Your wishlist for Blenders modeling/painting etc tools for a game pipeline

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
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A call for game developer feature requests,

In the Apricot Open Game Project real planning will start in the January. We have already nice wishlist, but we want to ask about your ideas ! Let’s start brainstorm without judging what is sane, what insane.
Like in topic :
What are you missing in your gamedev toolchain ?
What do you think that should be improved ?
Say about bottleneck or annoying process in your project.

http://www.blender.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=12567

Please post your requests either in that thread or here (and I will post them there).

LetterRip

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As far as the painting model tools, I would give almost anything for a Straight line tool.

In gimp just click anywhere on a n image with a paintbrush or a pencil tool, and then hold shift… it will activate the straight line tool… click to finish the line…

This would be very nice in both the 3d and the 2d painting tools.(sculpting tools would totally rock too!!)

Another thing… MORE THAN 1 UNDO FOR PAINT MODE!!!

In Zbrush we have a utility that allows us to port our model texture into GIMP and paintshop… after it exports, zbrush will monitor the file, so after you save in GIMP or PS, it automaticaly updates for you so you can see how it looks on your model :smiley: This feature really rocks!!!

Clone brush would be pretty cool too :slight_smile:

AND!!!

When we automatically unwrap the UV, have some setting so that we can space the UV islands a certain distance from other islands and the edge of the texture!!
This would literally save me days worth of tweaking my UV maps.

Thanks guys!!

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Any of these modelling tools.

Thanks for the proposal.

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Eliminate seams on texture baking!

Having a clone brush in Blender, especially with the wonderous sculpting tool, would make peoples heads explode.

A few good rock-solid importers and exporters for popular games formats (MD3, as used in millions of Quake III engine games is one notable one we haven’t got). In my mind, that was the main problem I’ve had in using Blender for game models.

5

yea MD3 export would be awesome!!

Milkshape ascii with animations would totaly rock too, Torque, Irrlicht, 3D game studio, and a few hundred other game engines use MS3d ascii for animated models.

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Just a few thing that was annoying me yesterday:

  1. Chamfer tool - a tool to chamfer edges similar to 3ds Max’s chamfer
    tool
  2. Select next edge in loop by ex. shift + mousewheel - to be able to quickly select parts of a loop
  3. have different drawing settings depending on which mode your in - I want to be able always have solid + wireframe when I sculpting and only solid when I’m in object mode.
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A “stick foot/wheel/thing to surface and script” to see if its possible to have procedural animation warping.

Please don’t laugh.

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Good thread

Here are my suggestions that are mostly related to world building and laying out scenes

Set filtering on individual textures. This texture has a tri linear mip mapping filter but this one is just point sampled.

Improved/bug fixed text editor. It’s nice being able to alter text files associated with your game art from inside blender. Whether it’s a configuration file or a python script attached to a character.

UV island packer. This would save so much time in texturing models. A big island would also get more UV space compared to a small island.

ability to change layer names/colours. Helps visualize complex scenes. (exploding things are draw in red, physics objects are blue etc etc)

More flexible OpenGL draw modes. I’d like the option to define new draw modes and save them for future use. eg. draw the poly mesh in xray mode but the skeleton and bones in solid.

Quick fast pretty model library. Say I was populating a road with buildings for a GTA type game. It would be great if I could pop up a library window that displayed icons for predefined game models. These could then be quickly placed into my game scene.

And finally a few things related to the interface (sorry!)

  • lock the 3D cursor
  • option to restrict the ortho windows. I’m stupid and I keep accidentally changing my ortho views in user/3d viewports. I bet other people do this as well
  • user definable hotkeys :wink:
  • more flexible headers for windows (horizontal/vertical layout, add or remove icons and menus)

thanks for taking the time to read this. PM if you need help in anyway

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Can’t believe I forgot to mention LODS and STATE switching.

What about a LOD object (maybe a modified null?) Under this object you could group the high, medium and low object models and set the switch in and out distances. Btw LOD 0 would always be the highest detail.

Being able to define damage states would be great also.

Finally the LOD switching would actually work in the Blender viewports depending on the distance from camera

cheers

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“Set” or “get/know” the width/height of the 3D window ( the gui one!)

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It would be nice if all the brush tools worked with the same or similar controls. Sculpt, Texture, Vertex, and Weight painting. Would be nice to be able to see the brush, change sizes, same kbsc, etc… in paint and the others as you have with sculpt.

Cheers!

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I agree with lucidmonkey. Some connection between the various paint tools would be nice. I’d love to see normal map based 3D sculpting. And improvements in painting performance.

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maybe better intergation with import export scripts and documentation to go along with it. Most/some scripts around seem like not-to-sure-to-be-maintained scripts, with little or no documentation other than a forum post or two.

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Only thing I really miss is the ability to see textures in edit mode and Tangent space normal maps. Both will probably come in 2.5, I’ve heard.

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both already in SVN trunk!

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Hey Michael W,
I just visited your website…very impressive!
I see that you did your avatar in LW and that you are a recent member of BA.
Are you planning to make the jump to Blender? What are your thoughts on this
game project?

Sorry for stealing this thread!

PMM

17

My wishes for Painting tool are:

  1. Strokes mirroring by any axis, just like for Sculpt tools (paint left eye and get right eye at the same time)
  2. Brush engine (to make you brush and have such parameters as scattering, angle, etc., like in Photoshop)
  3. Being able to paint texture on hi poly model via vertex colors or in paint mode without UV maps and bake it to low poly model (like normal baking, but texture baking).

Besides painting tool, it would be nice to expand/adjust sculpting tools, do something with custom bones (at this moment it’s really time consuming to set 'em up)

And I think Blender is very suitable for game dev already (I develop my game using Blender 100%).

Thank you.

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This is my first year freelance after too many in the industry…

most of this year I’ve been doing 2d concept work on a variety of projects, but am just entering a production phase where I deliver the final game assets for a sony project… that gets a public beta next year… <my bit is small, but cool with quite a tight schedule…
I’ve got sucked in to blender and aim to prototype the whole thing to pretty much finished in the blender engine and then “port” to PS3… My first major milestone is this friday!

the tool chain is rich and has exceeded my expectations… <i’ve found it very cool and find it really helpful to sketch ideas out and can see that prototyping gameplay could be really efficient here. I miss Lightwaves materials and renderer (hypervoxels and f-prime the most) but other than that am completely into blender now.

Back on topic though…
If theSOC GLSL stuff had come off )(textures, and node support ) combined with the new 2d GLSL post processing my life would be much easier… add in a variety of reatime shadowing options, crank up the antialiasing and filtering on my graphics card. for real time rendering…

Regardless, some way of authoring GLSL textures for the game engine within blender would be very cool.

I have an idea for a 2d post process that I’ve used on a couple of games recently…
essentially <you take a screenshot of your game, expand the canvas on one side and paste in a premade colour chart (essentially colour ramps and saturation)

take this screen shot into 2d software of choice, modify (brightness/contrast, curves, levels, multiply overlay screen, whatever… as ong as you don’t paint and dont use filters
essentially any photoshop style adjustment layers are fare game…

All of these edits modify the colour chart… cut it out and keep…

our GLSL post pass compares the two charts and essentially acts as a look up table to modify our screen footage. No matter how dramatic the change the cost is the same… in between values can be interpolated…

this is quick and easy for night vision, negative or just colour timing fx. If you can also animate the intensity you can do loads with this!

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Thanks Micheal W for the quick reply.
I too was hoping for the glsl stuff for use in pre-viz type work.

PMM

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I’ve just run across this problem for the Duke Nukem High Res Project. A few of the devs were thinking of implementing a LOD system.

I tried that on one of my models and there is no way that I can see of getting rid of detail on an already constructed mesh. The multires goes up in detail, but you can’t subtract detail from an existing mesh.

I was able to apply the ‘Decimate’ function in the mod stack. With some minor errors it kept the mesh together with the armature. Unfortunately the UV Map is completely screwed up.

What would be great is a “LOD Modifier” or a few extra buttons on the “Decimate” modifier that would let you apply several targets for poly numbers. It needs to keep the UV Mapping as well. I didn’t test it recently, but previously, when I decimated a mesh, It wasn’t symmetrical, so I had to cut it in half and dup over the remaining half to keep symmetry.

Obviously this is a deal breaker on a mesh with an armature!.

One more thing. I’ve noticed that when you convert to ‘tri’s’, Blender ‘forgets’ where the edge loops on a mesh are. You have to convert back to quads to edit loops and then convert back again. This could mess up the UV mapping as well.