BETA 7 Ends May 17th, 2017
Please make sure that you save any of the projects that you have been working on in Beta Pro-7 because the beta release will end on Wednesday, May 17th at 10am. Projects saved in Beta7 will work in the regular Pro-7 software that will be released on the same day.
http://blacksmith3d.com/files/Blacksmith3D-v6.9.94.0-Win.zip
http://blacksmith3d.com/files/Blacksmith3D-v6.9.94.0-Mac.zip
This is the best time to sign-up for the monthly subscription. Active subscribers will get to use version 7 FREE once it is released. Get more details on subscriptions HERE.
Get 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" .
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 Packs
Texture Transformer packs are now distributed as single files, instead of a folder containing multiple files. This makes managing your collection much easier, and reduced confusion when updating/replacing packages.
