Robin Hohni

VDM Brush Baker : Blender Add-On [Free]

Added 2023-05-07 07:13:09 +0000 UTC

This add-on is now officially part of Blender 3.6+: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/addons/baking/vdm_brush_baker.html
And available as Extension in Blender 4.2+: https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/vdm-brush-baker/

This is a small add-on that makes it easy to create VDM brushes in Blender. They can be created with one click. A new brush will be added with all relevant options set and a vector displacement map is saved near the blender file (or a 'tmp' folder if the blender file wasn't saved) The add-on won't create any preview images for these brushes. It is simply to make it easy to create the brushes.

Blender 3.5 (or later) is required

Further information:

The add-on UI can be found in the tool settings (N-panel)
New brushes are only available on the 'draw brush' in sculpt mode. It is the first tool that can be selected there.
If your brush gets cut off at the corners, you can increase the size inside the texture panel of the brush settings to 1.1 or 1.2 for each axis.
A vdm-resolution of 512 px is usually enough. Unless you have extremely detailed sculptings I'd recommend using 512 or lower. EXR files can get quite large in filesize but they preserve the form quite well even in lower resolution since the pixel values are interpolated.

If you have difficulties with the add-on, please don't hesitate to reach out. I'm happy to help. :)

Updates:

1.0.2:

Added render samples setting and increased default samples to 64 to reduce noise
Added setting for color depth (16 reduces the file size of EXRs compared to 32)
Compression should now work as expected which results in smaller files