Blender Market Black Friday Cyber Sale

 

Of course BlenderMarket does Black Friday and my add-ons are in it too. Check my BlenderMarket shop if you were thinking about purchasing one. Whether you think it's all commercial bullshit or not, there are some nice discounts to be had 

WeightLifter add-on updated for Blender 4.0

WeightLifter has been been updated for 4.0 compatibility. It has been tested with the daily built of November 3rd  and only minor modifications were needed to make it compatible. If you still encounter a bug, please let me know so that I can have a look at it.

WeightLifter is available on BlenderMarket. This update is free for customers who bought previous versions of WeightLifter.

WeightLifter is an add-on that can calculate all sorts of information and store this into vertex groups or vertex color layers. It can for example determine the visibility of vertices for a certain camera or the distance to some light source and much, much more (the add-on comes with a 30 page fully illustrated manual), information that can for example be used as a density map in particle systems. You can even bake this information if your scene is animated. 

The future

The code in the add-on is very old (9 years, which in Internet terms is ancient) and it does show its age in the way it is structured and also, as I experience myself, it is not very fast, especially on large meshes.

I was tempted to modernize it, and improve its speed if possible, but this might also be an opportunity to add features. So if you have an idea or suggestion, please drop me a note in the contact box at the top right of the page or via BlenderMarket and I'll be happy to consider it.

IDMapper add-on ported to Blender 4.0

 

I am pleased to announce that IDMapper is now available for Blender 4.0. 

It has been tested against the daily of November 3rd, but I expect no changes will be needed for the 4.0 release candidate or the final release.

Blender 4.0 introduced quite a few breaking changes, so this version is not backwards compatible with 3.x

Although no new functionality was introduced in this release, please be aware of the following:

• IDMapper can currently not work with facemaps, because they are no longer supported in 4.0. This may change in the future (hopefully, see this discussion) and if possible I will try to get this back into IDMapper. Meanwhile, I did create a small, free add-on to make selecting faces from facemaps possible in 4.0 which may be useful in some workflows.
• Color picking in Face Paint Mode (with the S-key) is no longer restricted to the 3d-View area, so colors can be picked from anywhere in the Blender application (although still not outside of it).

IDMapper simplifies creation and editing of vertex color layers that can be used as ID-maps in texturing software like Substance Painter or Quixel. It aims to reduce the time it takes to create an ID-map significantly, especially for complex hard surface models. It uses powerful heuristics to create an ID-map from scratch and lets you interactively adjust the results. It offers options to use existing information, like uv-seams, but can also intelligently assign the same color to similar mesh parts. 

The new version is available on BlenderMarket.

This previous article showcases some of IDMapper's functionality.

Snap! add-on ported to Blender 4.0

Snap! has been updated to run on Blender 4.0.

It has been tested against the daily of November 3rd, but I expect no changes will be needed for the 4.0 release candidate or the final release.

Blender 4.0 introduced quite a few breaking changes, so this version is not backwards compatible with 3.x

For an introduction to Snap! see this article and for the new functionality added in the April 2022 release, see this article. Both articles have links to demo videos as well.

Snap! is a time saving tool for people who often work with modular assets packs or creators of asset packs who want to make there product easier to use.

Snap! allows you to define snap-points with a predefined location and orientation on objects which can then be used to interactively snap objects together without the hassle of precise positioning.

Snap! is available in a personal and a redistributable version on my BlenderMarket shop.

Adding selecting from face maps to Blender 4.0

Because it is currently not possible to select faces based on the values in a face map, and because creating new face maps is cumbersome (First: Add attribute, select name, domain and type, then: Mesh -> Set attribute), I decided to create a tiny add-on that provides this functionality for the time being.

It is called facemap_select.py and can be downloaded from this GitHub repository (or you can right click and this link directly and select download.)

It is a bit rough-and-ready, but once downloaded, you can install and enable it in the usual way by selecting Edit -> Preferences -> Add-ons -> Install and then locating the file you downloaded. Don't forget the check the enable checkbox.

The add-on will add two options to the Select menu (in mesh edit mode):

From facemap will select faces based on the currently active face map, while Create facemap will create a new facemap and set its values to reflect the currently selected faces.

From facemap will be grayed out if no suitable facemap is selected.

A created face map will have a name starting with 'Facemap' and will be in the FACE domain and have a boolean type.

Note: face maps are not typically called that in the Blender documentation but are custom attributes (to be found in the Object data properties of a mesh object in the Attributes panel:

There might be more and different kinds of attribute layers here as well, like a uv map, as shown in the image).

I don't think (hope?) this add-on will last forever, as I expect this missing bit of functionality to be added to Blender sometime in the future (or someone might take my code and incorporate it, that's fine too of course). In the mean time I hope this might help some people with multiple complex selections to switch easily between those.

Weightlifter updated for 3.6

Celebrations! 🎉

WeightLifter has been been updated for 3.6 LTS compatibility. It has been tested on Blender 3.6.2 and only minor modifications were needed to make it compatible. If you still encounter a bug, please let me know so that I can have a look at it.

The history of this add-on goes back more than 9 years(!) and this update forced me to reduce the font of the revision history section of the manual to make it fit on one page. 😊

WeightLifter is available on BlenderMarket. This update is free for customers who bought previous versions of WeightLifter.

WeightLifter is an add-on that can calculate all sorts of information and store this into vertex groups or vertex color layers. It can for example determine the visibility of vertices for a certain camera or the distance to some light source and much, much more (the add-on comes with a 30 page fully illustrated manual), information that can for example be used as a density map in particle systems. You can even bake this information if your scene is animated. 

The future

The code in the add-on is very old (9 years, which in Internet terms is ancient) and it does show its age in the way it is structured and also, as I experience myself, it is not very fast, especially on large meshes.

I was tempted to modernize it, and improve its speed if possible, but this might also be an opportunity to add features. So if you have an idea or suggestion, please drop me a note in the contact box at the top right of the page or via BlenderMarket and I'll be happy to consider it.

Blender Market Summer Sale

 

A summer sale is on at BlenderMarket ! They are having a sale from August 21 - August 27.

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.

IDMapper ported to Blender 3.6 LTS

IDMapper has been ported to Blender 3.6 LTS

I am happy to announce that I have updated IDMapper to work with Blender 3.6.

It sports a few bug-fixes and internal changes to work with the newer Blender versions, and also has two bits of new functionality:

• you can change the color of the help text shown in face paint mode, to better adapt it to your theme (in the add-on preferences), and
• the IDMapper operator is now applied to all selected objects, instead of just to the active object. This ensures that assigned colors are unique across those objects. If you prefer the old behavior you can select that in the add-on preferences

I have also created a new demo video that shows the basic workflow when using the add-on in Blender 3.6

IDMapper simplifies creation and editing of vertex color layers that can be used as ID-maps in texturing software like Substance Painter or Quixel. It aims to reduce the time it takes to create an ID-map significantly, especially for complex hard surface models. It uses powerful heuristics to create an ID-map from scratch and lets you interactively adjust the results. It offers options to use existing information, like uv-seams, but can also intelligently assign the same color to similar mesh parts. 

The new version is available on BlenderMarket.

Prometheus metrics for Blender: Demo video

In the video I showcase the add-on presented in the previous two blog posts (1, 2) and show how to install and configure it.

The video is a bit too detailed perhaps for something that is basically a simple install and doesn't go into detail on how to install Prometheus or Grafana itself, but I was learning to use OBS and wanted to try some stuff out, so I decided to have some fun with it 😀

If you have questions or suggestions, consider opening an issue in the GitHub repository.

Prometheus metrics for Blender: New repo

The add-on introduced in the previous post has moved to its own repository

That repository also includes installation and build instructions
We moved it to its own repo to facilitate rapid development and also because that way we can easily incorporate the prometheus client library as a git submodule.

Donations welcome

You are more than welcome to use this add-on: It is completely free and open source.
But if you would like to show your appreciation and you can afford it, consider following the sponsor button at the top of the repo, or directly via this Paypal link.

Prometheus metrics for Blender

Exposes Prometheus metrics on port 8000 when enabled.

In particular, it exposes a Gauge, Blender_Render, that is 1 when the Blender instance is rendering, and 0 when it is not. The standard metrics, like cpu usage are also exposed.

Building the add-on

Currently we use an embedded and slightly modified version of the prometheus_client for Python, which is in the subdirectory. That is not ideal and might change once I have figured out how to monkey path the server instead of hacking the source, but i don´t like to depend on external Python packages because that makes it difficult to distribute and add-on. Copying is also very far from ideal, so a git sub-repository is probably the way to go.

git clone https://github.com/varkenvarken/blenderaddons.git
cd blenderaddons
zip -urv prometheus.zip prometheus

Then install prometheus.zip in the usual way and enable the add-on.

You can inspect the published metrics on http://localhost:8000.

Scraping this with a Prometheus container and creating a Grafana dashboard is something you'll have to figure out yourself.

Source code

Available on Github.

The code is extremely simple: when the add-on is enabled we create a Gauge metric and start the prometheus http server. We then register a Blender timer that checks every 10 seconds if we are rendering or not with the is_app_running() function and sets the Gauge accordingly.

The timer is made persistent, so it will keep running even if we load another .blend file. The Prometheus server is running in a separate (daemon) thread and will only end if we exit Blender or if we invoke our custom stop_http_server() function, and that's where the ugly hack comes in: the start_http-server() function does not return the server it creates, so w e have no way to call its shutdown() function (which is present, because it is a subclass of http.server) or call close() on the socket it is listening on, and this would prevent us from disabling and then enabling the add-on again, because we would get an address in use exception.

Same goes for the Gauge: If we want o be able to reenable the add-on we have to make sure to remove it from the registry in the unregister() function.

import bpy  # type: ignore
from .prometheus_client import Gauge, start_http_server, stop_http_server, REGISTRY

def every_10_seconds():
    global g
    r = bpy.app.is_job_running("RENDER")
    if r:
        g.set(1.0)
    else:
        g.set(0.0)
    return 10.0

def register():
    global g
    g = Gauge("Blender_Render", "Rendering processes")
    start_http_server(8000)
    bpy.app.timers.register(every_10_seconds, persistent=True)

def unregister():
    global g
    bpy.app.timers.unregister(every_10_seconds)
    REGISTRY.unregister(g)
    stop_http_server()