There has been an interesting recent development.

For the last several weeks, Dalai Felinto has been working on Blender Cycles baking. For those unfamiliar with it, Cycles is a renderer for Blender (an alternative to Blender's traditional Blender Internal renderer) that provides a shader-like node-based material system, path-tracing, support for the Open Shading Language, and support for GPU acceleration of rendering using CUDA or OpenCL. Cycles provides excellent lighting using node-based lights, emissive materials, etc... However, the largest drawback for Cycles in game development pipelines has been the lack of ability to bake the various data out to texture maps. The work that DFelinto is doing is intended to fix that. It's still very rough, and very much in progress, but in the future we can look forward to being able to use Cycles' powerful capabilities to bake light maps, environment maps, normal maps, diffuse, etc... It's going to end up pretty powerful, I think.

As always with experimental and in-development Blender stuff, you can check out builds at graphicall.org; in particular, tungerz has a Win64 Cycles baking build here that is kept fairly up-to-date from DFelinto's git repo.

Thanks for the tip Jtippetts!

Maya Autodesk and zBrush are probably my preference for 3D modelling. Autodesk is great for animation

That Zbrush model is awesome. I miss Zbrush! I have Sculptris, which can do basic stuff, but there is nothing in the league of Zbrush. I can only imagine the features they have in it now since I last used it.

As far as exporting that, the engine is the one that does the blending usually as part of the shaders used when rendering

Ahh, okay, thank you. I figured it was the BGE doing the rendering. I might look around for a plugin that could help with this. Right now the API for the engine I am using doesn't have many animation functions, so we have to hack stuff. Blending animations based on keyframes is proving a bit too much for the speed of workflow I am going for.

I dont mind blender, i just hate the bad practices it generates for people who start with it.

I dont mind blender, i just hate the bad practices it generates for people who start with it.

I'm curious what you mean? I didn't start with it ( 3ds (not max... )) personally, but dont really see what bad habits it would form?

Most people in blender leave seams, verts are almost never welded, and their edgeloops are horrid. This is because the tools make it seem like the model is complete and ready for export when in reality it can cause some serious issues when used in real game development. I guess the complaint is the program is too easy thus people dont learn the proper methods for creating assets for game development.

Posted Yesterday, 03:33 PM

Most people in blender leave seams, verts are almost never welded, and their edgeloops are horrid. This is because the tools make it seem like the model is complete and ready for export when in reality it can cause some serious issues when used in real game development. I guess the complaint is the program is too easy thus people dont learn the proper methods for creating assets for game development.

You need to consider, that most people using blender do it , because of not having (legal) access or enough money to use max/maya. Most people who use max/maya are professional or atleast students, who study art and have better access to this tools. The effect, that their art has better quality is just the result of an higher time investment and not the result of the tool.

The quality of my code I write does not differ if written with VS2012 or notepad, but I'm much faster with VS2012. The quality differs only, because I study it and dedicated 20 years to code more or less each day, so , please don't blame the tool.

Most people in blender leave seams, verts are almost never welded, and their edgeloops are horrid. This is because the tools make it seem like the model is complete and ready for export when in reality it can cause some serious issues when used in real game development. I guess the complaint is the program is too easy thus people dont learn the proper methods for creating assets for game development.

Almost every 3d professional and artist that uses blender knows how to make a proper edge loop and how to not leave seams. There are only two kinds of professional the one who is and the one who isn't. Independent of the tool, knowledge makes the artist. Any program can be excellent it just depends on who is using it.

Posted Yesterday, 03:33 PM

Most people in blender leave seams, verts are almost never welded, and their edgeloops are horrid. This is because the tools make it seem like the model is complete and ready for export when in reality it can cause some serious issues when used in real game development. I guess the complaint is the program is too easy thus people dont learn the proper methods for creating assets for game development.

You need to consider, that most people using blender do it , because of not having (legal) access or enough money to use max/maya. Most people who use max/maya are professional or atleast students, who study art and have better access to this tools. The effect, that their art has better quality is just the result of an higher time investment and not the result of the tool.

The quality of my code I write does not differ if written with VS2012 or notepad, but I'm much faster with VS2012. The quality differs only, because I study it and dedicated 20 years to code more or less each day, so , please don't blame the tool.

While your point is great in theory it cant be anything further from the truth. The tool is SO simple they are not forced to learn those things that are crucial to GOOD model design. You ever see somebody put FRONTPAGE on their resume for being a "website professional"? You sure as hell don't now but you sure did back then. Everybody who had access to a computer could make cool clipart webpages but it doesn't mean they knew anything about making a real website. The same could be said for Photoshop and the people who use filters to make "cool flame art" but have no idea what the filter is actually doing and most of their work looks generic and cant be used for anything other than a silly signature on a forum page.

This actually goes deeper than just blender if you really wanted to get into it. It is the whole concept that the further we advance in technology the more we loose in basic knowledge and skill. I wont bore you with the details here and we can discuss in private or in another thread if you wished... but the point is this is MY opinion of the program.

Almost every 3d professional and artist that uses blender knows how to make a proper edge loop and how to not leave seams. There are only two kinds of professional the one who is and the one who isn't. Independent of the tool, knowledge makes the artist. Any program can be excellent it just depends on who is using it.

You make a solid point here. Problem with this is that blender is free and easy to use so the COMMON non-professional gets their hands on this program and creates the issue stated above. The OP's question was should it be used for gamedev, and while I believe the tool can be used to do so I hate it as a standard because the common person ( most indie people ) don't know how to create proper models or uv maps.