Location of the original world HDRI environment map As you can see the names used internally in Blender and the actual file names are different this makes searching for them difficult so I am sharing the list here: City: Portland Landing Pad Courtyard: Courtyard Forest: Ninomaru Teien Interior: Hotel Room Night: Moonless Golf Studio: Studio Small Sunrise: Spruit Sunrise Sunset: Venice Sunsets They are all available on HDRI Haven

Now that Blender has an option for a more Maya like mouse manipulation workflow, and I am back looking at it once again, I noticed one thing I missed from the default Blender mappings… In the default Blender mouse set up you can use the Middle Mouse and the ALT key to perform Axis Snapping and get a quick way to view Left Right Top Front etc. Orthogonal Views. When I switched over to Maya like I thought I had lost this function, as it uses ALT as the main key for manipulations.

In Modo importing CAD files that have been converted to a Polygon format such as LWO FBX or OBJ often contain a Vertex Normal Map. Exporting from Moi3d as LWO works well for example until you change anything on the imported mesh. I got a nice tip today from @funk on the Modo slack group it basically replaces the Vertex Normal map with a Standard (as of 13) Hard edge workflow.

If a program appears to crash to often Windows may apply a control Shim to monitor the app, this can cause slow operations in Modo such as UV edits. To check if windows is applying a shim: Press start and in the search type regedit.exe and hit enter Go to this folder: HKEY\_LOCAL\_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\FTH\State If modo is listed in there, then a shim is being applied. To remove the shim

I recently had a problem with the V-Ray license server on Windows returning and error -200 when I tried to render. It turns out the error is because the VRL service wasn’t running and no amount of reinstall and reboots helped. Thanks to the help of friend I was able to resolve the issue by deleting a folder located at: C:\Program Files\Common Files\ChaosGroup Uninstall the License Server from the machine Then delete the folder <code>C:\Program Files\Common Files\ChaosGroup Reboot the machine to reset the Windows Services Install the License server, it should ask for log in data now.

vrimg files are not associated with any program in Windows by default, they may be associated with the Chaos Group PD Player. Also it doesn’t appear that open with creates an association as expected therefore one may have to use the command line function ftype to achieve the desire association. The general way to associate files using terminal commands is as follows: Open cmd.exe with administrator rights (right-click on the shortcut to get this option) Type ftype extfile="C:\Program Files (x86)\YourProgram.

These are the basic Shadow Catcher settings I use in Modo. The main thing is the Alpha Contribution set to -1 in the V-Ray Object Properties.

After years of avoiding weapons I have just completed my first one, an Assault Rifle concept, of my own design. I did all the work in Modo including the concepting while I modelled this meant it took a bit of time to complete. I may do some more in the future as I learned a few tricks in doing the piece. More renders on artstation The name schnuller is a play on words from the US English translation.

To quickly space out items in the Item List in Modo you can use the Curve Transform Tool under the Duplicate Tab in the Model Palette F2 shortcut.

This one is too easy but I never got it so: Select the Curve in Poly mode (3 key) then hit F to flip. Boom the curve direction is reversed, F is used to Flip the polygon faces so I would never have guessed but when you know it makes sense.

The pen tool in MODO is pretty powerful and come with a lot of of shortcuts as noted below: Click = Move Right-click = Move Edge Loop Middle-click = Split Shift+click = Duplicate Shift+right-click = Duplicate Loop Shift+middle-click = Add Loop Ctrl+click = Slide Ctrl+middle-click = Remove

I recently had occasion to reset the CTRL R key in MODO which repeats the last command. It isn’t the easiest command to find and so I am making a note of it on here: cmds.fireAgain uiCmds:false selectionCmds:false Searching for last or repeat obviously wont help you find this esoteric beauty.

In a recent post on Facebook Eric Soulvie released a beta version of his LDraw loader kit for MODO. I am pretty excited to try it out and you can expect some feed back and examples on here and mbt3d. It is necessary to have the LDraw library installed for this to work, something that was immediately apparent to me, after that the installation is pretty straight forward. If you are interested then his Article is on his site along with instructions on how to install the kit.

Render outputs are useful when you wish to compose layers in an external application such as Photoshop. The render outputs required to produce the same image as the Final Colour output are: Diffuse Shading (Total) + Transparent Shading + Reflection Shading + Specular Shading + Subsurface Shading + Luminous Shading = Final Color Each layer is Added (Linear Dodge) to the previous layer in the composition. Each Layer is rendered with a gamma of 1.

Toy Robot Concept - Modo Marmoset Toolbag

Retro Radio Receiver - Modo Marmoset Toolbag

Tin Rocket on Ramp - Modo Marmoset Toolbag

Bauhaus Lamp Kaiser Idell 6631 - Blender Marmoset Toolbag

BBC Doctor Who Brachacki TARDIS - Modo Marmoset Toolbag.

Newton Relfector - Modo Marmoset Toolbag The world’s first reflecting telescope built by Sir Isaac Newton in 1668 it is the first known successful reflecting telescope.

BBC Doctor Who Dalek PBR - Modo Marmoset Toolbag BBC Doctor Who Dalek PBR - Modo Marmoset Toolbag BBC Doctor Who Dalek PBR - Modo Marmoset Toolbag BBC Doctor Who Dalek PBR - Modo Marmoset Toolbag BBC Doctor Who Dalek PBR - Modo Marmoset Toolbag BBC Doctor Who Dalek PBR - Modo Marmoset Toolbag Modelled in Blender textured in Substance Designer, Substance Painter and rendered in Marmoset Toolbag.

Retro Toy concept - Modo Markmoset Toolbag

A very interesting article on PolyCount by EarthQuake on the reasons why we need to use more than 8 bits in certain maps and in particular Normal maps. Of Bit Depths, Banding and Normal Maps  This is an issue that pops up more and more frequently these days. Now that many engines/renderers are finally using synced normal map workflows, the weaknesses in our pipeline become easier to spot.

Classic Red Victorinox Swiss Army Knife - Blender Marmoset Toolbag.

Dinky Diecast Fire Engine 555 - Blender Marmoset Toolbag.

Update: I received an answer from Allegorithmic which explains what I was doing wrong and how to connect the nodes normally. Thanks for reporting this issue. The connection problem happens because of the material modes (standard and compact). If you hit the 1 key to place the graph in standard mode, you can make the connection. I seem to have come across a bug in Substance Designer’s Curvature Node, which I have reported to Allegorithmic so it may be resolved by the time you read this.

Model of an old die cast toy Fireman - Blender Marmoset Toolbag

Brio Speedy Bullet Wooden Train - Blender Marmoset Toolbag

With the release of Substance Designer 4.4 Allegorithmic has included 50 Substances from GameTextures which you may have missed. Unfortunately they didn’t seem to make it very clear, I only found out about it from one of the demonstration videos, and even then I missed it the first time I looked. To get the textures and they are pretty nice you need to go to your account page and select the Substance Designer download option and look in the list for the two zip files.

Substance Designer can be set up to auto save every few minutes in case of a crash, which is something that happens a lot to me at least. The problem is I couldn’t find the auto save files no matter how I tired they weren’t in any of the obvious folders, including the /tmp folder which would be logical. So I did a little web search and found that the programmers in their infinite wisdom decided to put the back ups in a .

Model of the Emmet character from the Lego movie

Old galvanised metal rubbish bin or trashcan

Grey wooden locomotive from Brio - Blender Cycles

I have been looking at the interesting render abilities of the Marmoset Toolbag 2 physical based render on the Mac. While I like the results a lot I am not convinced of a place for it in my workflow and here is why: The program creates some very impressive results and has a ton of texturing options however it is only able to produce still frame and a turntable as output.

Original design of a toy fireman robot - Blender Cycles

Original Suffolk Canisters by Henry Watson Pottery - Blender Cycles

Test Render BBC Doctor Who 2005 Dalek - Blender Cycles

Kaiser Idell Bauhaus Lamp by Christian Dell. Blender and Cycles

Model of the Classic Swiss Army Knife from Victorinox

An orange PVC plastic road safety cone - Blender and Cycles Using a bespoke shader to simulate the light absorption through a translucent material in Blender. This is a slightly simpler shader than a full Sub Surface Scattering shader and is based upon the Beer Lambert Law: The Beer–Lambert law, also known as Beer’s law or the Lambert–Beer law or the Beer–Lambert–Bouguer law relates the absorption of light to the properties of the material through which the light is traveling.

Model crown neck bowling pin from Brunswick - Blender Cycles

A cartoon model of a Ewe sheep - Blender Cycles

Western Electric Candlestick Telephone, 1920s - Blender Cycles

Green wooden toy train engine from Brio.

Yellow and red tipper wagon for the Brio train set

A set of dark pine wooden dining chairs - Blender Cycles

This is the first attempt at using Visual Studio Code to initialise and create Hugo matter for the blog. One thing I notice as I write this is the Dictionary is set to en:US and not en:GB which is fine it you don’t mind swapping out the z’s everywhere. What was it Shaw said: “The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.” Which is its self incorrect as Great Britain is actually three countries and three languages although English is the predominant one.

I recently wrote about how nice it was to see Windows Live Writer again, and while it works great in most aspects it fails on a purely cosmetic one. The site themes or at least the simple one I am using renders incorrectly in fact it makes the feature a bug not a bonus. Today I came across and article on Blogging editors for off-line work and was reminded of one I have had since it was launched Blogo is Mac only and it was nice, it wasn’t perfect but pretty good.

I spent the afternoon sorting out this site and updating the theme customisation, I didn’t care for the default font, I prefer something easier on the eye. Also I culled a lot of images from the old gallery on here as they are getting old and I haven’t updated in a very long time. Far too many places that I post to and I can’t keep up with the needy nature of the web so they hit the bin.

Today I managed to finally setup HTTPS on this site. It was not as straight forward as I had first thought because it was using Cloudflare and a stray Name Server that took a little tweaking to get working. After a few false starts and a little waiting for the Name Servers to catch up is finally working. Installing the certificates was much easier than I had first thought thanks to the scripts on my Host provider uberspace.

Charlie Chaplin LEGO Minifigure I haven’t posted on here in a very long time, I have been very busy on other things mostly to do with my 3d work. Part of that included setting up some new servers and a domain for my Freelance 3d art site mbt3d.com I have moved things around a few times in the last year and I am finally coming to a solution I like. It has become more and more demanding to have multiple web presences and so I finally decided to use Artstation as my main and only portfolio.

I have just changed hosting company and I am in the process of setting up the site in its new home. As with all moves there are bound to be a few articles that go astray in the moving process, so please bare with me while I tidy up all the loose ends. This site is available as https but doesn’t have a valid certificate yet, so expect warnings and errors.

I just checked the iCloud web reminders app and was surprised to see the dates listed in the quaint but uniquely US centric date format; even the US military don’t seem to use it. At first I couldn’t see how to change it then I found it hidden under the Calendar app. Not very intuitive but there you go. Here is a screenshot you need to hit the Red Cog bottom left first though.

I have managed to acquire the domain name markbtomlinson.com which fits in with the handle I use on the web @MarkBTomlinson and so should help finding me easier. As a consequence of this acquisition I have decided to moved and consolidate all my CG 3D work over on the new website which is called Mark B Tomlinson All new work and projects I add related to my 3D work and portfolio will be put on Mark B Tomlinson and this site will revert to its old role as my personal 3D, photography and tech blog.

For Windows using the Apple USB keyboard without Bootcamp Control Panel software i.e. you aren’t using a Mac but still want to use the APPLE SUB Keyboard. Open the Registry and search for the following Key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\KeyMagic Find the entry OSXFnBehavior Change the value from 01 to 00 00 is Function Keys 01 is Media Keys Unplug the keyboard or restart the computer to reload the new value.  

Apple added 10-bit colour to the Apple Display drivers this is causing issues with older Macs including the Mac-Mini this little application can fix it by allowing you to select 8-bit from the list. ResXtreme ResXtreme provides access to all display modes for each connected screen, including extended and HiDPI modes accessible only via private system APIs. These private modes are not normally accessible to App Store apps.

To open a file from AstroGrep at the Line and Column of the search result Text Editor Location: C:\Program Files\Microsoft VS Code\Code.exe Command Line: --goto %1:%2:%3

Hard Links in Window are called Junctions and are useful for example to create an Assets link in current folder and link to one in Dropbox. First change to the directory where the link should be placed: CD %home%\Documents\Luxology\Content Then enter this line at the Command Prompt to create the Junction: mklink /J Assets "%home%\Dropbox\Modo\Assets" Note the location of your Dropbox and Content folder may vary this is the default location.

In Modo you can make inactive Meshes either Wireframe or the same as the active Meshes. This usually involves going into the 3D Viewport Properties via the ‘o’ key, you can assign a shortcut but what if you want a shortcut that toggles the behavior well you can do that too by using ‘?+‘ which is the toggle instruction for all boolean commands. So in the Map to shortcut dialog use this instead of the given TRUE or FALSE

Modo supports customisable Layouts displayed in the form of Tabs at the top of the UI. Adding a new Layout is as easy as clicking the small + symbol on the right of the Tab pane. Removing a Tab is a little more obtuse, it requires a few clicks in the Menus. As the Tabs represent Layouts you go to the Layout menu and select Delete… to open the Delete Layout window.

If you want to remove an Edge and keep the vertex, you can use the UI button F2 Model Tab > Edge > Remove You can also use right-click the edge and select remove. It pops up a dialog box where you can check Keep Vertices Assign it to ALT Backspace for example to make it easier to access

I work with lots of different image formats in my work and I often need to quickly view them in one program and then edit in another. The context menu in Windows 10 allows you to pick, initially, an Open with program optionally. It doesn’t easily allow you to pick an Edit with program. To this end I did a search online and found this recommended, tried it liked it, and so I am sharing with you.

The last months I have been working through the tools on Allegorithmic’s Substance Painter and Substance Designer and how to use it in conjunction with Blender 3D So far the main conclusion I have come to is it works and works pretty well, there are a couple of caveats though, these I will go into perhaps in a later post. The main thing though I will mention here is to ensure you export the model in either OBJ or preferably FBX (the reason for this is OBJ doesn’t update in Substance Designer automatically).

Tutorial: PBR Texture Conversion By Joe “EarthQuake” Wilson In this tutorial, I’m going to demonstrate how content created for traditional shaders can be converted to PBR shaders, how to convert content from one PBR workflow to another, and explain the various differences in modern workflows. This tutorial is intended for intermediate to advanced users, so be sure to read the previous two PBR tutorials that Jeff Russell and I wrote as the base concepts are explained in great detail and may only be briefly mentioned here.

After installing Karabiner Elements for MacOS I found that the Logitech Gaming Software (LGS) was no longer detecting the mouse and was showing the move mouse to wake dialog. It took a while to figure out that the cause was the recently installed Karabiner Software, exiting the software allowed immediate recognition of the mouse. Not sure what the cause is and the mouse was functional though not under the LGS command.

With the Dell Display Manager dmm.exe there are command-line parameters to allow some remote control. They are as follows: ddm.exe /IncControl 10 • to increase brightness ddm.exe /IncControl 12 • to increase contrast ddm.exe /DecControl 10 • to decrease brightness ddm.exe /DecControl 12 • to decrease contrast The default with no second figure set is 1 or 1% - so in my example I use 5 for 5% like so:

ExactMouse acceleration killer: ExactMouse from Steelseries removes mouse acceleration on the Mac. Acceleration is a a problem for me when using a mouse on any computer that requires precise pointer placement. It is not easy to disable it completely on the Mac without using some fancy terminal command. To make it easy to disable acceleration either term-rally or permanently you can use the ExactMouse tool from Steelseries. The improvement in general mouse work are subtle but noticeable and improve the feel of high quality gaming mice.

How to configure AstroGrep to use Atom.io as the default editor and to open the file at the specific location. Change the path and version to suite the location of the atom.exe on your system. C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Local\atom\app-1.18.0\atom.exe

You are going to love this Windows 10 bug: Drag and Drop stops working for me occasionally and I finally found out how to fix it, hit the escape key. That’s it if you find you can’t drag drop icons in Explorer under Windows 10 try hitting the Escape key once and it should work. Although it isn’t working for everyone but worth a try 🙂 Another thing worth trying and checking is to run the

I recently noticed the virtual desktops or Spaces on Mac were not working as expected. They had become locked together and it was not possible to switch on one monitor without switching the second too. The problem is fixed by ensuring the check box next to Displays have separate Spaces is on under the Mission Control pane in the System Preferences.

The tablet driver for the Wacom Tablet occasionally crashes under Mac OS X. This seems to happen more often after the machine is woken from Sleep mode. When you look in the Preference you will see some warning similar to the image above. The only solution it offers is to restart the Mac. This is a pain even though restarting with and SSD is quick enough it still means closing all the open apps and waiting an age for some to close like the Mail.

Autodesk FBX viewer is dead in Yosemite and isn’t going to be fixed until later this month with the release of a new FBX suite. Therefore I have had to look for an alternative and have tried many viewers some nice some not the problem is few open FBX by association if at all. There is one program that does open them and reads them quickly and that is Marmoset Toolbag 2 I had just been using Toolbag to open files and then thought, hell why not just associate the files to the program so they open there by default.

The quickest way to delete all the photos from an iPad running ios 7 is to use the Image Capture program. Open Image Capture Connect you iPad to your Mac with USB cable Click on the iPad icon top left Select all by using ⌘A (or select manually if you want to selectively delete) Click the red circle symbol on the bottom and confirm you want to delete. After a few seconds or minutes depending on the size they will be deleted from the iPad.

Build a $35 Time Capsule – Raspberry Pi Time Machine Backup Server HomeArticlesBuild a $35 Time Capsule – Raspberry Pi Time Machine Backup Server 29-08-2014 | Remy van Elst This is a simple guide on building a $35 Time Capsule with a Raspberry Pi. A Time Capsule is a network attached storage device from Apple for use with their Time Machine. Time Machine gives users a very easy and userfriendly way to automatically create and restore (encrypted) backups.

As much as I love shortcuts to take the strain of the mouse I sometimes wish they weren’t quite so obtuse. I don’t play piano and so struggle spreading a hand over some of the combinations Blender uses. Alt M for example is doable but hardly comfortable, while others would require a punishing regime under a trainer to achieve. To this end I decided to tryout the excellent app for iPad calledActions *No longer available.

After updating Apple’s OS X to 10.9.3 you may find the /Users directory is hidden. This can be annoying but easy to fix and unhide it again just enter this command into the Terminal: sudo chflags nohidden /Users It will ask you for an administrators password just enter it and the folders should be visible again. While it may seem like a good idea to hide things in this case it is just a nuisance and of limited security benefit.

Recently I got the Hazel.app for my Mac. I had heard good things about it and decided to give the trial a go. It didn’t take long to realise it is an amazingly useful tool. I have written actions now to move files all over the place and sort them in a sensible way. For example I use [r] at the front of images to denote renders so in this action any image that isn’t a render or a screenshot is moved to a directory Assorted Pictures and added to sub-folders using the domain name where I found it.