Pancakes

dam nice. dam nice. is it me or are you improving?

Yeah i've had this problem too, but I didn't know why. So rather than fight it I just embraced it lol. Embrace the pixels

The reason blender is the only open source 3d app you'd ever need is because it is 1,000 easier to make blender look/feel like Alladin, than to make Alladin have all the features that blender does. That said, Alladin, Wings3d, DAZ studio, Sketchup all of those programs are good enough to use with Leadwerks. But still blender has the most features and best organization and support of all of them. In my mind it just comes down to whether or not you want a complete 3d app with monster development or you want less complete one with much less development. Alladin4d doesn't have 1/4 the features blender does. Sketchup is great but it teaches you nontransferrable habits for teh most part. So to a newbie it's hard for me to recommend that one. Wings3d, has less features than Alladin4d probably and DAZ also doesn't have as many features. You can use whatever you like with Leadwerks. But I simply could not ever recommend a 3d open source app over blender. Not without feeling like I'm being dishonest. Now I would recommend, still, downloading sculptris over sculpting in blender. But blender's sculpting is improving all the time. Pretty soon I probably won't be able to recommend sculptris over blender any more. It's not that I'm just a mindless blender idiot (I hope not). But that program really has Akira (you've seen that manga/movie )level of evolution going on. It changes so much one day to the next in so many different ways. It's hungry to evolve all the time and that's what it does. That's why it gets prominance in my mind over all others. Because it's more than earned that prominence.

auto topo produces a low poly from a high poly

Cuz you sculpt a high detail model first. The more 3d detail, the more geometry that it needs. So if you want a highly detailed normal map, you will have a mesh that can go up into the millions of polygons. This is not practical for realtime rendering. So you make a lower poly mesh that matches the siloughette of the high poly and then you bake the normal information from the high geometry model to the low one. And that is how you get a low poly mesh that looks like a high poly mesh in a real time engine. This process is known as retopology. Because you are changing the geometric shapes that comprise the surface of the model. 3dCoat makes a process that could take hours or days, and does it in seconds or minutes. But not only that. It practically eliminates the need to know how to model with polygons. Of course understand edgeflow is still essential if you plan to animate. But that isn't difficult to understand. Before you'd have to make edgeloops by hand and it could be involved and required lots of expertise at times. Now you just draw some curves. Press a button. And you're done.

In that way you can retopo a human model in seconds! Seconds!! It's insane, Rick! Insane!

can't you do that anyway with right click?

But what if the geometry inside the structure is high? I have to admit that I feel occlusion culling is one of Leadwerks 2 weak points at least relative to cryengine and blender. Anyways some people use sketchup also for making buildings. It is a little higher on the poly count, but probably not enough to slow down leadwerks I'd guess.

you just wanted a chance to say, "warm teet"

I'm just speachless. But anyway it's my failing because I cant' communicate well enough about the topic. Blender and Leadwerks are two of the most exceptional pieces of 3d software in all the world. And that the two should be so oblivious to one another I suppose is just how it's going to to be. I understand you don't have the time to learn about blender. At least that since you don't understand what blender is, you don't have any reason to make the time to learn about blender. And that's the conundrum. I just can't communicate well enough in forum posts. But that's okay Leadwerks is fine the way it is.

The way Blade3d handled things was wonderful. Basically the editor was smart enough to see what you were importing. Then if you apply the imported item into your project it would save it to the appropriate place automatically. In this way it created it's own file structure for you which was just great.

Ton Roosendal the mastermind behind blender. A big part of their reasoning for completely re-writing blender from the ground up more or less, is the same reason you are writing a new Leadwerks engine. They want it to gain more appeal. Non-commercial appeal? They already have that. They want the industry to make use of blender. You are the industry. They didn't write that code just to be looked at they want people to use it not just for their hobbies but in their professions as well. It's free. It's open source. They aren't asking you to pay them any money. It's not try before you buy. It's free. And people have such a hard time accepting that. I know it sounds like a crazy scheme because you guys are unfamiliar with blender. Some of you are unfamiliar with open source in general. Also like I said, with blender you can have the polys and also add the CSG. There is no reason to have to pit one against the other. Also interface discussions are irrelevant because you can change the interface to be whatever you want it to be. You can make it look exactly like 3dsMax if you wanted to. You could make it look like photoshop. I don't care about teh interface I want the features in Leadwerks editor. That's what I'm talking about. I didn't say I wanted Leadwerks to become blender Jr. I said Blender has tons of features that could sky rocket the power of Leadwerks editor. I'm talking about the features not the interface. Okay so for concern 1: CSG - just add CSG to blender. It's that simple. In this way you can say thank you for all the millions of dollars worth of code that they would be handing Leadwerks for free. Not that you even have to do that if you don't want.0 concern 2 interface: It doesn't matter. You can make your own interface. Since Josh will be making his own interface from scratch anyway, he can do it with blender. Concern 3 - Won't Leadwerks have to be free too? No. Keep the SDK seperate from the editor. It's that simple. Make the editor symbiotic with blender. But then the editor exports out to the SDK which does the actual processing and rendering compiling whatever. It's like the mental ray plugins for blender, you can get the plugin all day but you can't use mental ray without a legit license. is this making any sense? You can get the features of blender, add CSG, and also change the interface to whatever you want. Anyway it's just a thought. And I'm not an expert on it and I'm just going to leave it at this post and not say anything else. But I would at least think about it.

Ok ok ok ok... CSG is a standard of the past. Of course more people have it. Just like Leadwerks deferred renderer. You could say, UDK doesn't have deferred lighting so Leadwerks is non standard etc. Well anyways. Blender has more to it than CSG. The pipeline just amazing. And also, the CSG argument is irrelevant because Josh would be free to add CSG to Blender's other features if he wanted to. It's not an either or situation. You can have it all. PTEX, CSG, polys, sculpting, flowgraph, lightmapping with realtime feedback built in, fully featured cinematic editting and compositing, material node system, I mean just everythign at your fingertips inside of the game engine. I think people won't appreciate Blender's game engine editor features until 2 years from now when UDK finally catches up to where blender is TODAY and makes a video about one of the above features with techno music blaring in the background. "UDK now has built in Beast lightmapping and PTEX, and you sculpt and paint and adjust animations directly in your editor for unparrelleled industry standard professionalism plus a bunch of cool hip buzzwords" *cue techno music* maybe then you'd see how good it was. Josh, they WANT YOU to do it. They are trying so hard to get blender into the industry. That's the entire rational behind blender 2.5!

CSG is not easier than modeling with polygons. Especially if you're intention is to block out shapes for an experienced artist to come in and model OR if you yourself are the experienced artist. Modeling with polygons is a lot simpler and quicker too. Watching some UDK CSG tutorials, I'm like "WTF", because of all the steps you have to do make the simplest things. Honestly polys are easier. And 1000 more versatile for making quick shapes. I think if you saw my tree modeling tutorial u'd understand what I mean. But unfortunately I don't have the power to prove this to you. So, yeah.

Hello. Just curious. I see a lot of people touting CSG and such, but blender has features like being able to actually model/texture/animate the final game asset directly in the game engine itself. CSG is a step backwards from what has already been coded into blender. Blender has built in light mapping, flowgraphs, sculpting, procedural material nodes, cinematics tools, bullet physics, rendering etc. I was just curious, putting legal theories asside, what is the final word on why that would be a good thing or a bad thing? Keep in mind, interface issues are irrelevant for many reasons.Namely blender 2.5's bigger focuses has been only allowing users to make the interface into whatever they like. This is a serious question from me. Because I see you guys citing features of UDK, Unity, or CryEngine's editors. But those editors are actually far FAAAAR less advanced than Blender's. In other words, if you add Blender's editor to Leadwerks renderer and technology, you'd have a flawless game engine that was more advanced than any other.

Not that I consider myself much of an artist but I thought the grid snap was enough. I've never used multi-viewports not even in blender for just modeling things.

or he could just find a way of taking advantage of all of blender's code, I'm not sure if it would be called a plugin or not and yes I know you're tired of me saying that but now would be the perfect time to give it some thought just imagine, cinematics tools, sculpting, ptex, modeling,materials, bullet physics, light mapping, flowgraphs...these things have already been coded inside blender already. The biggest hurdle is the legal research I would guess. This would instantly teleport your editor's funcationality above and beyond all others in existence.

I'm thinking Rick's main point is, what if Josh becomes preoccupied with some other part of the code and he has to hire someone to complete some parts of the editor. It would be a lot easier to get someone if it was written in non-Blitzmax basically. I think that's his point.

I found a coupon with your name on it

crysis like water needs a crysis like sky!

Hey! I just tried it and here is what I think: I think that I imagined it would be different than it is. I was thinking that it would be like a nested widget or embedded in the taskbar, that once I hover my mouse over it I could click on an option such as convert model, edit material, etc, then it would use my saved settings to perform an action. I'm talking about the way that there is a little grey bar at the bottom of Werkspace, and when you click on who's online, the names pop up. I was thinking that Middlewerks would be like that. But other than that instead of commenting further or asking any questions I'll just wait on your upcoming blog

The Gui should be written in flowgraphs. Any problems with that?

if I had your brain I'd rule the world

excellent, your enthusiasm for helos absolutely comes through and the flight brought back feelings of teh purity of gaming back in the day nice music too, is it going to be in the actual game?

Realplayer in particular had been given me trouble for a long time. I'm thinking what happened is that maybe realplayer was doing it's usual business of not working properly at the same time that maybe something important was going on and then it screwed some part of itself up or something. Steam's automatically running on startup was annoying me anyway. Hopefully I'm not borked!