Close

Blender notes

A project log for Silly software wishlist

Motivation to do some software projects by writing them down.

lion-mclionheadlion mclionhead 07/11/2018 at 07:400 Comments

Blender is the hardest, with Freecad 2nd & Maya easiest.  The odd mouse button juggling, odd window interface, & randomly placed menus from 1998 are still there.   It doesn't have a notion of dependencies like the others.  You have to convert a curve to a mesh & extrude it to get a solid, every single time you tweek the curve.  Seem to recall Maya being smarter, but maybe not.  Even the crazy complex demo models show exclusive use of meshes, with nurbs only used for creating tubes.  The BMW example is made of cubes which were subdivided & manually carved into panels.

The mane workflow seems to be manually subdividing faces & tweeking vertices in meshes, hence most examples are more organic than precision machines.  The mane way around this is scripting.  It can perform booleans between meshes, which Freecad can't do.  A lot of BFR's have been modeled a lot better in the last 3 months, with similar programs, so maybe lions aren't used to such a manual process.

Godot needs normals & UV unwrapping to do anything useful, which only Blender can provide, so some combination of Blender & Freecad is required.  The general idea is the full rocket has to be a tree of scenes & each part that moves needs to be different scene. Each scene comes from a gltf file.  Then, the tree of scenes is added to a game scene.  Suspect "scene" & "node" were the 1st 2 english words they learned, so they called everything a scene or a node.

Discussions