Blender

[Jojon]

Not really, rite now my problem is trying to get textures onto the Hills on the tutorial.

What happens if you try using not the tiny render button in your view window, but instead the big text one, on the buttons/scene/render panel?

If you want the object to appear textured in the realtime editor view, you have to (as far as I've managed to figure) assign it a/some texture(s) and a UV-map in the UV editor window and view/UVFaceSelect. We can, alas, currenly not export more than one texture that has been assigned this way, per object. (@Developers: How about a stop-gap solution? Export all the UV-mapped images, then "simply" distribute alpha evenly among textures that share each vertex and create the (for each texture) undefined UV-faces that are adjacent to defined ones, by mirroring along the edges. Hmm, may be more trouble than it's worth...:7=)


My own greatest Blender headache, which I might as well divulge here, is in manipulating the scene structure - I keep tearing my hair our over not being able to drag'n'drop entities in the outliner (to alter the hierarchy, not just move blocks around in the oops schematic). The software of my choice, have spoiled me with the way you handle everything exactly as you do disk operations in a file handler. Want your new cube to be made of glass? -paste a copy of your glass material reference into the same "directory" as the cube. Regrets? -just remove it again. Everything; geometry, attributes, maps, animation methods, etc, is directly visible and easy to move around, without a huge spaghetti ball of bindings, spanning multiple windows and panels.

With Blender, I still have not figured out how I might break a mesh out of an object and adopt it to another, other than to keep it within that object and make the other one parent to IT, rather than just the mesh.
So if anyone has a quick pointer to a nicely pedagogical and comprahensive guide to the blender scene structure, with its parents and groups and how one easily manipulates it, please do enlighten me.

[Justintime9]

My problem was that i thought i would b able to see the texture out of the Render window... so i didn't press F12... too bad tho, i wish i would've been able to see it in 3D space

[Trylon]

oh, you can, on the 3d menu/toolbar, ther is a combobox that allows you to select the view mode.
you can switch between:
- Bounds (only boundign boxes)
- Wireframe (you saw that already)
- Solid (shows a sloid object in color)
- Shaded (as Solid, but with lights and blender materials applied)
- Textured (As solid, but without build-in lights, and with UV textures applied)

[Justintime9]

aha! thx, now that problem is fixed.

grrrr... here we go again... I'm doing Stenciling now, and I did everything the tutorial told me to do... and it didn't work! here's wat it's telling me to do: http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D ... Stenciling
and here's what happens. when i try Rendering, it's just the Rock texture, it doesn't mix the textures, and i did my stencil Perfectly!:

[Jojon]

...it doesn't mix the textures, and i did my stencil Perfectly!

Looks like your stencil is at the bottom of the list. If I don't misunderstand things completely, the order is paramount: The stencil is a mask that defines which areas of all subsequent textures are overlayed onto the texture stack, so far (then the next stencil shrinks the keyhole further and so on) - think of it as airbrushing with stencils. I.e. Try putting it between the two textures.
I haven't tried; does these stencils work in Plasma?

[Justintime9]

how do i move them? o, and what in the world is Plasma, remember, I've never used any program like this in my life, and don't know any of the terms the Tutorial didn't teach me.

[Jojon]

how do i move them? o, and what in the world is Plasma, remember, I've never used any program like this in my life, and don't know any of the terms the Tutorial didn't teach me.

You are doing excellently, for one who ventures for the first time into the mucky world of 3D modelling.

On that Shading/Material/Texture panel, you have there; select each of the buttons, with the names of your textures, in turn and pick which texture should go into that slot, using the pop-up menu to the left of the button that says "Clear". Put them in the order:
1. Grass (This is the base coat of paint on that car you are painting)
2. Stencil (The masking tape that decides where the next layer of paint can go)
3. Rock (And here we have those red flames you paint along the sides. :7)

Textures are painted on, starting with the top one and then each subsequent one paints on top of what is there so far, so if you, for example, want an even mix of three textures, in your final material, your first material would have a mixing ratio (alpha) of 1, the second 0.5, the third 0.33, a hypothetical fourth 0.25 and so on. (somebody correct me, If I'm wrong.)

"Plasma" is the 3D engine that URU uses - the program that puts D'ni on your screen, as you play. My question was not really directed at you, specifically - just a general callout, as to whether these stencils will work in the game engine and whether the pyPRP exporter supports them.

[Paradox]

Currently, the Stencil flag is not used by the exporter; we're looking into how it could be used to make things easier though

[Jojon]

Currently, the Stencil flag is not used by the exporter; we're looking into how it could be used to make things easier though

Sounds promising.

Btw, a thought regarding documentation: If it is not already done, it may be a good idea, in order to avoid confusion, to add, as standard, a Nota Bene, early in the description of every feature that does not mean quite the same thing to the exporter, as it does to Blender itself and also encourage tutorial writers to do the same.

[Pryftan]

Well Jojon, Justin's using a tutorial written for Blender, not for the PyPRP plugin. There's a lot of stuff in the Blender tutorials that doesn't translate or at least not the same when exporting to an Age.. but learning it anyway is a good idea in terms of getting comfortable with Blender.