Does Blender support large open worlds?

Hi folks,

Blender N00b here, working on a 3-D adventure/puzzle game set in large environments, with lots of tall cliffs and broad plateaus. When I try creating planes the size I want to work with in Blender, though, they don’t display well, and they’re hard to navigate, even before I apply materials and textures. Is Blender the wrong dev environment for a big open world? I can subdivide some of the levels into smaller maps, but not all of them.

I was able to easily create the level geometry I want in the UDK, but I’d rather use Blender because I can do all the dev work there (3-d modeling, animation, and game-engine physics). But I don’t know if Blender can handle my grand plans, or if I just don’t yet understand how to implement them correctly.

I’ve spent the last few months doing Blender tutorials (including much of N00b to Pro) to learn as much as I can on my own, so I’m pretty familiar with the UI.

Thanks!

Yes it’s possible, in my demos, I have a huge planet with 2 moon and a few asteroids, all of them navigable.
If your scene is based on a grid landscape, you can cut it into various scenes, if it’s just busy with much detail, you can use a Level Of Detail setup (there are many ways to do it), combined with many scenes.
Explain what problems exactly you are having, so we can help you.

some tips, set you camera and viewport vision range to something very high

SHIFT-F will enter flycam mode, helps with navigating large areas.

There are options to rotate the view around the selected object or verticies, and an option to zoom to the mouse location, in 2.5 they are in the user preferences

Hope that helps

Ah – thanks, both of you – I think “clipping limits” is the key here. I didn’t know the right terminology to search for.

The problem I was having was that I was creating a plane, scaling it up 100 times, trying to view the whole thing, and failing. Now I understand that I can set clipping limits for both the camera and the view. (I’m just prototyping right now, so there’s very little detail.)

Thanks again! I’m sure I’ll have more questions soon. :slight_smile:

Think about the scale that you will use in your game.
You need to see how small you can make small objects by zooming in as far as possible. then you can judge how big your starting plain will need to be. You’ll be surprised (Or at least I was when I did this)

Another thing to take into account is physics. I believe Bullet treats one Blender unit as 1 meter.

Even if blender is fully capable of supporting massive amounts of geometry, that functionality is of little to no use for 99% of us - unless you have a decently sized team that can actually model/texture/animate/program everything in this “massive world”, such “grand scale” features are largely useless.

As a self-admitted beginner, you should focus on something smaller.

Thanks again, everyone. I’d read that one Blender unit was one meter for Bullet, which is why I figured shrinking everything down might not be my best option. But I can play with the scale a bit and see how the physics works best.

The feedback is much appreciated. I know I’ve taken on a big project, but I figure that’s the way I’ll learn. :slight_smile: It’s more about the journey than the end results for me. Plus I’m quite jazzed about the game concept itself, which requires the big geometry.

Basically, I’m a fiction writer trying to break into writing for games, so I’m educating myself about the game development process and trying to broaden my skillset so I can at least talk intelligently with developers and designers about the work they do.

And Blender is amazing, so I’m having a great time learning it. :slight_smile: