On Blender
At the Utah Indie Game Dev Meet last week, Dreamer asked me to explain my reasoning behind moving from Milkshape to Blender for 3D modeling. Tonight I'm coming off of a bit of a high for getting an animation done in Blender that worked flawlessly in Torque on the first try, so I figured --- why not now?

First off - I love Milkshape. My previous modeling experience was in SoftImage version that was circa 1997. I never quite figured it out. Milkshape was a piece of cake to model with. So for ease of learning, it absolutely rules. It also supports a bazillion model formats for importing and exporting, which makes it continue to be useful to me as an intermediate tool. Just translating between file formats (especially as I work with modelers who use Lightwave and 3DSMax) is worth the price of the package.

But there are two CRITICAL areas in which Milkshape sucks (or at least it did, I am a couple of versions behind now). Animation, and texturing. In fact, most recommendations I see for handling texturing and animation in Milkshape rely upon using external tools (such as CharacterFX for the animation and I think Ultimate Unwrap for the texturing).

Blender3D was a bit of a beast to get over the learning curve. Ah, who am I kidding... I'm still in the middle of the learning curve. But I'm enjoying myself and producing stuff now. Nothing to write home about, but things that look vaguely like they are supposed to at a distance. But it was free (always a plus), and included (supposedly) solid animation and texturing capabilities - including neat-sounding features like Inverse Kinematics (something I understand in theory but haven't used), and LSCM unwrapping (which is NEAT!!!).

Now, most of the complaints I have heard about Blender stem from the fact that it has an interface that is counter-intuitive to users of other modeling packages (namely Maya, Lightwave, and 3DSMax). Since I am not a user of those software packages, I really have nothing to compare it to - except Milkshape. My brain doesn't go so far back as to remember the SoftImage stuff.

I've pretty much been learning Blender one tool or trick at a time. I discovered the knife tool after watching one of Nigel Syme's OUTSTANDING tutorial videos, and suddenly I found myself using it everywhere. Oh, and merging vertices. Then I learned a few more tricks. And hotkey combinations. I still think I'm only tapping about 10% of Blender's power right now, but that's enough to get things done. And I can do texturing and animation right there from within the tool, and the capabilities seem pretty solid.

The only thing missing right now is some exporter issues - which Joseph Greenawalt has been addressing with near superhuman powers. I've got a bug right now in sorting polygons in the exporter with transparencies. Apparently the Milkshape exporter WORKS with sorting transparencies, so I may have to fire up the ol' Milkshape editor to get things working right, after all. (Then see if I can remember how to use it...)

Of course, bear in mind I am a PROGRAMMER, not a 3D modeler or artist. So my version of "productivity" may be skewed somewhat by my programmer bias, and I may find some things intuitive to me that a 'real' artist would find completely and utterly non-intuitive to the point of being painful. But I've seen some amazing 3D renderings coming out of the Blender community - so I guess some artist-types are finding it useful.

Oh, and one more thing: If you are trying to learn Blender, I can't recommend Nigel Symes' tutorial videos highly enough. They are mostly Torque-oriented, but most of the tutorials should be valuable to you no matter what engine you are using. You can find them here:

http://www.users.on.net/~symes/gamedev/videotuts/videotuts.html
- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 10:54 PM (Permalink)