Sample artwork with ProWood shaders

I started playing around with Karl Andreas Gross' ProWood Shader pack and after some twiddling around I must say I like it:

In this example scene (a scene from Chocofur) I used the beech preset material for the chair (the chair is also from Chocofur. Note that I dropped the bundled textured material and replaced it by the ProWood procedural material). I picked the colors to match and upped the brightness and the reflectivity a bit to get the varnished look of the steam-pressed plywood of the chair. The books were generated by the book wizard cover generator.

For the floor (generated with my floorboard add-on) I used the material preset that is included in the shader pack specifically for the add-on, in this case oak. I just changed the colors. I had to changed the profile in bevel settings of the floor to 0.69 to prevent strange shadows. That has nothing to do with the shaders but everything with the geometry of the planks my add-on is generating, so it might be a good idea to make this the default in future versions.

floorboard add-on: a commercial shader with specific support

My free floorboards add-on has proven to be quite popular and now even a professional shader writer, Karl Andreas Groß, has created a wood shader collection that includes specific settings for use with the add-on. His shaders are available on BlenderMarket and I hope to try them out myself soon.

The floorboard add-on itself can be downloaded from GitHub.

WeightLifter add-on: new features

A new version of the WeightLifter add-on (available on BlenderMarket) adds some functionality based on user feedback. Besides some bug fixes you can now:

• use an arbitrary reference axis in Height en Slope modes,
• restrict the range of calculated values interactively, and
• control the size of the patches when assigning random values to faces.

A tutorial showing this new functionality is available on YouTube:

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: