Trimflow is a Blender (3.5 - 4.3) add-on designed to add repeating patterns like ornaments or stitches to objects in a non-destructive way. It is very similar in approach to Substance Painter’s Path tool, but utilizes trims instead of brushes.
Main features:
Create decals from trims / trim sheets using curves
Non-destructive, easy to create, easy to adjust
Bake placed trim decals with the integrated baking tool
Can use trims with ‘Head’ and ‘Tail’ at their ends
Store mapping information in JSON files for quick and easy pattern loading / swapping
Powered by GeometryNodes
Custom UI with many extra features (the Modifiers panel is not needed at all)
Example projects included + detailed documentation
Would this work fine under 3.4?
It looks really good and i would love to try it out but i have to many addons to switch from 3.4 so any chances for demo version?
As it is, it will very likely not work with 3.4 because the node tree uses features that were added with 3.5. Those could be replaced with some (hopefully minor) drawbacks. I’ll look into it.
I made a version that is compatible with 3.4. I will add it once I did a little bit more testing and updated the documentation accordingly.
Going lower than 3.4 would require me to do some further changes on the included example projects. I’ll have to see about that…
Trimflow is now also available at Blender Market with 25% off!
Coming soon with the next update: a little tool (I’m tempted to say ‘one click’ but I guess it will be 4 or 5 in the end…) for baking placed trims into a mask. Super simple to use, independent from current material settings and it is also able to handle overlapping decals.
I think this will be a great addition to Trimflow because baking the trims with Blender’s native tools has always been a little downer before. This will be much easier and faster.
I’m about to finish the baker. This tool basically enables a new way of working with Trimflow that is easier and probably more practical for most users than the all-non-destructive method (which will still be an option, of course).
Normal map trims can be used on trim decals for Eevee / Cycles rendering.
As for baking though, unless your UVs are absolutely even and free of rotations, normal map trims will not bake correctly. So my advice would be to turn that normal map into a grayscale height/bump map and bake that.
I was looking at this video https://youtu.be/LN0do5rEK8g?t=8 (between minute 0:06 and 0:14) it looks like the trims do a real-time normal map engraving effect, so those trims are not tangent/object normal map but grayscale so it bake them correctly?
Bought it ! Looking forward to play with it and report back. It’s really cheap actually, especially the studio liscence. Great to see creators who really try to make their work so accessible
What a fantastic tool. I’ve done this sort of work in Zbrush, but using temporary UVs and a bit of back and forth. This looks like a really nice workflow though.
Have you got any plans to add features to turn the decals to geometry, or allow displacement sculpting, rather than just map baking? Or I suppose you could apply the generated height map as a geometry displacement map.
Thanks! Using the trims / decals to directly drive displacement on the target object is actually one of the things on my list. In its current state, Trimflow pretty much corresponds to my personal needs which is getting masks / patterns into Substance Designer and creating textures there, hence the focus on baking. This works nicely but when it comes to height maps and displacement, I’d actually prefer to displace geometry inside Blender without baking maps first.
