Learning Blender 2.7.3

[AEon]

Well, tried to use the Solidify modifier in Blender on my bevelled cube... could not get it so make the cube solid. Just noted that the walls of the cube are paper thin... this may be the reason the converter has problems.

[phantazm11]

A couple of more things you could check for:

Make sure all of the vertexes are welded (not sure what the command is in Blender) This could possible cause problems.

Make sure that the normals on the faces of your bevels are oriented the correct position (facing "out" instead of "in") I'm pretty sure that this isn't the problem, but it is always good to check. I can't remember the command in Blender to show face normals.

The model should only have one smoothing group set.

Past that I would say that it might be the exporter. One way you can check for sure is to export the model as an .lwo straight from Blender and import it into radiant (again, make sure the models is composed of triangles)

Also, lwo's, like ASE's will come into Radiant at exactly the correct size, if you have your units set up correctly of course.

Katsbits really is the go to place for Blender and Blender to Radiant tutorials : http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/#blender

---------------------

As for your model being "hollow"... Technically all models are hollow, or more precise, they are created as a "shell" comprised of the outside facing polygons of the object. If you delete one face of your cube you should see what I'm talking about. Whenever you use any "CSG" type of action, or bevel, extrude, etc., the program will fill in (or take away) whatever polygons it needs to in order to give you the result that you are intending. It may "look" like a solid object, but the inside is really always hollow. Which is the way it should be for obvious performance reasons.

I'm not sure how you ended up with a separate inside shell to your model unless at one point you beveled the whole thing?

And BTW, one thing I have learned is that modelling is definitely worth your time!

[AEon]

Make sure all of the vertexes are welded.

Well... apparently a simple "select the complete object, go into edit mode, vertex select, and weld all vertices" does not exit. They seem to have a "merge 2 or more vertices", but that is pretty much what we do not want. I am not even sure you could see if vertices are off or not. The way the vertices react to movement they are welded. Did a test... did not help. But I watched a CoD Radiant tutorial where welding of patch vertices was a huge deal. So good thought.

Make sure that the normals on the faces of your bevels are oriented the correct position (facing "out" instead of "in")

Select the cube in object mode, then switch to edit mode, then open the property window via N-key, under Mesh Display turn on the Normals (3 icons). All mine are fine and pointing outwards. But it was good to find out how to show them.

The model should only have one smoothing group set.

Under Scene my cube does not seem to have any smoothing group set. But I may be looking in the wrong place.

Past that I would say that it might be the exporter. One way you can check for sure is to export the model as an .lwo straight from Blender and import it into radiant.

Test for tomorrow.

I know that my narrow edges seem to be the issue, "fatter" angled edges on a larger cube accidentally worked... though I did double the size of the bevelled cube and exported that, still the edges did not show. Apparently the edges where not wide enough. Oh well.

Katsbits really is the go to place for Blender and Blender to Radiant tutorials : http://www.katsbits.com/tutorials/#blender

I stumbled accross some of these... will take a closer look.

I'm not sure how you ended up with a separate inside shell to your model unless at one point you bevelled the whole thing?

I did... my first bevel application was paper thin... the second inner hull was from some experiment, and is not the normal bevelled cube it use... that is only paper thin in thickness.

To be clear, selected a cube in object mode, then switched to edit mode, and hit Ctrl-B... apparently this is the same as manually selecting all edges of the cube and the applying bevel. I used Amount type: Offset and Amount 0.04. And you are of course right, the cube was "hollow" to begin with.

And BTW, one thing I have learned is that modelling is definitely worth your time!

Well at least I am learning many modelling related concepts... and bit by bit the different philosophy behind all this. And it really really helps to be able to ask for advice. Thanks.

[Kat]

Thank you... that works for export to Q3A .map... is there a import .map also available?


Installing above Exporter:
For those interested, the above exporter needs to be unpacked into:

• Blender\<version number>\scripts\addons\

creating the io_scene_map folder there. Launch Blender, then under File menu, User Preferences, Add-ons tab, find Import-Export: Quake MAP format, enable the addon, and do not forget to hit the Save User Settings button at the bottom of the window. You may need to restart Blender for the addon to take (not sure, I did). After you then create some primitives, select the ones you want to export, use File menu, Export, Quake MAP (.map) to save them in Q3 map format. In Radiant use File menu, Import... to load the primitives into the editor.


Been testing a bit, your suggestion for grid Scale 0.800 leads from a 1.6 sided cube to 160u in Radiant, so 0.01 = 1u.

I noted that the bevel tool actually hollows out the inside of the cube. Is there some way to fill out a hollow object in Blender? I.e. to later do a CSG merge and turn it all into one brush?

Update:
Created a 0.64³ cube in Blender (that is a 64³u³ one in Radiant), turned on Edit Mode, then via Ctrl+B (Bevel) manually set offset to 0.04, segments 1 and profile 0.5 (?), the rest unselected. This recreates "exactly" (dimensions and mostly in shape) the brush cubes in Radiant. But when importing this in Radiant, the brushes (now angled) that define all 12 bevelled cube edges have gone missing. I.e are not loaded and shown by Radiant. Seems these are sub-unit or something... for the larger 160³u³ cube it worked. Hopefully I did not set up something properly...

If there's one thing you need to wrap your head around and get right using Blender is to make sure you set Blenders grid properly; you want to be using a Display property "Scale" of "8" with "Subdivisions" "8" to match Radiant default grid spacing (see link) - if you use anything else (Object Scale) you'll not quite match up properly (especially when working offgrid). If you turn on snapping as mentioned above you're basically able to use Blender in a similar way to Radiant.

Setting the grid properly also means you should be able to bevel using 'units' - on a 64 unit block, if you type "8" after initialising Bevel, it'll bevel by that value (you can check accuracy by manually loopcutting the mesh "8" units from an edge and comparing to see if the bevel matches [it should do]). You do need to be careful with things like Bevel though because cuts can basically go offgrid and become nonaxial, on export those types of volumes stand a really good chance of getting buggered bad. Incidentally there's also a reference pack containing a few basic cube volumes that are helpful during construction.

[obsidian]

Too many felines in this thread.

[AEon]

If there's one thing you need to wrap your head around and get right using Blender is to make sure you set Blenders grid properly; you want to be using a Display property "Scale" of "8" with "Subdivisions" "8" to match Radiant default grid spacing (see link) - if you use anything else (Object Scale) you'll not quite match up properly (especially when working offgrid). If you turn on snapping as mentioned above you're basically able to use Blender in a similar way to Radiant.

Setting the grid properly also means you should be able to bevel using 'units' - on a 64 unit block, if you type "8" after initialising Bevel, it'll bevel by that value (you can check accuracy by manually loopcutting the mesh "8" units from an edge and comparing to see if the bevel matches [it should do]). You do need to be careful with things like Bevel though because cuts can basically go offgrid and become nonaxial, on export those types of volumes stand a really good chance of getting buggered bad. Incidentally there's also a reference pack containing a few basic cube volumes that are helpful during construction.

Funny how good comments arrive a few hours later than what I have learned reading up and trying out things. I read the other article about the grid, Blenders Grid settings, and was a bit surprised that GTKradiant is mentioned but that there is no infobox what would "simply" mention what to set up to get the grid working. If you have the time, updating that article might help newcomers find the info they need more readily. Another thing I would strongly suggest is to separate the article into two sections. One explaining all the info for > 2.49 and the other 2.49 <=... as a Blender newbie and reader the old versions interrupting the "v2.73" pertinent info confuses more than it helps. It makes the good article very hard to read, IMO. Hopefully my comment can be seen as constructive feedback.

Now about the grid... the io_scene_map Quake .map exporter Theftbot kindly made available, in the Export menu called Quake MAP (.map) seems to be from a "version of Blender that includes it". I am guessing from v2.49 (I have not been able to find the exporter on any wiki for download). I read that from v2.49 to the present v2.73 the grid is treated differently. Under v2.73 using a 0.64³ cube (Blender) will be exported as a 64³u³ (Radiant) using this exporter, no matter how you set up the grid. I did install a MD3 importer/exporter and found that the tree.md3 I loaded was much larger conforming to your 1:1 sizes, i.e. 64.0³ (Blender) = 64³u³ (Radiant). So my "problems" and "different" grid stem from the way the exporter works under 2.73.

Also downloaded and looked at your reference packs yesterday. And also loaded the test map (the two rooms in L-shape) using the .map exporter, exported one brush . The old exporter apparently simply does no longer properly work with 2.73 it seems. Thus is was not included, apparently.

Anyway, making the original cube 64.0³, should help avoid getting off grid. Alas chances for an update of the .map exporter seem to be zero, since it has not been updated in a very long time . I'll experiment with your 8.0 scaled grid and use the MD3 and ASE exporters and see how that goes.

I looked into the python script for the exporter, and found these hardcoded values:
[spoiler]Info below outdated:

Code: Select all

# TODO, make options
PREF_SCALE = 100
PREF_FACE_THICK = 0.1
PREF_GRID_SNAP = False

If I scale down the output via

Code: Select all

PREF_SCALE = 1

this might make it conform to your 1:1 settings. And possibly improve what brushes survive. Giving that a try, hopefully I can "edit" into python scripts in "real time" and Blender then re-caches them on the fly.

(My .64³ cubes would need a

Code: Select all

PREF_SCALE = 10000

).[/spoiler]

[AEon]

Correction... what I found above were the hardcoded defaults (the fallback values if you will), that are overridden and set by the values in the Blender\2.73\scripts\addons\io_scene_map\__init__.py. Luckily Blender automatically (compiles) and updates the python cache files, in \io_scene_map\__pycache__\. So .py source code changes work automatically. Thankfully.

So here the relevant code in io_scene_map\__init__.py:

Code: Select all

    face_thickness = FloatProperty(
            name="Face Thickness",
            description=("Thickness given to geometry which can't be "
                         "converted into a brush"),
            min=0.0001, max=10.0,
            default=0.1,
            )
    global_scale = FloatProperty(
            name="Scale",
            description="Scale everything by this value",
            min=0.01, max=1000.0,
            default=100.0,
            )
    grid_snap = BoolProperty(
            name="Grid Snap",
            description="Round to whole numbers",
            default=False,
            )

To make it conform to what Kat mentions in his grid under v2.73, i.e. 1:1...

Code: Select all

    face_thickness = FloatProperty(
...
            default=1.0,
            )
    global_scale = FloatProperty(
...
            default=1.0,
            )

Should work. The extremely small thickness of 0.1 may be one cardinal problem of the exporter under 2.73, set to 1.0 = 1u now. (Comes in handy to have programmed at some point in life and not shying away from actually meddling a bit of my own . I kept avoiding the obvious and actually looking at the exporter code... sigh.).

New test and new cube:
Creating a large 64.0³ cube in Blender and bevelling that, and then exporting using these new settings. Hopefully that works. Setting grid_snap to True may be another thing to try. To get cleaner "on-grid" values directly, since Blender's values are close but not rounded to the unit "properly".

Hope!

[AEon]

It works... wheee ...

Now to set the thickness to 2.0 (that conforms with Blender's "Bevel offset 0.5" and Radiant's 2u corner cuts I did in my test versions... and the inside of the cube should be a simple cube hollow that is easy to fill in Radiant... letting me CSG Merge it into one brush).

Thanks Kat for sticking with me, and inspiring me to finally actually edit the source code of the exporter... well... on the very good side all the failings let me understand what Blender is actually doing... and to now know what to set up. Kat your grid at 8.0 let me check and find the proper bevel offset value... I wanted to see a "2u" wide "angled edge" (so 1/4 of a minor grid width) on the cube and that conforms to "bevel offset 0.5". Neat...

Now for the more complicated shapes... which reminds me I will actually need to properly learn to clip in Blender... ahem... I think I saw a tutorial that actually used a plane, positioned it to perform a cut? Ieek...

[Kat]

They pulled the exporter from 2.71 because they thought on-one was using it so that last working version is in 2.70 (so 2.71 thru to the latest version don't have it - I don't know if it will ever return).

Depending on the exporter for *.map you *can* work the way your describe (using 'blender sized objects') but as you found out, you get into problems exporting *models*... it's highly suggested you work one-to-one because scaling models on export doesn't always work, often resulting in precision issues (sparklies, gaps and the like).

Radiant grid settings are covered in the articles I linked to, the one you mention above explains the grid itself rather than with any given 'tech'. But your point is acknowledged. So long as you grid snap in Blender and have your grid set up as mentioned, the resulting brushwork is correctly rounded so you won't get any precision errors. Just make sure that when you manipulate surfaces you snap to the 'correct' increments (i.e. snapping to "64" instead of "63"). Also to avoid or at least mitigate the thickness issue you amended to script for, when you're working don't using planes, use volumes, they exporter works much more comfortable with those (otherwise you end up with corrupt brushes (being to thin or warped incorrectly etc.).

[AEon]

Oh... was not aware of using volumes... hmm will check on that. The snapping to grid, for now I do not trust... I always check the properties of the object and manually set them to exact values... should they be off. But working with snap to grid will require more "practice" on my part it seems. It does not seem to be "idiot-proof" enough like in Radiant.


To show what I did and explain a few terms I used, that may not have been clearly worded, here a few screenshots of what I mean and want from bevelling. A chat with Hipshot showed that 3ds Max seems to interpret bevelling differently, and so does Radiant. So my "good" Bevelling is what Blender does in the pretty much the simplest case the tool creates. You can really whack out your bevelling if you want to though.

In Blender 2.7.3:

• Blender Bevel 2015-01-09 14'14'44.png

So this is what I ended up with in Blender by adding a 64.0³ Cube, selecting it, then in Edit mode (this keeps everything selected (vertices, edges and faces apparently). Ctrl+B, to turn on Bevel... not sure what bevel, since there is a vertex, edge and face one using the same shortcut. Then under the bevel options set offset to 0.5.

This is what I understand under bevelling, this special case of clipping off the edges at 45°, no fancy other thrills.


In Radiant 1.6.4:

• On-64-Cubes-and-Bevelling.jpg

I visually defined all the simple cases I mean, since as mentioned bevelling can become insanely complex. The Angled Edge, is just that a 45° cut parallel to the original cube edge. Easily done in the orthogonal views of Radiant. This does *not* yield the nice Tri-Corner, I only discovered by using Blender's bevel. The bottom right corner shows what I mean with "2u Corner Cut".

Top, left image: This is how the imported cube looks directly from Blender. As you can see, looking closer, the paper thin outside faces of the bevelled cube had become "thinkened" to 2u. This leads to a "weird" inside hollow space. I tried to simply put a 60³u³ cube into the hollow, to fill it up, but CSG Merge apparently wants no overlapping of brushes, at all. I seem to have confused that with how Microbrush 3 does it, the latter is more accommodating, IIRC. Or maybe it was simply wishful thinking.

Top, right image: Selected the 60³u³ cube, on a 1u grid, and then did a CSG Substract. This cleaned up the hollow inside of the cube. And the 60³u³ cube now completely fills the insides of the bevelled cube

Bottom, left image: Select outer and inner cube completely, and do a CSG Merge, this finally works, and yields *one* nice bevelled brush.

Bottom, right image: In top view, shows the nicely on-grid bevelled cube.


Simple, so what's the big deal?
Indeed, if I had imagined the nice Tri-Corner, I could have done all that in Radiant using 2 and 3-point clipping. But imagine two cases... look at a perfect cube from above, then make a diagonal cut via opposing corners (creating two triangles), in 3D these are two ramps. Now try to create correct "Angled Edges" on the diagonal. Or even worse (here I had to give up in Radiant) create a 3-sided pyramid with triangular floor (e.g. angle a plane and cut off the corner of a cube)... this "triangular ramp" has all sorts of angles.

My hope is Blender will create the proper bevelling for those less trivial shapes. And I needed the cube example to come out perfectly in Radiant... or all this would have been pointless.

In case you are wondering, will anyone ever notice all this extra effort... the answer... "probably not"... but I care and it also helps me learn to use Blender as a modelling tool... and a specific goal is always better, than "just create something in Blender".

Kat,
will look into using volumes next. You might give me a pointer on how clipping works in Blender, if you would?

[Kat]

When you do relatively complex shapes like you show above with your beveled cube, you're relying on the scripts ability to properly convert a plane into a volume, it does that by extruding surfaces backwards - it's this extrusion process that causes corrupt brush volumes (try it on that tiny corned piece to see what happens... you'll likely find it's depth isn't "1"). For something like the object you have above then, the best thing to do is bevel a cube rather than a series of planes (hollow box) - ironically, the way that Radiant use volumes is an advantage for plane cutting or 2 & 3pt clipping, that's quite awkward at present in Blender because you can't quite defined the clip points as can be done in Radiant, meaning, although a beveled cube seems like a simple object to make in Blender, it's not quite so straightforward because the constructional metaphors are different (surfaces vs. volumes).

And you're quite correct BTW, although you can just make your map in Blender, it still requires some thought because you're ostensibly supposed to think in volumes not surfaces or planes, that can make certain types of object otherwise tricky to create when compared to how easy it might be done in Radiant (because of the aforementioned differences).

[AEon]

Thanks... so I might be able to tinker something... clipping-related in Blender. Hmm...

And to be clear, I never planned to build a whole map in Blender, never... that would be nuts with a problematic exporter and a very much more stable Radiant for all the trivial brushwork readily at hand. I seen Blender as a tool to create "finer" assets, that are very difficult to create in Radiant. Hipshot mentioned that he uses modelling tools to create lamp (fixtures) and the like. I am think basically anything that requires a lot of vertex editing in Radiant, is much easier to get done in Blender.

I'll try the more complicated shapes next and see how Blender's bevelling and the .map exporter handle them.

As you quite rightly point out, the issue and limitation is the extruding of the planes creating problematic geometry by the exporter. I experimented with the thickness in the exporter script and found the messed up geometry again, with the missing "angled edges".

Maybe the exporter with my settings can make it back into Blender distribution again... since it now mostly works again.

It certainly would help to use Radian's 3-point-clipping to create the "primitives" for Blender that can then be used e.g. for bevelling. I do the latter for Microbrush 3, create the raw brush in Radiant, import it into the other editor, to use the bevelling there. Though the 3-point-clipping in Microbrush 3 I pretty much have figured out, almost better than in Radiant. Oh well .

[AEon]

Also to avoid or at least mitigate the thickness issue you amended to script for, when you're working don't using planes, use volumes, they exporter works much more comfortable with those (otherwise you end up with corrupt brushes (being to thin or warped incorrectly etc.).

No idea how to use/create solid "volumes". The Create, Cube objects were IMO supposed to be that. Could you walk me though this? Thanks.

As you suspected, an extruded triangle, half a cube, creates artefacts using the .map exporter from Blender. Trying to turn the object faces in Blender into something valid with thickness in Radiant, i.e. extruding messes up the bevels. My cube example was simple enough for me to trick the exporter into working. So unless there is a way to create solid volumes in Blender... alas this is a dead end for the .map exporter. I tried the Solidify modifier, but that only seems to make things worse.
see *.map based levels with Blender 2.49 - advanced where all these issues are explicitly mentioned, already... I was behind in reading.

Clipping... deleted vertices of cube, then selected the 3 or 4 vertices, hit f (to add a face, thus closed the cut open cube, creating an extruded triangle or ramp. So one can "tinker" to get the shapes... well I barely can .

Bit of fun:

• Blender Bevel 2015-01-09 19'18'15.png

Using vertex editing instead of clipping in Blender I came up with this diamond-shaped ramp, that fits into a cube volume... never even thought of that in Radiant before. The bevelling is starting to get slightly wild.

[Kat]

You're over complicating what you're trying to do. When you look at the default scene in Blender you see a single cube. To Blender that is an empty shell, an object with 6 surfaces. To *us* however, that same object represents a solid volume. This means that when you're modelling you're doing so using closed mesh objects NOT panels or open meshes - it's these latter two that cause the most problems.

That ramp likely won't export or will result in some weird shape (not what you intended), so yes, just using bevel has significant limitations when needing to export brush volumes, and you might then need to correct those or just build those structures as ASE models or rebuild as clipped brushes in Radiant.

It is possible to build a level completely in Blender but you're generally going to get better results building to it's strengths; sock mentioned in another topic about how he used a lot of modelled assets in POM - modular thinking in other words.