I’m working on a plugin to speed up level design in Blender. I come from a Hammer background and really dislike how long it takes to throw together some basic stuff.
The plugin isn’t really all that much but here’s an example. It would eventually have more features like texture applications (along with specific textures to eventually delete certain faces of a mesh) as well as some sort of collision mesh generator (specifically targetting Unity3D)
I’m just curious on if anyone knows any alternatives before I put more effort in? I’ve done a bit of research but couldn’t find anything.
This is amazing! I’d love to see the script to know how you got a python script in blender to be interactive like that. I’m still a bit of a blender-python noob.
It’s actually not that hard. I used Blender’s OpenGL wrapper along with a semi-complex modal operator.
If you want I can explain more in a write-up
As of now I have very little plans on making an exporter to publicly release. The workflow will require a sort of compilation step to the level (Hammer has a few tool texture I want to emulate so you can apply them to faces to make them delete in game but keep them as actual data still in Blender).
We’ll see where it takes me but a .map exporter would be a separate project that I would kind of append to work with my tool, not something I’d ship with the tool.
Also, I added a little UI. It’s not much but it’s worth a share. If you’re interested, I post updates on http://cobertos.com
Of course not
The plugins main concern was to just make the workflow of level design much more manageable in a modelling tool like blender where there’s already a bunch of exporters and other manipulation tools. A specific .map exporter isn’t really in the scope of the tool but it’s something I’ve thought about adding.
This is pretty neat. I used to make Quake levels when I was a kid (sometimes I still do, in fact), so I am well versed in the older Hammer editors, since Valve bought a popular Quake level editing tool (named WorldCraft) and turned it into their in-house editor. I especially like that you’ve cloned the brush tool from Hammer in Blender - like LazyCoder, I didn’t realise you could do that with Blender’s python scripting. I really hope that the new work on manipulators by Julien Eisel makes doing that kind of stuff easier.
So are you still trying to create brushes as convex solids for map compilation, or are you merely trying to get blender to treat objects like brushes to speed up putting together a level? If you want to keep convex solids, maybe it would be easier to write a map parser and import geometry from hammer? Also, if you are targeting unity is there a specific reason that you are writing this for Blender and not making a Unity plugin?
