• Gustav

  6 months ago

  The way this node setup goes about things is genius. It's very light and relies on stylized/broken up masks. It also gives you premade tri-planar projections and un-tiler nodes to blend textures in a seamless manner. Every other material mixer is focused on heavy material blending methods and baking, that's necessary for foreground assets, but most of the time you just want a similar level of control and convenience without the performance penalty and the baking steps. I imagine they are trying to emulate Substance Painter, missing the point in regards to the level of control and focusing on the fidelity of the materials.

  The fact that this developer thought of blending/masking the texture paint is genius, you can just paint with with Blender's pixelated jaggy brushes and this node will break it into a nice fuzzy texture giving you a great result with direct control without dealing with unintuitive setups. Not only for backgrounds, I see myself using this as a nice base for hand painted assets with the other more known layer based texture painting addons that are out there.

  Another unexpected consequence is how convenient it is for High-poly texturing. I've been working with a lot of heavy, multi million poly assets from sculpting with clearly defined vertex colors that were baked on sculpting software (Ambient occlusion, curvature and base color all in RGB vertex color data) and I always had to manually set the attributes to individual materials. But with this I can just blend them nicely in a single material setup without doing much while keeping the option of changing the blending in the future. This is incredibly important and particular because since Unreal came to the scene with nanite, even though I'm not an Unreal user, it has pushed a lot of other applications to go a bit overboard with the functionality and usability of high-poly assets. Since then I've seen that being able to preserve the original sculpts in a scene is just more convenient in certain situation, and the method of remeshing and baking displacements is not suitable for stylized workflows or when you need to realize the geometry in the viewport, at which point you are just dealing with the same original geometry.

  Taking this into consideration, if the material of a high poly asset is heavy to manipulate (like traditional multi material blending methods do with the most popular texturing addons out there), it will become an annoyance well deep into a project. If Blender could handle assets like Houdini does by offloading them from memory and keeping them just in disk cache, that would be perfect, but given the circumstances, being able to handle these assets with very light material setups is a godsend.

  Only thing that would make it even more convenient is that if the developer made another node group just for this color masking method

  It's just too convenient! Anyone that's still on the fence should just buy this

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  Quentin

  5 months ago

  Thanks SO MUCH for this detailed review, I am very happy that you found these tools useful.
  And you totally got the point of it: Having the flexibility to have very lightweight setup or go full on and have a super complex blending of textures. All while keeping control over what you are doing.

  Just curious about your suggestion, feel free to send me a message so we can talk about it!
• Erik Halsey

  6 months ago

  Amazing tools! These ARE the droids I've been looking for.

  I think this product could very easily be underestimated. It's crazy many features are packed into this very reasonable price.

  It's clear these are made by a production artist who understands the importance of flexibility, simplicity and efficiency. Just a pleasure to use. Nice work!

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  Quentin

  6 months ago

  Thanks you so much for your rating. It goes straight to my heart as it really is what I am trying to do while making these!

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