I am currently working on a Minecraft animation which involves a giant city with skyscrapers. However, when designing the city in Blender, I am having TONS of issues. For example, when I try to select a block at the bottom of a tower, Blender sometimes selects a block towards the top of the tower OR on the other tower. Another is that, even on my high-end gaming desktop with 16 GB of RAM, just 2 towers slows Blender down to the point I cannot build any more. This is a huge problem because I need the city to be gigantic, and a city with just 2 buildings is hardly a city, not to mention how will I ever be able to animate anything in a scene that stops responding every time I try to select something? If anyone can help me get this thing running smoothly, I would greatly appreciate it. And I know it can be done, because I’ve seen some pretty crazy Minecraft animations with city architecture. Thanks in advance to anyone who can help out!
Here are the towers (each Minecraft block is actually a separate block, I would import using Mineways but the city has to be able to be destroyed later on):
I guess your problem is the number of objects, not the amount of geometry
try joining a complete building with Ctrl+J, then add it to a group with Ctrl+G, press F6 and rename it Building_01
then with Shift+A >> Group Instance you can add more instances of your building
instancing could even be done on bricks level, maybe with ‘Make Dupli-Face’ operator but that would be a more advanced setup
edit - it could be something like this:
pick a block, press Shift+L to get objects with the same ‘Material’
now Ctrl+L to make them share ‘Object Data’
now press bar and type ‘Make Dupli-Face’
you get tiny faces and a single block instanced on those faces
dupliverts would be better, also there may be some addons to work with this
Hmm… should have gone with the Join Building thing… I used Make Dupli-Face and now the Snap to Grid feature isn’t working properly… and I’ve saved and reloaded the file since then, is there any way I can undo everything and get back to where I was when I posted this question? I really don’t want to have to rebuild the entire skyscraper…
It is interesting to note that most 3d applications are not that great at dealing with that many small individual objects. I tested Modo and Cinema4d, and low and behold: in this particular case Blender outperforms both with two “skyscrapers” with each 6000 textured cubes. In my case the viewport remains much more responsive in Blender than in the other two.
(Nvidia GTX590).
Also, depending on your setup, you may want to turn off double-sided lighting. Activate the “3D Tools” add-on, and open the Misc section of the toolshelf. Then locate the “shading setup”, and turn off “Dsided”.
For Nvidia graphic cards this may speed up the display even more. It does in my case.
It is strange it takes such a long time to undo actions in your case. With a drastically more complex example I made for myself (about five times as many blocks), undoing is almost instantaneous.
sorry, you should be more careful when saving, press F2 then ‘+’ will increase file ‘number’
now you can try File > Recover Auto Save and sort by modification time -calendar icon-
could also try to fix your file…
Ah well, I already deleted the original skyscraper… going to rebuild it tomorrow with an upgraded design. Herbert, I agree it is strange about the undoing, but I think it was most likely because of something I did earlier on in the scene that I forgot about. Hopefully I will have a better outcome when I rebuild the skyscraper. Also, that is interesting and awesome that Blender, a free program, can handle many objects better than 2 paid programs. Makes me like Blender even more!
Have you considered Alt-D instances instead of Shift D duplicates? I have had luck with using this as long as I don’t have a multires or subsurf modifier on the objects when I need multiples that will share geo and textures/materials.
Okay, so I rebuilt the tower and joined it, but now the textures are all messed up. Even though each individual cube in the model has its own texture assigned, it stretches the single texture across all blocks of that type.
As a single object from joining all the cubes, I don’t know if you can. Someone else with better experience in joining large numbers together might have a better answer though.
Could I possibly do something where I have the entire building in one file, unjoined, and import multiple instances of it into another file, not as actual objects with geometry, but as ‘ghost objects’ (as in, not actually there, but look like they are and appear in the render)? I don’t even know if this is possible, but if it is, would it work?
I’m sorry if this sounds rude, but I have a rule about animating which is that I animate at least one shot every day, and due to my problems creating this city I have already missed a week of animation. Because of this, I would appreciate it if someone could provide an answer ASAP. As I said before, I’ve seen plenty of Minecraft animations, so I know this can be done.
Are you animating just pure animation, or are you exporting to a game engine? Lots of trick can be done with instances to build up your geo, and then make an instance of the whole building. The idea of bringing in the whole building could work as a group that you append in, and then you can make instances of that group.
Are you using as simple of geo as possible in this, as in a real default cube? What are your system specs? Do you have a sample file to look at?
