• Yusri Ghouse

  about 2 months ago

  I am kinda new to blender, but I have really been making strides after getting a couple of useful addons. This addon is by far one of the best I have ever purchased. It has hugely improved the quality and speed of creating stuff. It is really expansive and there are really great tutorials on the documentation site. I highly recommend it.

• 

  MACHIN3

  about 2 months ago

  Very happy to hear that, thank you!
• Tommy

  2 months ago

  This is awesome for creating some cool looking fast models in Blender. However I primarily got this asset to make Video Game Assets, which involves baking the decals to the model's UV space. However the Bake process does not work at all. I get weird graphical artifacts. There's next to no documentation on how to bake aside from one video that mostly complains about the baking process rather than actually explaining how to bake. There could be a lot more helpful information on what to do if a bake doesn't work properly, but unfortunately there's just a lot of criticism of Blender's baking process and not a lot of information on how to actually do it. As it is, if I can only get this to work in Blender and not in a Game Engine like it advertised then this asset is next to useless to me.

• 

  MACHIN3

  2 months ago

  The documentation is extensive and covers 3 export workflows for game art.

  The 2 main workflows that make sense in a decal workflow are using decal shaders in deferred rendering pipelines and trim sheets.

  Baking decals sucks, because baking in Blender sucks. Baking also sucks because you loose all the benefits of decals.

  I warn about this everywhere in the docs. I've added baking support because people requested it and I regret it everyday.
  See https://machin3.io/DECALmachine/docs/export_introduction/
• Jason Geldmacher

  2 months ago

  Another must if you are modelling and detailing hard surface models or any environments. Easy to use, customizable and tons of resources. Again, worth every dollar! :D

• 

  MACHIN3

  about 2 months ago

  Thanks Jason!
• Lily Huang

  3 months ago

  First of all I want to say that I love this add-on and I love the author's other two add-ons Meshmachine and Mesh3tools, each of them is powerful. About Decal I watched the tutorials and videos for days to learn. So the question is, why I only gave 4 stars. Yes, it is because of the video. I don't know why the author was in such a hurry to make the videos, it was really rushed and every click was as fast as lightning. For people who are familiar with this add-on is not a problem, but for newone to this add-on, my goodness, I just want to see these features what you just said you actually clicked what button and clicked where and then came out of those magic results, and then less than half a second, a flash, everything's done. So, in fact the author provide a lot detailed tutorial videos, I may be quickly familiar with the add-ons, However, I ended up spending a lot of time getting familiar with that videos because I had to keep pressing the pause button or replaying it over and over again just to see what was actually clicked on those 3 frames. This really makes people uncomfortable, why can't you just pause for two seconds to show the operation clearly ....

  The other two add-ons have the same problem, super fast, like Quicksilver

  Another problem, DM is better for basic colors and textures. If you want to use it on those PBR materials, like rusty iron or rocks or something, then even after some adjustments, decals' material and main body are always unable to be the same. So if you really need to use it in this case, you may need to use PS to deal with it.

  Well, at the beginnin I thought Decalmachine was just a tool to quickly paste a PNG or something, but then I realized that it was much more powerful than just pasting a picture. In fact for a quick presentation this thing can save a lot of time. And it's fun to play.

• 

  MACHIN3

  3 months ago

  Which video? The trailer? Obviously that's fast, it crams dozens of features in 1-2 minutes..
  Beyond that, I have over 50 feature videos in the docs, complemented by additional textual information, tips and advice. Nothing about it was rushed. This took a tremendous effort.
  Although unfortunately, I did accidentally record the pre-2.0 videos using a lower framerate.

  As for decals on textured materials, the documentation makes this VERY clear. In fact on the first page of the docs, this is mentioned near very the top:

  ---
  Keep in mind

  The focus of DECALmachine is speed and flexibility in terms of Design and Detailing. Depending on how far you intend to take your designs, and especially if you, intend to use complex shader node setups or do complex texturing such as weathering, floating mesh decals might not be the best workflow, unless you are targeting a deferred rendering solution with mesh decal support, which allows for selective channel blending, instead of just alpha blending as in Blender's Eeevee and Cycles.
  ---

  I'm a bit tired of seeing this as a complaint tbh, people expect DM to do something that it never advertised and that's not practical to do in forward rendering, often due to a fundamental misunderstanding of concepts in 3D.

  Glad to see you enjoy DM nonetheless.
  
• crankenstein

  4 months ago

  Very good addon, was a nice introduction to parallax mapping in blender too.

• 

  MACHIN3

  3 months ago

  Thanks man!
• Timur

  4 months ago

  Genius-level addon. Once you start using it, it's very hard to stop :D I love that you can make your own decals too, so you don't have to only use other people's ones.

• 

  MACHIN3

  3 months ago

  Obrigado!
• Jablaya

  4 months ago

  Absolutely FANTASTIC addon! It does not only saves a TON of time, it opens a whole new world in the "detailing models" field! The custom decals creation is a pleasure to use! truly a godsend! Thank you MACHIN3 !

• 

  MACHIN3

  4 months ago

  Glad to hear that, thanks and enjoy!
• Justin Thomas

  4 months ago

  I wasted $50 thinking this would be a cool additional tool for adding details before taking them into Substance Painter... if you use Substance Painter, this add on is absolutely pointless.. If I thought recording a video throwing it in the recycling bin and emptying it would get me a refund I'd do it but thats highly doubtful... just chopping it up to a lost $50 on something I'll literally never use...

• 

  MACHIN3

  4 months ago

  These are the first lines of the the product description of DECALmachine:

  "DECALmachine is a blender addon, which through mesh Decals, allows for surface detailing in a very non-committal, non-destructive, UV-less way. As such it represents an alternative approach to hard surface texturing."

  It's like you expect the screwdriver to be a hammer, and then rate it 1/5 when you fail to get the nail into the wall with it. I rate your rating 1/5.
• TJ

  5 months ago

  I've had quite a few issues getting the geometry the decals produce to actually apply properly, especially around cylindrical shapes. It's a shame that you have to combine textures outside of Blender if you want to do anything else with the normals etc, but it's not the end of the world.

• 

  MACHIN3

  5 months ago

  If you are talking about the baking export workflow, there are numerous places in the docs, where I point out that baking is not an ideal workflow in context of decals. Beyond that, I'm also limited by what Blender can do here, and there's an ongoing Blender bug since 2019, that prevents me from pushing it further.
  
  People who insist on cramming Decals into their texture painting workflow, instead of leveraging the actual potential of Decals via Atlasing or Trim Sheets, have no place to complain IMO. I warn about it everywhere.
• Niall McCaffrey

  6 months ago

  Works ok if you just want to stick decals on blank materials and render the results in Blender, but if you try to bake things, use textures, or do anything else it doesn't work. Fully agree with Sashas review. I will add that the author is rude, arrogant and unhelpful when you look for support, so I am only giving this a 2 star review. At this high price, I would expect a very professional level of support, with someone polite and helpful, not a condescending ass who says everything is my problem. Perhaps that is why the author keeps saying to email them with support, so it's not obvious in public how bad it is. Product works for rendering in blender as stated, but forget about baking, forget about the material matching, it doesn't work, and you'll be treated rather rudely when you ask for help.

• 

  MACHIN3

  6 months ago

  This users has written 26 emails in the span of 3 weeks. All of these were not about DECALmachine issues or problems. But general game art workflow. Ok, I tried to be as helpful as I could.
  For instance, his first few emails were about the deferred decal workflow in Unity. I outlined how this works, how you don't need to match materials, as various surface material parameters like color, metallic etc are simply "taken" from the partent object, and not defined in the decal shader.
  All good, part of the job I guess.
  His latest issue was about him attempting to bake trim sheets, instead of exporting them directly. He's trying to bake them with an addon, that I have not created, and that it fails. I pointed out that you absolutely can bake trim sheet materials in Blender manually, so it is an issue with his chosen baking addon, not a DECALmachine issue. This went back and forth a bit with him insisting it's a DECALmachine issue and me insisting it's not, as you can bake them manually just fine in Blender.
  He accused me of being an asshole and trying to push him off to someone else, he then threatened to leave a bad review and here we are now.

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