Sorry your browser is not supported!

I'm happily learning how to use Blender and have created my first model by following a Tuftt's University tutorial. It's the one where you construct the famous Yellow Submarine using a jpeg from the album cover of the rock and roll band, The Beetles, and then create a short animation sequence with it.

Anyway I have the model looking just like the one made by the instructor and now all I have to do is create the short animation sequence. So far, so good. Obviously I have a long, long way to go before I can do anything useful with Blender.

But eventually I intend to use my Blender made models in DarkBasicPro, but I've read in this forum, however, where people often have massive difficulties importing and using things made in various 3d applications programs for DBPro. I also know that it's not just Blender, either; I've skimmed over a fair amount of the archived contents of this 3d forum and it seems that DarkBASICpro doesn't really get along in a friendly fashion with the products of ANY 3d application. If it accepts the mesh it doesn't accept the texturing.

If it accepts the mesh and texturing it doesn't like the UV work. If it accepts the mesh and texturing or UV work it hates the animation. So forth and so on for -- apparently -- the end product of EVERY 3d application program under the sun. That weird, isn't it?

Anyway, I fully intend to use Blender for modeling work and animation sequences where people and monsters are concerned, but I fully expect to have to pull my hair out by the double handfuls in getting DBPro to 'play nice' with what I make and export. Apparently, that's just the way it is.

But what about using Google's free Sketchup program for entire buildings, which The Game Creators endorses? I mean, if I understand things correctly, I could probably use Sketchup to create everything from furniture to buildings and perhaps even some vehicles and then use the free Converso application to make everything happily function with DBPro.

So, does anyone know if it actually works out the way it's supposed to? Or does it in reality ALSO refuse to function properly when its items are pulled into DBPro -- like so many other things, apparently -- until after it's been tweaked to a fair-thee-well?

The reason I ask is that I've downloaded Google's Sketchup and so far things ARE as easy to make as both Google and The Game Creators representatives claim. So is this feasible or should I just aim to make everything with Blender and just resign myself to everything being wonky in some way whenever it interfaces with DBPro?

for blenders exporter to work correctly every object needs at least one vertex group and at lest one key frame. a more reliable way is to export a .obj and convert it in some other app. but this dusnt support animation

DBP accepts external media just fine. Just make sure its in either .x or .dbo format and you're set. AFAIK blender is the only program that ever really gave difficulty with getting models into dbp, because it wrote .x files differently, and there is a post that explains how to get these models working in DBP stickied at the top of this board.

Oh . . . okay, I guess I understand now. Thanks hessiess and RUCCUS!

Anyway I've finished my first Blender tutorial now and the submarine's animation sequence worked beautifully. I'm going to go ahead and stick with the Tuft's university tutorials, and hopefully by the time I finish them, I will have a good feel for the fundamental Blender commands.

Yay for Blender! It's good to see someone who doesn't take one look at the GUI and decide they want milkshape. Once you get used to the controls, you can make some pretty cool renders

*cough* signature *cough*

Yes Venge, that's beautiful work. I can only hope that someday I can produce something equally amazing and cool.

It doesn't take that long to learn, really. I started using Blender around September of '06, but it was my first experience with 3d modelling besides 3dCanvas, so a lot of what took me this long to get good was learning general modelling technique. I suppose someone with experience in modelling on a different application would be able to catch on much faster to Blender's tools.

the Google Sketchup in the thread title caught my attention, I am one of the modellers for TGC Heroes (see WIP section) and I use only Google Sketchup, why? Because its so darn reliable and easy to use. You honestly get things done much quicker than in other modelling programs plus the interface has a very shallow learning curve. But now importing to Darkbasic Pro, thats another issue. I bought(sorry, i still believe it's unfair that some of us actually paid $30 for software TGC chooses to release for free only 2 months later and does not even abide by their promise to release a version compatible with sketchup 6.0) and it worked but it wasn't great. The textures come out rather dull looking and the way the model loads is just awful, it looks like a super low poly model is made up for thousands of poly's. Of course, if you choose to just stick to Convseo, that's fine, just be warned the process isn't perfect by any means.

However, there is a solution! Create a model in version 6(even though sketchup is technically not compatible with it) and then save the version 6 model as a version 5 model, this will make no actual difference to your model. Ok, now you have to acquire sketchup (obviously, it's now free) and this program written by Underdue: http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=105941&b=31
Alright, now go back to your version 5 sketchup model and export it as a Google Earth 4 model. You will get a .kmz file. This is actually a .zip file so all you need to do is to extract it with WinRAR into a folder of your choice. Still following? Lastly, open up Underdue's source code and replace the necassary names and directories (really self explanatory once you do it, Underdue commented on his code extremely well). Launch the source code and Underdue's program will display your model and save it as a .DBO file in the folder that the extracted files were in. And that's it! Now you can simply copy the .DBO file into whatever project folder you wish and it loads perfectly! The textures come out beautiful and there is virtually no quality loss, however, I strongly recommend that you use This is because DBPro's automatic lighting completely fails with these models as it creates terrible shadows that made you model look gray and not textured.


Hope it helps and I really hope you give it a try, Sketchup is very easy to use and following the instructions above, its really not that hard to import the files!

Data

Thanks very much Data! I'll save this information in s doc file in my Sketchup directory so that I have it on hand for when I'm ready to export and use a model in DBPro. I really appreciate this information!

No problem Opus, glad I could help, in fact, I think I'll make a more formal tutorial on this subject of the benefit of all