MBE in Blender 0.9.9

HI!
News on Material by Element in Blender .263a:

• Assign to Subobjects: assign to group of linked polygons inside an object
• Assign to Polygons: assign to single polygons
• Fill slots: fill active object's material slots with all material from selected list
• improved UI
• docstrings for operators and functions

feel free to use it, modify it and  including operators in your scripts.

DOWNLOAD!

Screenshot:

Thank you,

ciao!

Pietro

MaterialByElement - rewritten and updated!

11. June 2012 - Berlin


Sorry for the delay,
I've been really busy because I'm working between Milano and Berlin and it's no
simple setting up two different workspaces...


Anyway: I've finally rewritten Material by Element addon in order to be lighter
and more concentred on less tasks. And it's working!


Now, let's see how it works:
you've got two boxes in UI that relate to "material list" and "material"
management; the first menu selector is to choose current working list: it finds
them into the scene through a custom property (bpy.types.Materials.mbe).
This property is added to the scene if not found: its default value is "default
list" (really!?!)
There's a label that shows you which list is active (due to menu issue: check
TODO below) and two buttons: the former selects all objects with a material
belonging to current list applyied, the latter assigns to current selected
objects random list's material.
In the second box you can manage single material:
- "list" property assigns current material to a list ('default list' for
NONE). Just type in list's name.
- remove unused, select orphans and clear slot are the same as in the
previous version


Example:
I want to create the same rooftiles as before (I'm building rooftiles since
August 2011...); take the first object, create material and assing it to a new
list; take the second, assign the material just created, make it unique, modify
something to get a different material. Do this for six, seven times. Ok, now
select all you rooftiles object, select correct working list a click "Assign".
If you want to add new material to collection just assign it to list, select all
objects with first button and reassign all.
With the new 'mbe' property you can use different names, beacuse addon doesn't
care about names now.


What you said? Ok, ok... I understand: I'm upgrading a script and it holds at
least an half than previous version's functions... Du hast recht!
But I don't use that functions and I think that them make it less usable.
Anyway, I'm planning to integrate them as a 'plus' into the script, so you won't
have thousands buttons that you don't use.


DOWNLOAD LINK:
material by element - 0.9.7.tar.gz


ChangeLog (0.9.7):
 - the addon is now splitted into 3 files; to install it, simply unzip
'material_by_element.xxx.tar.gz' into you  addon folder and activate it in user
preferences/addon
 - you cannot generate new materials with random diffuse: this is beacuse in my
everyday work I saw that I never use it. And with cycles it's bettere setting up
every material each one.


TODO:
 - let list selector update itself as soon as you choose
 - identify 'subobject' quickly (quite difficult, please refer to blenderartist
thread: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?256937-Get-list-of-selected-vertices-segment-polys-without-looping-the-entire-geometry

I wish to give my thanks to:
blenderartists.org forum - CoDEmanX, TrumanBlending, kgeogeo, batFINGER
Thomas Larsson - "Code snippets. Introduction to scripting with Blender
2.5x."
Mark Pilgrim - "Dive into Python"
Witold Jaworski - "Programming Add-ons for Blender 2.5"
http://blenderpython.blogspot.de/
Blender 2.5x official documentation (www.blender.org)

...sorry if I forgot someone, blender community is really wide!



Cheers,
Pietro

Material by Element - Blender 2.6 addon - Tutorial

CAD on Linux: a case study

Warning: this review is currently "work in progress". I'm updating it.


Hi folks, I'm currently working on a little task (some plants 2.5D, you can see some of them on my flickr portfolio http://www.flickr.com/photos/pietrograndi/sets/72157622248043397/).
Actually I rarely accept this kind of work, but I thought this could be an hard test for CAD on my linux laptop for a rainy Sunday :-)
So, let's test it.


Input files format: Autocad 2012 DWG
Converted to DXF 2007 with Autocad WS on Chrome - Linux Ubuntu 11.10 x64




FreeCad http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/free-cad/index.php?title=Main_Page

• no DWG support
• ok DXF support
• crash on a 1.6Mb DXF
• unable to use it, I think it's the worst cad I've used on Linux

LibreCad http://librecad.org/cms/home.html

• no DWG support
• ok DXF support
• crash on a 1.6Mb DXF
• unable to use it, too slow

QCad http://www.ribbonsoft.com/en/

2.0.5-free version

• no DWG support
• ok DXF support
• it works, but I'm a registered user: why couldn't I use the commercial version???

QCad http://www.ribbonsoft.com/en/

3rc2 - commercial version

• unable to run (tgz and bin packages)
• error: ./qcad-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libGLU.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
• I've buyed it in 2011 and use it on windows 
• in the official forum this issues are "Discussion moved to bugtracker: "  and of course, nothing changes.

• UPDATE:
• I have to apologize with Ribbonsoft: on their website I've found this solution: "Ubuntu 11.04 64bit requires package "ia32-libs" to be installed."
• installing "ia32-libs" through Ubuntu Software Center solved the issue
• Ok DWG support - Autocad 2012 - VERY GOOD!

At the moment I'm working on QCad 3rc5, commercial version.

As soon as I'll terminate my works I'll post an update. I usually use it on Windows.


here's a screenshot:

UPDATE:
Finally I've found QCad really useful and reliable: for about 30€ you got a good software. Obviously, you won't think to substitute Autocad, but for a 3D artist who use CAD only for cleaning and export purposes is the best choice in my opinion. It's just a bit slow in viewport but not so bad.


note on other products:
LibreCad and FreeCad were unusable for my work.
I've tryed Draftsight on Windows and I think it's one of the best but I was unable to find it for Linux 64 (can someone suggest me were I can find it?) and it's not free for commercial use.
AutocadWS is really cool and free but it's good only for opening and converting DWG files.
I wish to test BricsCad but anyway it's too expensive.
BRL-CAD: I'd like to have the time to compile and test it. Maybe in the future...

Pietro

Reel 2012 - Pietro Grandi - 3D Artist

And finally I got it :-)

My showreel 2012...

pietro

ObjectMaterialTool - 1.2

Hi,
I've updated my utility for 3D Studio Max.
For the in-depth description I suggest you to read my ScriptSpot page: ObjectMaterialTool 1.2


Here's a simple presentation:

I've developed this tools in order to go fast with UV Mapping in shading stage of my work, but I added some selection tools and a pair of button to work with vrayproxies.


You can download the script here:
download OMT 1.2


I hope that this could be usefull to you as it is for me!
Pietro