WeightLifter add-on verified for Blender 4.1

 

WeightLifter has been verified for 4.1 compatibility. It has been tested with the 4.1.1 version of April 16, 2024  and no 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 (10 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.

In its current form it is unlikely it will be supported beyond Blender 4.2 LTS

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.

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 addon: visible vertices part III: bug fixes

A couple of weeks ago I presented a small addon that created a vertex group with weights that depend on the visibility of the vertex from the camera. This can be quite useful if you want to restrict particles to areas where they are actually visible, which will reduce render time and memory consumption and in a folow-up article I showed some new features. The addon was wel received but did contain a annoying bug which is fixed in this new version: vertices that were far enough behind the camera received weight as well; this is now fixed. I also disabled numerous print statements accidentally left in for debugging purposes.

Availability and usage

All functionality of this add-on plus a lot more is now available as a convenient all-in-one add-on on BlenderMarket. It comes with an extensive PDF manual and your purchase will encourage me to develop new Blender add-ons.

Version 0.0.3 of the simple add-on shown in this article is available from GitHub (right click the link to download the script somewhere then install it from Blender with File -> User Preferences -> Addons -> Install from file. Don't forget to enable the check box and don;t forget to remove any previous version from you addon directory).

Once installed it's available in weight paint mode from the Weights menu.

The addon might also be discussed in this BlenderArtists thread.

Blender Addon: Weight paint vertices visible from the active camera, part II: distance weights and more

A couple of weeks ago I presented a small addon that created a vertex group with weights that depend on the visibility of the vertex from the camera. This can be quite useful if you want to restrict particles to areas where they are actually visible, which will reduce render time and memory consumption.

The addon did take into other objects in the scene that could block the view but there was room for improvement. The first new feature in this version is that the weight of the visible vertices diminishes with the distance from the camera. For a field of grass particles you often can do with less particles at a greater distance without destroying the apparent density so this helps in cutting down the number of particles even further.

The second addition is the option to add a margin around the camera frame. Some extra particles just outside the camera view might be needed to prevent a sparse edge and to allow shadows from outside the view.

The final extra is the addition of a vertex weight edit modifier. Probably one of the lesser known modifiers, this nifty tool allows us to tweak vertex weights after the are calculated. The addon itself for example decreases the weight linearly with distance but if you want it to fall off in a different way this can be done quite easily by tweaking the curve in the modifier.

All these new options are on by default and the addon even makes sure the vertex weight modifier is visible in the properties panel just to draw some attention to it.

Example

The image below shows the generated weights falling of with the distance to the camera and with some extra margin selected:

Availability and usage

All functionality of this add-on plus a lot more is now available as a convenient all-in-one add-on on BlenderMarket. It comes with an extensive PDF manual and your purchase will encourage me to develop new Blender add-ons.

Version 0.0.2 of the simple add-on shown in this article is available from GitHub (right click the link to download the script somewhere then install it from Blender with File -> User Preferences -> Addons -> Install from file. Don't forget to enable the check box).

Once installed it's available in weight paint mode from the Weights menu.

The addon might also be discussed in this BlenderArtists thread.

Blender Addon: Weight paint vertices visible from the active camera

When working with particles it is often a waste of resources to distribute the particles outside the area visible from the camera. Fortunately the particle distribution can be controlled by a vertex group but weight painting the visible area by hand is a bit cumbersome. I therefore created a simple script that offers the option to paint the vertices of a mesh in the active vertex group with a weight of one if they are visible from the camera and zero otherwise. With a toggle switch you can select whether objects in the scene should be taken into account as well.

Availability and usage

All functionality of this add-on plus a lot more is now available as a convenient all-in-one add-on on BlenderMarket. It comes with an extensive PDF manual and your purchase will encourage me to develop new Blender add-ons.

The simple add-on presented in this article is available from GitHub (right click the link to download the script somewhere then install it from Blender with File -> User Preferences -> Addons -> Install from file. Don't forget to enable the check box).

Once installed it's available in weight paint mode from the Weights menu as shown below:

Simply select the mesh you want to paint, switch to weight paint mode and click Weights -> Visible Vertices. It will adjust the weights of the active vertex group and if the mesh hasn't got one, a new vertex group will be added. If you toggle the Full Scene option (in the VisibleVertices tab of the toolbar, you might need to press control-T to show it) objects in the scene might block the view as well as shown in the image below, where a cube and a sphere are shown in wireframe mode to reveal that blocked portions of the plane have been assigned a weight of zero.

The add-on was presented in this BlenderArtists thread.