Blender 2.44 released – artists/coders, give it 30 mins

[Anonymous]

Hi folks,

The new version of Blender ( 2.44 ) has just been released, with lots of nice new features ( especially for a completely free, and open source, app ).

You can read about it here…
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-244/

Additional Z-Brush style sculpting tools

[Anonymous]

Thanks for info Mal. I’ve been using blender for about 6 months now (version 2.42) and will be downloading the new version as soon as current projects are complete. I can’t say enough good things about blender. Takes a little while to get used to not having a traditional side tool bar but once you learn the keyboard commands productivity skyrockets. The best feature of all has to be it’s tight python integration. I have scripted a tonne of things which have made exporting my custom formats for ai waypoints and game assets a doddle.

[Anonymous]

Hi David,

Do you have a screenshot or three that you can post of your Blender setup, with a current scene ( I’m assuming you’re working in Blender for your mobile phone driving game? ).

Blender 2.44 has a cool Rotate around view option, where it tweens the movement between the various cameras rather than jumping straight away – quite a cool effect!

If you do load one of your scenes in 2.44 to see if it’s compatible with your assets, be sure to make a copy of the .blend first – I believe there may be an issue with re-loading it in 2.42, due to the additional support of multiple texture layers etc.
Mal

[Anonymous]

Hi Mal,
Yeah I can post a shot of setup. Here it is. Has everything I need to hand. Not sure that this would be of much interest to anyone else though?

[Anonymous]

Very cool indeed! It’s interesting to see screenshots of how other developers work, as well as of in-game shots.

Are you using this .m3g exporter for Blender to export the 3D scene to the mobile phone? If it’s stable enough, it should be possible to have it included as part of the official Blender download.

http://www.nelson-games.de/bl2m3g/default.html

This might be an interesting list of instructions for any developers wanting to get into 3D mobile game development, it explains how to export a mesh from Blender into the correct format.

http://bittyjava.wordpress.com/2007/01/04/creating-a-basic-m3g-file-with-blender/

Regards…
Mal

[Anonymous]

Glad you liked it Mal. Meant to say I glanced at your blender tutorial looks very well put together I downloaded the pages and will have to make some time to go through it.

Are you using this .m3g exporter for Blender to export the 3D scene to the mobile phone? If it’s stable enough, it should be possible to have it included as part of the official Blender download. [/quote:878db1e5c2]
A modified version of it. The exporter is a python script so I edited it for my purposes.

I have made some suggestions to the author (very nice guy) that he is considering for the next release like selective export, currently it exports everything in the scene. My code has option to export only master/unique objects (or just the meshes highlighted) and creates a level text file of duplicates transformation details which obviously results in a smaller m3g file size and ensures that cloned objects do not produce redundant resources.

The exporter is very stable so I would be a supporter of having it included in the download as it is only just over 100kb extracted. Only thing to be careful about with it is uv coordinates need to be within the bounds of texture image (Blender has an option that helps with this though) (Don’t expect tilling by say having uv’s extend past image, I handle tiling in code – actually if you look at my in game shot the red and gray warehouse texture is tiled twice where as you can see in blender the UV’s are fixed to the image dimensions).

I usually do a short what went right and wrong doc at end of project but thinking of writing a full length tutorial / postmortem of development of the driving game covering workflow, api issues and tricks I learned if that would be of use to anyone. But not at post stage yet.:)

Other good res for M3g (JSR184) is:
http://developer.sonyericsson.com/site/global/newsandevents/campaigns/java_3d/p_java3d.jsp
A series of 5 tutorials covering everything you need to get started.
http://developer.sonyericsson.com/site/global/techsupport/tipstrickscode/mobilejava3d/p_java3d_tutorial_part5_compliments_redikod.jsp

[Anonymous]

This looks grat, thanks for the heads up Mal!

[Anonymous]

David, the M3G export script has been officially accepted, and is going to be included now in future releases of Blender!

http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-blender-cvs/2007-May/010054.html

I’ve started working on a patch that will allow textures to stay visible during object edit mode, which should hopefully help the modelling process a bit. If / when I get the patch working, I’ll drop you a line to see if you’d be interested in testing it out.

Have you upgraded to the latest 2.44 version yet?

Regards…
Mal

[Anonymous]

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