Building an Environment from Standard Models Mark Green School of Creative Media

Introduction How do we put together an environment without doing much modelling? Use the web! There are lots of sites with free models, can make our lives much easier one of the better known ones is

Example

Put together a simple environment with: air field plane ground sky using pre-built models and Blender can do this in about minutes

Models The ground and the sky are easy SE provides the sky, one line in the script file use Blender for the ground, large plane, subdivided a few times, convert to triangles add green material to make it look like ground or grass

Models The plane and airfield were downloaded from models are in 3ds format, each model has a different scale in SE the unit of measurement is 1 meter, environments should be on the order of 10 x 10 meters for easy navigation

3DS Models Need to know how big the 3ds models are so we can put them together we can use dump3ds for this purpose: a simple program that prints information about a 3ds file all information is in text format run from command line: dump3ds file_name

3DS Models For the air field the last few lines are: Total vertices: 2273, Total faces: 1739 Model size: ( , , -0.00) -> ( , , 33.00) Center: , , Size: , , this is a fairly large model, we will need to make it much smaller, we can do this in the script file

3DS Models In the script file we have: object field add hierarchy airfield scale 0.01 centre end add hierarchy is like add file in this case we scale by 0.01, reduce 3000 meter size to 30 meters also give the centre of the model, point to scale around

3DS Models We can do the same thing with the plane, in the script file: object plane add hierarchy biplane scale centre on first translate 9.4, 0, 0; end we make the plane even smaller and then position it on taxi way

3DS Models The on command is used to position the plane, it is executed on the first update before adding the plane I navigated to the taxi way to find its position, used eye position displayed at bottom of SE window then translated the plane to that position build the environment one piece at a time

Blender Model Need to add grass one large green plane below the air field in Blender create a plane, subdivide it a few times, convert to triangles now need to scale it to the right size we know that the air field is about 30 meters wide, so the plane should be that big

Blender Model The plane is about 2 meters centred at origin, so need to scale it by 16 use the n command for this, will provide a property sheet for entering a transformation easiest way to get accurate transformations also move the plane down a small amount, translate -0.1 in the z axis

Blender Now colour the model green, use material editor create a new material, then set the colour to green finally export the model using the Python program include in SE script the same way as before

Sky The sky is one line in the SE script: background colour the three numbers are the red, green and blue components of the background colour it should take about minutes to do this, with some practice you will be much quicker