I have been back on the computer working in Blender, started adding textures to my game assets when I realized how long it has been since I used the Blender Internal render engine. I am not sure if using BI is the correct or only direction when creating and texturing assets for a game, I am going to be using Unity3D and Unreal Engine 4 for the game engines. I am actively searching for materials regardless of the media (Books, articles or videos) on the subject of creating assets for a game engine. I am sure they are out there but I have found the topic of creating assets difficult to find. Most of the information I have located concentrate on the programming aspect and don’t pick up on the modeling aspect. Actually I am comfortable with the modeling just not the baking/texturing when it comes to game assets.
I ran across a tutorial set in work a few weeks back which creates a horror game from start to finish. He uses 3ds Max for the modeling where I use Blender but as with most software I am familiar with, if you know the concepts you can use whatever tool you are familiar with. This course is very detailed with the last part produced at two hours and there is no telling how long it actually took to create not to mention edit.
I also found some items on CG Cookie/Unity that might be of some help as well as a book titled “Game Development with blender”. I am not interested in using Blender for the game engine however any modeling mentioned should be relevant for my purposes.
I can’t believe it, Blender crashed on me. I was working on a simple asset for Unity and Unreal 4, very simple, a set of drawers, boxy without much detail, actually no detail and poof, semi white screen then Blender stopped working. I have not had Blender crash in over a year and I was not using a build bot version. I must have hit some combination of buttons in error.
No, I did not save first but like I said it was very simple and did not take much time at all to recreate what was lost.
Started back in blender working with constraints watching Chris Kuhn via CG Cookie and having his book “Death to Armatures” it is great to see other objects working like this and gives me quite a few ideas for some of the projects I am currently working on.
I have been having trouble with the site lately. When I have tried to sign in and create a new post everything I type is blank, as if the font color was set to white. The cursor moves as if I am typing and when I select ‘Preview’ the post shows up as written but what the heck, I can’t see while I am typing. Ok, I’m not all that bad in the typing arena (70+ wpm with very minimal errors) but I want to see. I hope I have that fixed and will start posting more often than I have been.
Purchased a new phone this weekend, a Samsung Galaxy Note 3. After diligently searching for any and all reviews both written and Youtube, and finding just about zero negative ones I decided to go with that phone. Wouldn’t you know, right off the bat, when bringing it to work for the first time I leave it there. Bone head! Jeff was there to hide it away in a file cabinet till I get back to be safe.
Today (7/2/2014) is supposed to be the day of the big announcement. That announcement is the sale of SpiritAerosystems to whomever is purchasing this company, specifically in Tulsa, OK. Do I think we will have any announcement today? No I do not and the reason for this is we, our team has been working on the transition of our legacy systems to the SAP product for the last two years and are just about complete during which time we have heard more times than I can remember about an announcement to be made on ‘x’ date and it has never happened.
I think I had posted about this little piece of software last year, however after looking at a twitch video in which the UE4 developers were discussing the latest revision they had the founders of SpeedTree as guests. This software, used to create tree’s, is rather expensive (up to 4,995.00) or 19.00/month for UE4 subscribers which is not bad but I don’t want another monthly payment I decided to look back at the TreeSketch3 product on the iPad. While there are many trees included with the software when you down load (free by the way) I had created my own to get the feel of the package. This was exported out as .obj which also exports all of the material textures for the leaves/bark etc. and then imported into Blender. I checked the materials did a quick convert to cycles and this is the render.
Please note: I did not do anything spectacular with the materials, just made them work with cycles as a test. I will tweak them a little later this weekend.
For a free iPad app I don’t think this turned out half bad 🙂 .
While I am going through the Unity books, creating and texturing the terrain etc. I am also going to start creating some of the simple game assets I will be needing. For the most part the items are the very simple ones that should only take a few minutes to create and so forth. Here is one created in about 5 minutes for a street light similar to all of the lights surrounding the parking lots at my home. While I am learning Unity it will not hurt to expand on the book some, creating the assets as well as additional scripts I will be needing.
That was a very quick and sloppy job so here is a better quick render. By the way, I added this asset into Unity this morning and play in the afternoon but looked go so far.
I’m starting to miss modeling a bit. Working with Unity 3D I will start to need some game assets so I’ll start creating a small collection of game objects and get used to this work flow.
I started to get the itch to work in Blender because I was going through withdraws working in Unity so much lately and I did not want my muscle memory to be replaced by the different UI in Unity. I received an email from the Blender Guru showing a wrecking ball and I spent about 20 minutes at lunch yesterday reproducing it. I gave everything very simple materials for a fast render so without further adieu, here it is in all it’s 11 second glory.
I did finished up this module rather quickly because the modeling was not that complicated and I think, in a few days I will be adjusting the other buildings within the city and create a new main Skyscraper for this scene. I have found some cool reference images on a new website I found “Skyscrapers.com”. This site has reference images from all over the world and has given me ideas for a better focus for this image. Plus, I made a mistake on the framing of the model, location of the camera in relation to the main building etc.. Other than those, for a quick and dirty I think it didn’t turn out half bad. Could have been better? Yes, a bunch and the main building has a lot to do with that.
