Does anyone have any experience using Deled to design levels for their games in Jmonkey? Right now I’m trying to optimise my graphics pipeline by using a few high specialised intuitive programs to support blender. That way I don’t have to become a blender master to make nice looking things.
If anyone has found importing things from Deled into Jmonkey problematic or have any alternatives to suggest I’d love to hear them.
I’ve never heard of this and I don’t think ever reading a post mentioning it.
Hi,
Do you mean DeleD 3D? I played around with it for a while and it is indeed very intuitive. At least if you want to build basic indoor levels. Especially the ease of texturing simple geometry is nice (compared to blender). Also you can export in obj which is easy to handle in jme. But I had some difficulties to import the shadowmaps correctly (can’t remember what went wrong).
I also tried alot of other modeling tools but came to the conclusion that blender is one of the most versatile and powerfull (besides all the commercial ones) and it is very worth it to spend some time with it to get the hang on it. After a short while you get some routine of the basic stuff from creating shapes, texturing and importing into the sdk and you will realize that you don’t need to be a blender-master to get everything done what you can do otherwise in DeleD 3D. Well I still struggle with animations in blender.
What I didn’t tested yet is google sketchup. I just watched some youtube vids and it seems also a good choice for simple models like houses, etc. But I’m not certain what format it exports. It’s possible that one needs blender as intermediate software after all.
Deled 3d works but not for animated, so if it fits your needs its fine, else i would probably invest the time to learn blender a bit more as its more flexibile.
I echo what people are saying. Blender may look scary at first glance, but watch a few of the millions of tutorials out there for it (not the fancy rendering ones tho) and especially the beginner ones which go through the interface of where everything is, and within a week u should have a strong understanding of creating static objects and texturing them. Then with practice your modelling skills will increase
I advise you to use Blender even though I still have tons of problems with it since its version 2.50 as lots of exporters and importers have been dropped (MD2, MD3, …) and the Collada export doesn’t always work correctly on animated models. If you use WaveFront OBJ or Collada, you won’t have a lot of troubles. You can use Blender in the same way than you use DeleD 3D except that it’s generally a bit more complicated. I had to use it for several weeks before feeling comfortable enough to create some basic models. I use some Python scripts in Blender, I had to fix some importers myself, it would be better if I could use Java. Using a modeler is fine but not enough, I implement my own mesh optimizations outside of them.
I am trying to take time to learn blender, however being a student I do have other commitments, I was aiming to use a few specialised easy to use programs to make select things then if more is needed taking them into blender and tweaking it. Then I could move onto my real passion, programming!
Still I guess I oughta lock myself in a room and spend a week learning blender =/