I am new to these forums and wanted to introduce myself. I hope I am posting this in the correct section. :yes: I consider myself and artist. I can draw and my medium of choice is Pencil and whatever paper I decide to use at the time. However, I have decided to enter the realm of 3-D graphics applications.
A little story: My brother and I are video game connoissuers. We often find ourselves complaining about the video games we try out and can tell when a game was put out just for money making purposes with no real thought and when a video game is a real work of art with a lot of thought and preparation put into it. However, There are still a good number of well thought out artistic games with some minor drawbacks such as control interface problems, as I see them. Lengthy tutorials on game play you have to sit through which lose my interest. Then I played Assassin’s Creed. A great game. Great tutorial interface and not lengthy. The game keeps you in the story as you go through the beginning tutorial as well as some fighting tutorials,which are minor,placed through out the game. It is visually stunning and gives great free play and exploration throughout the world. The only drawback was the redundancy, which is quit easy to overlook.
So,instead of complaining about games I decided to look into what it would take to make my own game and that is when I discovered Blender. To my surprise it was open-source, as you all are well aware, and it was FREE. I downloaded the program and was pleasantly surprised it has a wonderful game engine. I bought the Blender Essentials book. I have had Blender for about 6 months. My imagination went nuts and it’s is hard to focus on one aspect at a time. After more research I found Blender has a wonderful growing community. Needless to say I am very Happy with this program. I have seen Maya and some other high end, high priced programs and I am not very pleased with the lack of intuition of these programs. In my opinion Blender rivals these programs on a large scale. I am a firm believer that a program is only limited by imagination and an artistic eye. Yet it should be user friendly.
I have seen some tutorials. Good and Bad.
How I like to work is to think of an idea and try to apply my idea with my knowledge of the BUI and BGE. I like problem solving. With that being said I have no desire to use or get to know Python scripting. I realize with Python scripting you can make your game run more smoothly, and I may eventually get into it. It is my understanding I do not need Python and I can achieve anything in the BGE with the interface without the aid of Python. I understand Blender has it’s limitations but most of them can be overcome through simulations.
My level of Blender understanding is basic as well as using my own logic and thinking abilities. I know how to add music to the game engine. I am well aware of the logic brick system.
I animated a cube doing some zig zagging with the use of IPO curves. It is my understanding that to animate a walk cycle for a character in the BGE you need to use IPO curve animation. (of course I could be wrong about this.:o) So I added my logic bricks for the animation and tested it and it worked correctly. Then I wanted to be able to move the cube forward with the use of the UP arrow. I tried this and tested it and it worked great. Then I wanted the animation to play as the cube moved forward. (Sort of a small scale test of a character walk cycle to see if my logic was correct before I mesh out a character, rig and animate.) I did my logic brick system for this but, the cube did not move forward. The animation played when I hit the UP arrow and stopped playing when I stopped pushing the UP arrow. It seems the animation over-rid the move forward command. I know I am on the right track.
I have been looking for a tutorial on adding the walk cycle and character into the BGE. When I push the UP arrow I want the character to move forward and have the walk cycle animation play, so the character appears to be walking through the world. If anyone knows of any tutorial it would greatly be appreciated. ?
Sorry if this post is long. I just wanted to introduce myself and give you a little understanding about my direction.