In addition to the progress made on the Collada plugin, there is a whole lot of neat game developer related things going on.
At a cursory glance, there is a really nice normal map creation script. I tried it out on some quick terrain and it made a nice lovely normal map. I may make a Unity web player test tonight to make sure it really is working right.
There is also a new menu item in Edit mode: Mesh → Scripts → Poly Reducer. It worked really well in my test as it can interpolate UVs. This is much more useful to me than the old decimator modifier.
Sounds like good stuff, particularly the edge split modifier. Although I should point out (for people who don’t want to do CVS builds) that the poly reducer script has been there for a while…and yes, it’s way better than the decimator function (but slower).
Well it’s not in my build. Or at least it has been relabeled. I suspected this may have been the case, though.
I have been trying the new UV scripts. It is waay easier to bake ambient occlusion/radiosity now with the vertex colors to texture script. It was finnicky before for me.
However, on closer inspection, the normal map generator makes object space normal maps. (We all need tangent space.) Argh!
Actually you can write shaders for Unity that would take object space normal maps. Of course, you’d lose the ability to deform the models in an easy way.
I thought about it, but the time basically wasted doing this I should probably just buy a commercial 3D application that supports it. I guess there are a few advantages to object space, though.
So the Blender normal maps still don’t work in Unity? How about lightmaps - is there a way to bake lightmaps in Blender (ala ZeroFractal) and get them into Unity?
Sure. Three ways off the top of my head: bake them on top of your textures with “texture bake” or “BRrayBaker” scripts, bake them separately on a pure white texture and blend them in GIMP (or photoshop), or bake on white, make white transparent in GIMP and use a multi-texture material in Unity.
I spent the last couple of days with this and came up with a super easy way to bake textures and AO in Blender. Once I’ve got lightmaps/shadowmaps figured out, I’ll post a tutorial.
