Xoel's School of 3D.

[Chucki]

Well, I've recently had a wee idea.

I am going to offer tutoring in Blender3D and Photoshop CS4 (the latter of which can be replaced with a solid knowledge of GIMP). The tutoring will focus on game model/zone/character creation, and will be student driven (you choose what you learn).

This tutoring will only be open to applicants currently working/signed up to a FREE MMORPG project.

Give me some feedback, and I'll see about setting up an IRC channel etc.

(EDIT: No students will be partaking in personal projects of mine. They will be creating game content for their chosen free MMO.)

(EDIT2: more clarification)

I don't intend to teach people everything from scratch. I'd appreciate if applicants had a minimal knowledge of Blender's editing controls and the like. If you can't use Photoshop, you need to learn GIMP on your own.

The basic use of this idea is to assist in making optimised, efficient assets for free MMOs, especially using the Crystal Space 3D engine. I'll cover polycounts, efficient texturing, UVing, shaders, etc.

[Linuus]

I would be interested, I've been using blender for a little more than a year now, and I'm starting to get good, but I haven't had time to look into game modeling. I would love some tips

I use Blender 2.5 and Photoshop CS4.

[Vakachehk]

Nice idea!

I wouldn't mind tagging along, although I do not contribute to any MMO but I am thinking about it in the future.
But I guess I have MSN, Facebook and IRC to just ask questions as they arise.

[novacadian]

If you would like to give the project a home then a copy of the out of the box Open Source PS Server could be made available to the project. A copy is now compiled and running on my machine and is access-able on the net.

The goal of the project could be to give the PS developmental team lots of open source content so as to make the out of the box PS Server more robust. Right now there seems to be only a dwarf skin as far as character types go, for example. It would be also cool to have a little village available to those that download and compile the PS server.

It would be nice to make skins for all the classic RPG types like human, elf, dwarf, fighter, cleric, gnomes. half-elves, Half-Orcs and halflings; as found in the Open Source d20 rpg rule set.

My graphic skills are not that great; although Blender 2.49b has been recently installed on my machine. GIMP also was included in my Linux install and reading through Wikibooks' Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro is making sense. My biggest input may be that of an Admin/Host of the PS Server which the project could work out of.

The intention would not be to compete with PS, the game, in any way.  Accounts would be offered for developmental purposes only and game players would not be accomidated. The goal would be to offer the PS development team more Open Source content to be able to ship with their Open Source Package.

If any of that is of interest then let's talk it up.

- Nova

[LigH]

@ nova:

Do you still believe that PS *must* obey to any rules of other games? You can be certain that it won't implement the d20 system only because all other games do. Not if Talad doesn't decide so. It is his game, his settings.

[novacadian]

@]LigH

Perhaps you have not seen the graphic content which is released with the PS Open Source Package. It consists of an army of cloned dwarfs and one clone of Hern's Smitty shack; as well as a smattering of graphics objects like flames, weapons, containers, etc.. Even that limited content found in the art directory and its sub-directories are covered under the Atomic Blue License.

My thought was, that if there are some graphic artists interested in working under the PS Open Source Server; then a good place to start would be to replace the content of the present art.zip package with content that is released under GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE.

This would help train those potential PS developers under the same environment that they would be using as members of the PS Dev Team; while expanding on the start up PS Open Source Server without walking on any copyright toes.

The skins for the characters of the d20 Rule Set seemed an obvious choice as they are GPL already and their images are already out there in a 2D degree and it seemed the obvious let down with the art.zip content of the PS Open Source Server Package. I.E. any character type you create looks like Hangatyr.

(Not that he is not a handsome dwarf!  )

Those interested in graphics development could work on pink smurf skins if they wanted; it does not interest me in the least what they work on. It was just a suggestion that using the character skins of the  d20 Rule Set, as inspiration, would make the start up package look more interesting.

My main interest was to provide an environment which upcoming graphic artists could train under; using styles that could be easily transferred to work done if they should eventually join the PS development team. There was never any thought that such content would be incorporated into the official PS development; as they would be Open Source intended to be outside of the Atomic Blue License. The content could be made available to the Dev Team; if they chose to use it; to distribute with the PS Open Source Server Package. There was never a thought that d20 character skins would be incorporated in PS, The Game.

Hope that clarifies things a bit.

- Nova

[Chucki]

Hey guys,

Firstly thanks for your feedback!

@nova: I intend for my "school" to be used more for contribution to the actual official projects themselves... but, I see no reason why not to train people wanting to work on your straight-out-of-the-box PS server project you mentioned. It may come in handy for my personal work later, also. Just note that in the case of any politics between projects, I will not be getting involved.

Rather than pointing my students to a particular project and assigning them tasks to expand and help that project, I would rather they have a project in mind, be assigned 3D tasks from that project, and bring it into my school and learn how to get it done the best way. That way, I will not become entangled in the well-known politics haunting open source MMOs around here, and my school will act as an independant centre of learning and a resource to be shared without any fear of resource-stealing, trolling, etc etc.

@Linus: I look forward to giving you those tips you want.

[novacadian]

Have been working my way through the Simple Modeling School thread and am now up to Lesson 5 with a unripe banana.blend object to show for it. Although not as detailed as wikibook's Blender 3D: Noob to Pro, it's exercises give nice hands on tips in layman's terms and the screen shots of where and what to click were very helpful to me. The lessons also point out, nicely, where you are likely to go wrong; which helped me over areas which weren't working for me in the wikibook instructions.

- Nova

[Dracaeon]

I am interested in partaking in this school.  As you know, Xoel, I am developing with another team, and my modeling sorely needs some help.  Please, may I be informed of when I can be given lessons?



[a little too formal maybe]

[novacadian]

One area that could use a little updating from Cherppow's Simple Modeling School thread is with setting up the blender2crystal module. Many of the support links in Cherppow's thread have lapsed and been hijacked by marketeers.

The following finally worked on my Fedora 13 OS...

After some searching a tarball of the SVN was found and downloaded. There was a lot of hacking involved in moving things around once make install was run; so be sure to read the INSTALL file that comes with the package.

It would still not work for me from within Blender. Ironically, what finally worked after being told to copy the scripts content into $HOME/.blender was to define the PYTHONPATH environment variable to /usr/share/blender/scripts/bpymodules . Go figure. That was only done when grasping at my last straw.

The Blender to Crystal UI window is finally coming up for me in Blender; instead of the previous python errors.

It seems an up to date walk through of exporting, by a master, would be helpful to those new to Blender2crystal. Also the most appropriate links for grabbing the code would be useful too.

- Nova

[Chucki]

I have setup an IRC channel for my personal project, and to save time and effort, I will be happy to give art lessons, advice, and the like to anyone who has learned the basics (Cherppow's tutorials are a good start, even if outdated a little as time has passed).

The channel is #0lympia on Freenode. Note that the 0 in #0lympia is a zero (as in, the digit, not the letter).

Dracaeon, you are of course welcome to learn from me. I would suggest that you refrain from talking about your project around PlaneShift though (there are some sore wounds) but nonetheless all are welcome to learn. I live in NZ (GMT+12) and I'm usually around afternoons and evenings, sometimes all day.