First Release

So, over the past few weeks, I have been working on my latest addition to the Torque 3D pack collection, the Advanced FPS Kit. The majority of my work over the past week has been focused on an individual element of the pack, the modelling and weapon design series, which to my proud announcement, has been officially launched.

And because my I've learned from last time that pictures tell many many words, I've got loads of them to share today. :)

So, last summer, I embarked on the hefty journey of picking up Blender for the very first time, and like pretty much everyone else, I understood pretty much nothing about it for the longest time. Many many horribly shown tutorials later I came about the idea of introducing my own tutorial series for modelling guns for Torque 3D, including the whole process of setting up the nodes and doing the UV unwrapping. That has finally come to pass in my eyes with this pack release, so what's all in it?


We'll, I'm giving you a four part tutorial series that walks you through Blender the way I learned it, with practice, and by understanding the individual elements. Not to mention I broke the tutorial down into steps that would help a new Blender user quickly pick up Blender and tell themselves: "Hey, I can actually do this".


I also took to the importance of the fact that Blender was extremely hotkey oriented, so while the tutorials started out by pretty much handing you the hotkey, I slowly but surely took that away in favor of simply using terms that new users can quickly associate with the hotkey.


The reason I decided to go for the four part tutorial is that I figured that it would do well to start out small and slowly build on what was learned, so while I know someone might blaze through all four parts just to learn and get done their first gun, there could be someone else who takes what I have taught and maybe off on the side does part 1, makes something else, then picks it up in part 2 to learn new things. The way I wrote this makes it very feasible for the tutorials to follow "knowledge" levels, from beginning techniques, to intermediate, and even a few little Blender Ninja Techniques that even have some of my much more blender oriented friends saying "how did you???".


The thing I found most enjoyable about this however, is that I was actually completing work for a game of mine while I was working on the model (since as I wrote in the tutorial, my game called for an RPK, and so it's time to model one). This gun was the perfect choice for the tutorial, as some of the elements were very easy to model, and then it ramped up in complexity as you moved along.


And of course, when teaching someone how to model, it sometimes helps to interfere with a good picture by drawing all over it, or simply going into a ton of detail, I actually did that quite a bit as I moved through the tutorial files. I even did a diagram at some point just to get the point across (as my semi-horrible photoshop skills will show ;) ).


What I honestly loved the most about doing this however was watching the pictures I took of the model slowly growing into what I honestly think was one of my most coolest third person weapon models to date, and the fact that the step by step process to make a similar model was being recorded by me as I was doing it. It's things like that, which honestly make me feel that someone will be able to pull a great deal of knowledge from these pieces.


And of course, when you write something that takes a lot of time to actually do, you have to incorporate some humor in there, as my comment about how much I hate spheres really showed. I'm sure some people will get some laughs from it from time to time. :)


I even went to the lengths to ensure one of my old jokes from when I was asking questions came back up.


All in all though, I really loved to do this, and I would do it all over again for another weapon if I had the chance, maybe I just might. :)

This was honestly the most fun I've had working on a pack related tutorial series to data, and I would honestly be all but thrilled if you guys took away from this as much and even more than what I put into it. I'm sure that this series will be extremely rewarding to those who need to sit down and give modelling a try to accomplish creating something that they always wanted to have in their game, and I even sit down with you and tell you what to do and what not to do when you make the scripts for your gun, then I show off a few of my old weapon gems to do some "interesting" things. You also get ahold of that Model 1887 shotgun I've been showing off excessively over the past few weeks to play around with, all of this for only Ten bucks ($10).

And for those of you looking to get the modelling series or any single parts of the pack as they launch, you can do so here. I'd love feedback regarding this and the design concept of my next pack, so fire away and if you've got more ideas you'd like to see prior to launch, now is the time for that! This is probably going to be my last pack for T3D (unless the community grows alot), so lets send it out with a bang.