Model making is a complexe thing.
I'm going to go over some of the main things in Blender. That's
right, Blender. Blender is a free 3D modeling program capible of exporting and
importing a variety of different formats. It is a profesional program, and can
do most of the things other modeling softwares can do. However, Blender is not
noob friendly, meaning it will take some time to learn.
In this page, I
am going to go over the main things in Blender, and by that, I mean the bare
basics. Animation will be explained on the animating
page. I reccomend reading guides and tutorials on the internet for help and
more. I recomend chec out these:
http://www.blender.org/ -- Main blender
homepage.
Blender, noob to pro guide -- Do google search to find it. It's on
Wikipedia Books.
And of course use google (or any other search engine) to
find guides and tutorials. There are also a few videos on Youtube.
I will spend some time telling you how to get your model ready for
glest.
Making Models:
When you open Blender, you see
a square. Doesn't look too 3D yet, does it? Well, hold down MMD (Middle Mouse
Button) and move the mouse. This rotates the view. Use MMD + Shift to pan the
view. Now, all 3D models are made from 3D shapes. Open the add menu and choose
Mesh:
See?
We've got a menu of things to add. A plane is a 2D plane, and not all that
handy. The cube is like the default cube, the circle is a 2D circle, The UV
sphere is a 3D sphere, and between UV and Ico sphere's, it is recommended. The
cylinder is an 3D cylinder, and the cone is just a 3D cone. These are most
of the ones we will need in glest. When we select it, it will be placed where
ever the 3D cursor is. (The 3D is the red crosshair, not the normal mouse
cursor!) No we can go into edit mode by clicking the drop-down menu (currently
in object mode) and choosing edit mode, or more simply, just hit TAB to go into
edit mode (NOTE: you need to select an object with LMB first). It's best to
insert 3D meshes while in edit mode, that way they become part of the current
mesh, rather than a seperate mesh. (Meshes can be joined by selecting both
[multiple selecting can be done with shift + LMB] then pushing CTRL + J) In edit
mode, there is three selection modes:
The
first button here is vertice select, this selects the vertices individually. You
can move these vertices. The next selection mode is the edge select mode, which
selects edges. The last selection mode is face select mode, it selects entire
faces.
But there isn't many vertices (or edges or faces) to select. If we
wanted to say, edit a rectange prism so that it looked like a arm, we would need
more vertices to edit. We can make vertices by subdividing. To do this, hit w,
then choose either subdivide to divide the faces in half, adding more vertices,
or use subdivide multi to subdivide multiple times. Remember you do not want too
many faces, or the model will be too large in file size.
The subdivide menu.
A cube after being
subdivided 2 times. Now we know how to make an mesh have enough vertices to edit
properly, but how do we edit it? Simple. Choose wether you want to move the
vertice, (for editing) rotate it (for when you have full objects selected) or
scale it (make full objects bigger, smaller, thinner, etc;) The menu for those
looks like this:
The triangle is moving manipulator. It allows you to
move the object/vertice/etc. The next it the rotation manipulator. It rotates an
object or mesh. Finally, we have the scale manipulator, which can make a model
fatter, thinner, longer, shorter, etc; While we talk about manipulators, we
should learn about resizing. Selecting a model (you can use the 'a' key to
select or deselect all) then hit the 's' key. Now move the mouse either closer
or farther from the center of the model(s) and it will become either bigger or
smaller.
Next is extrude. To have a subdivided cube have a face extruded,
select the face and hit the 'e' key. If more than one face is selected, a
dialouge box will give you two options. Choose to 'extrude region' if you see
this.
Example of extruded faces
on a subdivided cube.
Lastly for us, we are going to learn subsurfing. In
object mode, select an object, then in the editing menu of the buttons menu.
(defaultly, placed on the bottom of the screen) click 'Add Modifier' and choose
'Subsurf'. Now the model with smooth by subsurfing sides. You can change the
levels to make it even smoother, but do not go above level 2 (level 3 in some
cases) or it will get too high poly. When you are happy with the results, hit
apply to apply it to the model. Failure to do this will result in a unexportable
model.
The above model
subsurfed to level 1. That's plenty for a decent start to modeling. Take some
online tutorials for more.
Now we are going learn how to apply a
texture to our models. In edit mode, select edges. Now choose the edges that
would be the seems. There is no easy way to explain this, but think that if you
were to have a box in the shape of your 3D model, and you were to unwrap that
box by cutting some of the edges then flattening it out, were would you cut?
That's what seem marking is. Just select the edges you wish to mark, then hit
CTRL + E and choose 'Mark Seems'. Now you have the seems marked:
Now the seems are marked in orange.
Left click anywhere on the edge of a section going horizontally and choose split
area. Now adjust the marker to make a new window. In that window, Click the far
right bottom icon (probably looks like a graph) and choose UV/Image image
editor. Now select your entire model while in edit mode (use the 'A' key) and
hit 'U'. Now choose unwrap from that menu and the image editor will fill up with
your UV.
The UV of a simple cube with
all edges marked as seems.
Now click UVs and choose scripts. From that menu
click 'Save UV Face Layout'. Choose a folder and a name for the TGA. Now we have
saved a TGA with the layout of the seems. Now edit that TGA (see TGAs) and load it into blender (image > open) Now in
object mode, set the display (look at the cube picture to the right of where you
switch between edit mode and object mode) Look at your final model. If
satisfied, you need to link the texture.
An
example of a Textured Cube is above. Now in the buttons window (on the bottom of
the screen) Click the sphere picture. Once done that, make sure the next one
beside it is also on a sphere picture. Choose 'Add New' and way on the right in
the texture section, hit 'Add New' as well. Now switch to the camoflauge icon.
Once again we have to click 'Add New', Change the texture type to image, and in
the image section, click load. Load that TGA that you used for the texture, and
you're good to go.
Getting ready for glest:
The model
is done, but it is not ready for glest yet. First, in edit mode, select all of
the objects, then hit CTRL + T to turn them all to triangles. ANy non-triangular
shapes will not show in glest, so this is very important. The next thing is to
make sure that if the model is unanimated (such as a building) set the start
frame and end frame to 1, or the file will be way too big! Once you've got that
done, if you linked the mesh as explained before, the model should be ready to
export. Download the exporter and converter (gleximal) I don't know if they
updated the one on Glest.org yet, but I believe Eurion or whatever it's called
has a working download. In object mode, select all the model, and export as a
glest xml. Now use the converter to convert to g3d. To use the converter, either
open up command line and type in xml2g's path and put a space, then
'file_name.xml' another space and 'g3d_name.g3d'. The file_name.xml should be
the input file, while g3d_name.g3d is what you want to call the output file.
Optionally, for faster converting, make a .bat file (just take any file and
rename it as a .bat file) put it in the same folder as xml2g, and type in
it:
xml2g.exe input_file.xml
output_file.g3d
This is all you should need to know. Check out animation and tga's