SunBurn Snippets #4 – Blender to SunBurn basics – Multi-Material mapping

Due to popular request here’s yet another snippet for the Blender to SunBurn series.

Here I cover how to setup materials in Blender for use in the SunBurn Game Engine and it’s editor (this links up the training video for materials and assigning textures on the Synapse site)

The basic instructions are as follows:

1. Get your model and Unwrap the UV's how you wish, both Main Text UV and the lightmap (using smart project and create lightmap with new channel respectively), remembering this has to be done in "Edit Mode" (if any of this is already done in your model, ignore that part)
2. Go to the Materials panel and set up the materials you want to use (be careful what you call your materials as they need to be uniquely recognisable)
3. Next, whilst still in Edit mode, un-select all parts of the model
4. Change to your specific selection mode (Vertices, Edges or Faces) and select the items you want to assign to a NEW material (by default all entities of a model are mapped to the default model)
5. Next Select your new material and click on Assign. (this will move the selected items from the default to your new material, they are automatically unassigned from the default)
6. Repeat this for the rest of you materials
7. Save file (Important or it doesn't export correctly!)
8. Export using the exporter of your choice

If you are using multiple models in a scene you can either just have one material per model, or separate the visible portions of the model from the hidden and only texture the visible to save on rendering. (as shown in the video on the Synapse Gaming site)

Right I'm outta here, lots to see and people to do. Wait reverse that!!.

One last thing!!!

I’m now using the latest version of Blender (2.7RC2) now but when I tried opening the “User Settings” screen Blender would crash, lots of troubleshooting later no fix, even reverting to old versions of the 2.5 series did now help.

Eventually found a fix which you should know about and it seems it’s just one of those gotcha’s when using Blender.

Blender needs the AREO theme enabled in Windows 7

Don’t fully know why but using a basic theme (which I did for doing the webcasts) seems to disable some 3D stuff which blender then doesn’t re-enable it for use (or depends on something to be there). The Blender team are now aware and are looking in to it, which will either produce a fix or an update to the documentation.

Just thought I’d let you know

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