Blog feeds for Gamers and Developers in the GarageGames community. http://www.garagegames.com/ 2008-11-21T09:42:59+00:00 text/html 2006-10-28T11:43:38+00:00 Jason Howard http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/43612/11496 Here is a sample of some tutorials I'm working on: <a href='http://webpages.charter.net/jasonhoward/GG/Moons.pdf' target=_blank>webpages.charter.net/jasonhoward/GG/Moons.pdf</a>. The tutorials focus on space graphics -- in this case moons. They all center around using *free* blender 3D software. <a href='http://blender.org' target=_blank>blender.org</a><br><br>So... is anyone interested on more? text/html 2006-09-18T03:58:01+00:00 Jason Howard http://www.garagegames.com/blogs/43612/11288 Exporting blender geometry to Quark maps:<br><br>First of all, I must preface this by stating the obvious. Blender was not made for brush modeling -- Quark was. I'm not a complete idiot. So I'll ignore you if you rant about blender here...<br><br>Secondly, I love blender. So I'll ignore you if you want to rant about blender here...<br><br>Ok... If you're like me and you want to do movie sequences for your game in blender, you're not excited about re-modeling your Quark buildings and structures in blender. I read a little about some people who experimented with blender to map exporters, but I couldn't find their scripts anywhere. Am I looking in the wrong places, or are they no longer published?<br><br>Anyway - I decided to go ahead and make my own blender to Quark map exporter, knowing that blender wasn't meant for that kind of thing but wanting to do it anyway.<br><br>There are some ground rules. To export properly each you need follow these guidelines:<br>- Model using brushes only (convex polygons -- each as a seperate mesh object). For example, a cube is suitable completely-enclosed convex polygon. Modeling out of bricks or cubes would work. <br>- Dimples or any other sort of concave shapes are not allowed, but you can break them up into several smaller convex shapes. Perhaps future versions will support automatically splitting up concave shapes, but don't expect that anytime soon... that's very complex.<br>- The early versions of this script really only export the geometry. Exporting UV textures and lamps is a natural next step for development. It's complex, but not as difficult as breaking up concave geometry into convex shapes. For now, retexture inside Quark. Currently it just uses a default texture called &quot;concrete&quot;. You'll need import a concrete.jpg to your Quark setup so that this will work.<br>- Use quark and the map2dif tools to export all the way into Torque.<br>- Expect this to have a lot of issues. It's in the early stages of development, and I don't have a lot of time. Plenty of interest, but not a lot of time...<br><br>If anyone wants to help, feel free -- but please share your updates to the script. If anyone wants to complain, I'd love to listen but I don't have time. I'm busy making things happen and suggest that you do the same. If anyone is glad to see this script posted, I'll be glad to make time to listen to that. For those who have been longing for a script like this -- here's my little contribution back to a GREAT Garage Games community. Thanks for everything. <br><br>Here goes nothing... I hope this doesn't result in total chaos when it hits the community, but I want to share it anyway...<br><br>Oh... and lastly -- I will be a Constructor fan when it is published. Maybe after that comes out I'll start working on a map2blend import script to get Constructor based geometry into blender rendered movie scenes...