I’m interested in how to “splat” quads in Blender. I use quotes there because I’m not sure what it might be called in Blender or its addons. Splats are what they were called in the idTech5 editor and what I’ve called them ever since. A tool/method/addon may do this and even more, such as procedural scattering, and I welcome any and all suggestions.
A “splat” is a decal that is placed (or shot) from the viewpoint onto a surface, aligning between the viewpoint and the surface, usually resulting in a quad with a filtered texture on it. In the case of idTech5, these would be baked into the texture during a compile process and handle corners and curves, which sounds like texture painting but that’s not the direction I want to go. Splatting decals like tossing pancakes, but not resulting in 1000s of texture variations, rather a collection of geometric decals I can give its own atlas.
I tried messing with the Grease Pencil, it has an option to draw a “poly”, but I get what seem to be edges or splines that I don’t know how to make much use of. I think I’m barking up the wrong tree? Perhaps there is an addon or a whole other piece of software I might look at? Perhaps particles, perhaps physics, perhaps a Python-wizard.
Since nobody knows (or Blender can’t do it at all), I came up with a couple of really low-tech brute-force solutions to this. Both work while flying around with FPS-style camera, and use AutoHotkey to quickly automate a series of events to achieve close to what I was looking for.
The first just pastes a quad using some snap settings that align it to the geometry, switching quickly in and out so the camera navigation is quite seamless, and this is the safe method with a side-effect that you may have overhanging/tucked decals if not careful, as this always just pastes a planar quad on a very precise pinpoint in the center of the viewport.
The second method is more crazy, it actually uses the knife tool to slice a square out of the geometry and hide it away to be all combined later. The benefit is that it will wrap around curves and details, but this is far less foolproof. Viewport clipping needs to be used (and constantly readjusted) to avoid carving squares through the wall and every other surface behind it. Really need to know the map and where not to aim it, and how not to use it, else ridiculous mess can easily occur. It also leaves holes all over the place so it’s a hassle to layer overlapping decals or even work those close in proximity. The map needs to be reloaded and multiple sets need combining. Another benefit is how you can skew and stretch decals simply by “shooting” on angles. Normally it would be used viewing perpendicular surfaces, but this a side-effect that can be exploited.
These work like fire-modes using the same scripting, and even use 2 other rectangular shapes each, so 6 modes in total. It’s a LOT quicker to dirty up our maps this way. The textures for both are currently randomised from a defined list, so I also need to think of a way for mappers to easily assign specific textures to them all. I think I can use this same concept, with the FPS-camera and a series of fire-modes, but making those textures visible in Blender in an automated way sounds like a very difficult challenge.
Well… imho a lot of the Blender addons are way to cheap compared to other 3d solutions.
Especially more complex ones are hard to maintain and service, especially with the rapid pace Blender is developing and leaving ‘old tech’ behind.
But I can imagine that in certain parts of the world, or your current financial situation, 50 bukcs is a lot of money.
