What are you missing in your gamedev toolchain ?

[metalliandy]

It would be nice to be able to set up 3 views with the image in the background (yes I know the texture a plane with the image technique - and it is inconvenient and can tend to interfere with your workflow...)

Im not sure if this is what you mean...but you can already set up a background image with multiple views by going View> Background image> Use Background Image> Load

Just set up your views first




Hope that helps.

I am in agreement with all the above requests especially the following (with some extra suggestions by myself)...

1) 3D Painting...Integration with gimp (without using verse ) would be sweet!.

2) Auto UV Mapping would be amazing... by this i mean like the UVLayout tool by headus http://www.uvlayout.com/

Even though the LSCM is amazing in blender i find i still need to do loads of manual tweaking.

3) The ability to export double sided poly's (for grass planes and leaves etc) would be a godsend

4) A Thicken tool.

5) A window that shows Poly count and poly Budget that you can leave open...much like the one in max.
I find the current poly count (top right corner) flawed because it counts Quads only. (i know you only have to divide by two, but it would be a nice addition )

6)A merge verts brush, much like the box select brush (double tap B) that welds all the verts together in its selection area.

I find myself constantly Alt+M Alt+M Alt+M Alt+M Alt+M lol

7) A better decimate tool, that keeps UV's intact and has enough decency to keep a good mesh flow.

Efficient Tri strips when converting Quads to Tri's

(I lifted this from a previous post of mine here)


"After creating a cylinder and cutting the centre with the knife tool, then running the conversion, some tris seem not follow the most logical order.
Some go one way and then in the same line of tri's others are flipped.

I have attached a gif showing my test, and i hope it explains my rambling more that my power of the English language ever could.

The last part of the image shows in red, the direction that the tri's should follow for the most efficient conversion."



see the full post below

http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic. ... highlight=

9) some integration with the Nvidia texture tools and Cuda would be great...Thus allowing users with new GPU's to take full advantage of them within Blender.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/texture_tools.html
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html



Thanks for looking

[Sindwiller]

Hello there. Thanks for asking that question, as this is, at least in my opinion, one of the greatest problems in the world of libre game development. I have worked with quite a lot game engines before (Source, Darkplaces/Quake3, Sauerbraten, now Unreal Engine 3 for UT3). I do mainly level design stuff, as well as a bit of environment art. No really serious stuff though, due to the lack of motivation and nice engines What I miss in my (open source based) gamedev toolchain? A lot, I would say. First of all, I had never the opportunity to work with a complete and, more importantly, working FOSS mapping pipeline. Working with GTKRadiant (the map editor for all Quake-based respectively all games using Quake3's map format, for example Darkplaces/Nexuiz) was a horrible experience. Sauerbraten was okay-ish for a while, but it lacks comprehensive editing tools (ingame editing might be cool for a while, but it pisses you off after a while, especially since you don't have multiple viewports etc.) and model integration. A big problem in the libre game development world might be that the majority of developers are pretty conservative for that matter. Working with CS2Blender wasn't too bad. I like its concept (it would be utter awesome if someone implements something like that for Sauer or some other engine). But while I only hooked up some test levels with it, the shader management pissed me off. Again, hooray for user friendliness.

What I'm trying to say is that there is a need for a solid base, meaning that, regardless of what technology or engine is in use, keeping a specific concept for the future pipeline in mind is the key. I don't want to shape basic stuff with complex mesh geometry, I'd rather go for simple shapes (like brushes in UE or Quake, or cubes in Sauerbraten). Then again, there should always be an easy to integrate complex geometry for detailing. When I compare the existing FOSS tech with, for instance, the Unreal Engine, which is pretty much a industry standard (and before someone whines about the effort etc. I quote: "One of the our important goals is to improve open source tools to better fit to the professional gamedev indrustry."), then I actually see the problems in the engine, respectively its tools and environment, rather than the external applications, like Blender or the GIMP. Both are very nice examples of fine software (although they all have their flaws - every software has its flaws ). The root of the problem must be eliminated to solve it.

Lastly, my little wish list for Blender:

- A faster renderer/sculpting mode - I don't know what exactly is responsible for that, but working with a million of polygons can be really annoying, due to slowness
- A GLSL viewport - (Is it already in schedule for 2.5?)
- A flatten function

[Mariolink]

i know that you can bake ambient occlusion and diffuse color already.

but i would like to be able to bake such things from high poly objects to low poly objects. just like with normal map baking but instead of sampling the normal, other high poly surface information gets sampled.

Try out the new SVN. instead of baking normals try the other options, they also work.

[kakapo]

ah, thanks! i wasn't aware of that. i tried out a recent SVN build now. the patch of your link sounds great too (possibility to bake lighting only).

but we need better baking quality (-> baking doesn't seem to use any kind of anti aliasing).

[Mariolink]

Oh yeah OSA for baking would be nice
Add that to the wish list.(Totally forgot that)

Also a stretch vizualitation green for non strecht red for too little space blue for overstretched for UVs.

[Matroblend]

Exporters

- collada and fbx exporters with good animation support
- improved workflow for light mapping whole levels (and previewing them without much effort)
- radiosity baking (not vertex based but texture based)
- the possibility to use blender as physics editor (for example setting up joint hierarchies and collision shapes and so on and export them as collada file or in other formats)
- more high poly to low poly baking options like ambient occlusion or diffuse color

[Coz]

That the textures path is also searched for textures whenever you load a model. At least, when importing a .ac file and having the textured referenced as(the actual line in the .ac model that names the texture to load):

texture "stonegrass.rgb"

And setting the texture path to where the that texture is, it won't find it unless you run Blender from the texture's directory, or copy the texture into the same directory the model is.

This shouldn't be hard to add.

[Dread Knight]

> Advanced image manipulation capabilities / image editing (2d drawing and manipulation software, would be nice to remove gimp / krita from pipeline), even more on the raster part (to remove inkscape from pipeline)... also with real-time and "turns" cooperative editing using verse and a version control system integration perhaps? (something like bazaar). Also i will like a mind-maping module Thing about it... Some features from pencil software integrated ... and more on the text editing capabilities. The ideea is to have blender for all art related / development stuff. Like from starting a project: design documents (text or ming maping), 2d story board (animated).... hope you get the ideea... my post is messy. I could make a design document for the "mind-maping" viewport/feature/tool.

[Fog]

This tool is a BASIC tool that we don't have in blender and we need it for making games

- Soft / Hard normals. A way to break the normals between 2 faces without creating more geometry.

my 2 cents

[Sindwiller]

This tool is a BASIC tool that we don't have in blender and we need it for making games

- Soft / Hard normals. A way to break the normals between 2 faces without creating more geometry.

my 2 cents

Hotkey W -> Set Smooth/Set Solid ?

[Mariolink]

No. What he means is smooth groups:
http://www.3dtutorials.sk/index.php?id=104

target weld would also be nice or just redoing the snap tool so it's possible to use proportional edit with it.

[LetterRip]

Fog,

see the edge split modifier.

For the 3 views - I meant set up the background image so that it stays behind the object for three views - ie rotate the object and the background, top and side images would stay relative to the object top side and front.

LetterRip

[Mariolink]

Letterrip

The edgesplit creates more geometry which is not good for game models. Less geomoetry more FPS.

[kakapo]

The edgesplit creates more geometry which is good for game models. Less geomoetry more FPS.

the graphics hardware, directx and opengl don't support something like smoothing groups or hard/soft edges. if an edge is supposed to be hard, the vertices have to be doubled for the vertex buffer and the edge split modifier does exactly that. there won't be a fps disadvantage. in the end smoothing groups or maya's hard/soft edges also always get converted to doubled vertices. that's how it works.

[LetterRip]

Mariolink,

The edgesplit creates more geometry which is [not] good for game models. Less geomoetry more FPS.

Smoothing groups/hard normals does the same thing (that is actually what occurs with smoothing groups and hard normals are used in other software and in games).

LetterRip