DECALmachine



The custom decal creator is awesome- Really allows you to form find without worrying about topology at all. Really makes Blender an awesome tool for industrial design.
This is the underlying mesh and the overlaid decals quickly add detail and believability

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Outstanding! Wonderful surfacing, your ID background is obvious :slight_smile: Thanks for sharing!

Panel decal refinements.

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Nice addition of the ribbed gaps. It would be good to have a panel gap with chamfers (in addition to the current filleted edges)

Have you tried paneling01_03? It’s very hard, very chiseled though.

I have few issues with DECALmachine and I think here is the best place to asking for help instead a private message.

  1. I didn’t managed to create a rounded, not square custom decal, because all custom decals I’ve made are squares. How can I do that?
  2. I didn’t found any info about how to create text / image decal. Can you tell me how can I create one or this is an up coming feature?

@Georjack

I didn’t found any info about how to create text / image decal. Can you tell me how can I create one or this is an up coming feature?

The instructions are in the file “Readme.html” located in the directory:
Blender / 2.78 / scripts / addons / DECALmachine / assets / create

Excerpts instructions:

  • Instant Panel Decal creation will follow soon.
  • Also, for info decals, follow the batch approach, even if you have just one decal.

BATCH DECAL CREATION - externally baked, bulk decal creation

  • bake your maps and put them into the batch folder
  • open DECAL_create.blend file and run the script

To make this work flawlessly, make sure to follow this naming scheme:
%decalname_%texturetype.png

  • INFO decals require a color map, wich can be transparent

Hoping to help you …:slight_smile:

Thanks for the headsup- Yes that works very well.

Some other profiles that you may consider

1: Drafted Groove. Angling the walls helps pull parts out of tooling (machines that manufacture molded parts) and catches light nicely. Scales up nicely
2: Chamfered groove: Running a bevel along the top of the groove- There is usually a flat at the bottom of the panels- either a gap for sheet metal parts on cars or a hard geometric bottom for the tooling to push off on.
3: Positive panels: These feather down to the nominal starting surface- so could be used for bezels around buttons or features like that- Non blended transitions would be cool.
4: Positive Panel with inset groove- found in many waterproof and ruggedized parts- a seal is usually squeezed between the two parts.



Other panels to consider: Stitching would be AWESOME with this workflow if you could create an option.
Would be great for seats, leather parts etc:Great in automotive dashes.

Other thoughts- Since the workflow is somewhat material dependent could you have a browser of materials that work well out of the box- metals plastics clear etc: OR panels and decals that only have the normal effect?

Keep it up machin3!

This will be a moot point once the baker comes out- but it will provide a more satisfying out of the box experience.

@FreeAccess, Thank you!
Now, I’m still curios for my first question, about 3D decals with transparency.

http://i.imgur.com/9PFrwN6.gif
those damn decals… haha best tool… ever/

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@Georjack

I didn’t managed to create a rounded, not square custom decal, because all custom decals I’ve made are squares. How can I do that?

Your question lacks precision !
If you look at the different textures used for decals, you will see that many textures are not square . . :confused:

Here the background is “transparent” . . .


When to wait for the rapid creation of Assets?

Decal bake from geometry is already in 1.3. It is pretty damn rapid.

As said @parel . . . the creation of decals function relatively quickly.

In version 1.3c, shortcut [Ctrl + Shit + Alt + D] works well for creating “decals01” and “decal02”.
These decals are then used directly in your scene.

Let’s leave some time @ MACHIN3 to “debugger” and “improve” his addon.
In view of the images they post, version 1.4 promises to be even better :slight_smile:

@FreeAccess, I will wait, but I thought that I have some troubles and I didn’t understand how works this addon.

DECALmachine 1.3.5 is out.

Some of the things in the trailer you’ll now, if you’ve used one of the previous 1.3 releases. But 1.3 was a bit of a silent release and it was a bit bumpy in regards to the PIL dependency. A few windows users had issues with PIL despite following the installation instruction. I’m happy to say that this is solved now and the crux was a missing installation of ‘Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 2015’.

There’s a lot of good stuff and refinement in 1.3.5, so enjoy. I’m going to focus on exporting for 1.4 from now on.

I must try the latest versions so dont know if my request is already accomplished or not: could you include a heightmap texture output from a decal baking? I mean the traditional heightmap in grayscale flavor, for those guys who wanna make’n’use alpha/texture/brushes inside apps like Substance Painter.

@Tosky

There is a traditional greyscale heightmap, it is in the blue channel of the ao_curv_height texture. iirc though you can just use the normal map for the stamp in Substance Painter.