Resource Roundup July 2024 - Art Squirrel

This months resource roundup includes a few resources and news I’ve come across that might be useful for digital artists.

Resources

I tried out Spud Tablet by SadWhale Studios the other week on one of my videos (using OBS to record). It encouraged me to draw and paint a hand which was a cool exercise to do. I probably won’t use it on every video I make but I think it adds a bit of a human touch to digital painting.

BrushFlow – 3D Normal Map Painting is a tool for Blender 4.2 to help paint tangent normal maps. It is developed by Alan Wyatt.

News

Since I last used it Relief Maker has added a transparency option for PNG / TIF export, circular / oval relief types and Mac Support.

Tea Conceptor is at version 6 which introduces several new features including the ability to generate object variants and boolean brushes.

Moho 14 had a really awesome update which introduces several useful features you can read about on their website here.

VGC Animation has a new update on development so far.

PixelCNC has released an update and has a summer sale on at the moment. I like the new simulation wood shaders, I’ve been trying to get my head around generating toolpaths so that I can test my heightmaps work OK.

Black Ink by Bleank has released an update which introduces a Radial Symmetry operator and lots of bug fixes.

Interesting Videos

I had experimented with this in Blender after reading about it on a forum last year but I think Michael Bridges explains and demonstrates how to make MatCap shaders work in Cycles for Blender very well in his video. I think this is a useful technique if you want to then bake MatCap textures for a model, perhaps to create a base for further painting or to create PBR textures out of MatCaps.

I wanted to find a way to render multiple objects as separate PNGs faster in Blender a few months ago to test something for an animation and I came across this video by Mike Lundahl. He has made an add-on that helps with the process.