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