What is the Final Word on the Blender "Plugin" for LE3?

[Pancakes]

Hello. Just curious. I see a lot of people touting CSG and such, but blender has features like being able to actually model/texture/animate the final game asset directly in the game engine itself. CSG is a step backwards from what has already been coded into blender. Blender has built in light mapping, flowgraphs, sculpting, procedural material nodes, cinematics tools, bullet physics, rendering etc.

 

I was just curious, putting legal theories asside, what is the final word on why that would be a good thing or a bad thing? Keep in mind, interface issues are irrelevant for many reasons.Namely blender 2.5's bigger focuses has been only allowing users to make the interface into whatever they like.

 

This is a serious question from me. Because I see you guys citing features of UDK, Unity, or CryEngine's editors. But those editors are actually far FAAAAR less advanced than Blender's. In other words, if you add Blender's editor to Leadwerks renderer and technology, you'd have a flawless game engine that was more advanced than any other.

[flachdrache]

I know that ... the whole ASE terrain thing within E.T. was blender or nothing, since i dont own a copy of 3DStudio. However, some front-ends are simply counterproductive (aint for me since 2.5 though).

If configuration is simple enough i would happily download such a "configuration/plugIn" but forcing me to have to use this or that, since there is no other solution available, amplifies the possibility that i have to use another counterproductive tool.

[Rick]

I disagree about the CSG being backwards. 3D modeling programs are much more complicated to use for non artists than CSG editors. The point of CSG isn't just to be able to model in the editor, it's meant to be much easier to use than modeling in a 3D program so that level designers can easily and quickly do it.

 

Back in the day when I was making levels for HL & CS I picked up on CSG in Hammer very quickly, but I still to this day have no idea what is going with Blender. It's just more complicated than something like 3DWS, and that's just the facts. It's a big reason why CSG exists in editors. It's just easier.

[Laurens]

I agree with Rick.

 

It's great for blocking out levels without getting into complicated applications. I am sure that Blender will be just as fast when you get used to it but the whole point of CSG in the editor (in my belief) is a low barrier to entry, something that Blender definatly has NOT

[franck22000]

It's good because it's easy but as rick said before it can be good too:

 

 

1- Make the base architecture of your buildings.

 

By this way you have rapid results and once the base architecture is finished you add some blender/3dsmax mades models in the editor on this building for the complicated parts, it's called modular level design if i remember right.

 

For example, a programmer or level designer can make a room with CSG in 2 minutes and ask for an artist to make models to place inside this room. It save time and 3D artists have less work to do.

 

 

On a csg editor you can male a good building in a few ammount of time compared to a specialized modeling tool. I dont need to know UV mapping or crazy interfaces of blender or 3dsmax to make some good things.

 

 

2- Prototypinq a level

 

By building some CSG brushes, a programmer or level designer can do some prototyping of a level without the need of an 3D artist.

 

Anyway it change nothing for artists if they dont want to use CGS they still can make their buildings in some modeling applications.

 

Valve use CSG a lot, Epic Games use CSG, frictionnal games use CSG, Crytech too, this is not for nothing

[Pancakes]

CSG is not easier than modeling with polygons. Especially if you're intention is to block out shapes for an experienced artist to come in and model OR if you yourself are the experienced artist.

 

Modeling with polygons is a lot simpler and quicker too.

 

Watching some UDK CSG tutorials, I'm like "WTF", because of all the steps you have to do make the simplest things. Honestly polys are easier. And 1000 more versatile for making quick shapes. I think if you saw my tree modeling tutorial u'd understand what I mean.

 

But unfortunately I don't have the power to prove this to you. So, yeah.

[Marleys Ghost]

because of all the steps you have to do make the simplest things

 

?? cant say I ever noticed .. it was just like using 3DWS ... but then I'd take 3DWS over Blunder any day.

[Josh]

To answer the OP's question, I'm not really interested in delving through the Blender code, and I don't think it would be moral to take their open-source code and turn it into a commercial product.

[Pancakes]

Ok ok ok ok... CSG is a standard of the past. Of course more people have it. Just like Leadwerks deferred renderer. You could say, UDK doesn't have deferred lighting so Leadwerks is non standard etc. Well anyways. Blender has more to it than CSG.

 

The pipeline just amazing. And also, the CSG argument is irrelevant because Josh would be free to add CSG to Blender's other features if he wanted to. It's not an either or situation. You can have it all.

 

PTEX, CSG, polys, sculpting, flowgraph, lightmapping with realtime feedback built in, fully featured cinematic editting and compositing, material node system, I mean just everythign at your fingertips inside of the game engine.

 

I think people won't appreciate Blender's game engine editor features until 2 years from now when UDK finally catches up to where blender is TODAY and makes a video about one of the above features with techno music blaring in the background.

 

"UDK now has built in Beast lightmapping and PTEX, and you sculpt and paint and adjust animations directly in your editor for unparrelleled industry standard professionalism plus a bunch of cool hip buzzwords" *cue techno music*

 

maybe then you'd see how good it was.

 

To answer the OP's question, I'm not really interested in delving through the Blender code, and I don't think it would be moral to take their open-source code and turn it into a commercial product.

 

Josh, they WANT YOU to do it. They are trying so hard to get blender into the industry.

 

That's the entire rational behind blender 2.5!

[Rick]

I think people won't appreciate Blender's game engine editor features until 2 years from now when UDK finally catches up to where blender is TODAY and makes a video about one of the above features with techno music blaring in the background.

 

If this happens it'll be because the interface is much easier to use. Pancakes you have to face the facts, Blender is hard to use for new people, and even harder for people who have become used to a certain interface. You can have all the features in the world but if people have a hard time using it, that means the interface isn't good. Even if the creators think what they have is brilliant, it doesn't matter. What matters is how the general public, the average Joe, thinks about it and the common theme from most people seem to be that they don't like the interface. It doesn't follow some standards that most people are used to.

 

 

Here is a quote from someone reviewing Blender

 

For some reason Blender has gotten a reputation for being "hard to use", something I used to think this as well. But after a couple days of digging around the interface and asking questions on the forums, I was starting to feel pretty comfortable with it.

 

That may seem harmless and not asking for a ton from the user. "Take some time and learn the interface" you may say, but honestly once the editor opens and if a person goes to the "standard" WASD and mouse movement and it doesn't work the way they expect, you've already lost the majority of the people. That simple minor thing is something almost everyone in the game making business has come to accept as a standard and when you take it away, people freak out.

[Josh]

Josh, they WANT YOU to do it. They are trying so hard to get blender into the industry.

Who does?

[Marleys Ghost]

Sounds more like you want a Leadwerks plug-in for blunder not the other way around.

[Rick]

Blender Foundation!

[franck22000]

I dont know how it is for the others non-artists guys but here is my experience with 3DWS and blender

 

- Blender: I never be able to make any good building after hours on it.

 

- 3DWS: after 30minutes i made a very nice looking warehouse with textures...

[Davaris]

I thought the Blender code was GPL, which means if you make anything using it, its got to be free. Anyway if that's not the case, it might be worth looking into, as everything can be customized, including layouts and keys and the customizations can be shared. As for plugins, they can be made in Python to automate virtually anything and I assume that includes the building of levels.

 

If it is true the Blender Foundation want commercial companies to take an interest, it might be worth looking into, as most people can afford a $200-$300 for a game engine, but paying thousands for 3D Max or Maya, just to make games in your spare time?

 

Anyway if people think Blender is hard to use, have a look at some of these video tutes. It is easier than you think:

 

http://gryllus.net/Blender/3D.html

 

And yeah, like Pancakes I am a Blender user as well - albeit new. I used to be a Hexagon user, but when it changed owners, they stopped fixing show stopping bugs and after being burned like that, I won't be using a complex 3D modeling commercial product again. If I take the time to learn something complex, I want it to be around and maintained for a long time and I'm pretty sure Blender is forever.

[Pancakes]

Who does?

 

Ton Roosendal the mastermind behind blender. A big part of their reasoning for completely re-writing blender from the ground up more or less, is the same reason you are writing a new Leadwerks engine. They want it to gain more appeal. Non-commercial appeal? They already have that. They want the industry to make use of blender. You are the industry. They didn't write that code just to be looked at they want people to use it not just for their hobbies but in their professions as well. It's free. It's open source. They aren't asking you to pay them any money. It's not try before you buy. It's free. And people have such a hard time accepting that.

 

I know it sounds like a crazy scheme because you guys are unfamiliar with blender. Some of you are unfamiliar with open source in general.

 

Also like I said, with blender you can have the polys and also add the CSG. There is no reason to have to pit one against the other.

 

Also interface discussions are irrelevant because you can change the interface to be whatever you want it to be. You can make it look exactly like 3dsMax if you wanted to. You could make it look like photoshop. I don't care about teh interface I want the features in Leadwerks editor. That's what I'm talking about. I didn't say I wanted Leadwerks to become blender Jr. I said Blender has tons of features that could sky rocket the power of Leadwerks editor. I'm talking about the features not the interface.

 

Okay so for concern 1: CSG - just add CSG to blender. It's that simple. In this way you can say thank you for all the millions of dollars worth of code that they would be handing Leadwerks for free. Not that you even have to do that if you don't want.0

 

concern 2 interface: It doesn't matter. You can make your own interface. Since Josh will be making his own interface from scratch anyway, he can do it with blender.

 

Concern 3 - Won't Leadwerks have to be free too? No. Keep the SDK seperate from the editor. It's that simple. Make the editor symbiotic with blender. But then the editor exports out to the SDK which does the actual processing and rendering compiling whatever.

 

It's like the mental ray plugins for blender, you can get the plugin all day but you can't use mental ray without a legit license.

 

is this making any sense?

 

You can get the features of blender, add CSG, and also change the interface to whatever you want.

 

Anyway it's just a thought. And I'm not an expert on it and I'm just going to leave it at this post and not say anything else. But I would at least think about it.

[Rick]

I'm just going to leave it at this post and not say anything else

 

Come on Pancakes we know that's not going to happen

[Josh]

If Ton Roosendal has a lot of money and is interested in Leadwerks, then I might be interested, but he hasn't contacted me yet.

 

All I ever hear about Blender is that the interface sucks. Over and over, for years and years. I think I downloaded it once a few years ago, and if I remember right it was just a blank window with some squares at the bottom or side, and I couldn't make it do anything. I can't exactly remember, but the point is people generally don't have time to learn something they aren't even sure they want to know, so if you don't convince them right away you will lose them.

 

So in very crude terms, if they can't even solve their most remedial problem of having a poor interface, it's not something I feel very optimistic about. And no one from the Blender company(?) (is there one?) is asking for my help or offering me anything. So why would I want to try to learn their code when I can write my own that is at most better and at least understandable by me?

 

Blender may have some good design ideas that I can use, but as far as entwining my company's future with a product that they can't even give away for free, I don't see any reason I would want to do that.

[omid3098]

basically I'm totally agree with original post. and will appreciate this kind of plugins/tools or what ever!

usually artists needs more easy ways to transfer their models to engine but they can't do much with that as they can't code much! in the other side programmers just use these softwares (like blender) for creating some simple models to fill up their needs, and usually they don't challenge much with modeling softwares. so these Ideas will hang in artists head. (in some cases forever!)

 

Long time before I was thinking on how to render with leadwerks engine in realtime 3dmax viewport. (which never became true!)

the Idea was based on deference between environment modeling and level design with other parts of game creating.

It would be amazing if what you are modeling/texturing in 3dmax was the final game engine view. and in the other hand to use max/maya/XSI/Blender as engine editor. (I know that is dreamy)

how ever now it's possible to model in a good realtime view such as engine quality, but it's not what you get.

 

 

if there were any collaborations to work on something like this for max or even blender, I can take a part with 5 hours per week.

[omid3098]

Blender may have some good design ideas that I can use, but as far as entwining my company's future with a product that they can't even give away for free, I don't see any reason I would want to do that.

I think using blender to help your engine become better is just like using newton to help your engine become better.

[Josh Brown (Razz)]

Since Blender 2.5 I'd say the interface has become rather intuitive. I watched one tutorial from Blender Guru and was already making stuff. I mean the keyboard shortcuts are obvious too, 'G', 'R', 'S' for Grab, Rotate and Scale. 'X','Y','Z', to constraint the transformation to the corresponding axis, however from what I gather from previous posts here is that wouldn't matter because the interface would be entirely editable.

 

TBH though, this seems to benefit only Blender users giving them the features of Blender for use with Leadwerks, since it seems to be a plugin for Blender? Therefore only really helping out the minority of people here which means Josh's time could be best spent working on some other part of the engine.

[Pancakes]

If Ton Roosendal has a lot of money and is interested in Leadwerks, then I might be interested, but he hasn't contacted me yet.

 

All I ever hear about Blender is that the interface sucks. Over and over, for years and years. I think I downloaded it once a few years ago, and if I remember right it was just a blank window with some squares at the bottom or side, and I couldn't make it do anything. I can't exactly remember, but the point is people generally don't have time to learn something they aren't even sure they want to know, so if you don't convince them right away you will lose them.

 

So in very crude terms, if they can't even solve their most remedial problem of having a poor interface, it's not something I feel very optimistic about. And no one from the Blender company(?) (is there one?) is asking for my help or offering me anything. So why would I want to try to learn their code when I can write my own that is at most better and at least understandable by me?

 

Blender may have some good design ideas that I can use, but as far as entwining my company's future with a product that they can't even give away for free, I don't see any reason I would want to do that.

 

 

I'm just speachless. But anyway it's my failing because I cant' communicate well enough about the topic.

 

Blender and Leadwerks are two of the most exceptional pieces of 3d software in all the world. And that the two should be so oblivious to one another I suppose is just how it's going to to be.

 

I understand you don't have the time to learn about blender. At least that since you don't understand what blender is, you don't have any reason to make the time to learn about blender. And that's the conundrum.

 

I just can't communicate well enough in forum posts. But that's okay Leadwerks is fine the way it is.

[Rick]

It's not your fault Pancakes. It's Blenders. If they can't get people to see what they (you) see then either they aren't very good at displaying it, or it just isn't as good as people expect it to be.

 

I think we all understand that you can change the interface and basically change everything about it, but asking Josh to put LE 3 in the hands of software that someone else wrote and he knows nothing about is risky for him.

 

You have some serious passion for Blender and it's engine capabilities. I think you should really learn how to do some of the programming around it and try to come up with some kind of engine yourself. That faith you have in it should keep you motivated to do that learning.

[Davaris]

If I am understanding Pancakes correctly, all you'd need is for Blender to output in Leadwerks format?

 

If the format is not secret, I don't see why someone in the community couldn't write a Python script to do it, without accessing LWs code.

 

They could also write a Python script that spits out Lua scripts and gmf files. The only problem is writing those scripts would be a lot of work and in the end, you wouldn't be able to sell it.

[Josh]

I don't see any way Blender helps me. It doesn't help in a technical sense, because I can't decipher code someone else wrote. It doesn't help me in a sales approach, because I don't have large numbers of people asking for me to support it. It doesn't help me financially, because the Blender staff isn't offering me money for my services.

 

I just downloaded the program again. There's no 64-bit installer. I can't figure out how the camera moves. I found a "camera fly mode" and now the world is flipping around. If there are examples included with the program, I can't find them because there is a weird file browser I can't figure out.

 

I'm not being harsh or opinionated when I say Blender's interface is bad. It's objectively horrible. I mean, I can either not offer my assessment of it (which I have done until now), I can lie and say it is good, or I can tell the truth and say it is really bad. There might be other features that are fantastic, but I will never see them because the basics are missing.

 

I like the idea of Blender. I even like GMax, but the MD3 export has limited precision. Maybe someone on Blender's staff will take my criticism or someone else's to heart and change their design approach.