Hello all
I’ve been waiting for this site to come back all week now. I’m so glad that it finally has.
I have a problem regarding some next gen game modeling that I am trying. The problem is the tutorial I am working of is for 3DS MAX and while most of the things remain the same there are some functions that elude me.
I am trying to creating a knife. On the blade is a simple groove. In the tutorial he uses a sphere then deletes 3/4 of it, duplicates it then bridges inbetween them. I used a bridge script and managed to do the same. But now suddenly I can only select 1 object at a time so it doesn’t work anymore? Did I do something wrong. Example is I cant select the blade and the groove at the same time anymore. So I cant do any editing on multiple object which is kinda frustrating if you want to merge 2 objects.
2nd is how do you do floating geometry for the groove in that similiar why? I’ve tried lots of different things but just can’t seem to get blender to make that groove out of the floating geometry.
I am using blender 2.5 . Sorry I can’t post the link to the tutorial as I am a new member but if you google “next gen weapon modeling” it is the tutorial at cgtutsplus.
Any help
Thank you
Ok maybe no one understands what I mean. How do I do what is pointed out in the picture with floating geometry???
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Hi,
to create the groove I recommend to use Blender’s boolean modifier.
Create a mesh object that looks like your groove. Then apply a bool modifier to your knife mesh / object. Under Operation select ‘Difference’.
Now you can press apply. The groove object is now cut out from the knife object, see attached image and blend file.
Hope that helps!
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BoolModifier.blend (399 KB)
Thank you for the reply.
I have used Boolean before to get that type of groove but what I was actually wondering was what was done in the 3DS MAX tutorial. See in the tutorial he creates floating geometry and just attaches it to the blade. He doesn’t physically cut it out of the mesh. So it’s a piece of geometry floating above the blade but because it’s attached it renders it as a groove.
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The easy and the best way is to vertex by vertex ;).
You must remember that modificators like sub-surf do not like triangles. You will have errors like this every time you put ss to the mesh with triangles. You can start like that :
So is there no way to do this with just floating geometry? See in the tutorial the groove is seperate mesh like the picture in my previous post. See because he basically just deletes the groove after he has baked the normal to make the lower poly. So it makes it easier. I don’t really want to make a new model for the lower poly one. I want to just use DECIMATE and move some verts and faces around to make it lower in detail.
If I have to I will but it seems so time consuming to model it like that.
Ok, you just said something new here: you said he deletes the separate mesh AFTER he bakes the normal map to the low poly model. From the sound of it you made two objects vs adding more stuff to the knife object (that’s what I would of done). All I would do in your case is make you knife model, duplicate & put on a different layer, then make all your high poly details on the original layer. Then you have your non-super high poly model on layer 2 & your super high poly model on layer 1 that you can use to make from.
You the same Happy Friar from doom3world? I’m trying to learn as much of blender as what I can but it’s a bit difficult if you google weapon making tutorials you get millions of hits but most of them are made by people that are completely inexperienced in game creating and then models come out about 100 000faces. It was just interesting to see how it was done in MAX and I was trying to duplicate the process completely.
But if there is no way to do exactly as was done in the tutorial I will try and finish it the Blender way. Will have some pics up maybe by the end of the weekend.
Hello again
Well I just thought I’d give you an update on what is happening to the model. So far everything going well only problem I have is when I try to apply smoothing to the whole model the grooves and cut out edges mess up a bit. I can work around it in a very time consuming way but as I’m still new to blender I would like to know if there is a better way to fix the problem.
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This thing in game its call “decal” if you do not want to do complicate mesh but you want ad something eg:crack i the wall, groove to the knife you put plane with alpha texture thats is shown in GE like one with the low poly model. In game you do not see that this is floating plane. But you have make perfect Hi-poly model an make this decals from it with the normal maps. Then you can put them wherever you want ;).
I managed to get everything basically done and I baked a normal for it. While the normal has some rough edges it is acceptable for my first model. What I am wondering now. Seeing as the blade is basically a mirror of it self how can I use the UV coordinates to only display one side of the blade but apply it to both sides. So when I texture I only texture one side and it effects both side on the mesh?
Yes I am. Are you doing models for the doom 3 engine? I’d suggest you learn blender first before you start making any specific kind of model. I’ll assumed you know the AI & most features though. 
He’s talking about the details that will apear on the models, not the decals (those aren’t normally used on POV weapon or 3rd person weapon models).
This Quake 4 tutorial is what your knife tutorial seems to be saying: http://www.iddevnet.com/quake4/ArtReference_CreatingTextures
That’s probably more detail then you want & the Doom 3 engine has it’s own bump map rendering code so things are done a little differently (awesome engine!).
When you’re unwrapping the knife & you want both sides to be the exact same, just unwrap & overlap one side’s UV’s on top of the other side. I do that at lot, especially when I have an all black or white surface.
Yes I am making models for the doom 3 engine. I have made maps before and am familiar with most of the feature inside doom 3. I’ve never tried animating a model because I’ve always just used static meshes. I was using UDK for some time but prefer id tech 4 at the moment.
I know about renderbump in doom3 but I am trying to learn as much as I can from blender before I learn something else. I had no real issues baking the normal for my model in blender except for some edges that didn’t look right but using gimp I smoothed them out and it looks better. The model ended up being about 600 faces which I don’t believe is too bad. But then again it’s only a knife.
After this I have to try a learn animation specifically doom3 .md5 exporting from blender. It looks like a nightmare actually but I’m still looking forward to it.
The doom 3 md5 format is actually really really easy. I put out my weapon POV/3rd person model assets for people to use as examples: http://www.moddb.com/members/thehappyfriar/downloads/pb-max-beta-001-non-game-assets
With doom 3 there’s a few important things to remember: the FIRST bone must be “origin”, lowercase & everything else must be under “origin”. Monster movement (with the exception of flying monster) is done in the animation: move the monster the distance you want. You just animate via bone movements (normally the origin bone doesn’t advance). If you want jiggle stuff you use the game’s built in AE editor & tell it to make certain bones jiggly.
This guy has some really good Doom 3 tutorials: http://www.trepaning.com/d3Vids/d3Vids2.htm
Enjoy modding Doom 3, it can do quite a bit! 
Thanks THE HAPPY FRIAR. You have no idea how much this is going to help me. I’m creating a little tech demo that I’ve been putting off since about 2009. You can find lots of tutorials but like I said google a tutorial for blender or even doom3 and you get millions of tutorials but most of them from people that don’t really know whats going on.
I was thinking of adding sikkmod graphic effects in but that will really just be optional if I’m going to use it. Ok got to get back to work now.
Ok now I know ;), first I was thinking “He wants render floating geometry?”, then I thing maybe he’s talking about decals:).
Ok you can render floating geometry for Normal map in blender. You need material for the objects and then render.
and then you put this material in low poly
Thanx Chris
That was originally what I was looking for and I did manage to use it eventually. I’m getting better with blender and will eventually show off some models. Thanks all of you for the help. Like I said in my first post I was waiting for blenderartists to come back online because everywhere I looked no one could help me.
Sorry for the late reply but lightning struck our house and internet was off for about a week. (struck twice in 3 days and nearly a third time 2 days later, strange thing considering we are surround by houses that have lightning rods and our house got struck)
