Hi - im planning to start a project using blender of my school buildings and hopefully i’ll be able to make them into a game that you can walk around them in. Does anyone have any ideas where i should start? should i create the land, put up big boxes and then chip away at them to make windows etc? or should i do something different? any help appreciated. if you want some photos i think theres some on the site www.bluecoatschool.org - eg if you click ‘school history’
Again many tia
Mark
It would depend on what you’re using the buildings for. If you are planning to have scenes inside the buildings then it would be best to model the actual buildings first, with the rooms inside being modeled first.
Try to get plans for the school buildings and scan the pictures so that you can get the dimentions right, then save the picture as a JPEG file. Then use blender’s “view background” feature in order to view the pans via blender. To make rooms, use cubes and carefully tease them into shape in edit mode, using the plans as a guideline - windows and doors can be added later - then use a larger cube and modify it in order to suit your schools external shape. After that use edit mode to add more detail to your building model, again using the plans for your school building. Et voila! Your school building is complete!
If you have Halflife it comes with a fantastic level editor called Hammer. Its very quick to learn and easy to use, and might be more suited to your project, as you can run your level in Halflife to walk around in it. I’d imagine this would be way easier than modelling a world environment in blender, then figuring out how to program an engine to run it in… other 3d FPS games such as the quake series, HL2, unreal etc have similar level editors available if you dont have HL, but i found Hammer to be a very good program.
good idea - I live in the uk and so was wondering if you know where i could get plans - would the school have them, the council, or what?
i was planning on using the walkthrough plugin http://www.blender3d.org/cms/3D_Walkthrough.340.0.html - is this just for the web or can i use it to create .exe 's?
help much appreciated.
Mark
The walkthrough tutorial can be expanded into making applications which use the game engine, which is built into blender - it can be used for anything. Go to http://blender3d.org/cms/Stand-alones.162.0.html for some examples of games made in blender - I don’t know how to make the files into .exe’s though…
You might find this tut of interest:
http://www.harkyman.com/searsbarn01.html
Harkyman is amazing. Anyway it’d be better (IMHO) to make the doors and windows the way he describes on that page since blender only supports tris or quads. If you try to use booleans you’ll get really messed up geometry