Blender Tips n Tricks

[MadGypsy]

Tidbits


The above image is intended to highlight some less obvious things I've encountered recently. Things in blue are considered self explanatory and have no textplanations (heh).

Please feel free to add your own blender tutorials to this thread. Feel free to request them as well. I believe this thread is relevant because it is intended to give aid regarding one of the most popular tools used among the community.

In a perfect world, I'd like to see something from Shambler234 regarding whatever he would like to share about blender cycles. Something from golden_boy would certainly be quite valuable. Tea Monster, Talisa, the list goes on regarding people here that have valuable knowledge to share about blender. I ask you to do exactly that.

*sorry the image is so huge. I'll try dropping my resolution before taking a screen shot, next time.

[MadGypsy]

Procedural Textures, Blender Cycles



The above tutorial is a little jacked up. This is because I am still learning this and I'm not 100% sure of what I'm talking about however, I believe my tutorial can still be helpful because, even in places where I am wrong (or misguided) something is definitely happening and I believe my illustration gives enough data for someone to either have an "Aha" moment or someone with more knowledge to come and correct me.

@super huge image - it is what it is. I have a big ass screen and it don't want to be smaller. I set it to lower resolutions and then my taskbar disappears, everything starts getting hard to grab, etc. Scaling the image is not an option cause then you can't read anything. It's bad enough that IMGUR is compressing my HD images and making them look like jpegs.

[MadGypsy]

Heads Up

For anyone messing with procedural textures in blender cycles and feeling a lot of a bit lost (like me), I can give you a heads up that, there is a program called Neo Texture Edit which is like a lite version of blender nodes. I've noticed that messing around in NTE is helping me get a better grasp of blender nodes. They are very similar.

NeoTextureEdit - Procedural Texture Editor

You may wonder how you can take one thing you don't know to show you how to do another thing you don't know. Well, the way NTE is set up changing settings gives you big results. This means that you can use observation to understand what that setting is doing and then translate that information to any program that uses that attribute. One of the things I've noticed in blender nodes is that sometimes changing settings does nothing. This is because your changes are being buried in some mix. It's not so easy to do that in NTE.

Alternately, you may even like NTE more. I do. I'm still going to learn the blender way but I am so so so much faster (and with better results) in NTE. If anyone wants to try NTE but is feeling a bit lost in it, I can make an illustration to get you started. It is actually a very simple program once you know how to navigate and assign specific maps (normal,spec,etc) to a node.

[Mr.Burns]

Hi MG,

Now, be gentle with me here, newbie alert...
I've done a couple of simple things in Blender so if I produce a simple object in Blender, for the sake of arguement let's imagine that for some reason I wanted a plain Box, how do I then port that box in to quake so that any engine (Proquake, Qrack, EngineX, DP) can see it clearly in game?

Kind regards

Monty

[Ebisu]

Hi MG,

Now, be gentle with me here, newbie alert...
I've done a couple of simple things in Blender so if I produce a simple object in Blender, for the sake of arguement let's imagine that for some reason I wanted a plain Box, how do I then port that box in to quake so that any engine (Proquake, Qrack, EngineX, DP) can see it clearly in game?

Kind regards

Monty

There are plugins for blender that export models as .mdl files which can be put in your PAK.

[MadGypsy]

Are you satisfied with Ebisu's answer or would you like a more involved one?

Ebisu is right but his answer wil only get you a .mdl. Getting that model in quake can have multiple answers depending if your model is a replacement or an addition. The answer could take another fork if you are focused on a specific engine. For instance, Darkplaces/FTE can handle model types that the other engines can't and DP actually wants you to rename non-mdl models to mdl for replacement models.

This question can have a lot of answers. I can answer them no matter which way you go.

Another thing to consider is there are already lots of cubes in Quake (ammo/health). What if you just renamed one and gave it a replacement texture?

@ be gentle - lol, I know who the roughnecks are here. I don't generally go harsh on incredibly mild mannered respectful people. Plus, I yhink I'm getting old, my !RAWG! is disipating.Which is good and bad. It's good cause I am 4% nicer. It's bad cause I'm also 4% less determined.

[Ebisu]

How could one go about inserting models into Quake aside from the way I said? I use FTE for almost everything I can use it for, but feel free to generalize.

[talisa]

@ebisu

several engines (including FTE) also support MD3 models
http://jkhub.org/files/file/1413-ble...-plugin-suite/

and several also support IQM which is a skeleton-based model-format
Inter-Quake Model (IQM) Format

[golden_boy]

If you just want to put static models into the game, you could also use the Quake 3 BSP format (Darkplaces, FTE can use it) and compile your models straight into the BSP using the map compiler. You can use .obj or .ase formats for this.

What to say about Blender... there is so much to it. It's easier to answer questions really. I lost the urge to write wall-of-text tutorials long ago. The best place for Blender tutorials is Youtube, I think. There are video tutorials about practically everything..

Perhaps the most important advice is to keep it simple. Most people don't need animated logos or fluid simulations. When you're new to Blender, just try to do some simple models. A crate, a barrel, a tree, a pistol.

When you want to animate something, don't use Blender's "rigify" for game models. It creates more problems than it solves. Instead, learn to build a rig / skeleton by hand.

Use the right workflow for the task at hand - lowpoly vs highpoly and baking normal maps.

Establish a working pipeline - get to a point where you can effortlessly transfer models between Blender and the game engine / the map editor.

Learn the most important key combos until you know them by heart.

Really, there is not much else to say regarding high-level advice.

[Mr.Burns]

Not wishing to hijack this thread, but thank you all for the advice and suggestions so far, it really is appreciated. I'm hoping to find answers to 2 areas really and I fully appreciate that either of these may or may not be possible ..

1. Design a simple object in Blender, perhaps a bit of scenery or props of some description neither of which will have any moving parts, and then inserting it to a custom bsp map that can loaded up and played seemlessly to the player using any quake client as opposed to just DP/FTE. I'm guessing this may well be the deal breaker here and it's a choice of having custom entities vs having complete compatibility.
2. Design a direct replacement object in Blender, eg a weapon, and then be able to "drop" it in to an appropriate location in my quake folder structure for it to appear in game.

Sorry for the newbie questions but I've been observing some of the great work Seven, Angel, Talisa and others have been doing with DP and SMC, and this seems an interesting new avenue to take to inject new life in to the game if the process was simple enough.

Kind regards

Monty

[golden_boy]

Design a simple object in Blender, perhaps a bit of scenery or props of some description neither of which will have any moving parts, and then inserting it to a custom bsp map that can loaded up and played seemlessly to the player using any quake client as opposed to just DP/FTE. I'm guessing this may well be the deal breaker here and it's a choice of having custom entities vs having complete compatibility.

You will want to learn relatively simple lowpoly modeling techniques for this (how do I turn the starting cube into some other object; how do I UV-unwrap and texture an object.)

There are three parts to the process:

1) Create your object in Blender.

2) Export the object as .mdl (since compatibility is wanted).

3) Insert it into a map using a custom QC entity (such as Quoth's misc_model, SMC might have something similar) and perhaps use a clip brush to make the object collide, tweak the lighting etc.


You should focus on 1) before the others.

Design a direct replacement object in Blender, eg a weapon, and then be able to "drop" it in to an appropriate location in my quake folder structure for it to appear in game.

This is similar to the above.

For a world model weapon, ie the one that can be picked up, the process is identical to the one above except the model is not inserted as a misc_model, but by having the same name and path as an original Quake model.

For a viewmodel (the animated one the player is holding), the process is similar but now you need to rig and animate it. This means you will create a skeleton (aka an armature) for the model that contains at least one bone. You will then bind the model to the armature using an armature modifier. Finally, you will use pose mode to pose the model for the characteristic frames of the animation (the frames where the motion is at its extremes) and mark those as "key frames" in the dope sheet / the action editor. Blender will calculate the in-between frames.

Then you will again export it as a .mdl and replace one of the standard Quake viewmodel files.

For a new weapon effect or projectile, you will need QC programming (duplicate one of the existing weapon effects and tweak it.)

It sounds difficult, but it is learnable.

As for modelling a simple shape, this short video tutorial helped me.

For UV unwrapping, the Blender wiki describes the process.

[Mr.Burns]

Thanks for taking the time to reply and thank you very much for the links, I'll explore those shortly. It looks like I have some more familiarisation to do with Blender before i continue. I've had a little time from work lately, which is very rare for me, and I've been following a few very basic tutorials and you're right in that there is just so much to it.

First things first I'll try and insert a simple block from Blender in to Quake. No doubt I will be back with reports of the disaster I will inevitably cause

Thanks again to one and all

Warm regards

Monty

[MadGypsy]

Not wishing to hijack this thread

@Mr Burns - you haven't hijacked anything, sir. Your questions are exactly what I hoped with all of my heart would appear here. The participation of others here was part 2 of that hope and I love the direction this thread is going.

When you want to animate something, don't use Blender's "rigify" for game models. It creates more problems than it solves. Instead, learn to build a rig / skeleton by hand.

I knew I wrote all of this for something. I realize that my tutorial is a bit hard to follow cause I actually tell you every single solitary key to press and button to click in perfect order, which actually makes it look confusing but, my information is correct.

http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-hel...tml#post145183

and

http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-hel...tml#post145197

and

http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-hel...tml#post145375

and

http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-hel...tml#post145504

or just click this and read it all
http://quakeone.com/forums/quake-hel...-tutorial.html

What to say about Blender... there is so much to it. It's easier to answer questions really. I lost the urge to write wall-of-text tutorials long ago. The best place for Blender tutorials is Youtube, I think. There are video tutorials about practically everything..

... I was looking at your blog (MG post) and I noticed that you have some advanced nodes going on there (definitely advanced for me, anyway). All the node tutorials I have found are pretty basic and kind of crappy.

IMO, my image method is superior to a video. It gives you something you never have to pause or rewind in order to get the complete information for a given task. I also feel like explaining less and providing more of a visual explanation that is basically a snapshot in time is much faster. I realize this is just my opinion, but you have to at least admit that something like this, is virtually instant learning.



It is also much less bandwidth for the information and downloadable without any 3rd party tools. Not to mention that you get to admire my "excellent" arrow drawing skills . I mean, let's be honest, can you even tell those were drawn by hand? (sarc). I will agree that there are plenty of things that cannot be summed up in one image and in those cases a video is probably a better way to go, unless you get driven like me and decide to make lots of images (like my armature tuts)... which were actually intended to eventually be a pdf.

Thank all of you for making and keeping this thread good. Pllllleeeeeeeeaaaaaaasssssssseeeeeeeee continue. I don't care what you teach or ask here as long as some kind of way it is tied into blender. That can even include how to tie blender results into something else (much like the results of Mr Burns questions) or even comparing blender functions to other programs which accomplish the same task (like I did with NeoTexture Edit).

Really, on this entire site, this is probably the only thread that I really care about and I'm pretty serious about dumping information here that can help people become better. Mostly, I get an idea of something or an interest, learn it and then try and visualize it for you. I know this means that I may be making tutorials that people don't currently care about but the day will come... and "you" will think... "wait a minute, I think Gypsy made some illustrations on this thing I now need" and they will be right here waiting for you.

[Tea Monster]

A great source of blender game tuts is Kats bits.
http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/#blender

[Tea Monster]

I did a few pdfs for the Duke HRP, different game, but a lot of the same principles apply. I'll try and dig them out and get them up here.