/agdg/ - Amateur Game Development General

Home-made Render Farm

https://www.blender.org/manual/render/output/video.html

An easy way to get multiple machines to share the rendering workload is to:

Set up a shared directory (such as a Windows Share or an NFS mount)

Un-check “Overwrite” and check “Placeholders”

Start as many machines as you wish rendering to that directory – they will not step on each other’s toes.

Dropbox would make this super easy to do. Each computer has Dropbox installed along with Blender. Have it render directly to the Dropbox\blender\YourProject folder with placeholders. Each computer picks up a frame, renders it in its own time, and uploads it to the shared Dropbox. The slow ones falls behind rendering what they can, the fast ones skip ahead. However, that'll leave you with a bunch of frames that will still need to be rendered into video and I don't know how to do that yet. Adobe Premier is not cheap.

Could also be done with a home file server too:

How to Turn an Old PC Into a Home File Server

'http://www.howtogeek.com/190835/how-to-turn-an-old-pc-into-a-home-file-server/''

I set up a home blender render farm years ago as a proof of concept, but I hardly remember much about it. We got it working, but I never had a project that really needed the horsepower. I would use it today to render "cutscenes" because I miss FMV or game trailers I guess. It would be fun to know how to make my own home-made pixar-style "novelette".

I had an issue where I had applied both a cloth physics modifier and a subserf modifier at the same time to the same object and it wasn't rendering the movement out in the animation. To fix it, I had to make sure the cloth was above the sub serf in the listing of modifiers.

How do I set a background image while I am editing?

http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/118/how-do-i-set-a-background-image-while-i-am-editing

Bump mapping

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Bump_mapping

Bump mapping[1] is a technique in computer graphics for simulating bumps and wrinkles on the surface of an object. This is achieved by perturbing the surface normals of the object and using the perturbed normal during lighting calculations. The result is an apparently bumpy surface rather than a smooth surface although the surface of the underlying object is not actually changed. Bump mapping was introduced by James Blinn in 1978.

Normal mapping is the most common variation of bump mapping used.

Parallax mapping

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Parallax_mapping

Parallax mapping (also called offset mapping or virtual displacement mapping) is an enhancement of the bump mapping or normal mapping techniques applied to textures in 3D rendering applications such as video games. To the end user, this means that textures such as stone walls will have more apparent depth and thus greater realism with less of an influence on the performance of the simulation. Parallax mapping was introduced by Tomomichi Kaneko et al., in 2001.

Parallax mapping is implemented by displacing the texture coordinates at a point on the rendered polygon by a function of the view angle in tangent space (the angle relative to the surface normal) and the value of the height map at that point. At steeper view-angles, the texture coordinates are displaced more, giving the illusion of depth due to parallax effects as the view changes.

Optimizing blender’s real time mesh drawing, part 1

https://code.blender.org/2015/06/optimizing-blenders-real-time-mesh-drawing-part-1/

7 Essential Resources & Tips to Get Started with Game Development

https://medium.com/@ZEEFcom/7-essential-resources-tips-to-get-started-with-game-development-d7379db2273b

CTRL + TAB while in edit mode to quick select vertex, edge, or face

Select faces and press S, Z, 0 to "flatten" them like to the floor/ground

http://www.ogre3d.org/tikiwiki/Blender+Exporter

The script OGRE Meshes Exporter converts meshes and armatures from Blender to OGRE file format XML / binary mesh / material file). It supports the export of

mesh objects with vertex colours, multiple materials, UV textures and blend modes,

a multitude of material properties, most notably: ambient, diffuse, specular, emissive, UV textures with and without alpha channel, vertex colours, normal maps, two sided faces,

keyframe animations of armature actions as skeleton animations,

keyframe animations of relative mesh shapes as pose or morph animations.

I also found an export guide specifically for Second Life:

http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Mesh/Exporting_a_mesh_from_Blender

What are you exporting to? Like what is further down the pipeline?

And here is the Blender documentation:

https://www.blender.org/manual/data_system/files/import_export.html

Blender supports import and export to and from other file formats (e.g. OBJ, FBX, 3DS, PLY... etc).

http://www.the-blueprints.com/blueprints/weapons/

https://s3.amazonaws.com/blenderguru.com/uploads/2015/03/Concrete11.jpg

http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/basics-realistic-texturing/

To subdivide a plane:

1. Tab to go to edit mode

2. W to bring up menu

3. Subdivide

4. Press T to bring up the tool menu to select how far to subdivide it

AwesomeBump is a free and open source program written using Qt library designed to generate normal, height, specular or ambient occlusion, metallic, roughness textures from a single image. Additional features like material textures or grunge maps are available. Since the image processing is done in 99% on GPU the program runs very fast and all the parameters can be changed in real time. AB was made to be a new alternative to known gimp plugin called Insane Bump or commercial tool: Crazy Bump.

AwesomeBumpv4.0 for Win7/8 x32

https://github.com/kmkolasinski/AwesomeBump/releases/tag/Winx32v4.0

This is a little confusing at first, but you get used to it really quick. Click on the 'Diffuse' tab, and drag your image into there. At the bottom (make sure the Diffuse tab is active) click on the checkbox labeled "Basemap to others" and then click the button that says Convert N to H. From there you can tweak the settings

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?364529-AwesomeBump-A-free-alternative-to-CrazyBump

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?366395-AwesomeBump-3-0-beta-released

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?366395-AwesomeBump-3-0-beta-released!/page4

In general, I have been doing the following:

Start AwesomeBump

Change to Diffuse Tab

Open a photo of, for example, a rock wall

Check the "Enable Preview" button

Hit the "Convert to N H" button

Un-check the Enable Preview button

Start tweaking.

Basically the processing should be as you described above.

Hope this clarified your doubts

Multi-View Render

https://www.blender.org/manual/render/workflows/multiview.html

For this 5-minute guide we will take an existent .blend file that was made for monoscopic rendering and transform it in stereo-3d ready.

How to apply Matcap materials for sculpting in Blender 2.71?

Simple out-of-the-box matcaps that work with cycles:

http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/16339/how-to-apply-matcap-materials-for-sculpting-in-blender-2-71

Adding your own gets quite a bit more tricky if you want to stay in cycles. You can download ZMT files here:

Welcome to Pixologic's MatCap Library

http://pixologic.com/zbrush/downloadcenter/library/

But I don't think Blender supports them natively. Couple work arounds:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?174790-ZBrush-matcap-in-Blender&highlight=matcap

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?303899-SOLVED-matcap-in-cycles-with-nodes

http://terrance8d.deviantart.com/journal/Quick-Tip-Using-Custom-Matcaps-in-Blender-538588988

Might dig into the work-arounds at some point, but for now the quick and easy defaults should be more than enough for me.

Historical Poly Counts

http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/threads/23520-Historical-Poly-Counts

Half-Life, PC, 1998

Zombie – 844 polygons

High Definition pack Zombie- 1700 polygons

Half-Life, Dreamcast, 2000-2001 (Canned)

Zombie - 1649 polygons

Half-Life, PS2, 2001

Zombie - 2822 (Highest LOD)

Quake, PC, 1996

200 polygons with 1 320×200 8bit texture using predefined palette.

Unreal Tournament, PC, 1999

Player model – 800 polygons

Unreal Tournament 2k3, PC, 2003

Player model – 3,000 polygons

GTA San Andreas, PS2, 2004

Characters – 2,000 polygons with 1 256×256 8bit texture

NPCs - 1,200 polygons with 1 256x128 8bit texture

Gant bridge - 16,000 polygons, includes LOD

Blender to Unreal Engine 4 in a Nutshell

Learn the basics of getting your assets from Blender to Unreal Engine 4 in just 5 minutes! If you run into problems or have questions, please ask in the comments.

Used were Blender 2.70a and Unreal Engine 4.0.2.

UNITS & AXES

0:10 - Units

0:31 - Axes

STATIC MESHES

0:49 - Blender FBX export

1:47 - Unreal FBX import

1:59 - Collision

2:51 - Materials & UVs

SKELETAL MESHES

3:43 - Seriously, triple check it!

4:07 - Unreal FBX import

4:45 - Thanks :)

Blender to Unity Tutorial - Import with Textures

Just a quick video to show my method of bringing 3d models from Blender into Unity and applying the Texture.

Blender Character To Unity part 1 of 2

Blender Character Creation: Modelling

Welcome to the first episode in a series on creating a simple character in Blender. (http://blender.org)

Download reference images:

http://i.imgur.com/7LPDejZ.jpg (front)

http://i.imgur.com/Bjfeafn.jpg (side)

Download blender file:

http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/...

FAQ:

Q: My background images won't show up after dragging them in.

A: Ensure that your view is properly aligned (press 1 on numpad to set view from front). You also need to be in orthographic (as opposed to perspective) view. You can toggle between ortho and perspective with 5 on the numpad. As an alternative to dragging the images in, you can press 'n' to open the properties panel, and add an image manually in the 'Background Images' section near the bottom.

Q: Pressing the numbers only changes frame/layer.

A: You need to press the numbers on the numpad. If your keyboard does not have a numpad, go into preferences and in the input tab check 'emulate numpad'.

Follow me on twitter @SebastianLague

The Basics of Good Texturing in Blender

Blender tutorial showing you how to create your own realistic material and textures. Download the texture: http://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/...

The Secrets of Realistic Texturing in Blender

In this tutorial you will discover:

-The fundamentals of texturing

-How to use CrazyBump to generate better textures

-How to make a realistic cobblestone material

AwesomeBump - Tutorial #3: Generating textures from image

This video shows how to generate - normal, height, specular and occlusion map from a single image using AwesomeBump software.

AwesomeBump website: http://awesomebump.besaba.com/

Introduction to Dynamic Topology Sculpting in Blender

Learn how to use Dynamic Topology Sculpting in Blender

http://cgcookie.com/blender/2013/04/2...

The dynamic topology system in Blender allows for a much more organic, creative sculpting process. It gives you much more flexibility in not only how, but what you sculpt by not limiting you to the original starting basemesh.

When working with dynamic topology, Blender will automatically tessellate the mesh under your brush stroke to account for the detail needed. This gives you the ability to add detail anywhere you wish, create new forms, and work with a much more optimized polycount since the tessellations are localized.

Check out CG Cookie Citizen for more sculpting training: http://cgcookie.com/membership

To learn more about using dynamic topology in your workflow and creating finished sculptures I also recommend you check out:

Creature Modeling For Production: http://cgcookie.com/downloads/creatur...

Hard-Surface Sci-Fi Weapon Sculpting: http://cgcookie.com/blender/cgc-serie...

How To Unwrap A UV Sphere In Blender

In this mini tutorial I go over how to unwrap a UV Sphere for usage with Equirectangular maps and tilable textures as well due to it's seamless UV layout. Check out the text version of this tutorial on my website: http://enigmatoots.wix.com/enigmatoot....

You can get the images of Earth from here: http://visibleearth.nasa.gov/

Check out this video and others at my website: www.enigmatoots.co.uk. Feel free to contact me there or by emailing me at enigmatoots@hotmail.co.uk :)

Keep up to date on twitter: https://twitter.com/Enigma_Toots

Follow me on Google+: https://plus.google.com/1058652631047...

Good Luck with your Blenderations and have a nice day :)

Cycles' Volume Materials

Here I just go over the new volume nodes available in the Cycles Render Engine, and how to make some pretty marbles using the Volume Absorption node.

My text guide on Volumetric Lighting can be found here:

http://www.enigmatoots.co.uk/#!volume...

A great tutorial on smoke/fire rendering can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSiV5...

Check out this video and others at my website: www.enigmatoots.co.uk. Feel free to contact me there or by emailing me at enigmatoots@hotmail.co.uk :)

Keep up to date on twitter: https://twitter.com/Enigma_Toots

Follow me on Google+: https://plus.google.com/+EnigmatootsC...

Good Luck with your Blenderations and have a nice day :)

I wanted to learn more with 3dsmax but I'm a beginner so should I learn the basics with blender? I'm going to assume a lot of general principles carry over.

>>24927

Yes, learning the art is essentially independent of the tools you use. You will, of course, know and come to adopt the methodology of whatever tool you do choose, but Blender is a good choice for a number of reasons.

What you learn in Blender will carry over to 3DSMax later.

Blender 2.7 Tutorial #33 : Sharp Edges on Smooth Objects #b3d

Visit my Blender 2.7 Tutorial Series playlist for more Blender Tutorials:

In this Tutorial #33 I cover:

-How to create hard/sharp edges on otherwise smooth objects using two methods:

#1) A Combination of Edge Creases, the Edge Split modifider, and marking edges as sharp.

#2) Using Proximity Loop (make an extra edge loop on either side of an edge you want to be sharp)

Blender 2.7 Tutorial #34 : Intro to Bones & Rigging (Minecraft) #b3d

In this Tutorial #34 I cover:

-How to create a simple six-block minecraft human

-Loop cut tool (ctrl-R)

-Bevel tool (ctrl-B)

-Adding an Armature object, adding more bones to an armature in edit mode.

-Naming bones

-Recalculating bone roll (ctrl-N)

-the Snap menu (shift-S)

-Attaching an armature to a character mesh using automatic weights.

Quick Rigging With Rigify in Blender

>>25147

Nice man, I like it.

Blender 2.7 Tutorial #35 : Weight Paint Mode (Minecraft) #b3d

In this Tutorial #35 I cover:

-After connecting an armature (bones) to a character mesh, the best way to make sure the bones properly control the correct parts of the mesh is by using weight paint mode.

-In this video I'll show you how to use weight paint mode to paint 'weights' (the amount of influence each bone has on each vertex) easily and quickly. I also cover how to *mask* parts of your mesh (in this case each block of the Minecraft person) to make it easier to paint only the sections you want.

https://www.blender.org/manual/painting_sculpting/painting/weight_paint/index.html

MAYLEE’S TIPS AND TRICKS FOR A BETTER UVING IN BLENDER

https://anothertutorial.wordpress.com/2015/07/22/maylees-tips-and-tricks-for-a-better-uving-in-blender/

Any good info on how to just get better at modeling and sculpting in general? I have a lot of tools down at just don't have good workflow and all that.

>>25521

And of course, by "3rd pic", I meant "4th pic".

Is it better to simply make models in blender or sculpt them in zbrush for some not so advanced 3D game?

>>25522

Ok makes more sense now.

>>25539

That pic is so aesthetic.

learning 3d modelling is just as easy as learning to paint

just do a lot of still life from references or actual physical things lying on your desk

do one every day

you're the best

Blender 2.7 Tutorial #36 : UV Mapping for Minecraft #b3d

''In this Tutorial #36 I cover:

Detailed instructions on how to add a Minecraft-like texture to a simple character:

-The process of marking seams, unwrapping, laying out a UV Map, Exporting a UV Map into Photoshop or Gimp.

-Painting a texture in Photoshopusing layers and the Dodge/Burn tool, Pixelating the texture using Photoshop's Mosaic Filter, saving .psd file and exporting to PNG, finally applying the texture back onto the character model in Blender

Remember, before UV unwrapping, go into object mode, then object menu > Apply > Scale

how the fuck would I do billboard sprites in blender.

i.e. a flat alphamapped quad that rotates to face the view in place. but can still be rigged to bones.

>>25663

>translucent

Translucent or transparent?

Blender 2.7 Tutorial #37 : IK Rigging (Part 1/2) #b3d

In this Tutorial #37 I cover:

-The difference between a simple FK armature rig, and a more advanced IK Rig.

-The creation and setup of bones and IK target bones to create a more advanced IK rig. This includes the overall structure, parenting, naming, and orienting of bones required.

>>25679

One or the other.

>>25680

Blender 2.7 Tutorial #47 : Image Textures with Transparency #b3d

In this Blender 2.7 Tutorial #47 I cover:

-How to use a PNG image file's alpha channel as a "transparency map" for image textures in Blender Cycles. This will allow you to have textures with transparent areas, eg: surrounding the edge of the a leaf. :)

>>25681

Mm, I see. I'm just used to controlling transparencies straight from the Material menu.

Anyone know decent retopology tools for blender?

>>26058

Just activate the BSurface plugin mate!

Bump.

Thanks for all the hard work OP. You've inspired me to pick Blender back up again.

I am currently writing some software to simulate robotics problems (my own code), and decided I should try and integrate with ROS to kind of standardize my approach. Long story short, while it was probably an OK idea, getting past dependency issues while trying to build on my current setup never really worked out.

Now I see I could have just used Blender all along for the visualization part (and much more very likely) and so I've got a copy of the latest code built on my system now and digging through it atm.

Appreciate it OP.

God i hate blender, which the faggots would fix their shitty ui and make it so you dont have to remember a shortcut for every goddamn command. then maby i would use it.

more related with Blender than game development, but is it possible for a one or two man team to make an animated short worth anything with Blender?

I look at 3D cartoons now on tv done by teams and the animation often looks stiff with the models looking mediocre at best, but is that just due to a lack of talent in the industry?

>>27321

git gud faggot

>>27321

Press space and type the command name you want.

Learn or set keybind until satisfied.

>>27321

>using any software without having hotkeys for everything that can be hotkeyed

It's like you enjoy being slow.

>>27245

No problem anon. OP here from a different computer. I let this thread go stale while picking up some Unreal experience, but now that I've got enough to get a shitty demo going I find myself needing art and coming back to this thread. Glad someone got something out of all this work. :)

>>27321

Use 3DSMax or Maya then?

>>27611

Good question, and I think it really depends on the scope of the project. Models, textures, animation, composition, lighting, editing, music, sound, etc are nothing to sneeze at. If you are looking at like 1-2 minutes long, simple, not complex and not too detailed I don't see why not. But to be honest I haven't done one in Blender so I am really just speaking out my ass. :)

>>27629

>Glad someone got something out of all this work. :)

Anon here from a different part of the country. Yup. In fact I'm building the latest releases of Blender at least 3 or 4 times a week now. Ton shared some cool news the Cycles renderer getting a sponsored full time engineer from an animation studio in Toronto working on a new film pretty much entirely in Blender.

>I also had a sneak peek of the excellent concept art of the new feature that’s in development – more budget, and much more ambitious even. For that project they offer to invest substantially in Blender, we spent the 2nd day on outlining a deal. In short that is:

> Tangent will sponsor two developers to work in Blender Institute on 2.8 targets (defined by us)

> Tangent will sponsor one Cycles developer, either to work in Blender Institute or in Toronto.

> All of this full time and decently paid positions, for at least 1 year. Can be effective in September.

https://www.blender.org/media-exposure/siggraph-2016-report/

So yea. I've personally met Ton and a few of the staff before at SIGGRAPH and they are all very cool guys. Glad to connect back again with this remarkable opensauce project. Thanks again.

>>27724

I use this batch rename tool:

https://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?272086-Addon-Item-Panel-amp-Batch-Naming

Pretty useful when you have a lot of things to rename, like objects, bones, vertex groups, etc. before porting the model to another software that uses different naming conventions, which normally would've taken you half an hour.

>>27724

thanks for the great poster anon. any others?

Bump.

>>24914

This video isn't quite the holy grail I was hoping it would be. UV especially from Blender to Unreal has been quite tricky. In fact, Unreal as a whole has been a HUGE chunk to bite off, so much so that I'm considering just going back to Blender only, and maybe joining a team as an artist rather than a solo (no-game) dev.

I just saw that the BornCG series I was following is up to like video 72 now. I think I'm going to go back through them to catch myself back up.