that I don’t have something installed.
Looks great, though. This will definitely help a lot of people!
March 12th, 2010 at 6:18 pm
@ 4museman
Thanks. But I went through all those steps and the only thing that doesn’t work is when I hit the Apply button. It doesn’t get applied.
Like A saurus1 says I must not have something installed.
But it’s odd that it’s doing the same thing in 2 different OS’.
Did you download a graphicall build or did you compile your own?
March 12th, 2010 at 6:57 pm
It is really odd! Isn’t it something with specific hardware?
I use my own builds from actual SVN.
March 12th, 2010 at 8:47 pm
@Todd
Well, for most of you, it seems blender doesn’t apply the image. I can’t even get blender to open my image editor, much less apply the image.
For the record, I have build 27434
March 12th, 2010 at 9:11 pm
Well than, I can only hope Alpha 3 comes out soon! 😀
…and that fixes the problem for me. 😛
March 13th, 2010 at 7:43 am
It seems like there might be some kind of bug in how the alpha is used. Easiest to see projecting black shapes on to a black texture you end up with some white halos around areas. http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/4420/projection.png
March 15th, 2010 at 5:55 pm
Hello
For everyone who can’t apply.
First you must unwraping texture for your object. I have the same problem. I have opened blender, click texture paint for this standard cube and… nothing happen.
4museman give solution. After read this, I open my project with earlier unwraping texture and than click texture paint, view edit, save to png and apply. Everything working.
Thanks 4museman and Blender/Durian Team
March 15th, 2010 at 6:21 pm
Campbell, you rock! Just the kind o thing we needed.
March 15th, 2010 at 7:40 pm
@ lolko7 thanks for the trying to help. But I know I’m supposed to unwrap 🙂 but for whatever reason it doesn’t work for me.
Maybe though… My HD died over the weekend and I had to go out and get a new one and reinstall Ubuntu and everything else. Maybe I had broken something on my other install. I’ll try this again with another build.
March 15th, 2010 at 11:39 pm
Tried it with 27480 and it still crashed. Maybe something will happen when they merge the Render Branch with the Trunk. I heard Durian is using the render branch.
March 17th, 2010 at 3:14 pm
thanks for the fixes (broken & campbell) concerning the opening an image on mac problem.
March 17th, 2010 at 11:43 pm
@mcreamsurfer, glad its working for you!
For other reported crashes and errors, better do this with normal bug fixes, reporting errors in the tracker and Ill look into these when I get some time.
So long, until the next dev update 🙂
March 18th, 2010 at 7:37 pm
I really like this feature with the exception that I cannot get it set-up. Being rather new to Blender could be the problem. However, I went to preferences under file and still could not find where to set up the Gimp. I have not tried the Alpha1 release, only Alpha2. Was this temporarily removed for the Alpha2 build or am I just not getting it. I was going to wait for 2.5 until i saw you’re video on this way cool feature.
BTW happy belated birthday and keep up the good work,
merlin
March 19th, 2010 at 4:58 pm
It only works with releases that are more recent than Alpha2.
you’d have to go to graphicall.org and grab a newer build from there. Hope you have better luck than me.
March 20th, 2010 at 3:26 pm
Wow! When will this feature be available to us?
March 21st, 2010 at 6:58 pm
@ Todd
Thanks for the info Todd. Going to grab it now.
March 23rd, 2010 at 9:23 pm
sadly i’m one of the few who have problems with this. Gimp wont open. I get an “WindowsError: [Error 2] system cant find the specified file” output in the console (actually the german version of it, see http://www.blendpolis.de/download/file.php?id=52559&mode=view). I can find the image in the image/uveditor, but trying to open it via “Image edit externally” leads to the same error. I’m using a latest version of blender (rev27682) and have uv-unwrapped the moddel first. I’m using 32bit-Vista.
March 26th, 2010 at 4:50 am
@simon.void
I have the same error. I’m running WinXP_sp3 32-bit with Python2.6 installed.
Maybe I need to update to Python3.1 even though it is reading from the internal blender-python via the script
(
SETPYTHONPATH=
blender
)?
Perhaps the internal Py3.1 is missing an I/O_library?
I’ll install Python3.1 now and reply if it works…
March 26th, 2010 at 6:44 am
Installed latest Python3… File still not found
March 28th, 2010 at 10:44 pm
@simon.void & 42below
If you guys want to make it work for the time being you could try this to get it working.
Beginning on line 60 of .blender\scripts\op\image.py you will see something like this:
cmd = []
cmd.extend(image_editor)
cmd.append(bpy.utils.expandpath(path))
Change it to look something like this:
cmd = [r’path_to_executable’]
#cmd.extend(image_editor)
cmd.append(bpy.utils.expandpath(path))
Where path_to_executable is the exact path to the image editing software you use and the next line is commented out. I think it has something to do with the previous function not returning the image_editor variable to the execute function. Hope this helps you guys out.
April 10th, 2010 at 4:58 am
Strange… I don’t have this op directory generated. Maybe that’s why it’s not working for me. The builds I’m grabbing maybe aren’t creating this in my home folder?
July 21st, 2010 at 9:42 am
I have the same problem as Simon and 42below. I get an [Error 3]
And spider-dork, when I tried your fix the buttons for the re-projection painting disappeared.