Free 3d program: Blender

I just figured out how to make shadows WITHOUT having to have the bottom plane to change shades. All you have to do is goto your material the plane is set to and click Mirror Transp and then find the button near the bottom that says "Only Shadow" Click it and you have a shadow with out the diffuesed lighting.

Im thinking of begging a tutorial on making civ units. Might now be done for a whille though.
 
vbraun said:
I just figured out how to make shadows WITHOUT having to have the bottom plane to change shades. All you have to do is goto your material the plane is set to and click Mirror Transp and then find the button near the bottom that says "Only Shadow" Click it and you have a shadow with out the diffuesed lighting. There is a box outline from the plane however.... and I haven't seen if the magenta is truly 255 0 255. This I believe I used toon shading....

Im thinking of begging a tutorial on making civ units. Might now be done for a whille though.
Click to expand...

I like the diffused lighting... and playing around with the spotlight's settings will eventually get you a good shadow I believe. I am on lunch right now, and going to try and redo my GDR's run animation, as it had a stutter between frames 16 and 1. But it is looking pretty good right now. here is a zipped .avi
 

Attachments

That is very cool! An easy way to get rid of the line around the plane is to put lots of planes with the "Shadless" button pressed. And your right about the diffused lighting. it seems to work better that way.
 

Civ IV will be using the Gamebryo engine, which uses either 3ds max or Maya, both of which are prohibitively expensive programs. Probably neither Open FX or Blender will be able to be compatible!
 
Neomega said:

Civ IV will be using the Gamebryo engine, which uses either 3ds max or Maya, both of which are prohibitively expensive programs. Probably neither Open FX or Blender will be able to be compatible!
Click to expand...
Source?

Anyway, why wouldn't they be compatible? does it take the animations directly from the 3D files???
 
Dease said:
Source?

Anyway, why wouldn't they be compatible? does it take the animations directly from the 3D files???
Click to expand...

Form Gamebryo's website, about using 3d Studio max and Maya.

It is hard to say whether the actual animations will be compatible... allthough I am looking in to it as we speak. It may be compatible, just a little less flexible than civ III's units.
 
odintheking said:
Is this easy to make leaderheads with? I'm only twelve so if it's too hard, tell me:lol: but if it's easier to learn than Open FX, then tell me so.
Click to expand...

It is probably easier to make leaderheads on Blender than Open FX, because they have some special effects which give texture maps 3d appearance.

However, I am not sure either would do too well for leaderheads.
 
Neomega said:
http://www.ibiblio.org/bvidtute/

A link to 13 almost half hour video tutorials :eek:
Click to expand...
I'm looking very seriously at Blender actually :) Serious enough to buy ... yes, buy ... their manual

Blender has powerful things that OpenFX doesn't (like a weighted attachment system for skeletons and particle effects) and I have a feeling that the ray-tracing is better too. The only thing that I can see that OpenFX has over Blender is 'depth of feild' blur.

Once I've finished my current project I'm getting Blender (and buying their manual :D ).
 
I just re-started modelling yesterday, with gimp as my 2d program, and Blender as my 3d.

And I am having a blast. Everything seemed to all of the sudden fall into place and make sense for both. Nothing looks too good yet, as I just spent 6 hours watching these tutorials, as opposed to refining my model, but I am very excited.

And I quizzed the guys at Elysium about Gamebryo compatibility, and other games have needed conversion programs for compatibility... so it is possible.

So after a 4 month break, I am ready to crack Blender open for real.
 
Well, with dawn of war (not sure what engine they use) models first have to be produced in 3ds and then exported using an add on to be used in game.
I should imagine Civ IV will use something similar, and 3dsmax will likely be the one aimed at. It depends on how similar blender is in the areas of skeletons and such that will probably decide if they design a "exporter" for blender files.

That is Asuming that Blender can not export in 3ds format? (I'm prety sure that Open FX can't, not with fixed textures anyhow).
 
I've been using Blender for something over a year now, but I've never been good at it. On the other hand, I found the Makehuman project, which looks fabulously useful for civ unit creation. If only I had time and energy...
 
From what I've seen (and heard) of Civ IV, I'm not planning on buying the game anyways. Hell, one of the reasons I got Civ III is because of the realative ease of modding..... I figure if worse comes to worst, just download GMAX (Freeware version of 3D studio max that has all the features of the main program, but you can only save/export the files as whatever game format your plugins support, i.e. Half-Life .mdl, etc) and use that to make the units for Civ IV

Anyways, I'm assuming you have the newest version of Blender, because I have an older version and due to interface bugs (menus closing when you try to click on them with the mouse, etc), I never use the program for anything but making some complex design/misc parts for my Bryce stuff (I import the DXF files and re-size/re-texture them as needed. The Stars on my Tesla tank were done using Blender). Once I get my high-speed wireless internet set up, I'll be downloading the latest verion of Blender just to see what it's like. If I like it, I'll be using it to make more complex models than I'd normally create in Bryce, Import the parts and animate them in Bryce (I'm sorry, but the only program that I've ever worked with that could hold a candle to Bryce in terms of Textures and lighting was 3D Studio Max). Then again, I'm planning on getting Shade 7 (I was impressed with what I saw of the program when I first came accross it in Japan, now that it's in English and only $300, I'm tempted to buy it), so I don't know....
 
Reeeeeeaaaaaaaallllllllyyyyyyyyy?

Well, in that case, once I get my High-Speed wireless internet set up, I'm definitely going to download GMax, since I can then simply import the raw .3ds objects into Poser or Bryce and do all sorts of funky stuff with them (definitely beats the heck outta trying to scrounge up stuff on the net).
 
well, to be honest, I think Gmax would actualy not be quite that bad for doing civ 4 units to start with, I'm thinking that the requirement for models is going to be quite low polly, (probably around 1-2K) as you are going to end up with a lot of models on screen at once. Either that or they are going to release it aimed at high end computers, in which case you are going to need to use something like 3dsmax just to do justice to the game. :(

Whats the texturing like for GMax? I think I could cope with low poly models as long as I can use some good, well fitted textures...
 
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