Blender Quick Tip: Scaling Instead Of Extruding On Simple Shapes

This trick is something I've found extremely handy during recent projects as it's a massive time saver. Usually when it comes to extruding faces I do them one by on, while this process works it takes quite a while to do and not only that sometimes you find yourself left with gaps in the model which means you have to sit and merge them all together again.

This gets kind of annoying after a while...

This new method I found whilst working on another project cuts out a lot of the little extra changes you would need to make which of course is going to save you a reasonable amount of time, especially when it comes to more complex models. 

Look how fast that was!

As you can see from the Gif above It's a fairly simple process. Simple select the faces that you want to extrude, press "E" (the normal extrude button) but instead of moving the mouse to extrude the face or typing in a value to extrude it simply left-click to create the new faces. Now you have the new faces created and selected left click on the small box shown below,

And change it to the symbol highlighted in the picture shown here.

Changing this option makes it so that Blender takes the origin or center point of each of the faces and then scales it along that. With this option changed and the faces still selected hit "S" to scale the faces and move the mouse outwards and all of the faces will scale along their own axis. 

I've only really tested this on creating simple shapes like the cylinder shown in this tutorial and have encountered some small problems when testing it on more complex objects. (I'll edit this tutorial If I find a better way to do this with more complex models.). 

Experiment Blossoming Into A Game!

(Sorry about potato quality, yet to find a good video editor for free)

Earlier today I came up with an idea to try and make my own AI in the free version of Unity seeing as though it doesn't seem to feature any definite AI system. I started experimenting with the idea when I eventually made it to college and I couldn't seem to make the concept work. However all was not lost!

As my first attempt at making the system work included some input from the player I decided to try and make more of an AI behavior that would respond to the players movements. I set up a group of four cubes and went about creating the code  that would then make the AI (The red cubes) move in response to the player. The more I coded the more I realized, hold on a sec! The more I code of this the more separate scripts I'm using. I quickly hit that idea on the head and switched to using Unity's tagging system to give each AI a tag and then have them only react to a certain bit of code which was all compiled into one script (With many many if statements!). After a while of writing the code fully and testing to make sure it worked I started to come up with a new idea to turn it into a completely new game.

For some reason I'm stuck on the idea lately of taking any form of power or attack away from the player, I'm not entirely sure why but I do think it gives the player a bit more of a challenge. I've started out with the basic idea of creating a score based game with multiple different types of AI that spawn in with the plan of once this main mode is down and concrete adding another "Challenge" mode with a variety of different tasks for the player to complete. I'm intending to add a few different characters as well to try and add a little variety to the game to keep players from getting bored (Check back for updates on that soon!). 

This update ended up being a little longer than intended but hey! Trying to make these posts a heck of a lot more frequent so check back for more!

First Person Animating

So recently I've had an idea for a couple of first person based animations. Both of the animations are escape based one inspired by Spelunky and the other being a castle/ death gauntlet escape. Below is a quick example I whipped up the other night with some simple platforms and jumping.

I used a cube that I moved at the same time as the camera to make sure that the person stayed at the same height throughout the animation and not bouncing up and down making it look like the "person" is growing and shrinking. 

For a first try I'm pretty happy with how this turned out even though there's more things I need to learn to make it even better. 

Arts Award Sword Creation

As part of working on an Arts Award I had to show some way of improving my skills. I gained some inspiration from one of the games I have been playing which gave me the idea of what to focus on for this section of the award. The game that I've been playing, called Destiny, from the latest update the game now has a series of new weapons which gave me the inspiration and idea to create a sword to be used in a future animation. 




The sword is loosely based on the weapons shown in the picture below. 



I personally really like the glowing effects on these weapons as well as the overall shape and style of them, especially the hammer. This hammer was where most of the inspiration for my sword came from. I tested a couple of different versions of the sword, the first version shown below mainly served as a draft version to get an idea of what I was going to create.

I wasn't really happy with the overall shape of this version but it still gave me an idea of the basic structure I wanted for the sword. The second blade that I created really looked great compared to the original so I decided to stick with it, I also added a small floating gem detail to give the sword more of a magic look.

This was the second blade that I created.

Once I had the blade set up it gave me an idea as to how I wanted the swords hilt to look so I was able to create that almost instantly. Below is the final version of the sword that I settled with. 

The sword looked kind of boring with just the basic colours so I used the free image editing program called Gimp to create two textures that I could then apply to the blade and hilt of the sword to give it some colour. I decided that I only needed a basic pattern for each of them which was easily created. 

These are the two textures that I created.
The left one was applied to the blade and
the right one was applied to the hilt of the sword.

There was still a little bit of the sword without colour so I added a basic grey colour to that section which fitted perfectly with the style I was going for. Once these colours and textures were applied I was a lot happier with how the sword looked, to give it an extra little bit of a magic look I used the modelling programs smoke effect to create a small blue smoke effect that covered the blade of the sword.

For a first time creating something like this I was pleased with how it looked. I intend to use this in a future animation and will more than likely use it for some other future projects. 

Helpful Blender Shortcuts For Beginners

When I first started using Blender I remember the interface put my off for quite a while but after getting some practice in and learning some helpful skills and shortcuts in the process I can now work through creating things pretty swiftly and efficiently.

Blender is a very keyboard based program, most of the functions can be accessed via keyboard shortcuts which saves time and makes the program a lot easier to use. Below are a series of key combinations that will make using Blender a lot smoother and may even boost the speed at which you create models.

Shift + A

The first shortcut might be one you already know of but I thought it would still be a good one to include. Pressing Shift + A when you have  your cursor in the 3D view to add one of the basic objects to the scene. 

1,3,7 Numpad Keys

When you have an object in the scene you can use some of the keys on the number pad to view the object from different angles. Pressing the numbers 1,3 and 7 will change the angle that you are viewing the object from. 1 will 

Shift + Right Click

Using Shift + RIght Click you can select and manipulate multiple objects in the scene. With all of these objects selected you can rotate,scale and move all of the objects at the same time. You can also add quick effects to these objects as well as add keyframes in animations and lots more.

Shift + J 

Shift + J combines the data of each of the objects so that Blender recognizes them as one complete object. With all of the objects joined together you can edit them at the same time 

P

After combining the objects together you might want to separate the objects again. If you select the whole object whilst in Edit Mode and press P, this will separate the selected object from the currently selected object. With this you can now edit this object separately. 

Score Attack Astronaut Devblog

Over the past couple of days I've been working on my astronaut game and so far everything's going a lot smoother than I ever expected it to! So far I've managed to get the players movement and shooting mechanics all set up and have a working random spawn system for the falling debris and the enemies. 

As  you can see in the preview above there are a couple of placeholder graphics mostly in the form of the giant cubes that fall from above, these cubes will be replaced in the future with things like meteorites and shooting stars, you may also have noticed that the player only faces in one direction regardless of the direction they're moving in. Changing the direction that the player faces is one of the next main things I want to get around to fixing as well as animations for each of the enemies. 

So far I only have 1 enemy type in the game in the form of a simple orange blob (Shown below) but by the time the game is finished I aim to have at least 3 enemies built in. The enemy below may seem a little simple, this is because i want my game to appeal to everyone so I chose to go with a simple cartoon style alien because its the sort of thing that most people will be familiar with. 

Having multiple different enemies in my game will add some variety so the player isn't seeing the same thing over and over again. As well as just having extra enemies in my game I intend to make it so that they take between 1-3 shots to kill to add a little bit of extra variety to the game. 

With the basics of the main mechanics set up I also created a script to control other properties of the game, this script destroys any aliens or bullets that go off of the edge of the screen which stops the game from lagging out or slowing down. This script also controls the games timer which works as a visual indicator to show the player how much game time they have left. The only other mechanic I really need to set up is some way to add a value to the score each time an enemy is destroyed and then the game will be in a playable (yet super rough) state. 

If everything continues to progress as well as it has been a rough playable version of the game should be ready in the next couple of months on itch.io . After that I plan to keep working on the game to polish it and iron out any bugs then work on getting the game working on a mobile device. I'll try to keep updating this regularly for anyone who's actually interested :P but  other wise keep an eye on my Twitter (@markimo2) for other updates.

Digital Futures Showcase WIP

Just wanted to use this to show off a little WIP animation that i'm busy creating for a showcase that i'm going to be part of in the next couple of weeks.

Overall this animation isn't going to be anything special as its just a little idea that I came up with while go and wanted to finish up specifically for the showcase.