|
Metal
Sept 28, 2017 6:08:19 GMT -5
Post by s3nova on Sept 28, 2017 6:08:19 GMT -5
Hello! See my post here. It's about making metal materials in Blender Cycles. This includes a Cycles setup for metals in Blender, including reflection of the environment (HDRI map) My post here is about adding a metal shine by editing the specular file. This will create a live shiny effect ingame, you'll see the reflections move over the object.
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 27, 2017 12:24:52 GMT -5
Yo! You have 2 strips of faces on top of each other. Select a face on the inside (Blender), use L to select linked faces and then G to move. You will see that another strip lies beneath and does not move. Select this strip, flip normals on it and it should work. Delete the moved faces. Added a picture for explanation. You might have to check your UV map as well.
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 26, 2017 12:34:49 GMT -5
Hi! You need to edit your specular for this, for a skin or a top. Long time ago I wrote an comprehensive tutorial for this, but my post on this site got lost. You can still find it here. Also a shorter but illustrative tutorial by Orangemittens exists on this site. In short: your specular file should not be black but more close to white. The tutorial shows you how to effectively do this for the separate color channels and the alpha channel. The effect you are looking for requires high values in the blue channel, see this picture, bottom left. In this picture B is the value for blue channel (on a scale 0-255) and A for alpha channel, the Red value is 32 and the Green is value is 192. The specular file should be named <your description>_SPECULAR.png and the mask file should be named <your description>_SPECULAR.mask.png Otherwise a mask file is automatically generated, which not always gives the desired results. Using these names you can control the mask file. Check Sim body templates for the parts to be used in your specular file (see here and here.)Success!! Auf Deutsch vielleicht einfacher für Sie, da Sie Deutsche Sprache Verwenden ins Bild . . . Deutsche Version.
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 24, 2017 11:02:12 GMT -5
Glad I could help you! Looks nice now . . . cheers!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 24, 2017 7:31:34 GMT -5
Hi! Look at this post. What holds for the silver part of the shoes, holds also for the chromed details on your mesh. Colors (as Chrome color is not in mentioned Wikipedia list) The bare metal: Glossy BSDF Shader set to Beckmann use rgb(224, 226, 227) / HEX E0E2E3 (the lower shader in the image). The reflection: Glossy BDSF Shader set to Sharp use rgb(249, 251, 252) / HEX F9FBFC (the upper shader in the image). Your material setup in Blender in a Node Editor view (using Cycles Render) should look like this to get the result you can see in the same image. Chrome is actually somewhat more blueish, but the HDRI image used contains much soft orange. Its just about the idea. Success!!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 24, 2017 5:53:54 GMT -5
Hello! This tutorial is about the same problem, also with glass. I hope it will work for you. If you use Blender 2.76 or higher, you might not have to split the mesh. Instead you can use the Autosmooth function, see here.Greetings!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 24, 2017 5:41:54 GMT -5
Great that things are working now!! The flipping faces issue: for simplicity lets say you have only a square plane and you UV unwrap it. Then add the Cheetos texture. In 3D editor you will see the Cheetos texture applied on the plane and you'll be able to read it, like this. Let's say you go into UV editor, select the upper and lower right vertices of the plane (in pic marked with red circles) together and move them to the left, like this. You will see the texture move, but as soon as you move the selected faces to the left of the non selected vertices, the image will be mirrored like this.This is what I mean with flipping an UV-tile. But there is no way to see this in UV editor, so you can accidentally flip UV tiles without knowing it. But you can see it in 3D editor, when it contains text that is mirrored. Check your UV-map and see if the faces you are having problems with are flipped this way. And you can use the same way to flip them back. Good luck and hope it'll work!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 24, 2017 5:11:47 GMT -5
When I check your mesh in Blender the first thing I notice is this: Faces 3.136 and tris: 4.892. On the outside I can count only 26 visible faces and if you'd like the inside to be also visible then this would be around 50 to 60 faces. Around 400 faces are in the rope grips, which is already much. But this leaves around 2.400 faces unaccounted for. When I try to move faces around, everything seems to be connected to many other things.
To be honest: don't waste your time on this mesh. Something must have gone wrong in the conversion process and now it's a total mess. Sorry to say that but better be honest with you. The shape is really simple so you should be able to build it in Blender in less than 30 minutes. Keep the rope grips low poly and you'll be fine.
Success!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 23, 2017 16:07:09 GMT -5
Hey! If you use Blender then you can easily apply a material using Cycles Renderer (Blender 2.76 or higher). This way you can create silver metal. Use 2 Glossy Shaders, set one to Beckmann and the other to Sharp. Set Roughness to zero for absolutely clean reflections (although about 0.03 is somewhat more natural). Combine the Glossy Shaders with a Mix Shader and connect this to a Material Output. Keep Factor at 0.5. Set the Beckmann Glossy Shader color to HEX C0C0C0, which is the color of silver. With a little help of this site you can get the right lighter values, let's say HEX F2F2F2 (20% lighter). Your Material setup in Cycles should look like this. Only with slightly different colors. Then use a HDRI map in the World texture, which is a HDRI picture that will reflect in the silver metal (you can download free HDRI maps and you don't need a very big one). It can all be done without much work and to great effect. Use Bake (Combined) to bake a texture. Your Material setup for World should look like this. The Mapping node is not essential, it is just there to rotate the environment texture if necessary (use Rotation on Z-axis to do this). You only have a very small objects on these shoes, so do not expect to much of HDRI lighting. An alternative can be simple studio lighting with planes. Add an Emission shader and you have perfect studio softboxes for lighting. Success!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 23, 2017 15:44:37 GMT -5
Hey! It seems that some faces have their normals pointing inward. A normal is a vector perpendicular to a face. You can see a face if the normal points roughly towards you, if it points away from you the connected face becomes invisible. To see normals in Blender goto Edit mode and see under Mesh Display, where you can select vector or face normals. They will be shown as thin blue lines. Check if you can see them. If there is a problem or just to be sure: menu Mesh / Faces / Recalculate normals.
Furthermore it seems that your texture was applied mirrored, at least the 'Cheetos' text is mirrored. You might have flipped faces in UV space, flip them back for proper texturing.
Success!!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 22, 2017 15:20:45 GMT -5
Hi! Your work looks nice! So keep up. There is something to do however. First the glare: its not from your file I guess. Check your necklace in CAS on a Sim who is wearing really nothing. Two options: 1. Glare has gone -> the glare comes from another object in another package file. Its specular map may not be properly shaped or it has an improper mask file associated. An example are Madlen shoes, that are notorious for having the wrong specular maps which causes glare on the wrong places on your sim. I assume that you used the right texture space for your necklace (UV map)? 2. Glare still visible -> other problem. There is no information for glare in your package however, so this would be interesting. Let us know. Other thing: Your mesh contains very many faces, too many to be honest. So you should do something to reduce that. Especially the pendant has 8.992 faces (=10.174 tris). You could use this high poly mesh to bake a detailed texture however and eventually a normal map. You can use them to simulate detail on a low poly variant of your current mesh. Sorry to say but is a bit unstructured mesh, as it does not contain clean edge loops. And it does contain poles, which are vertices that have more than 4 edges connected to it. In general this is something to avoid as it might cause trouble with UV mapping, lighting and shading. You should get rid of them. You can use some modifiers, but this might not work. Better option: Manual method in Blender -Menu Mesh / check the AutoMerge Editing checkbox in the menu. This will merge two vertices when they are moved to the same location. -Go to Edit Mode, select a vertex you want to remove and use shortcut: shift + V. This will slide the vertex over the surface of your mesh. Slide it to another vertex and they will be merged. (Shift+V is the same as Menu Mesh / Vertices / Slide) You can use other tools, like Dissolve, Subdivide Edge, Fill or Knife (see Blender manual for details). You can also reduce somewhat on the necklace, like the edges selected in this picture. Dissolving them will not change much of the detail, especially on the part that faces the skin of the Sim. So you can do without them. Keep an eye on the angle between two faces. If the angle is minimal, say less than 10 degrees, then the connecting edge between those faces can be dissolved, leaving only one (bigger) face. Success!!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 22, 2017 14:33:53 GMT -5
It seems that your skin texture is overlapping the texture of the eyelashes. Check the package file of the eyelashes and go to texture (diffuse map). There you should be able to see which part is used for the texture of the eyelashes. Do the same for the skin. Find out where they overlap and try to correct this. If it is too difficult to see, then try this. Export both texture files as png. Open them both in a photo editor like GIMP. Copy one texture image and paste it in the other image as a new layer. Then change transparency (or saturation) of the upper layer, so the lower layer will shine through the upper layer. This should help you to find the intersection of both textures. This can be of great help: the Sims 4 body templates here and the CAS texture templates here.Success!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 19, 2017 15:47:21 GMT -5
Hi there! It can be a graphics card issue, but not necessarily. It can also be a problem with smoothing groups in Blender (or another 3D editor), which is a common problem. So actually it can be one of those problems: 1. Graphics card - sometimes also relates to lines in Sims' faces and CAS-objects 2. Grouping in Blender - relates to lines in objects, like the ones you see in your chair. I suggest you try option 2 first, as making changes to your graphics card driver is probably more difficult and also tricky to test. In general if you see the lines you mentioned in S4Studio, you will also see them ingame. So S4Studio is a quick testing environment for any solutions. For 2. see this tutorial: tutorial - also mentioned as the solution in this post. You can also check this video. For me (nvidia GTX970, drivers updated, Win10 on Core i7) this worked for problem 2. The general idea of making smoothing groups is to select sharp edges, mark them as seams and split your mesh over these edges (P / Selection). Blender will automatically adjust the smoothing for those selections. After making the selections and separating them, select them all and join them with Ctrl + J. This will give a single object with several smoothing groups. ----- Edit: if you use Blender 2.76 or higher, you don't have to split and rejoin your mesh, as this adds extra faces. Select your mesh in Blender, then in the navigator click the Mesh tab and look for the Normals roll menu. See this picture.Check Auto Smooth and change the value at Angle to fit your smoothing needs. All faces with angles below the selected value will be in the same Auto-smooth group. This way smoothing can be applied while the amount of faces stays the same. Here is a very short and simple video to illustrate this. It might not work on very complicated meshes however. ----- Blender and other 3D editors simply cannot calculate the correct smoothing and lighting for every part of a mesh and this is a way to guide the smoothing process. Your mesh certainly has sharp edges, like the sides of the chair base and the sides of the chair legs. Make seams at the base of the legs to create a smoothing group for each leg and so on. Do a few legs, test it and if the lines are gone you know this solution works for you. If you use smoothing groups on objects that need weight transfer (like CAS-objects) then do the regrouping BEFORE weight transfer. The regrouping operation will seriously interfere with previous weight transfers and cause problems. Making seams in your mesh is also of great help with UV-mapping. You can UV-map the separate parts, which is much easier. Tip: it can often be useful to UV unwrap twice, the first time as Lightmap Pack and the second time as Follow Active Quads (both on exactly the same selection). This will give you a nice and straightened UV-map which you can easily bring into the right position. Hope this will help! Happy Simming!
|
|
|
Post by s3nova on Sept 16, 2017 10:56:33 GMT -5
Hi there! This issue is around for a long time. It happens also with fine lines around the mouth of Sims. I think there are 2 problems: 1. Graphics card - relates to lines in Sims' faces 2. Grouping in Blender - relates to lines in objects. For 2. see this tutorial: tutorial - also mentioned as the solution in this post. For me (nvidia GTX970, drivers updated, Win10 on Core i7) this worked for problem 2. Remark: in Blender you can create any mesh you want. Then turn all quads to tris and make proper mesh groups, according to the tutorial mentioned. Do not forget to join (Ctrl+J) after grouping! Do the regrouping BEFORE weight transfer, as the regrouping operation will interfere with previous weight transfers. I hope this will help! Happy Simming!
|
|