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I have two questions but decided to put them into one post. The first question is blenders smooth and straight options. I have a blender file picture of a sword I made attatched to this message. (Sorry if its quality is bad, this was my first time making a model in blender, making the textures in photoshop, and texturing and adding shaders to them without any tutorials). Anyways, I made the sword and for the most used the smoothing and subsurfing method to make the parts of the sword I wanted round rounded. There was one problem I encountered: the blade. The blade was made to be smooth on the faces but straight on its edges. I didn't know how to do this, so I made a pentagon by subdividing a plane (or square) and then extruded it two times up until I hade to make another diamond face from the rest of the blade to the tip, (as samurai swords go). Since I extruded so little, I decided to add a subsurf and smooth the shape out to make the edges and faces round. Is there a way that I can make certain edges and faces smooth or round while keep others straight or sharp?

The second question is importing blender made .x files into DBP. I noticed that the textures and shaders (and I think bumpmapping) didn't get imported. Since I made the swords handle, hilt, and blade different textures and shaders, and since when a .x file is imported into DBP is one mesh, and has no textures or shaders applied, how do I import the file so that textures and shaders are applied to different parts of the mesh, or do I have to import each part of the sword as a different mesh and add textures and shaders to them, and then group them together in DBP? This certainly sounds like a lot of work for me, especially if I have to do this with every model that I import into DBP. Is there a simple way I can do this?

Thanks to those who answer quickly (for there are always a lot of those people).

-SJH

Since I've read the first half of the manual (then had my power supply go out)... I can answer the first part.

The difference between Object mode and Edit mode is that, when you edit something (extrusions are done in edit mode -tab key shortcut-) anything you do is added to that particular object... In other words, if you want to smoothe one part and not the other, create the first one in edit mode, then switch to object mode and create a new object.

you can also duplicate something in edit mode then change it so that its mesh isn't "linked" to the original object. I forgot how to do this exactly, but check out object linking in the manual, it's a lot like virtual inheritance in C++.

A 3rd way to do it is using layers. The layers in blender are selected using that 20-button area in the upper right of the lower navigation area, just above the buttons. You can do use this for making sure only one part of the object is visible at a time, even for rendering. I never read much on it, as I'm not gonna animate in it for a bit.

Hope that helps! Try using another free program (anim8or for example) to add the other stuff and export, might be easier. (unsure on that)

The set smooth command in Blender will only smooth the selected faces. So, you could select all of the faces in your sword you want to set smooth, and use the SET SMOOTH command on them, and exclude the faces you want to keep sharp.


-Kravenwolf

(Just as a starter note, this forum doesn't use paragraphs any more so I use a hyphen [-] to seperate paragraphs). -----Feiting Shadow, its not the blender texturing thats the problem for me, its the importing of blender objects into DBP that did not support textures or shaders. In another post someone said that .x files do not support textures and shaders, so regardless of using layers, or different objects for the handle, hilt, and blad (which I did) the textures and shaders won't apply. Thanks for telling me of the layering though, I longed to know how to use layering (for I have done many animations in my past, which was about 70% layering).

-----Kravenwolf, in my first post I here I said about the selecting certain faces method and them ussing the set smooth option, and that's the problem. When I set anything smooth in those objects the smoothiness is slightly enhanced. In other words even when smooth you can still see the faces on the smoothed sufaces which means the quality for the 3d model isn't that great. Is there a way to make the "make smooth" feature smoother (like in subsurfing you can add more layers to the object to make it smooth). If You can do this then that solves one problem. That still leaves another problem: Models into DBP

-----In DBP when I export pretty much any object (.x, .3ds, .obj, etc.) there are never any textures and shaders. I know I can insert textures and shaders to objects, but only one of each to an object. Is there a way to either import the objects with the shaders and textures applied to them (with the same good quality) or apply shaders and textures to seperate parts of the objects in one object, (preferably not exporting each part as a different object, adding textures and textures to each part, and then grouping the objects together in DBP, which altogether sounds very complicated to me).

There'a few things you could try I guess. (I'm still not entirely sure what your problem is but I think I have the idea--you want your object to look more smooth?)


Have you tried autosmoothing yet?

Here's a link (it might help): http://www.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/x2681.html

You could also try hiding the sharp faces with a good texture map (if you haven't already). Mark a seam on the edge of the blade, and mark two more seams on the back end of the blade (I forget what it's called). When you unwrap the texture, it will cover the whole blade, and make it look smoother. If this doesn't work, let me know. Hopefully it'll help.


-Kravenwolf

ummm, SJH, I'm glad you read my post... but I wasn't talking about importing into DBP in the first half. I was telling you how to render half smoothe and half not, within blender.

Sounds like you benefit...

Also, set smoothe is the way to do that, but overall, you can change the rendering's smoothing levels using a button on the left, I think it shows up in the panels when you're in rendering. So you could use a 1 to render everything, then add using Set Smooth modifier panel.

As for textures... I'll be wondering that myself after finishing a few models, unsure when that'll be though. heh

Hey SJH,

You won't be able to get any materials that you assign to an object inside blender, out to DBpro. To do that, you will need to Unwrap your model, and texture it. This UVmap will then be exported with the model when you use the .X exporter. Search for Blender Unwrapping Tutorials in google and you should have no problems.

With the smoothing problems, if you want to add more edge loops, press the 'K' key while in edit mode, move your mouse over the edge you want to cut, and click to cut it. You can smooth the mesh a bit that way.

Regards,
Greenlig

I understand about the UV mapping and texturing and more, but the most of the question is how to add shaders to seperate parts of the object. If that isn't possible for DBP, then can someone tell me how to import several objects into DBP and then group them? Or better yet is there a file type in blender you can export that exports textures and shaders along with the object or mesh?

Let me rephrase the question. Can someone make a tutorial or give a tutorial that tell you how to texture and add shaders to different parts of a single mesh? For example, is there a way to UV Map meshes from blender and the UV mapping includes the sahders and textures with it? Anything that would work, such as exporting a blender object in a file type that is like a BSP, one that uncludes the mesh, the shaders, and the textures when exported.