3d Modeling for games

Anyone use Blender? After avoiding it for...ever, I finally broke down and figured I need to use it to make 3d terrains for little games I'm making, and it actually is really addicting.

In photoshop, gimp, or any 2d drawing program you make a heightmap by drawing various shades of gray which you can use to generate terrain depth. So I like to take a google earth image, and replace the colors in solid shades of gray, then replace the shades with textures and turn it into a world.

So I made a little tutorial this morning recapping what I'm talking about:

I started with this image from the grand canyon I edited a bit:

Where the black will be the lowest part, and the lighest shade will be the top of the canyon.
I copy and replace sections of that in photoshop and replace with copied sections of my textures. (I would have just brushed them on with a layer mask but my brush pattern was pissing me off and not working right.)

Once it's textured you have to flip it both horizontally and vertically.

Which gives something like this:


And when you turn it into a 3d model you get:



I made a video of the steps it takes if anyone's interested:
[video=youtube;AFmMfMOXQLg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFmMfMOXQLg[/video]

Pretty cool, not good with graphics but I love the writing of the code aspect, its like a very intricate set of legos.

Yeah that's what I like as well, in Unity I use C# exclusively and it's a lot of fun. Usually I hate art because it can be a time drain, but some of these little racetracks take 5 minutes to make now. It's alright that the resolution is all stretched, on the mobile devices screen it looks a lot better. Programming is like a puzzle, fitting pieces together.

I'm teaching myself Blender, but am a long way off from showing any of my work. I haven't done much with 3D modeling and most of that was many, many years ago.

cheechako said:

I'm teaching myself Blender, but am a long way off from showing any of my work. I haven't done much with 3D modeling and most of that was many, many years ago.

Click to expand...

Man, I've avoided it like the plague because it's all hotkey based but once you spend a couple days memorizing various hotkeys it's badass.

Usually I just stick to programming because with art I never have a preference whether it's turned this way, that way, etc and can sink too much time into making it perfect.

Right now I'm making a kids rpg for android OS where you can tame 30 different animals and ride them in an open world. In the world there are 5 towns and in each you can enter contests(racing, obstacle course, etc) or accept jobs hauling supplies to other towns. So now with blender I can whip out race tracks in minutes, which used to take me a long time.


In the past I've worked on dungeon crawler type RPGs:
[video=youtube;TK63CRQuGHU]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK63CRQuGHU[/video]

Not the greatest but we all start somewhere and I have more fun doing this than playing games.

if youd like you could also put this in our gaming section ^_^

I made these tree backgrounds today that tile together for a background, at first it looked like shit where the two photos met so I had to tweak it


Here's how they look as background, I made the clouds yesterday that are in the vid:
[video=youtube;EwZjjG6xKGA]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwZjjG6xKGA[/video]

I had a 3D modeling class at ITT-Tech. We spent more time modifying objects than learning how to create anything. So when the final project was announced I basically had 2 weeks to learn the program on my own time and create a 3D enviroment. This is what I came up with.
p.s I think i'll stick to web design. Modeling is very time consuming and tedious..lol