Texturing in Blender 2.48 Quick Start

Snowfly

I was getting fed up with max's clunkiness dealing with viewport shaders, so I threw this together this afternoon for my own reference while trying to get my head around Blender's material and shader viewing tools.

Download quick start
http://snowfly.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/blenderquickstart.pdf



(Model borrowed from Poop)

I'm liking Blender so far...You're kind of limited to a diff+spec+normal+etc. vanilla setup and the quality of the shader is pretty meh, but it's blazing fast. Texture reloads and undo/redo's don't lock up the program significantly. I'm still looking for a reload all textures script though, and I still haven't figured out how to load multiple materials per object.

Regular Blender users, please chime in with tips!

Daaark

You can actually use glsl shaders now. So you're limited only by your imagination, (and shader model).

Check out the materials section in the docs, it also links to tutorials.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Manual

ImSlightlyBored

thats real useful, when I used blender I always wanted to preview maps like that...

I know you say you're stuck with a boring shader set up, but is there any way to boost it with the node tree shader editor? Dont know if those can show up in viewport or anything.

Snowfly

Daaark:
Part of my frustration with Blender's docs is they aren't in sync with the current UI anymore, and I'm not a savvy enough user to know where some of the buttons have been hidden away. Partly why I wrote up my own quick start.

I couldn't find and tutorials showing how to load up custom shaders either...Do you how it's done?

SlightlyBored:
Well I'm only on day 1 of Blender usage. I'll definitely look into the node editor next, and find out if it does work with the GL shader.

Daaark

Multiple Materials: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Multiple_Materials (Leads to a materials / nodes tutorial)

Materials is my weak point so far. I've been focusing on modeling and have forgotten some of the tricks I learned a few weeks ago.


We've got a good Q&A thread going here: http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/18389.aspx
There is also the BlenderArtists forums, with lots of people doing game type stuff: http://blenderartists.org/forum/

Snowfly

That's the exact tutorial I was looking at that doesn't resemble 2.48's material UI anymore.

Anyway, the workaround for multiple materials is assigning unique materials to separate meshes and merging them, but workflow wise you're better off keeping them separate anyway.

Daaark

Snowfly wrote: »

That's the exact tutorial I was looking at that doesn't resemble 2.48's material UI anymore.

Anyway, the workaround for multiple materials is assigning unique materials to separate meshes and merging them, but workflow wise you're better off keeping them separate anyway.

We've got a good Q&A thread going here: http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/18389.aspx. PixelMinerXNA has been very helpful to me.

There is also the BlenderArtists forums, with lots of people doing game type stuff: http://blenderartists.org/forum/

Zwebbie

Some node-based shader elements do work in viewport, some don't. I haven't had any luck with assigning textures through nodes and getting them to show up (though this may just be me), but anything else seems to work fine. I made a simple node-based shader to saturate darker parts and light up faces facing away (a simple rim light) and it works perfectly in viewport.


Under View in the 3D window, there's the option for a Render Preview. It makes a render, but without anti-aliasing or interpolation, and you can easily make the rendered area rather small, so in all, it's a pretty fast way to see what your model looks like when rendered. I've found this useful anyway.

Daaark

Note that the viewport uses realtime textures, and the renderer (f12) uses it's own materials. This shows how to get a real time texture into the renderer, if that was an issue: [ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2U0gOoMtkc[/ame]

Snowfly

comradej, sounds interesting mind sharing your setup? i got something similar playing with the color ramps, but that was non-node and felt kind of restrictive after a while.

shift-p...love it.

dejawolf

+1 karma of awesomeness to snowfly.

Zwebbie

Snowfly wrote: »

comradej, sounds interesting mind sharing your setup? i got something similar playing with the color ramps, but that was non-node and felt kind of restrictive after a while.

Click me!

Nothing fancy here, I just had one class about nodes in Maya and figured that I could do that same stuff in Blender too. Maya has way more node types, but I've been able to do everything I wanted with Blender's so far.

I guess it's also possible to use the Normal node to emulate the standard viewport shader (i.e. independent from scene lights) with whatever other shading options you want and then use that for modeling.

LoTekK

Nice one, Chris. Ran across this while trying to find some info about some of the nodes in blender. Been messing about a bit with the node editor, just playing around to see what sort of viewport jazz I could cook up. Managed to get a decent rimlight similar to TF2's.





1. Base lighting
2. Rimlight
3. Rimlight after taking out down-facing normals

Was thinking about trying some color ramping where darks and lights are desat and midtones are resaturated, though it's not quite the same as getting the terminator to resat. Not sure if there's a way to do that with the node editor yet.

Anyone else got fun node setups to share?

edit: Model + normalmap's an SDK I grabbed a little while ago; it's not actually mine.

BradMyers82

Wow, really nice lotekk.