Any new 3D guides (Blender)?

[Noxid]

Hey there!

I've been away for a while and I see in my absence a lot of people have been creating props, characters, and all kinds of other fun stuff. I've been learning some things about 3D modeling in Blender and I'd like to take my new skills and show them off in an overgrowth level full of interesting custom content. I've seen the stickied thread and that gives an ok introduction but I wondered if anybody had information they could share about more specific stuff like importing/exporting normal maps, how detail maps work, weight maps and other stuff that might be helpful.
for example, I tried importing \Objects\Buildings\cat_town\high_tower into blender and it looks ok except for the normals are facing the wrong way. Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

if anyone's still out there...

[Thomason1005]

ok so as far as i remember if you want to export animations youll need blender 2.55, otherwise if you just import and moidify obj meshes, you can use the newest version
normal maps wise it depends on the shader you are using, the standard object shader uses world space normals, the detailmap objects and character use normal space. youll have to invert 2 channels on the world space normals, it should be mentioned in the tutorial though.

detail maps:
the objects has normal & color textures for the whole object (like normal objects with unique uvs etc).
then theres a weightmap which defines which detail texture (&detail normal) to apply in which area. these are smaller and tiled. basically both the main textures and the detail textures are multiplied. something like color.rgb = mainColor.rgb * (detailTex1Color.rgb*weightmap.x + detailTex2Color.rgb*weightmap.y + detailTex3Color.rgb*weightmap.z);
so the weightmap should be normalized, meaning if you add all channels together, they should result in 1. otherwise youll get overbright or darker spots.

[Gyrth]

Have you seen the wiki? It's pretty useful.
This for example is a tutorial on how to create models + textures:
http://wiki.wolfire.com/index.php/Makin ... 6_Textures

[halzoid]

I've seen the Wolfire Wiki a lot, somehow i never noticed these pages... and they're actually really useful! Thanks for pointing that out, i often just guessed when it came to 3D designing objects in Og

[Noxid]

Have you seen the wiki? It's pretty useful.
This for example is a tutorial on how to create models + textures:
http://wiki.wolfire.com/index.php/Makin ... 6_Textures

I actually didn't know this was on the wiki! This is pretty great, thank you.

I'll spend some time trying things out and see what I can come up with.

e: success! i've got my first working object in game.


there could be some improvements to the workflow but progress is progress.

[Endoperez]

IIRC Blender's normals and OG normals are a bit different. Like, one channel is reversed, or something.

If you have normals trouble, it's probably that.