alona
03-21-2005, 10:10 AM
Dear Blenders,
The "foreigner" in the heading refers to my not being a Blender user - at least not yet :). There's an aspect of Blender I'd like to better understand, if it turns out to be useful I'll just dig in and study another 3D app...
I'm asking about the built-in game creation features of Blender, although I don't have any games in mind. I want to create simple stand-alone applications in which some geometry and animation is presented and the user can control certain aspects of it: move something, make something thicker, slow down the animation, stuff like that. Typically there will be no "fly-by" aspects involved, just grabbing and moving sliders or perhaps grabbing part of a 3D object and pulling it around.
To give a very simple concrete example, let's say the application shows a torus and two sliders, one slider controls the major radius of the torus and the other controls the minor radius, the user can fiddle around with the sliders and the torus responds in real time using OpenGL or DirectX or whatever for the real-time texturing and rendering.
I can create the necessary components (geometry, animations, controls) in Blender or in another software - I currently use XSI, and I suppose the transfer of objects from one app to the other is manageable. The part I'm not sure about is how to take such a scene and convert it into a stand-alone application. I'm sure it can be done by programming in C++ and interfacing with the DirectX API and the scene geometry/animation format, but I'm (naturally) trying to save as much of the programming as possible. Writing a few lines of Python script just to tell it who controls what is not a problem, but I would very much like to avoid doing my own texturing, rendering, and even Windows interface...
Can Blender help me do that? What would be the general workflow? Is there by any chance a tutorial or manual chapter I should look at? The Blender game-tutorials I found so far focused on character creation and rigging, and were skimpy on the details of creating the actual application. Any guidance would be much appreciated.
AA
The "foreigner" in the heading refers to my not being a Blender user - at least not yet :). There's an aspect of Blender I'd like to better understand, if it turns out to be useful I'll just dig in and study another 3D app...
I'm asking about the built-in game creation features of Blender, although I don't have any games in mind. I want to create simple stand-alone applications in which some geometry and animation is presented and the user can control certain aspects of it: move something, make something thicker, slow down the animation, stuff like that. Typically there will be no "fly-by" aspects involved, just grabbing and moving sliders or perhaps grabbing part of a 3D object and pulling it around.
To give a very simple concrete example, let's say the application shows a torus and two sliders, one slider controls the major radius of the torus and the other controls the minor radius, the user can fiddle around with the sliders and the torus responds in real time using OpenGL or DirectX or whatever for the real-time texturing and rendering.
I can create the necessary components (geometry, animations, controls) in Blender or in another software - I currently use XSI, and I suppose the transfer of objects from one app to the other is manageable. The part I'm not sure about is how to take such a scene and convert it into a stand-alone application. I'm sure it can be done by programming in C++ and interfacing with the DirectX API and the scene geometry/animation format, but I'm (naturally) trying to save as much of the programming as possible. Writing a few lines of Python script just to tell it who controls what is not a problem, but I would very much like to avoid doing my own texturing, rendering, and even Windows interface...
Can Blender help me do that? What would be the general workflow? Is there by any chance a tutorial or manual chapter I should look at? The Blender game-tutorials I found so far focused on character creation and rigging, and were skimpy on the details of creating the actual application. Any guidance would be much appreciated.
AA