DECALmachine

Coding Released Scripts and Themes
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851

Pre-Packing panel decals, means they are packed before everything else, and stretched across the entire canvas.

This closes the loop and means an Atlas created from solo decals in DECALmachine, can in turn be used as a Trim Sheet in DECALmachine. Both are now the same thing.

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852

Stretching panel decals across the entire atlas isn’t ideal for panels with detail, so you can also choose to repeat those.

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853

Hi Emrebel, sorry for the late reply.
You just extract the archive inside the DECALMachine addon folder. The rest of the folder hierarchy is already set-up inside the archive.

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854

If you provide a zip instead, people can import it directly from the DECALmachine prefs too,
as long as you zip only the actual decal library, that is.

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855

Didn’t realize that, thanks for the info. I usually install/set up addons manually, so these things sometimes slip past my observation :slight_smile:
Thanks for the info!

856

See https://youtu.be/3aCe2KsPQJw?t=138

857

Hello Machine !
I was wondering if you had a public roadmap concerning your addons ?
Using MeshMachine too, i find that the hook, array plugs etc are really useful, and i was wondering whether a such feature was planned for DecalMachine (or a 9-patches system ?)

Thanks for all your work !

1 Like
858

Here is how to use one or multiple atlases, either the supplied ones, or your own ones (see previous videos how an atlas is created), to get ready for export.
If you have the same decals in multiple atlases, the first atlas in the list is prioritized, hence the option to sort them.
This process is fully reversible and supports decals you may have joined.

6 Likes
859

I was thinking about an align tool, which could to array and other things. I may look into it for 2.1. Same for hook-liike stretching.

Please elaborate.

860

Simple but effective tools to keep on top of complex scenes.

2 Likes
861

9-patch system is used for UI element such as frames and basically stuff that can have modulable size.
NinePatchExample

The in-between pars could be stretch or repeated.
Of course, taking exemple on this image is not really convincing, but we could have a complex and different part on each corner as well as the straight parts and the middle.

This is in my opinion not an absolutely must-have feature, but if some day you feel bored… Though i’m pretty sure it will not happen that fast with MeshMachine on the road and stuff :stuck_out_tongue:

Anyway, all those videos just make helps keeping me sane :wink:

1 Like
862

Thanks for the explanation, looks like a fun challenge!

863

Blender Market has started its spring sale just now!

BMSPRING20

864

So here’s a preview of the export workflow when using decal atlases.

  1. Use Atlas (make decals use atlas UVs)
  2. (optionally) automatically join decals per atlas
  3. save individual or customizable channel packed atlas textures to a location of your choice.

Done.

  1. Split decals and restore original uvs, if you want.
5 Likes
865

Batch Insert allows for bringing in entire decal libraries at once.
This is especially useful in context of atlas creation, to be able to add one or multiple decal libraries to an atlas.

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866

So that’s how future looks like.

1 Like
867

I need to ask a question, so I’ll do it here at risk of getting my head bitten off:

I’ve got a military aircraft model with a uv’d mesh and a camo texture painted on it, and I tried using strips to create aircraft panel edges all over the fuselage (with bolts running along them). I figured out how to make a custom strip material and how to switch materials from the built in strip ones, but I couldn’t get the albedo in my custom material to match the (uv’d) texture in the underlying material.

Is this doable in 1.9?

868

Materal matching works for material parameters, not textures. This is mentioned on the front page of the docs, as well as on the page of the Match tool, see https://machin3.io/DECALmachine/docs/ and https://machin3.io/DECALmachine/docs/match_material/

That said, it is possible to manually “texture match”, see https://machin3.io/DECALmachine/docs/init_generated_uvs/ as well as https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VxAZMfEBdg and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBnBcYSjk9c

This last example using a UVed texture works by having a data transfer mod, transfer UVs to a second uv channel from the parent to the decal.

Automating “texture matching” like I have done for parameter based material matching, presents considerably challenges - especially when attempting to support arbitrary node trees - which I haven’t tackled yet.

2 Likes
869

DECALmachine 2.0 Decals will:

  • support emission and emission maps
  • support normal blending
  • support transmission
  • have alpha input(info decals), useful for weathering or simply making decals transparent
  • support parallax for panel decals

FWIW, all the code is done now, after 8.5 months(!!!) and I have started documentation.

15 Likes
871

:sob:

[quote=“Ruuuuuumeng, post:870, topic:688181, full:true”]
please help me! When I bake, pressing the bake button will give an error.
It says
:Traceback (most recent call last):
File “C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.81\scripts\addons\DECALmachine\operators\bake.py”, line 133, in execute
target_mask = bake_target_mask(bakescene, bakebasepath, target.name, ‘mask’, bakeimg, bakemat, margin=0, ray_distance=ray_distance)
File “C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.81\scripts\addons\DECALmachine\utils\bake.py”, line 161, in bake_target_mask
tree.links.new(emit.outputs[‘Emission’], output.inputs[‘Surface’])
AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘inputs’

location: :-1

what should I do. . :sob: