adventures with blockbench pt 2

[kradeelav]

this afternoon i was procrastinating dayjob work i really really didn't want to do and may have made a functioning polygonal n64 sandbox test level for textures :D  compare/contrast with my sketch to the side. at this point all I needed to do was to make the river curvier, and add a little more triangle variation in the walls.  I'm really glad i did the sketch beforehand, kept me modeling fast and made mental decisions easier.

overall this was smooth as hell, didn't take any time to master (it feels so much like google sketchup), but there was one interesting hiccup: blockbench doesn't, technically natively let you make a triangle!

you model (like sketchup) with mostly cubes, since this program was made for minecraft at first. but it *can* emulate triangles if needed.  so after i was all 'hey where's all the triangles, wind waker has gobs of them in the collision maps and i'm definitely going to need triangles to model low poly characters .. i googled 'blockbench make triangles' and interestingly enough, nobody figured it out in an efficient way.

TURNS OUT .... my hack for making triangles is just to select two vertexs (vertexii?), then right-click > "merge vertexes" when you're in vertex mode!  this, as it says on the tin, makes two vertexii into one, and automatically creates the triangles you need.

i could see this being horribly clunky if you're coming from blender or doing massive 1000+ poly projects but when i'm doing things that are either cubes or sub 256 polys, being cognizant of each and every triangles is weirdly, a blessing. like u gotta Work for them.  i could see me making the characters next with big blocky shapes first, and then start reducing all the shapes.  right now, though i'm less concerned with polygon efficiency and just making a proof of concept from start to finish. (making a sandbox map, making a character, putting bones in the character to animate them, importing both into godot, and having a live demo.)

anyway, making the 3D polys of the sandbox was easy.  then came the uv mapping and more particularly, the textures which, if anything, this is the part i was most nervous/new at. (blockbench is neat in you can paint pixels directly on the object as i did on the chest last post, or you can import a texture you made in a different art program - we're doing the latter here.)

which uh, have an attempt :D

it took .... a few..... tries to figure out you gotta import the texture (in the lower left), then select the mesh in the UV box to the top left, and then double click (?) the mesh to import the texture without borking the OG texture. blockbench is very kind and user friendly in that it UV unwrraps the model for you, but the trade off is it feels a bit ... messy, so I had to click and drag nearly every individual polygon "over" the proper texture placement. i didn't even know you could overlap polys onto the same texture ngl :o (maybe that's not kosher. who knows. again, proof of concept run first.)

in things i wish i would have done differently for this step, you don't really make a texture for One Whole Scene to rule them all, you make a texture for a comparatively simple object that might have different sides and parts, right? like a chair, or a boulder with grass on top and stone on the sides. note to self when making future texture maps! lots of smaller textures are better than one giant grid.

anyway, here’s a shot of the final map:

i tried to do a neat turntable spin, but for whatever reason it kept saving with some of the “transparent” checkerboard pattern over all of my drawn textures? i wonder if when i save my textures, i need to save with a 100% opacity color behind everything to prevent that.

anyway holy shit i did this….. 😀 lots of things i’d change (making ground textures WAY larger for one) but this is unironically way cooler than i ever expected for an alpha test.

next up: first stabs at characters.

 

Comments

[queenlua]

don't have much to add but really enjoying seein your progress on all this <3

[kradeelav]

haha i was wondering if this series was annoying to everyone given the sudden OOH SHINY laser focused interest and the lack of comments, glad to see that it's well received with ya. :D

felt like it would be cool in a few years to at least have recorded the very, very first steps of learning the thing since there's a truly massive amount of knowledge being processed and a lot of times a whole medium like this can feel, understandably, a bit intimidating! especially with the lack of documentation, demystyfing the process is always a bonus ~