New to Blender and the 3D scene.

Hi,

Thank you for taking the time to read my post.

I am new to the blender and 3D scene but have spent enough time in the past considering moving from 2D to 3D to know that I need some friendly advice.

The advice I need to vast so I will start where I think is best.

My question boils down to: How much time do I need to allocate for the learning and making of graphics for my first 3D game?

Now for the clever, experienced and brave here is all the information I think you might need:

  • I am developing a commercial app all by lonesome for all the major mobile platforms: iOS, Android, WP8, BB10, Tizen, Kindle Fire and more.
  • I am to push myself to the point where I can produce high quality work but it needs only be low polygon and can be cartoony with bight plain colors (implying that I wont need to do allot of texture work).

Only because off limited funding am I doing it myself, otherwise I would gladly pay for the work. I am assuming that 20 low polygon cartoon models looking better or how I imagined would cost way more than 1000 USD or there would be no guarantee they were made in time.

I have completed two published works, one free game(Spacebubbles) on Android(Google Play), WP8, BB10(Z10) and Tizen. I made this game in its entirety as an individual, where I drew all the graphics pixel by pixel. I also published an App relevant to taxation which involved no custom artwork.

When making the 2D game I found artwork to be my biggest hold back. I could not design and draw the artwork as I imagined, as a newbie to drawing and having no professional tools I could not in any reasonable amount of time produce what I wanted.

I found as a one man show I have to design the game around my shortcomings in the art department.

With 3D graphics there is more flexibility, you inherently get multiple angles and can use shaders for special effects. You can transform the position of the object and make it fly around if you wanted. I found with 2D and limited artwork my game was not visually pleasing and did not give the user enough feedback. It wasn’t the game I wanted to make because I could not draw graphics and thus I didn’t put in enough time since it wasn’t going to give me any returns and my objective is to feel satisfied and earn enough for this to become self sustainable.

I now have 5 months to work full time on a game of my own design. I know I can write the code for it and publish it but what I don’t know is how long it would take me to learn the UI of blender and create, lets say up to 20 low poly cartoon characters.

Thanks again !

Friendly Regards
GM5

I’m inspired by Halfbricks Fruit Ninja graphics and Fish our of water graphics.
http://wac.76ff.edgecastcdn.net/0076FF/hbwebmedia/hb/v2/images/games/fish-out-of-water/screenshots//4.jpghttp://wac.76ff.edgecastcdn.net/0076FF/hbwebmedia/hb/v2/images/games/fish-out-of-water/screenshots//4.jpg

In 3D, you can take existing assets and tweak them into new ones. Depending on your cast of characters, you could model/rig/animate one character and get many other characters cheap by adapting it.

As for how long it’ll take to get up to speed, that depends. Working in 3D as opposed to 2D is not a magic bullet solution - you just trade one set of problems for another. If you’re interested in character building, CG Cookie can hook you up.

Blender’s basic UI interaction is pretty quick to learn if a little odd by Windows standards. You should be able to pick up the basics after a few hours. It will take some months to commit the ridiculous number of keyboard shortcuts to memory, but you should be able to produce useful work well before you learn most of them. Make sure to go over each panel in Preferences to adjust Blender to your liking - some of the default settings are rather bizarre.

However, I’m talking only about Blender’s UI here, so this would be true for a user familiar with another 3d package.

If you’re unfamiliar with how 3d graphics in general work, you’ll likely spend at least a few weeks learning that. While 3D is a rather large topic to cover, the basics are not terribly complicated and depending on how much you expect from yourself, you may start producing work you like rather quickly. But you’ll likely continue slowly understanding new things (such as topology, what exactly is tangent space, how transform matrices work, how large to set your texture margins and why, etc) for years.

Do yourself a favor and don’t bother coding for Windows Phone, and c’mon… Blackberry 10? Tizen!!! Do yourself a favor… Cut Windows, BB and Samsung completely out. The 3 of them combined wouldn’t amount to enough to make it worth your while. If your delving into the mobile world, Code for iOS first, then Android, then you’re done. Honestly it sounds rediculous for one person to maintain 6 codebases.

You don’t necessarily have to deal with different code bases when developing for different platforms. Game Dev environments like Game Maker or Unity have exporters to different platforms incl. mobile platforms with just one single original code base. It’s probably wise to test these games on some real devices for each platform but the efforts to produce games for different platforms these days aren’t as much as they used to be years ago. I’m pretty sure GM5 used something like Game Maker Studio for his games so far…

Marco

I’ve begun work on a 2D game. I could not even begin to estimate the time it would take me to create the artwork in 3D so 2D is my only viable option.

@John_L and @marcotronic, Thank you for the advice. Since you brought it up: I will be a full time self employed games developer for the next 5 months, I have the relevant Games Software Engineering Degree and I have worked on triple A titles for big companies like Ubisoft. I am using the Marmalade SDK which allows me to work in my language of choice C++. It also allows you to work with Open GL ES directly or with its slightly higher level 3D or 2D libraries.

Marmalade SDK is used by many of the major mobile platform developers, and does take a allot of expertise and time to use but gives you performance gains and cross platform deployment in return.

I already have apps/games on all the platforms mentioned and the differences are minimal for controls and UI given that you implement a few decent layers of abstraction. The performance on WP8 is not as high as it could be since WP8 is directx based but it doesn’t affect the kind of game I making.

The most work when deploying to so many platforms is licenses publishing and fact that some of these platforms are only popular in non English speaking countries.

I would have loved to do 3D work for this game but sadly I just don’t have the skills to work with Blender. I know a fair amount about 3D graphics in general but it doesn’t help with technique that I would need to create professional looking well rounded character in Blender.

So since I have to finish in less than 5 months I have begun work on a 2D game, though my 2D work isn’t professional either I know I can do the work in time.

A few game basics tweaked to suite 2D:
Huge generated item pool(single set of character portraits with stats systems with text display)
Huge generated character pool(single set of character portraits with stats systems with text display)
Exploring game(finding items and characters, the world is not progressive(complex system that boils down to the player being able to progress but instead of a typical linear progression, the player must avoid most character until they can challenge them(much more to say here))
Seemingly infinite world(given to the player a screen at a time)
Random non sensible monster types(because that’s all I can draw)
Item trading/selling

There is allot more to say but essentially because of my limitation in the art department I am re-using what I do draw and generating then tweaking stats to provide big variation for what I hope will be infinite game play coupled with progression and exploring but steering away from dungeon crawlers and classic mechanics (very challenging from a game design perspective).

Here is a sneak preview of some world(trees only) generated but organic and always the same result for this part of the work, player interaction is also persistent which is key technology I developed that makes a game like this possible(you don’t have to re-clear a section, it helps make the player feel like they’re progressing)

http://s11.postimg.org/xtgbtf0z7/noise_terrain.png
images upload

Working in 3D I would have had more option for re-use , such as rendering the game models into some banners for the app stores to name just one.

Thanks for the advice from all but it was just to much of an unknown to risk going for.