Dash
The full version of Dash is intended to let artists to build complex environments without having to navigate the Unreal Editor’s interface, working primarily in fullscreen mode in the viewport.
It provides readymade behaviors – accessible by typing natural-language search terms into a floating prompt bar – for common scene-building tasks like ‘create terrain’ and ‘apply water’, plus scattering tools for dressing environments.
As well as game development, Dash can be used for offline work: for example to create animations, visual effects projects or architectural visualizations in Unreal Engine.
You can read more about its features in this story on Dash 1.9, the current release.
Polygonflow has now updated the trial version of Dash so that artists can use part of its toolset for free indefinitely.
You can now use all of the features for free for 14 days, after which point you have access to the content browser, but not other functionality like object scattering, physics or material blending.
The change makes Dash a more fully featured free alternative to Unreal Engine 5’s native Content Browser, with support for asset tagging, and fuzzy, semantic and Boolean search.
You can read about its functionality – much of which was added in Dash 1.9, and which makes it quicker to search large collections of UE5 assets – in the online release notes.
Dash also integrates with Fab, Epic Games’ online marketplace, and comes with libraries of free IES lights and CC0 assets from Poly Haven.
Dash is compatible with Unreal Engine 5+ on Windows 10+ only.
Free licenses work in demo mode for 14 days, providing access to the full toolset; then in free mode indefinitely, providing access to the Conent Browser and AI assistant only.
https://www.polygonflow.io/try-dash
CharMorph
CharMorph is a successor to previous open-source Blender character generator MB-Lab – itself a community fork of the popular Manuel Bastioni Lab.
Both have now been discontinued: Manuel Bastioni Lab in 2018, and MB-Lab last year, with development work moving on to CharMorph following the release of MB-Lab 1.8.1.
According to the development team, CharMorph reimplements “most of MB-Lab’s features”, and uses the same base meshes and character morphs, but does not contain any of MB-Lab’s code.
CharMorph makes it possible to create custom 3D characters by starting with one of the base 3D characters included with the software and applying morphs to modify it.
The morphs have to be baked destructively before the character is rigged, although it is possible to export them in advance, making it possible to keep iterating on a character design.
It is also possible to use CharMorph to modify an existing imported 3D character, including those with different topology.
Exported characters can be rendered with Eevee, Blender’s real-time renderer, or Cycles, its main production renderer: you can find more details in the online documentation.
Although it lacks some of the features from MB-Lab, such as auto-modeling, CharMorph has a number of advantages over its predecessor, listed on the project’s GitHub page.
Key benefits include support for Rigify, Blender’s modular character rig creation system, including for facial rigs, and real-time fitting of clothing.
It is also possible to set skin and eye color directly, and displacement is done at material level rather than using the Displace modifier, making it possible to preview the effect in Eevee.
But perhaps most significantly, it is possible to use characters generated with CharMorph in any kind of commercial work, including closed-source games.
Whereas the base character from MB-Lab is licensed under an AGPL license, CharMorph has three alternative base characters with Creative Commons licenses: either CC-BY attribution licenses, or in the case of the Vitruvian character added in the latest update, a full CC0 license.
In a story on BlenderNation, the developers comment that they aim to provide character models that can compete with those from closed-source solutions like Character Creator or Daz Studio, “achieving the level of quality seen in blockbuster movies and next-gen video games”
As well as the Vitruvian character, CharMorph 0.4 features a number of other improvements, including the option to download characters or update the add-on directly within Blender.
The development team says that it now plans to extend the software beyond humanoid characters, making it possible to create animals and other creatures.
CharMorph is compatible with Blender 4.4. It’s a free download.
The software is open-source: the source code is available under a GPLv3 license. The individual base characters are available under a range of licenses: the new Vitruvian character is CC0.
https://blendercharacterproject.org/
https://github.com/Upliner/CharMorph
Yeti 5.2
The update adds two new nodes for resolving intersection issues: Plume, for resolving feather-feather and feather-geometry intersections, and Resolve, for fiber intersections.
Other new features include cross-platform file path mapping, following a similar convention to the Arnold renderer, and a new C++ API for evaluating Yeti graphs.
The previous 5.1 updates were primarily bugfix releases, and to add support for the current versions of Maya and the supported renderers.
Yeti 5.2 is available for Maya 2024+, running on Windows 10+, and RHEL and Rocky Linux 8.5.
Indie licenses – one perpetual node-locked workstation licence and one render licence – are available to artists with revenue under $100,000/year, and cost $329.
Studio licenses – one perpetual floating workstation licence, plus five render licences – cost $699. Further packs of five render licences cost $399.
https://docs.peregrinelabs.com/release-notes
Zen UV 5.0
New features in Zen UV 5.0 include the Zen UV Touch Tool, which makes it possible to perform common operations like moving, scaling, rotating or snapping UV islands more quickly by manipulating them directly in Blender’s UV Editor, using an intuitive-looking gizmo.
There is also a new Auto Unwrap operator, which provides a bridge to Ministry of Flat, Quel Solaar’s free standalone Windows-only UV unwrapping tool.
Workflow improvements include a new Zen Sync operator, which preserves edge and face selections when switching between working modes.
There are also new options for selecting intersecting or stretched faces, new control options in the trimsheet tools, and updates to Zen UV’s native UV unwrapping algorithm.
Zen UV 5.0 is compatible with Blender 4.0+. A single-user license costs $39. The update is free to users of version 4.x.
https://zenmastersteam.github.io/Zen-UV/latest/changelg/release_note_5.0.0/
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