Blacksmith3D-Pro Changelog

What's new in Blacksmith3D-Pro 7.0.6.0

• NEW Hair Creation and Editing tools:
• The Hair tab exposes tools for the creation and editing of hair objects for 3D characters. The hair is created and edited using a industry standard for 3D hair based on two main elements.
• A skull cap, or growth surface, which serves as a foundation for hair to grow out of.
• Flat, rectangular strands, which use a combination of transparency and color maps to give the illusion of many individual hair. A hair piece can be created from scratch, given the raw geometry used for the growth surface. Also, an existing hair piece can be edited as it is, or have additional strands added to it.
• Auto Pressure:
• For users that do not use a drawing tablet, and for creating special effects like small hairs on a surface, the Auto Pressure feature can vary the simulated pressure for each paint stroke. To create a hair effect, the Auto Pressure Midpoint may be set to a small value like 5%, to create a fatter base and a thinner tip.
• Stroke Smoothing:
• Stroke smoothing will automatically smooth out the path of the paint stroke to give a curvier effect. This will dramatically decrease "jitters" in the paint stroke that may be due to painting with a mouse or other pointing device that does not offer the natural motion like a stylus.
• Optimized Painting Speed:
• Painting speed has been optimized for overall speed, and to reduce bottlenecks/lag when applying paint strokes to multiple high resolution textures.
• Templates:
• Export and import subsets of your project using Templates. Templates can be customized specifically for your workflow. Examples of what can be stored templates.
• Complete character setups - Apply your own custom default settings for any character simply by importing the template. May include default textures, morphs, display groups, presets, etc.
• Image Map Layers - Create a template that stores only certain layers that can be reused in other projects.
• Morphs - Create templates for common morphs that will be reused often.
• Hair - Create templates for starting your hair projects, including custom growth surfaces, hair textures, etc.
• Almost anything that exists in a Blacksmith3D project can be stored and reused in a template.
• Material Sets:
• Auto-assign image maps to all materials that share the same map for standard commercial characters ( e.g. Genesis characters by DAZ, Dusk/Dawn by Hivewire3D, etc. ). So if you assign a map to the material "Face", you will be prompted to automatically assign the same map to all other materials in that set like "Lips", "Nostrils" .- Texture Transformer Version 2.0 - Texture Transformer (TTv2) has received a major upgrade. Skin textures can now be converted using cr2, duf, pz2 or mc6 files AND without having to first save the texture(s) to the original/source figure (you must still own the original/source figure for TTv2 to be able to find it in your 'runtime' path). Also, we have added batch input/source files to batch output/destination files to sub-folder paths that you specific, which is perfect for vendors updating their character packs. Finally, the TTv2 packs are now distributed as files, instead of a folder containing multiple files. This makes managing your collection much easier, and hopefully will reduce confusion when updating your software. Please remember that TTv2 is only available in the stand alone version or in Blacksmith3D PRO-7, and not available in the Standard versions. A couple of the male conversions now also include an option for anatomy transformations. However, due to the way G2 and G3 have a hip replacement, the anatomy conversions only serve as a good starting point for the texture maps and will likely need some manual touch-up in your 2d application.
• Fixed Assets - Content Management:
• Assets imported from your content libraries can now be stored as Fixed Assets in Blacksmith3D. This means that instead of saving and loading the data in every Blacksmith3D project and/or template file, they can be reloaded from their original file location instead. This makes project and template files much smaller, and faster to save. Examples of items that are good candidates for fixed assets are.
• Geometry files such as standard characters. ( e.g. Genesis characters from DAZ )
• Texture maps that are used for display, but not being edited.
• Fixed assets are especially useful when creating templates, since the template can be redistributed to other users without transferring items that may be protected by copyright, etc. The end user will need to have those fixed assets installed in their content folders.
• Photoshop ABR Import Support:
• Import ABR files to use as brush tips. Please note the following requirements.
• ABR version must be 6.1 or 6.2
• Only bitmap based brushes are supported
• Not all attributes of the brush are preserved due to compatibility reasons.
• Texture Transformer Version 2.0 (in PRO edition):
• The Texture Transformer (TTv2) has received a major upgrade. Skin textures can now be converted using cr2, duf, pz2 or mc6 files AND without having to first save the texture(s) to the original/source figure (you must still own the original/source figure for TTv2 to be able to find it in your 'runtime' path). Also, we have added batch input/source files to batch output/destination files to sub-folder paths that you specific, which is perfect for vendors updating their character packs. Finally, the TTv2 packs are now distributed as files, instead of a folder containing multiple files. This makes managing your collection much easier, and hopefully will reduce confusion when updating your software. Please remember that TTv2 is only available in the stand alone version or in Blacksmith3D PRO-7, and not available in the Standard versions. A couple of the male conversions now also include an option for anatomy transformations. However, due to the way G2 and G3 have a hip replacement, the anatomy conversions only serve as a good starting point for the texture maps and will likely need some manual touch-up in your 2d application.