There’s any plans about the bevel shader? F.e. use it when you bake a proper decal from a geometry without real bevels, or baking it into your final normal map along with the projected decals on your subject.
I’ve had my eye on this add-on for a bit and I feel I could use it my workflow now.
I see that 2.0 is on the horizon… would a purchase of 1.9 upgrade to 2.0?
And are there any “Black Friday” sales on from your distributors?
Thanks,
Tim
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Historically updates have always been free, and that won’t change for the 2.0 release, so all exsiting customers will get it for free.
DECALmachine is on sale right now on Blender Market.
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Will there be a discount on gumroad?
thanks!
I will make a winter flash sale on gumroad in two months or so, like I did in summer this year.
If you want a black friday style discount on gumroad right now, you should email me.
Blender Market goes to the effort to do these platform-wide sales 2 or 3 times a year, and gumroad doesn’t. So I don’t want to cut into their sales, by doing big sales on a competing platform at the same time.
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That’s a great deal… just purchased!
Thanks, and I’m looking forward to 2.0.
Tim
Heya Machin3,
Where’s the whole UE4 thing at?
Last I checked there was some issue with the decals displaying depth in UE4…
Hi, great addon, only problem I have is how to create a central storage for decals on an external drive/server as I can be working on anyone of three different computers. I tried changing the location in the preferences ie create a folder called DECALS inside my shared Blender Assets folder… but it just copied every existing folder in that directory into a new folder in that directory. Im missing something somewhere but I cant quite figure it out.
If you change the decal assets location, DECALmachine will copy the contents of its own assets/Decals/ folder to the new location. All you need to do then, is save your preferenecs.
Instead of changing the decal assets location, you can also put a symlink in place of it.
What issue are you encountering? And why are you surprised DECALmachine copies its decals to the new location? Please answer these via email, by filing a support request as outlined here.
Maybe its a Mac thing but it also copies everything else in that folder into the new ‘decal library’ folder. ie my ‘assets’ folder contains folders for, ‘models’, ‘textures’, ‘bump maps’ etc etc and I want a folder in the ‘assets’ folder along side those called ‘decals’ … but what I end up with is a folder called ‘decal library’ in the ‘assets’ folder, but all the libraries are outside of it as well as being copied along with the other folders into a new folder inside the ‘decal library’ folder, so I end up with duplicates of everything. I will email you a support request later when I finish work.
I’ve actually been looking at decal support in Unreal for some time now so maybe I can fill you in.
As far as I’m aware the following are now supported by the engine with decals:
- Metallic
- Parallax
To get what I’d consider “full” decal support I think we’d need the following:
- Multi-opacity (Currently sitting in this PR which has been backlogged for the whole year so far: https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/5463)
- AO (I haven’t seen any plans for it
)
If you were starting a project you could probably just fork the engine with the changes for multi-opacity, or fake the AO using base color, but I’m not sure about both at the same time - I think you’d want the AO going through the same multi-opacity channel as the normals rather than the actual base color, but I believe that wouldn’t be possible if you were faking it.
Aight, I just gave Tim Hobson a poke about it on the UE4 forums.
Fingers crossed for 4.24 eh?
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Aight… done my good deed for the day:
https://github.com/EpicGames/UnrealEngine/pull/5463#issuecomment-561124381
Looks like multi opacity will be in for UE4 4.24…
Will that unlock enough for decal machine stuff to work in UE4 now, or is still some deep magic that needs to be done to stuff we do in blender to get it working in UE4?
It’s been 2 years since I opened Unreal. Will check all this when I have have atlasing finished.
Note that with trimsheets, you won’t even need deferred decals. You basically just cut the decals into the parent objects mesh. I’ve got a tool for that. You then unwrap the decals/trims in the first uv channel, and the object as a whole in the 2nd(the lightmap channel). This is a really cool approach and basically runs on any engine/platform.
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I wrote my own Decal System for UE4! Support also POM:
The Decals are from my Decal Pack(s). → https://gumroad.com/mrradioactiv
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I use the first channel for the whole model and the second for the decals. Work too (picture above).
POM is a problem with UE4 and decals - if you dont be careful enough you get a freeze or a crash.
What’s your source on that 4.24 info? I don’t see anything from Epic employees (GitHub says everybody with the repo access is a part of EpicGames which is confusing)
I haven’t seen a lot about your trims workflow, and I’m excited to see more, but part what entices me about decals is their non-destructive nature.
I assume a trims workflow is more destructive?
Either way, having an option that works in Unreal at all will still be a plus for a lot of people.
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Ah, didn’t realise that about github saying everyone in it was epic games…
v1.9.2 is out | Gumroad | Blender Market
Changelog
- fix cropping of L images for decal creation
- fix 2.82 exception when calling pie menu or quick insert
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