Unlocking Blender resources

Creating tileable patterns can involve a lot of tedious tracing and tweaking to get them to tile seamlessly. This tutorial describes a method of automating the process of creating flawlessly tiling, patterns using GIMP, Inkscape and Blender to render seamless tiles.
Many games and indie projects make use of the *.map format to make their maps and levels. With the inclusion of the ‘map’ export script into Blender 3D, it’s now possible to model your level in 3D and output that as content that can be loaded directly into GTKRadiant or other ‘map’ editor.
This tutorials covers “how to..” and the more advanced information you need to look out for when working in this way.

A tutorial showing a specific example on how to create a normal map from a photograph of a tree-trunk. Also includes tips on what you should be aware of when taking your own photos for this kind of asset creation.

This tutorial explains in further detail the process of creating a “heightTemplate”, a specifically prepared grey scale image, which is passing through a normal map generator tool.

Although most scripts that run from Blender – either included when you install the application or 3rd party scripts created or downloaded – don’t necessarily need the Python API to be installed, you may, during the course of using Blender 3D, find that a number of the more ‘complex’ Python *.py scripts don’t run reporting various ‘runtime’ errors.
This tutorial discusses how to set up the Python path under Windows OS.