Getting Started With Blender

    Quick steps to becoming proficient with this moddeling and animation program.

 The "3D view" :

This is the main frame that displays a representation of what you are working on. For now, press the "z" key and see if this shows you the wireframe or "solid" mode. There are many possibe ways to view the objects in the 3d view, some better for one thing than others. After trying the z key a few times try the numpad 5 key. This switches back and forth from ortho and perspective, perspective being more realistic and probably more like the final result you will be trying to get.

Each seperate mesh object is edited seperately. If there is an object (by default there is) click it, usualy with the right not left mouse button. It should seem highlighted. Now pressing tab should change the display to show you the points at the end of each plane/face. Right click them to start moving and left click them to accept the new position.

Hold control and click to make new points. Select points, hold shift and right click several, and press "f " to try to connect them with a plane.

New objects should be easy to add with the add menu. If you are in the "edit" mode a new mesh object may appear in the current one, basically merging the two.

Materials

One way to get colors and textures, as well as specularity and reflection effects, is to assign a material to the object (or just part of the object). The "material buttons" can be found by clicking the grey ball icon, then the red ball icon. choose add new if it appears blank. Click text face and vcolor paint if you are making game models. This will make the game textures appear in a normal render, but is not needed for anything else.

UV Face Select mode:

Seect the mesh object and make sure you are in object mode not edit mode. Now click f, you should get lines around the faces of the object. This is the mode used to assign textures. Also click below on the black square with yellow corners. This is the editing buttons but it will also show the face uv editing buttons when in face select mode.

Further Texturing

Next you will want to make another cell, currently the screen probably has 2 and a third one collapsed on top where the menu is. Left click around the window till it lets you split the area. Then you'l get a new cell. Go to the cell menu on the left and select UV/Image from the dropdown of icons. This is the screen that shows uv faces and the actual texture. Use that frame's menu to load an image, which will be shown as the object texxture if the object's faces are selected.

Blender is usefull for creating game models and levels for many engines and game formats. It doesn't have them all built in but it's Python scripting abilities are very extensive and there are pre made exporters available for many things. For crystal space levels, save your level as a blend file and get the blend2cs program from Blender.org. It's a seperate program that converts the file.

Python

In Blender Python is written into the text section, which can be reached by the icon menu on any cell, like the UV/Image Editor. Pythin code is very dependant on whitespace and indentation. Here is a non functional example:

def findx(x,array): i=0 while array.length>i: if array[i]==x: return true return false

To execute Python code instantly press "alt p". It can also be assigned to an event. Iin the game engine it is assigned in the logic bricks. Game engine functions and objects are quite different from Blender's gui related features but both share most Python functions. You could include Python modules from a standard Python installation if you wanted more functionality.

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