Blender v2.43rc1

Just downloaded the new blender v.2.43 rc , and this one comes with a bunch of really nice features. The most exciting one is bake to texture which will allow you to bake the normals or the rendered result into a uv-map. This means that you can fake a lot of nice texture effects in a game engine easily by first creating a very detailed model in blender and bake the texture. This texture is then simply used directly in the game engine. Of course, you will have to make a bumpmap etc. to get position dependent properties, but it is really a leap forward I think. There has been a bake script available in blender for previous releases, but the up coming build in bake functionality really rocks.



All this made me even more hooked on blender and I've been messing around with it a bit. I've been reading a lot of tutorials and downloaded many new texture images, but also learned a lot of new key shortcuts which is essential when using blender. This makes the learning curve quite steep, but also makes it a very powerful tool once you get acquainted with it. Kinda the emacs of 3D modellers :)

Because I'm obviously now in model creation mode I've decided to document the mode creation pipeline for the game. This should make it much easier for new comers to get involved without getting de-motivated by the steep learning curve and lack of documentation. At the same time I'll create a very tiny tool that can be used for viewing models created without starting the game server etc. Maybe it will simply be game client run with a special command line option.