Hi guys, i have a free and powerful tool to share with you!
Dark Blender is the most advanced package for game asset creation available, it automates most of the technical tasks done by game artists to allow the artist to focus on the design of his creation. It is also the only option available for Linux users.
With it you can generate a base mesh from a drawing, convert your sculpture or hard surface model into a game asset, bake every textures, unfold and optimize the texel density of your model, apply premade gradient effects for texturing, generate advanced details on your model based on photography and much more all in few clicks. Everything is built to generate a good grayscale with a stylized hand painted looks that fit the Dota 2 style.
While other tools require hours of work to finish a game asset, Dark Blender can do most of the tasks in one click - having such speed allow you to go back and tweak your initial high poly model and generate your game asset again by pressing a button.
This project is made for free, the goal is to give the best and fastest tools possible to everyone. You have access to all the sources and can modify them.
It is very easy to use, just open the .blend provided and set it as your startup file.
I have edited the tool, you will not only get an high quality low poly with a good UV map and 0 intersection but will now get a Blizzard quality texture. The generated grayscale is much better, you can use point light to highlight your model and the vertex paint are used as an ID attached to a gradient node (i have provided a gradient ID image with +70 prebuilt gradient) that will automatically texture your game model. 90 % of your game asset will be done in one click, you will save 10 hours.
I have included the Orb brushes, they are the most famous brushes for stylized game artists.
Don’t hesitate to talk about this tool around you.
Could you please elaborate a bit what set’s it apart from regular Blender? What kind of incompatibilities could one face when switching between Dark Blender and Blender? Is Dark Blender just a set of customized python scripts or did you change the Blender source and recompile? Did you only streamline existing tech into automated workflows or did you write new algorithms for things like unwrapping or polygon reduction?
Hi, it is a saved .blend file with python scripts included, nodes and brushes that you have to set as your default startup file. It only uses existing tools but execute them automatically.
I see, thanks for explaining. Under what license are you offering the additional scripts and setups you made? CC0 / MIT?
I’ll take a look, but I doubt that a streamlined setup by someone else would be a very good fit for my usecase. Though it might be interesting to look at the setup and see if it can be adapted. Either way, I really appreciate you sharing your work!
