1.8.0 New "Eevee Diffuse" pass & fixed activation issues introduced in 1.7.0

Features:

• Introduces a new render pass "Eevee Diffuse". This new render pass renders "what you see" when you have your viewport shading set to render preview - without further modifying your render settings. This is especially useful for when performing batch renders & is compatible with Blenders viewport compositor (if the viewport compositor is enabled in the viewport it will show in the render).

  Arguably I named this pass a little incorrectly as this pass will use whatever render engine you have set under: Properties Window > Render Properties > Render Engine.
  

Fixes issue:

• Failing to activate on first attempt, requiring you to manually go into preferences > addons > fast pbr & click the little checkbox twice to deactivate & reactivate (this was a bug introduced with 1.7.0 that I believe I never documented up until now)

Tested working on Blender 3.5.1 Release candidate from 4 11 2023, Win11

1.7.0 Render Turntables Update

Make quick turntables without the need of a proper camera setup! Supports exporting as mp4, gif, wav (though the gif quality & compression rate is horrible atm). 99% sure this new feature is the fastest way of making turntables in Blender to this date - at least thats the primary goal of it.

How to use: You can find it under 3D viewport > N > Fast >Fast Turntable Renders. From there, once you've configured the settings, position the viewport (I like just focusing on an object that I want to pivot around and then use my mousewheel to get the right distance) and finally hit the "Fast Render Turntable" button. Now you will have to click in 2 places on the screen to set the record region and the recording will start, the files will then get saved in your designated output directory.

Video demo: https://youtu.be/nlrJ_2AIcQc
https://github.com/ItsCubeTime/FastPBR/raw/main/sword.mp4 (uncompressed video output)
https://i.imgur.com/wdTyAXy.mp4 (imgur demo, imgur changed the file format & applied some compression of its own here)

In the future I would like to add support for rendering wireframe/normal/ao/clay and then fading transitioning between those in the middle of the turntable, I should probably be hiding the UI before starting the recording as well :P Currently if theres UI or another window within the record region it will get captured too.

1.6.2 Heightmap fixes

So it turns out that when adding the heightmap support I forgot to save the images in linear space - hence the heightmaps produced would not be read properly by most CGI software (and there would be a visible data loss). In addition to this the quality of the heightmaps was questionable as they were only stored in 8 bit format.

• With this release heightmap render passes are now stored in 16 bits per channel, allowing for 65535 possible height values in the produced image. Other render passes are still stored in 8 bit as thats usually whats ideal.

• fixed an issue where images would be stored in sRGB, resulting in data degradation and making the height maps unusable for many usecases.

• Added an option to invert heightmaps so that 0 means is closest to the camera/viewport and 1 is furthest from the camera/viewport.

A quick usage example showcasing how to fetch heightmap from a camera in Blender, extracting the height data & then using that to create a landscape in Unreal Engine 5:
https://youtu.be/kGkdHABi6yE

1.6.1

Fixes for FastTrimUnwrap, reduced stretching & support for non-manifold geometry

Also added a "preview size" property under FastUV - which controls the preview sizes for fastMaterialPickerPie.

1.6.0

Note

more bugfixes will be posted in a couple of minutes/hours

New Features:

This update comes with major (thousands of lines of code kind of major) update to the still new FastTrimUnwrap operator as well as a new sister operator (thats also accessible from within FastTrimUnwrap).

Its a lot of features and functionality packed into this, so I will just paste in the "instructions" for the tool here:

Instructions:
* Move your mouse horizontally to translate UVs vertically.
* Move your mouse horizontally and hold down MMB to translate UVs horizontally.
* Move your mouse horizontally and hold RMB to scale.
* Move your mouse horizontally and hold MMB and RMB to scale horizontally.
* Scroll with your mouse wheel with alt held down to rotate the trim by fine increments.
* R (press) to rotate the trim by 90 degrees.
* Z (hold) and move your mouse horizontally to shear.
* O (press) to toggle overlays. Useful if the orange lines disturb you.
* P (press) to re-use previous unwrap

* Y (press) to toggle vertical UDIM lock
* X (press) to toggle horizontal UDIM lock
* N (press) to use natural scaling - making each face island's area in UV space corespond  to its area in 3D space
* C (press) to toggle whether automatic seams for cyclic selections should be kept after unwrap
* Spacebar (press) to bring up the material picker pie menu
* M (press) to match material from active face to selected faces
* Q and E (press) to increment/decrement the selected faces material based on material slot indices of the objects in your "material source objects" collection.

If alt is held down, it instead increments/decrements the active object in your "material source objects" collection. If shifts is held they instead just increment/decrement the selected object(s) material slot indices of the currently selected faces.
* i (press) to improve the unwrap
* Pressing either 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9 will move your UVs by the amount of the number you press horizontally (or vertically if you also hold shift). It also sets the opposing axis to 0-1 space unless ctrl is held.
If you double tap any of these keys it will move your UVs to negative space. For instance pressing shift+3+3 would move your UVs so each face islands center point is within [-3, 0].

For convenience, grave accent, numpad slash & grless are alternative keys for 0 to make it more reachable.

If alt is held you will instead assign a new material to your selected faces based on the material slot indices of the active object in the "material source objects" collection. If alt+ctrl is held, you instead set the active object for the "material source objects" collection.
* WASD lets you move your UVs by 1 in any direction

* Hold Shift for finer increments on all interactive controls.
* LMB to confirm
* ESC to cancel
* H to hide/collapse this help window

And a demo video (only demonstrates some basic features, the instruction list however is complete) : https://youtu.be/CXOazuUQ_3Y

1.5.0 New trim unwrapping feature & major bug fixes

Features:

• FastUVTrim - A tool that utilizes the UV Squares addon https://github.com/Radivarig/UvSquares under the hood & gives you convenient controls to interactively position, rotate & scale your new grid. I will likely continue building on this operator in the future to give it a tad bit more features, note that not all things listed in the little help window that appears at the bottom right are implemented yet.
  See:
  https://youtu.be/RyJMHqGWqa4

Bug fixes:

• Fixed an issue where the addon would refuse to enable on any Blender version but 3.0. As I updated my personal Blender installation to Blender 3.1 earlier I noticed that I had a hard coded filepath that would prevent the addon from completing the initial setup process on any Blender version but 3.0, which has now been replaced by more dynamic code.

1.4.0

Bugfixes:

• Fixed an issue where saving files to a different hard drive than that of the one that your Blender exe is located wouldnt let the files save properly.
• Various stability improvements.

New features:

• The addon now lets you copy generic Blender & system information useful for bug reports under "Blender icon at top left" > About Blender > Fast Copy Blender And System Information to Clipboard.
  
• Minor convenience features aimed towards use with UPBGE.
  

1.3 Batch Baking, true height maps & material management tools (Pre-release) (recommended over 1.2)

This release has known bugs related to some new features, shouldn't however break anything that have been working in previous versions & there are no known issues with anything related to actual "baking".

New features:

• Baking several cameras in 1 go with support for creating a custom path key based on the camera name and automatic height adjustment based on any objects that are parented to each camera used for rendering.
• Heightmaps using Eevee's mist now bakes proper and accurate heightmaps (previous implementation was half finished and didnt really give true height), the height lows & highs are automatically adjusted based on selected objects or based on objects parented to the camera when batch baking.
• Several material management & scene manipulation tools (still in development, some of these features are half finished, hence pre-release). These include:
  • removing duplicate material slots on objects
  • removing duplicate materials in the scene (uses value comparison that checks if the materials node graphs and settings are identical)
  • Converting DecalMachin3 materials to standard Principled BSDF materials
  • Removal of redundant numbers after materials (typically generated by Blenders naming system). This is useful to run after removing duplicate materials
  • A scene processing function that can combine the above mentioned material features to process an entire scene in one go. The idea of this is to be able to offer 1 click material optimization to reduce draw calls in game engines & make sure you dont have any redundant materials in your scene.

Automates the process of installing the necessary matcaps, bugfixes 1.2.1

Features:

• The addon will now automatically install the necessary normal matcap.

Bugfixes:

• The world background now has correct 128 128, 255 color when rendering normal maps.
• Fixed an issue where rendering the normal pass wouldn't work the second time you perform a render with the addon

Also tested with Blender 3.0.0 Beta 1.

Various stability improvements and new features 1.2.0

Among other things, render normals with workbench now has full support for inverted normals, Im using a custom post process filter to automatically flip the normals where necessary to give results where if it looks correct in Eevee, it will look correct in the normal map as well.