Using Blender as a Game Tool

Rick Worthington

Introduction

Objectives Provide a general overview of

what Blender is, and what it's capable of

De-mystify the much-criticized GUI

Demonstrate several useful use-cases

Demonstrate how to integrate with a game engine

Create an interest in learning more about Blender

Motivation Why should you listen to me?

Save Time Developing custom game tools is time-

consuming, tedious, and requires significant resources

Training artists or other users on custom tools adds to delay between initial need and actual usefulness of tool

Blender can download and install in less than five minutes (in general).

Save Money 3ds Max: $3500 ~ $4000 Maya: $3500 ~ $4100 RenderMan: ~$3500 Z-Brush: $595 Blender: $0 -- Free!

KISS Keep It Simple, Stupid! Built-in importers & exporters for many

popular formats 'Swiss Army Knife' of DCC Tools Runs on anything! (Keep your artists and their

silly inferior OS's happy) If what you want doesn't already exist – write a

plug-in for it!

Background

Ancient History Developed by NeoGeo & Not A Number

(NaN) Name was inspired by a song from the group

'Yello', off the album 'Baby'. Initially released & distributed as shareware

Oh teh noes!!11one NaN went bankrupt. Creditors agreed to release Blender as GNU

GPL for 100k Euros. In less than a year, the Blender Foundation

raised the funds mostly through the donations of the Blender community

Blender open-sourced, Blender Foundation supervises continued development

Where might I have seen it? Used as a production aid during the story-

boarding of Spider-man 2 The Various open movie projects:

Elephants Dream, 2006 (Project Orange) Big Buck Bunny, 2008 (Project Peach) Yo Frankie!, 2008 (Project Apricot) Sintel, (in production) (Project Durian)

Various shows on the History Channel

What does it do? 3D Modeling Texturing Animation Rendering Sequencing Makes Purdy colors

WTF am I looking at?:Making sense of the GUI

The Lingo Datablock: A

generic block of data. Think of it as an abstract base class.

Object (OB): This is actually just a 3D Node/Position. Think of it like an instance

Mesh (ME): A datablock for a polygonal mesh.

Lamp (LA): A datablock for a light source.

Material (MA): A datablock for a material

The Lingo (cont) Image (IM): An

Image/texture (can be from from file, or generated)

Interpolation (IPO): An animation curve

Scene (SCE): The top-level object in hierarchy

Curve (CU): A bezier or NURBS curve

Camera (CA): A viewpoint with additional projection parameters

Armature (AR): A skeletal 'Bone'

(Demo) View layout Splitting and joining views Pre-defined schemes Saving new schemes Basic hotkeys Mouse control

Use Case #1:Pre-rendered Graphics

Seen in: Many Blizzard games as primary rendering

method (Diablo I & II, Starcraft I, Warcraft I&II)

Older Command & Conquer titles

Also seen in: As high-res backgrounds for in many Final

Fantasy series, Resident Evil, Myst/7th Guest

Limited use in: Many, many games; especially for in-game

GUIs

World of Warcraft

Bioshock

Modern Warfare 2

Demo (SVD)

Use Case #2:Animation

Demo (Skeletal Animation)

Use Case #3:Level Editing

Demo (Level)

Integration

Demo (Code)

Conclusion

Blender can: Fit in multiple places in the pipeline Save you lots of time & money Be extended using Python to do just about

anything Give you something to use that caffeine buzz

on trying to make things 'perfect'

Moovee Tiem!!11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE7VzlLtp-4