MicroTiles - uniform subdivision of selected faces

Introduction

I often use Blender to model railway scenery in H0 scale for 3D printing. While Blender is not a CAD program, it proves to be a very useful tool in cases where artistic considerations are just as important as exact tolerances.

Problem with Tunnel Portals

Recently, I was working on some tunnel portals and wanted to create a rough surface on certain faces. Using fuzzing settings in a slicer did not yield the results I was looking for, so I decided to use a displacement modifier with Musgrave noise to achieve this effect.

Vertex Groups and Subdivision Modifier

By defining a vertex group, the displacement modifier can be restricted to just the faces that need the rough texture. However, there must be enough geometry to see any details.

The subdivision modifier, however, cannot be restricted with a vertex group. It also suffers from the same drawbacks as manual subdivision: all faces are subdivided uniformly, meaning the new faces will be proportional to the size of the original faces. Larger faces result in larger new faces, and smaller faces result in smaller new faces. Additionally, n-gons are often not subdivided properly, as shown in the next image, where the rectangular bricks each have six edges.

MicroTile Add-on

What I wanted was a way to create a dense grid of uniformly sized faces on any selected face, and this is exactly what the MicroTile add-on does.

Simply select any faces you want to subdivide, then choose Add → Tile selected faces. The default setting creates faces with sides of 1 cm, but the Size option can be adjusted to any value. In the image above, the large stones are approximately 2 x 4 cm and were subdivided into 1 mm tiles.

Availability

The add-on is available for download from my Github repository.

Click the Download raw file button (near the upper right corner), then install the downloaded file via Preferences → Add-ons → Install from disk. Once installed, a new menu item will appear in Edit mode: Add → Tile selected faces.

Notes

The add-on has been optimized for performance, but generating a large number of new faces can still be slow. For instance, on my machine, subdividing 122 selected faces of the tunnel portal down to 1 mm took just over six seconds, adding around 135k Tris in the process. Your experience may vary. The add-on includes a progress indicator to provide a sense of the process's progress.

The add-on also creates a new vertex group containing all the newly created vertices (excluding the vertices of the originally selected faces). This feature suits my particular use case, as I can then add a displacement modifier restricted to these vertices.

The add-on supports undo functionality. However, for some reason, any created vertex groups are not removed during undo. I'm not sure why this happens.

Minor tweak to Facemap Select

In a previous article I wrote about some new functionality in the Facemap Select add-on.

I just added a minor tweak to it: now all Facemap actions, like select and unselect can be undone, just like any other selection in Blender.

The updated version can be downloaded from my github repository.

Updated version of Facemap Select

 

In this article we introduced a small add-on to work face maps, and explained why such an add on is needed in Blender 4.0 and later.

Recently contributor Yann submitted a pull request that adds a nice, dedicated panel to manage any number of face maps. This offers an way to interact with face maps that is similar to how you would work with vertex groups.

I removed the now redundant entries in the select menu because I don´t want to clutter the interface more than needed.

The new version of the add on can be downloaded from Github. Simply click on the "download raw file" button (near the top right) and the install the file as an add-on in the usual manner.

Blender Market, the end?

 

I decided to discontinue selling add-ons and books on Blender Market.

Sales have been declining for a while now, and I had set myself a hard minimum on the average monthly revenue, and that minimum was reached last month.

I have been active for more than 10 years on Blender Market, my Weightlifter add-on was first published in August 2014, so the decision does hurt a bit, but in the end several factors added up to this final decision: It is not just the declining income, but costs have been increasing too. Both the fees to Blender Market (which are fair, but are still increasing nevertheless), as well as the time investment in maintaining add-ons and providing support, are no longer in balance with the income. 

I was never in it for the money anyway, it was just a hobby, and by doing this I hope to be able to spend more time on things I enjoy more, like creating completely free add-ons, and using Blender for my personal artwork.

I am not completely gone from Blender Market though; I like modelling too, and I will continue adding some if I think that they are good.

Export .obj file with the name of the active object preselected

When you select export .obj from the File menu the name of the file will typically be preselected as the name of your Blender file but with the .obj extension or just object.obj if you haven't named your Blender file yet.

That's fine, you can change the name of course, but when I am working on a collection of object variants, I typically want to export them one a time and to be able to recognize them easily, I typically name the file after the name of the object.

Can this be simplified?

The Export Active Obj add-on

Yes, this can be simplified because we can add the export obj operator to the File menu again, but with the filename prefilled with the name of the active object.

The code is shown below, and it sets some common options I use all the time as well, but the essence is in line 7 (there is some more code in the add-on to set things up). 

def menu_func(self, context):
    self.layout.separator()
    op = self.layout.operator(
        "wm.obj_export",
        text="Export Active Obj",
    )
    op.filepath = context.active_object.name + ".obj"
    op.forward_axis = "Y"
    op.up_axis = "Z"
    op.export_selected_objects = True


def register():
    bpy.types.TOPBAR_MT_file_export.append(menu_func)

The code can be downloaded from my GitHub repo [file: export_active_obj.py] or directly from this link.

Tiny add-on to match data-block names to object names

I often find myself starting with a simple cube mesh, changing it a lot and then only after a while I give the object a meaningful name. I am pretty structured about this so even if my file ends up with a lot of objects, all objects will generally have a descriptive name.

However, the data blocks will at some point have names like Cube, Cube.001, Cube.002, etc., or even worse, have names that reflect other variants. Not a big deal  per se, but it might get confusing after a while so I'd like to rename all data blocks to match the name of the object.

The Name Match add-on

Renaming tens or even hundreds of objects can get tedious so I created a small add-on that when installed adds an item to the Object menu in the 3d-View.

The code is really simple indeed (see below, line 14 , the complete add-on has some extra code to create the menu entry): it assigns the name of the data-block for each selected object to the name property of the object itself. No need to check for objects with the same name because Blender will already take care of that.

When a data-block is linked to more than one object, the objects get names with numerical suffixes.

class NameMatchOperator(bpy.types.Operator):
    """Rename datablocks to match the name of the objects they are linked to"""

    bl_idname = "object.name_match"
    bl_label = "Name match"
    bl_options = {"REGISTER", "UNDO"}

    @classmethod
    def poll(cls, context):
        return len(context.selected_objects)

    def execute(self, context):
        for obj in context.selected_objects:
            obj.data.name = obj.name
        return {"FINISHED"}

Code availability

You can download it from my GitHub repo, or click this link to go to the code directly.

 

Spring sale is on at BlenderMarket ! They are having a sale starting tomorrow, May 21

This means serious discounts on participating products and of course my add-ons are on sale too, including Snap!

Check out BlenderMarket to see if that special product on your wish list now has an 'on sale' label.