Blender Fixed!

A complete uninstall of Blender 2.57 and reinstall of Blender 2.49 apears to have done the job. Now I can get back to work.

Blender 2.57 Touble

I tried upgrading to Blender 2.57 today, and I was met with a completely alien and baffling interface. I tried loading up a model and after a large amount of time managed to texture paint it. With that completed I tried to import the model into Unity3d.
I got and error.
I tried again and again to import it, exporting it as different files and tweaking settings, but with no success. Eventually I gave up and tried importing a model which I hadn't touched with Blender 2.57.
I got an error.
I tried again. And error. I was told I needed atleast Blender 2.5 or higher to import. I was completely cut off from my models.

At the moment I'm searching for solutions to my Blender troubles. Hopefully I can get things back to normal.

Shadows and Hallways

Continuing my quest to improve my art skills, I made another scene.

This scene consists of a hallway. In one direction it leads to a large room, and in the other to two smaller rooms.

The scene is made up of modular objects, like a single section of wall, or a doorway, allowing for a huge amount of control over the layout of the entire level.
The problems began when I tried to reduce the amount of draw cells the scene uses. One way of doing this is to combine the meshes of several objects on screen. However, when the script to do so was added to the objects it caused sections of the lightmap or even entire modules to disapear. With mesh combining out of the picture, the scene could probably still be optimized by using occlusion culling.

I originally intended to use the scene for a survival horror game, but because the art style didn't turn out as planned, and for the reasons above, I probably wont be using these assets.

Building

A building crafted out of four different parts, each modeled and textured in Blender, then lightmapped with Beast in Unity.

Performance Boosters

I've been doing a few optimization experiments in Unity:

Here is a scene of 49 buildings, each is made up of many smaller objects like windows and doors. The buildings each uses approximately 45 draw cells.

Without any optimization, the scene uses over 2000 draw cells. To improve performance I parented each row of seven into an empty gameobject, then added the combine childeren script to each. Now I get a maximum of 57 draw cells.

This number could be reduced even further by combining several rows together, and by adding Occlusion Culling.

Blender

Have been trying to create a human character in Blender. I don't think I did too bad.

The head still needs ears, and the jaw and cranium need to be reshaped. Right now it looks like it took a few hits to the head with a blunt instrument.
We'll see where this goes.

Blog's Up!

I have a blog now. I'll be posting here whenever something big happens, like an update on a project.

I also put up a website: http://www.blacklightgames.co.nr/