What is Pinguin?

Pinguin is a Blender add-on that allows you to create meshes from your image cutouts (currently works only with png format images). By using this feature, you can greatly streamline your post-production workflow, as it eliminates the need to manually adjust the placement, scaling, lighting, and shadowing of your cutouts in external software.

Installation

Go to “Edit” in the Top Bar and choose “preferences.” The preferences window will open. On the left side are several tabs. Select the tab labeled “Add-Ons”.From the preferences window, click the “Install” button on the top right. Navigate to the location on your computer where the stored .zip file for the add-on is located. Select the file. Click Install Addon.

When you toggle the checkbox in the addon menu It may take a couple minutes to activate, this happens because the addon will check if some python modules are updated, if not, it will install them. Don't panic!

After the activation a new panel called Pinguin will show up in the 3d Viewport.

How to Use

Cutout to mesh panel

Create: After selecting your settings press this button!

Directory: Pick the folder where the cutouts you want to convert are stored. The addon will only process files that are in png format.

Vertical: Toggle to generate meshes in an upright position.

Holes: Toggle to generate meshes with holes in them, if it is turned off the silhouette will be created and the holes will be managed through the material alpha.

Mesh Height: Choose a desired height and the meshes will be generated to match it after converting your images.

Fast / Detailed: This picks the algorithm that interprets the contours of the cutout. 95% of the time the fast algorithm will perform as well as the detailed one, producing a mesh with just the right amount of vertices to capture the silhouette of the image in less time! However, in some specific cases, some edges may shrink noticeably from the original contour, for these occasions, you can activate the detailed mode which will solve the inconsistency.

Above meshes created with withouth holes checkbox toggled, below meshes created with the holes checkbox toggled.

Face Towards panel

Target Object: Pick the object you want to orient your selection towards

Face Towards: Selected objects will rotate towards the target object in the XY plane 

Tilt: Selected objects will incline towards the target object. Be aware it will only work if the selected objects are already facing toward the object in the XY plane.

Before you buy

Please be aware before you buy that Pinguin does not include cutout samples ,we encourage you to download them in platforms such as MrCutout or Skalgubbar (free).

Pinguin is dependent on a part of the Blender API. This means that future updates of Blender could possibly break it. In case this happens we will do our best to solve it ASAP.