1. Using Blender as a Game Tool Rick Worthington

2. Introduction

3. Objectives Provide a general overview of what Blender is, and what it's capable of De-mystify the much-criticized GUI Demonstrate several useful use- cases Demonstrate how to integrate with a game engine Create an interest in learning more about Blender

4. Motivation Why should you listen to me?

5. Save Time Developing custom game tools is time- consuming, tedious, and requires significant resources Training artists or other users on custom tools adds to delay between initial need and actual usefulness of tool Blender can download and install in less than five minutes (in general).

6. Save Money 3ds Max: $3500 ~ $4000 Maya: $3500 ~ $4100 RenderMan: ~$3500 Z-Brush: $595 Blender: $0 -- Free!

7. KISS Keep It Simple, Stupid! Built-in importers & exporters for many popular formats 'Swiss Army Knife' of DCC Tools Runs on anything! (Keep your artists and their silly inferior OS's happy) If what you want doesn't already exist – write a plug-in for it!

8. Background

9. Ancient History Developed by NeoGeo & Not A Number (NaN) Name was inspired by a song from the group 'Yello', off the album 'Baby'. Initially released & distributed as shareware

10. Oh teh noes!!11one NaN went bankrupt. Creditors agreed to release Blender as GNU GPL for 100k Euros. In less than a year, the Blender Foundation raised the funds mostly through the donations of the Blender community Blender open-sourced, Blender Foundation supervises continued development

11. Where might I have seen it? Used as a production aid during the story- boarding of Spider-man 2 The Various open movie projects:  Elephants Dream, 2006 (Project Orange)  Big Buck Bunny, 2008 (Project Peach)  Yo Frankie!, 2008 (Project Apricot)  Sintel, (in production) (Project Durian) Various shows on the History Channel

12. What does it do? 3D Modeling Texturing Animation Rendering Sequencing Makes Purdy colors

13. WTF am I looking at?: Making sense of the GUI

14. The Lingo Datablock: A generic block of data. Think of it as an abstract base class. Object (OB): This is actually just a 3D Node/Position. Think of it like an instance Mesh (ME): A datablock for a polygonal mesh. Lamp (LA): A datablock for a light source. Material (MA): A datablock for a material

15. The Lingo (cont) Image (IM): An Image/texture (can be from from file, or generated) Interpolation (IPO): An animation curve Scene (SCE): The top-level object in hierarchy Curve (CU): A bezier or NURBS curve Camera (CA): A viewpoint with additional projection parameters Armature (AR): A skeletal 'Bone'

16. (Demo) View layout Splitting and joining views Pre-defined schemes Saving new schemes Basic hotkeys Mouse control

17. Use Case #1: Pre-rendered Graphics

18. Seen in: Many Blizzard games as primary rendering method (Diablo I & II, Starcraft I, Warcraft I&II) Older Command & Conquer titles

19. Also seen in: As high-res backgrounds for in many Final Fantasy series, Resident Evil, Myst/7 th Guest

20. Limited use in: Many, many games; especially for in-game GUIs

21. World of Warcraft

22. Bioshock

23. Modern Warfare 2

24. Demo (SVD)

25. Use Case #2: Animation

26. Demo (Skeletal Animation)

27. Use Case #3: Level Editing

28. Demo (Level)

29. Integration

30. Demo (Code)

31. Conclusion

32. Blender can: Fit in multiple places in the pipeline Save you lots of time & money Be extended using Python to do just about anything Give you something to use that caffeine buzz on trying to make things 'perfect'

33. Moovee Tiem!!11 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE7VzlLtp-4