I’ve been at a bit of a loss for what to work on next. I am still going to be working on game math recipes, as well as the HTML based level editor, but I wanted to start a new tutorial series and couldn’t really decide what to work on. Then I realized how heavily I’ve been ignoring the artist side of the fence… perhaps because I am no artist. I do of course follow it as a hobby and have since I got 3DS for DOS way back in the 90s.
Programmer art is a tricky thing, especially when it comes to the world of 3D.
In 2D, you can download a spritesheet from the web and use that as a placeholder. In 3D, this becomes a bit more difficult. There exist tons of premade 3D models, some even completely animated, that you can download and plug into your game. This sounds wonderful… in theory, in practice it is anything but wonderful. After importing you will often find the animations don’t work, textures are missing, the scale is all wrong, the orientation is all wrong, etc..
That’s why it’s often handy for a programmer to be able to create their own art. That is exactly what this tutorial series is going to cover. From beginning to end on how to model, texture, animate and export your own 3D models or levels. The results aren’t going to be pretty… that part requires years of experience… but it will be functional and will teach you all the basics and you can take it from there. There are also a ton of resources available for Blender, I will point to or include them as I go.
Of course, you won’t need to be a programmer to follow this series, I am just making the assumption that my target audience is composed of programmers. This series should be useful to anyone looking to get up to speed with Blender.
Hope you enjoy it. Any and all suggestions, recommendations and feedback appreciated.
Stay tuned for part one shortly.
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