General Info

In this chapter I gathered basic information about how to use Blender for building models for Thief games.

Center Point

Every 3D model used in Dark Engine has its own center point. When you place your custom model in Thief game world it will be represented as a rectangular shape that embraces the whole model. Most of the times the center point should be located about the middle (centroid) of that rectangular shape, but it can be adjusted.

Starting from version 2.1 Dark Exporter offers a new option in Export Options called Center object. This option is set to true by default. If this option is set to true Dark Exporter will pass "-o" parameter to BSP.exe executable, which will try to move center point of the object near the controid of the model. It's very usefull when your model is not located near 0,0,0 coordinates in Blender, which is often a case.

If Center object option is not set to true, Dark Exporter will consider coordinates 0,0,0 to be the center of the model. If you want your model to have center point in the middle of its shape grab your 3D object and move it to a position in which coordinates (0,0,0) are in the middle of your model. On the below picture I show you the standard cube with center point intentionally established below the model:

As you can see the cube has been moved 2.568 units up along the Z axis. In order to place the model right in the center you can select your model and type zeros in X, Y and Z parameters of Location of Transform section. Off course the result depends on where the Origin Point of your model is.

If you cannot see the toolbox panel, enable it by pressing N key.

If you don't want to move your object from its current possition but you want it to have center point near its centroid you can always check the above given option Center object.

Measuring and dimensions

Designing your mission in Dromed requires paying attantion to the grid size. It's a big topic and I'm not gonna get down to the details of how grid size affects positioning of brushes. Yet maintaining the proper proportions and measuring for Dromed is very straighforward in Blender.

1 unit in Blender is 1 unit in Dromed. Thus if you want to create a custom box and you want it to have 2x2x2 dimensions in Dromed, simply use the same dimensions in Blender:

Consistent object and mesh names

This was a very important requirement in Dark Exporter 1, but it is not valid any more in Dark Exporter 2.

Material names

Blender is outfitted with a feature that automatically names every new material you create. The first material is always called Material. If you don't change that name, Blender will name the next material as Material.000, the next one will be named Material.001 and so on.  If you don't change these names to unique ones, under certain conditions it may even lead to unexpected problems of adjusting your E file.

Since materials play a very significant role in the E file I highly recommend to give materials unique meanigful names. You will then omit the above problem and have a clean structure of your model.