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 you custom model in 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 of that rectangular shape, but it can be adjusted.

When you are modeling in Blender the center point is just a coordinate (0,0,0). 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 (0,0,0). 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 the Z axis. In order to place the model right in the center in Blender you can select your model and type zeros in X, Y and Z parameters of Location of Transform section. You can also do it manualy if you want to have center point of your model somewhere else.

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

Measuring

Designing your mission in Dromed requires paying attantion to the grid size. It's a big topic and I'm not gonna go 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 measuring in Blender:

Consistent object and mesh names

This is a very important aspect of modelling if you want to use Dark Exporter. Object name and its mesh name must be the same! In Blender everything you model is an object. That's why the default work mode is Object Mode. In this mode you can rotate, move or uniformly scale your shape. When you press TAB key you switch to Edit Mode. Now you can change your shape on the vertex level. In this mode you are working on a so called mesh of your object. These two notions are very closely related. In other words your model has an Object name and underneath it a Mesh name.

Suppose you have a standard cube. You can name it MyBox using Object Panel. Then you have to switch to Object Data Panel and enter the same name for the mesh. See the screenshot below:

As you can see you can easily verify if the names are the same by means of the Outliner Window (upper part of the above screenshot).

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 name every new material with a unique meanigful name. You will then omit the above problem and have a clean structure of your model. It will also make it easy to inspect your models.