Does anyone have any ‘quick tips’, ‘long solutions’, or ‘infomatic logorythms’ for achieving a high gloss sheen in the game engine?
Setting up the colors for a render seems different than how they display in the game.
Any caveats?
Thanks in advance for all the help.
Textures are mostly used in the game engine. For instance if I were going to make a black gloss I’d make a black texture with a shine on it that looked exactly the way I wanted, and I’d push the “shiney ball” button in the uv texture window, to designate it a reflective surface. There are also ways of setting the the reflective properties of solid color objects in the material buttons, but only certain adjustments apply to the game engine.
The lighting in Blender’s game engine is done per-vertex, so to achieve a high gloss effect with materials would require an ultra high-polly mesh.
Fortunately there is a way to fake the effect using reflection maps. Reading the publisher user doc should turn up what you’re looking for.
Oh look, because I’m such a nice guy I found the link directly to the page on releftion maps 
(Actually it’s because I have no life and too much spare time 
)
http://www.blender.org/modules/documentation/publisherdoc/punisheronly.html#REFLECTIONMAP
You can control the look of the reflection map by clicking “set smooth” or “set solid” in the edit buttons when the object’s selected.
errrr,… where’s the ‘shiney ball’ button?
it is in the image window, because it is specific to the image. It is on the header near the right, and isn’t in 2.23 or earlier.
Load Image in Image Edit window, look at row of buttons under window and push button with ball on it.
DOH!!
OK found the Image Edit Window… ooof. Now I need to make a shiny black 64pixel x 64pixel jpeg? Right?
OK, I’m gonna fire up the gimp and make my shiny black square…
How come I cant just use the Marble texture plugin? For some reason it wont load onto my model…?
Can I load the marble dll into the image editor? No, that wouldnt work…
Thanks for the help guys.
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Ya know, I once didnt feel so dumb… But at least blender has a community and a someplace to turn to when the books just dont make sense. I’ve got 100’s of megs of info in d:\Tutorials\Blender And i’d be lucky if I could find the instructions to turn the damn thing on… LOL!
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procedural textures can’t be used in the game engine.
Only uv mapped textures (and reflection ones, but that is a property of the image), and/or vertex colors.
put another way, rendering with F12 is complety different than rendering in the game engine. The rules that govern either are completely different.
Well I got my black.jpg
But it wont go on the model…
I click the model, load the jpg in image window and…
Nothing…
Perhaps someone can point me to a tutorial?
selecting an image in the image window only applies it to the selected faces
go into face mode on your object
select desired faces with the usual methods
choose your texture in the image window
there are more options and buttons in the paint buttons window, changes are applied to the active face. Pressing the CopyDrawMode button will copy settings to all selected faces.
(most of the info you need, too lazy to look for a tut though)
oh, look for UV mapping tutorials.
OK! Thanks Guys!
One thing though? Now, when I intersect two objects I get some overlap. Not really a big deal… until I notice that where they overlap is a transparency that shows the inner object and not the outer one.
When I tried to select them both and do a boolean function on them I get an illegal operation and Blender 2.25 quits…
Should I just change the shapes so they dont intersect, or is there a warkaround for this?
Yes changing the shape is best, intersecting objects can give some really ugly graphical errors. It’s too bad booleans don’t work very well 
Apparently it has something to do with how I constructed the body. I extruded from a circle and closed both ends by sizing to zero and removing the doubles. On my end circle everything is A-Ok. But the one at the starting point where I closed off the shape, the area from the single point to the first concentric circle does not take color… oof, time for sleep.
hmmm, paint the verticies and faces individually?
So many little yellow and pink dots to mess with…
So little time…
“Time to make the donuts”