I started working with blender to see if I was worth anything... Heres my models.


Giraffe parts


Giraffe done (some what)


Giraffe saddled


Delivery truck


A quick sword


A little guy that will wield the sword and ride the giraffe.


Little guy with a quick texture


Little guy talking up a storm


A wine bottle and wine glass


Chibi


chibi fight animation


They may not be good models, but they are mine. lol.. I can't do texturing... I'm going to see about animating them when I get done with them. The truck is going to have an openable back door to loot, and the giraffe will be able to hopefully walk.

edit: the little guy was made in an hour, blender is amazing when you get the hang of the hotkeys... Maybe one day these guys will be in a bonus level of my game.

Very good start! What do you think of Blender so far?

I love blender, after you learn the hotkeys its pretty fluid. Im going to use the giraffe to learn to animate hopefully... With wine season coming in I probably wont get enough time off of work...

Yup, i keep telling people this, it's probably one of the best modelling programs available, and it's free. It just has a steep learning curve up until you get used to the hotkeys

...of which, there a rather a LOT! haha. Plus, all the different menus, naming conventions, etc. It's a difficult beast at times, but, I absolutely adore spending time in Blender. I have been using it now for around 4 years (maybe more) and I am still watching tutorials, always learning new things.

Practice, practice, practice! That's the key. Never give up.

My best advice for Blender would be, don't be afraid of ANY of the buttons! Press them all and see what happens. You will learn more about Blender by just pressing things, tweaking values, adding modifiers etc.

Have fun with it!

Cheers

Jay.

Yeah, and after a month or so in Blender, you realise how clunky Adobe Photoshop interface is.

Always amazes e how some tutorials want you to change the mouse input to match Photoshop - in fact (imo) Adobe could learn a thing or two regarding usability from Blender!

Reliquia....

I pretty well have a basic know how as to how to make and texture a model ( wihtout shadowmaps/light maps cuase i dont know how just yet.)
I pretty well have an idea of manually editing a bone grouping and almost have animating.
but how do I add the models i make into gg?
Also, the frames say from 1 - 20 are talking frames will that still be valid in game guru?

As far as adding your models to GG all you have to do is finish texturing your models and you can either use the model importer that comes with GG or

Take a bitmap image of each model 64x64 - white background
Export your model out to a direct x file
Ad an FPE, making sure that it has the same file name as the bitmap
in the fpe set the name of the object, and the filename of the direct x file
When setting the filename for the texture if you have dds files then put the xxxxxx_D.dds filename in else just put the
name of the file there if you just have a jpg, png or tga etc

Of course to do it properly you will need xxxxxx_D.dds, xxxxxx_N.dds, xxxxxx_S.dds files, I do this by using Mindtex 2. You just plug the texture in play with a few values which shows the texture in real time and then just save each as a dds file.

You then take either the 4 files (no dds) or 6 files (dds) and put them in the entitybank folder of GG and 'boom' you should be setup.

Thank you for explaining,

My double A battery that if I can qill give to the community, I know I needed one pretty bad.

Haha, i think everyone who has started learning modelling while using GG has made batteries in their early modeling career, there must be dozens of different ones for free on the store and in the free models section by now, i know i have a full set of different sizes in my free post for sure

and the circle continues. =]

For organics like humans etc use the skin modifier in blender. Its kind of the like the frame creator in zbrush. Save you a ton of time. Just youtube blender skin modifier to get started.

Thanks for the tip, now I will try to redo my giraffe with the skin modifier, I honestly have been hung up on watching youtube for blender and art tutorials so I can draw my own reference.

edit: He made my alien in 7 seconds with better hands..... lol... in the official skin modifier tutorial.