From time to time, I look through the forums and I ALWAYS see people asking for how to do a certain specific things in blender, and for good reason. Let’s face it, Blender’s got a terrible interface. With a million tiny buttons and no direction to how to use them, it makes it a nightmare for beginner users and even intermediate users.

So what do you do? Luckily many blender users have seen that there is a need and have made plenty of tutorials. However, I find that boring old static tutorials is always so annoying to read. Solution? Video tutorials!

But whats the problem with that?

There’s like a million video tutorial websites everywhere on the web, but they’re so hard to reach!

In come CGTube.net my very own video tutorial service. I’m planning to make this the one stop place for video tutorials for EVERYTHING you’d need to do with graphics.

CGTube.net, Video Training and Learning for CGArtists. Kinda has a nice ring to it doesn’t it?

This also means that I’m gonna be stopping this blog. But don’t worry! I’m moving to another one at

CGTube Blender Blog

It’s going to be interesting, you should drop by.

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The first option is to change it yourself. I recommend this, this is so you can customize your own theme to fit your unique wants and needs. Everyone has different likings to colours and combinations of colours, so I suggest you do this. This will be discussed in this tutorial.

Artists Impression of the Blender UI... I'd say its pretty accurate.

Or…

The second option is to simply get someone else’s theme. Why go through the hard work of making your own theme if you can choose someone else’s theme? This will be done in another post.

First Option: Customizing your own Theme

To do this you need to go to do the following:

• Pull down the top part menu (as shown on the right)
  

  Pull down the secret menu to set your Theme

• Find the Themes tab
• Add a new copy of the particular theme style you like. Name it whatever you want.
• Under the Name of the theme, there are two menus. Probably set to 3D View and Background respectively.
• The First Menu is the part of the user interface you want to change. The Second Menu is changing the aspect of that part. So things in menu 2 are the bits and pieces from menu 1.
• Now change the colours to what your heart desires!
• Don’t forget to Save Defaults Settings (Ctrl-U) otherwise it doesn’t get saved and you may have to do it again.

I like the colours blue, red and orange, so my colour theme are those colours. You should pick the ones you like.

That should get you busy for a while. If you don’t want to make your own theme and you want to use someone else’s one instead. I’ll show how that’s done in another post.

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Use all those CPUs to your advantage!

The settings for the threads can be found here:

• Go to the Scene (F10)
• Under the Output tab, there should be settings called Threads.

Note: Pressing the little icon next to the Threads settings will make it automatically make it the number of CPUs you have, otherwise you can set what settings you want to put in.

That’s that. Simple. Though these posts may seem a little simple, posts like these were a life saver for me when I first started using Blender.

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If you’re anything like me, you probably saw the new years fireworks and thought “Hmm, I wonder if the fireworks can be done with Blender Particles?” Even though the answer is probably yes, this is probably the point where you know that you’ve played around with 3D for too long =D. But that aside, what giant aspiring projects do you have for 2009?

I know there are some projects that everyone always wants to make. Why else would you take the time to learn a huge program such as Blender, Maya or 3DS Max?

Could it be works inspired from hollywood such as a huge scaley dragon swooping down, exhaling enormous amounts of flames as it flies down and burns everything in its path? Or maybe you saw a masterpiece of 3D computer-generated TV show and thought “I want to try that someday”? Or do you simply want to create ads for companies?

Whatever it is, I’m sure you have a huge project or goal you’ve always wanted to go for. Well it is for me anyway. I’ve always wanted to make action animations from Anime. I would also like to recreate some of my favourite SNES games, RPGs, or just my favourites old or new in 3D. Recreating my favourite games in high detail, high quality, hollywood quality 3D cinematics so everyone can enjoy my favourite game once again in terms of a beautiful high quality cinematic.

Who knows, Maybe I’ll be able to make them this year in 2009? This is quite a task for one person so maybe I’ll make my own 3D studio? Who knows.

What do you have planned for 2009?

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Unbelievably High FPS

Though it’s not much, it’s still a fair amount of a speed increase. And as gamers, you know every little bit of speed counts.

The way to increase the speed is this:

• Open up Blender
• Game -> Show Framerate and Profile (turn this OFF)

The reason why having this on makes so much laggier is because it’s takes a while to check every related hardware and report back to the screen.

I know, I know… You probably wont have this on in the first place. But having this on is a good indicator of judging how much detail you should put in your game. Maybe by adding more polys? Adding detail to textures?

Or maybe switching to baking normals or other interesting things to improve render or game speed?

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This game has been much anticipated, though probably not as much as Big Buck Bunny, it’s still has its fair share of its followers.

Amazing Masterpiece or Another Elephants Dream?

When I found out that Yo Frankie! was out, I was jumping for joy. However, when I got the game, I was a little disappointed.

I do have to admit, the graphics are pretty good. Ever since GLSL, Blender’s in game graphics have improved dramatically. And this game pretty much sums it up. We now all know, that the graphics in the Blender Game Engine is good.

But I can’t help but get this nagging feeling.

The nagging feeling that something was missing. Something like when I watched Elephant’s Dream. Something like, “Wow, the graphics are nice but… where’s the story?” Granted, it’s two different mediums; one is a Short Movie, one is a (sortof) indie game. But the thing that is missing is similar.

The short movie, even though Ton wanted to make it open, it was missing the elements of a short movie and seemed random.

The game, missing the elements of game play and ease of use.

There are some reasons why I think this.

Ease of use

The first irk I had in the ease of use category was the distribution. Let me give you a run down of what you needed to do to get the game working.

• We Download the game (nothing wrong here)
• We then Unzip it (nothing wrong here either)
• errr… what next? The parent folder is empty… except for the folders. Where’s the read me? Or installation guide? Or something???!!!
• We now check the next best place to find out how to run the damn thing, the yofrankie website.
• What?? The main post that said yofrankie was released doesn’t mention how to run it?? okkkayy…
• Systematically run each blend file to see which one works.
• Found it!
• Errr… there’s no sound.
• Figured it was my optimised version of blender so I opened another version up.

From that I found out. Hmmm… not a great way of starting off.

Btw for those people who want to know how to run this game, you go <yofrankie_unzipped>/levels/start_menu.blend. When you have that opened up you should see a black screen that doesn’t tell you anything. Press P.

So finally I got the game working. I couldn’t save as runtime because for some reason my blender doesn’t want to save as runtime.

Yes, I’ve tried the normal blender.
Yes, I’ve tried the game-optimized blender.
Yes, I’ve tried the 64-bit version of blender.

I had to deal with the Blender things around my screen. At least do this part for me dammit! Make a runtime for all the different machines if it works on your machine, it only takes 1 minute dammit!

Next is the Gameplay and controls
Everything seemed ok, for a while. I still really REALLY don’t like the m,n, space controls plus arrow key… It seems really counter intuitive to me. This is me brought up on DOS games and playing UP TO DATE GAMES. >_> Maybe Linux games all have weird controls like that, where space is throw instead of jump, mis the jumpand the n is the ‘action’ button.

Theres a lot more stuff… meh. This game seems a lot less polished than the their first tech demo. There were other things like animation problems, difficulty in using the dam flying, and getting severly punished by lightning when you took down an enemy. To be honest I had to make myself play a couple of times over a few days because I stop after a couple of minutes and try to start playing again. It breaks all the rules of a good game.

Oh well. The graphics was nice. So was the animation. If that’s all you’re looking for in a game, then I’m sure Yo Frankie! will please you. I’m not sure if I want to invest my time into learning the blender Game Engine. I might learn how to use the NeoAxis Engine instead, for creation of games.

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It seems like their on their way to finishing and reimplementing the features back in. Blender 2.5 is a rewrite so it should be a lot better, and hopefully less cluttery.

From the announcement:

• New window-manager, allowing multi-window setups.
• New area-manager, allowing flexible division in sub-regions with each a distinctive task (like toolbars, button list views, channel views, etc).
• The new area-manager will allow much easier custom editors (via python or C api)
• New event system, based on ‘handlers’ with dynamic (= user definable) keymaps. Events will much better support other devices, or multi-touch even.
• The new event system will also allow Macros, basic construction history, and since events are hanled centrally (separated from drawing) the UI will remain fully responsive (updated) while editing.
• Generic “data api”, giving uniform access to data properties for Blender’s UI, for Python, but especially for animation curves or drivers. This will enable the “get everything animated” feature.
• Generic “tools api”, which gives uniform access to every tool (option) Blender has. Together with the “data api” this will make scripting in Python much easier. Customizable UIs (toolbars, headers, menus, buttons) are simply possible  this  way

It seems like there’s going to be a lot more customizability for Blender!

But it also seems like there’s not gonna be much improvement in 2.5. But it’s also laying down the foundations for higher efficiency, so expect lots of improvements in the versions after!

I really hope there will be more improvements in the user interface. Blender’s User interface is quite… junky to say the least. And really ugly. But hopefully 2.5 will change that.

Imagine… Being able change buttons to make it look like glossy icons, or to have images for different buttons, or just simply having different themes and templates… *drool*

Yes I love customizing my user interface.

But seriously, customizing your user interface could improve workflow of your pictures.

On top of that it could also attract some of the XSI users or anti-Autodesk (because of the Autodesk monopolization of Maya, 3DS Max, and XSI) users into the Blender community and that’s always a good thing. Having more and great artists in to the community will improve Blender’s popularity and ultimately a better and faster program.

Maybe one day Hollywood movies will be made with Blender? It’s a nice thought.

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Here’s how you do it.

When you open up Blender, go to Game -> Generate Display Lists. With this, you can get up to 8x Speed Increase!

So why not have it on all the time? Well, apparently not all cards support this and *can* break a few things (though I’m not too sure about this, it might be just a myth).

So if you’re concerned with everybody being able to play your game, leave it off. But if you feel there’s no risk go ahead and experience the speed increase!

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GLSL is one of them.

But you probably already know that since you’re reading this post.

Since Blender 2.48, interest in GLSL has been reawakened since the open game development project of the  Apricot Game project (or yo frankie!).

I had a heck of a time trying to get it working, with hardly any help around, but once I got it working, it was actually something tiny stopping me from accessing what was the holy grail of shaders.

Here is how I did it.

Woooow GLSL, in game graphics. Allowing Blender materials in games when previously only it could only be seen through a render.

So lets get started.

First open up Blender and go Game -> Blender GLSL Materials on the top menu. Then Press P to play.

And that’s it! No not quite. I don’t see any GLSL at all.

Most websites saying how to activate GLSL in the game engine usually just stopped here. I was pulling my hair out for a long time until I figured out how to do it.

I was kicking myself on how simple it was when I finally got it working and you will to. So lets continue.

So the trick is…

You’ll be so amazing when you hear it…

it is…

Adding a New Material to the object.

I know, profound isn’t it.

Apparently GLSL doesn’t work if the object doesn’t have any materials.

So that is really it. Now go forth and create fantastic materials and textures to use in your next game development of MMORPGs or FPSs blockbuster hit game.

On a last note, GLSL can be used to make objects in games a lot more realistic such as use of Specular Textures, Normal Mapping, Bump Mapping etc. You can even use Ramp Shaders!

Basically, most of the things you’d find in the MapTo tab. There are more things you can do, you can check it out on the Blender3d.org site under Blender 2.48 Release.

If you have any interesting game developments drop me a note or a comment, I’d like to hear from you guys.

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You’ve probably seen it.

But you probably don’t know what it is.

It’s Subsurface Scattering, SSS for short.

Sub-Surface Scattering... Beautiful ain't it?

Ever since SSS, skin and other things have been a whole lot more realistic. It can remove that plasticky feel from your skin.

So what is it?

It’s when light goes into an object, bounces around inside the object while lighting everything inside. Think of a flash light lit against your hand. If you look on the other side, what do you see? Of course a (reddish) light coming through!

So it’s useful for things like skin, cheese, goo, milk blah blah. Everything and anything that needs a translucent feel to it.

Alright, lets cut the crap, and show how it’s done.

You can find the Sub-Surface Scattering settings here.

Found the SSS. Let’s play around with the settings

Default Settings

Hmm... interesting... default settings with set colours... looks like chocolate

Interesting huh? Playing around with Scale gets you this:

Changing Scale in SSS

Looks like the higher the scale the blobbier it looks. Or maybe the further it bounces inside the object?

IOR settings… hmm it says the higher it is the more denser it is…

Changing the IOR settings in SSS

To tell you the truth, I can’t tell the difference.

Now on to the Back and the Front Settings:

Front and Back Settings

The Front settings shows how much light hits the front of the object, and the Back settings shows how much light comes through the back… I think =P.

There’s also things like Radius R, Radius G, Radius B. The R probably means more red bouncing around, G probably means more green and the B probably means more Blue bouncing around.

So now you have learned Sub-Surface Scattering! Just go forth and make beautiful, translucent like pictures. Add Ambient Occlusion to make it look that much more realistic, and voila!

Sub-Surface Scattering plus Ambient Occlusion in all its glory.

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