It now also loads textures that end in _ambient_occlusion (if present). This suffix is of course configurable in the user preferences, just like all other suffixes.
Got this idea from Substance Designer which offers an option to sample a whole palette of colors from a reference image for their gradient node. Now you can do the same for Blender's color ramp node. With a color ramp node selected, just go to the Node menu and select Color Ramp Picker. An eye dropper will appear and you can sample from anywhere within your Blender window by clicking and dragging. Unfortunately it is not possible to sample outside the Blender window so you should have your reference image loaded in Blendeś uv-image editor.
I have also made a small video that illustrates the proces:
Availability
You can download the add-on from GitHub. (click right on the Raw button and save the python file anywhere you like and then in Blender select File->User preference, Add-ons, Install from file... Don't forget to enable the add-on as well after installing it.)
If you would like to write add-ons yourself, you might want to take a look a my books on BlenderMarket.
Alternative
After publication I learned about a similar and much more versatile tool to generate (and sample) gradients. Check this BlenderArtists thread to learn more.
If you select the Similar sub menu when in vertex edit mode Blender already offers a few options to extend your current selection of vertices.
And although useful I frequently find myself in a situation where the available options are not sufficient. Especially in hard edge modeling of objects with identical sub parts I often want to be able to select vertices that not just share the same number of faces but where the these shared faces have something else in common. For example in the object shown below we have two different collections of bumps but the is no way to select just all the spiky tips in one go.
The simple add-on I present here fills this gap: it checks not only if vertices have the same number of surrounding faces but also whether the average angle between the face normals and the vertex normals is similar. This will allow you to distinguish between flat and spiky. The amount of similarity can be tweaked to allow for round-off errors or non smooth meshes.
Availability and usage
After downloading, installing and enabling the add-on from GitHub, the new selection option is available in vertex edit mode from the Select -> Select_similar -> Neighborhood
Goods news for cost conscious Blenderheads: from november 25th - november 28th Blender Market will host the yearly Black Friday - Cyber Monday sale!
I will participate will all my products, including my new IDMapper add-on. So if you want to save 25% on WeightLifter, SpaceTree, IDMapper (video) or one of my books, head over to my shop on Blender Market this weekend. Of course many other creators will be participating as well so you might want to shop around a bit more :-)
[For Europeans: remember Blender Market runs on Chicago time, so don't start shopping too early next Friday :-) ]
it's always exiting to announce a new product on Blender Market and today I am pleased to announce IDMapper.
IDMapper is a Blender add-on that lets you create a vertex color layer that can be used as an ID-map by texture paint tools like Substance Painter.
When creating textures for models you often want to reduce the actual number of textures, for example because your GPU can only handle a limited number of textures or maybe simply because juggling a large number of textures for a single model is such a hassle.
Whatever your motivation, texture painting software lets you apply different materials to a texture with ease but you still need to identify areas. An ID-map makes it very simple to apply a material to faces that have a certain color, often by letting you pick a color from the ID-map with an eye-dropper tool.
You will still need to create the vertex color layer that can be used as an ID-map and that's where IDMapper can help.
The first thing it offers are powerful heuristics to assign a unique vertex color to regions consisting of related faces. What is considered related can be tweaked interactively and any resulting distinct regions with very similar geometry can still be assign the same vertex color, simplifying for example the assignment of colors in hard-ops modelling in situations where your mesh contains repeated features like handles or bolts.
The second feature is an operator that acts like a new face paint mode. Instead of applying blended colors to vertices in a painterly manner as with Blender's vertex paint mode, this operator keeps colors uniform across a face, something often desirable when assign materials to mesh parts. It also lets you assign new colors to colored regions and resize or smooth these regions interactively.
And finally it offers some convenience functions to combine different vertex color layers and copy vertex color layers from one mesh to another, probably more high poly, mesh.
A short video showcasing the main features is available on Youtube:
it's becoming a tradition and it is a good one: many products on Blender Market will carry a discount of 20% during the Blender Conference [28 - 30 October].
Of course I will participate all my products so if your were thinking of getting some nice asset or add-on this might be the perfect time.
