I can't get my head around Blender.

[bpgisme]

Hey, thanks for all the encouraging words guys! I'm gonna keep fighting this thing til I get it get right. And thanks for all the links too! I'll bookmark everything and hopefully after a while I'll get as comfortable with Blender as I am with Moray.

[Tsar Hoikas]

With Blender, the key is: Persistence, Persistence, Persistence.

It took me a year on and off... And even now my skills aren't something to be praised...

What's the theorem about programmers and modeling? "If one is a great programmer, then one cannot model worth fæces."

[Jojon]

(Thinking out loud here, I wonder if there's a printable list of keyboard commands for Blender?)

http://download.blender.org/documentati ... erence.pdf

[bpgisme]

With Blender, the key is: Persistence, Persistence, Persistence.

It took me a year on and off... And even now my skills aren't something to be praised...

What's the theorem about programmers and modeling? "If one is a great programmer, then one cannot model worth fæces."

I know what you mean! Here's a music video I made in Moray a few years ago: (This is at CNET so it's tiny, sorry.) http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-9310.html
Sadly, I had used Moray and Povray for years and had never learned how to use animation so I rendered each frame individually. As you can tell it's really simple, average shapes and textures, really not much to it, but oh well.

Oh wow, thank you Jojon! That is excellent! Just what I was looking for!

[Chacal]

I tend to agree with Andy: know what you want to do and stick with it. Search (google, tutorials, forums) for a way to do it that you're comfortable with.
It is a question of time. Last January I had a little free time, just when I wanted to add colliders to some Cyan Ages. Took me several hours to find how to do that in Blender, then I was quite proficient. A few months later, with no free time at all, I don't remember half of what I learned and I have little hope of ever learning more.

[bpgisme]

Okay, I'm getting a bit more practice with this thing, but I did some research and found a script that imports Terragen terrains into Blender. (Yay! I love Terragen.) That, in turn, while solving one problem for me created a bigger one. Is there an easy way to lower the vertice count? The Terragen terrain will render beautifully in Blender as a static image, but when I try to export to an age file it tells me there's way too many vertices. Of course, you can see that when looking in edit mode, but I'm not sure how to fix it. Do you guys have any ideas or should I give up and go a different way? (In the meantime I'm going to keep searching online for an answer.)

(By the way, I actually used to use Terragen terrain images saved as bitmaps to create heightfields in Moray, but the heightfield directions I found for Blender scared me off a bit.)

Thanks for all the advice and help everyone!

[Jojon]

Do you guys have any ideas or should I give up and go a different way? (In the meantime I'm going to keep searching online for an answer.)

The limitation (of some 14k vertices/faces, IIRC) is per object, so if reducing polygon count would make you lose too much detail, you can cut your landscape up into several smaller pieces -- then it will work fine.

As for easy reduction: Edit mode -> select all ("A" key [selects all, unless any are already selected, in which case all are de-selected) -> Mesh menu -> Scripts -> Poly reducer

If there are areas that you can only see from afar, it might be safe to reduce detail in those areas (maybe even completely remove bits facing away) and keep it high where the player is allowed to be. The script provides a way to protect parts of a mesh from the reduction process, by adding vertices to a vertex group, and giving its name to the script. The weight you assign to each handful of vertices, that you add to the group, decides how strongly the reduction will affect their area.

Vertex groups can be created and have vertices added to them, from Edit buttons -> Link and materials -- it's the button cluster to the left. Just make sure to delete the Vgroup afterwards - they will be valueable once we get skeleton animation, but at the moment they are not supported by the exporter and any export will halt if there are any in your project.