Blender Wrestling for Steampunk Pirates

I like having projects that stretch me. I liked doing NaNoWriMo alongside EMW. Completing it made me feel all warm inside. Doing it was even more fun. I'm feeling that way about the Steampunk Pirates mod at the moment.

One of the problems we have in Steampunk Pirates is that the 3D objects that will make up the world will need to be created in a very specific file format. Unfortunately, good ole Lightwave Modeller doesn't export to that format, so I've decided to learn to use Blender. It's remarkable how used to something you can get.

In Lightwave, I normally have a distinct flow of working: Do a sketch in pencil or on my graphics tablet, draw a load of points, connect them together as quads (four sided polygons), extrude a hell of a lot. Do another object, extrude some more, hit nurbs, fiddle a bit, texture and render. At first, I though that Blender would be the same, after all extruding in 3D is pretty basic and so is being able to draw points. That's where I was going wrong. The Blender way of doing things is to start with a primative and then extrude edges, points and volumes. You can then modify those primatives. It's annoying in a way but more powerful in others.

As soon as I worked out how to build a side view shape by creating a 'Plane' primative (a regular quad) and extruding edges, everything sped up considerably. Vertex, edge and face selection in Blender is much better than Lightwave, a little black box shows you the centre of a face, so no random clicking about selecting and deselecting. The marquee select tool is available under the 'b' key, rather than RMB, which is a bit annoying but you soon get used to it.

Extruding is definitely more powerful in Blender. If you have a load of faces selected, you can extrude such that it doesn't create inner faces which then have to be deleted as you did in LW. I also quite liked the face that vertices/edges/faces can be dragged in either direction in the current plane in the viewport or pulled on 'arrows' which represent the axis of moment. In the LW, the only way of doing this would be to turn off X,Y or Z movement and then turn them back on.

Some other niggles include the file save dialog is not the standard windows one, which from the point of view of a professional software developer is stupid. You should always use the native one, if available. When you select a point, it will change colour and also fade any edges connected to it. This is cool but at the same time annoying because the optical illusion is that the edge, which is straight, is no longer at 90 degrees. I soon got used to that.

Reading back through this, I think the biggest thing to take away from last nights little sesh was that most of my problems are due to not knowing the right keyboard commands or where to find things under menus. Because of the huge (and I mean HUGE) volume of tutorials online, things are not too difficult to find and there is a lot less digging through menus like Lightwave does. I doubt I will move over for the Icar stuff but after spending a couple of hours last night building my boat (see above), I could rebuild it in 10 minutes knowing what I do now. The whole Steampunk Project is looking much more doable.

Of course, I've not approached the difficult bits, such as boolean subtractions, nurbs, UV maps and texturing (called Materials everywhere but in LW) but that will come soon, no doubt. Then it's a matter of importing into UnrealEd and all the fun which that brings!