Black friday / cyber monday sale

During the weekend and next monday (from 27 to 30 November) many products at BlenderMarket will come with a 25% discount. Of course I will participate in that sale as well, so if you were thinking about purchasing either WeightLifter or Space Tree Pro, now is your chance to get an even better deal :-)

Now I wouldn't want to exclude my Open Shading Language for Blender E-book from the fun so even though it is not marketed by BlenderMarket it will carry the same 25% discount during the Black Friday / Cyber Monday weekend. Get it on Smashwords and enter the coupon code QP54E on checkout.

WeightLifter add-on: new feature

I extended the WeightLifter add-on with an extra operator in the Paint menu of the vertex paint mode: VertexColorCombine. It lets you combine color channels from different vertex color layers into a combined vertex color layer.

Combining this kind of information into a single vertex color layer might save considerable space when using large meshes. A small tutorial on a possible workflow to combine different attributes calculated with WeightLifter into a single vertex color layer is available on YouTube:

Floorboard add-on gets Versaille pattern

From time to time I keep on developing my floorboards add-on an I am happy to present a new option: the Versaille pattern.

(click to enlarge)

It was quite fiddly to get it right but now it looks fine. (Thank you Spirou4D for pointing out the issues with the center configuration).

This pattern offers the same options as the other pattern: you can add randomness to the planks, gaps between them, shift the origin, etc. etc. The generated uv-map (in Shuffle and Packed modes) aligns the uv coordinates in such a way that all are aligned along the longest axis of a plank. This means that if you have a single wood texture with the grain running in a certain direction, planks that are rotated still have a uv parallel to the grain, as it would probably be in reality. An example with a simple stripe material is shown below (note that each plank also has a different color in a vertex color layer that you can use to slightly randomize the material of each individual plank)

The pattern has border planks that are arranged in a symmetrical manner: 2 short horizontal ones,2 slightly longer vertical ones. Selecting the Switch option will change this to 4 identical planks arrange in a clockwise fashion.

An overview of the different articles that highlight all the options of the add-on can be found here.

Availability

The latest version is as always available on GitHub.

WIP: versaille pattern for floorboard add-on

I am currently working on an addition to my floor boards add-on for blender, the pattern often referred to as Versaille parquet.

I have implemented the simplest variant and am looking for a way to align the uv so the grain runs along with the length of the planks. With some manual tweaking it is already possible to get a decent result: