teaching machines

CS 491 Lecture 2 – Blendering

January 28, 2016 by Chris Johnson. Filed under gamedev3, lectures, spring 2016.

Agenda

• what ?s
• Blender interface review
• reverse engineering

TODO

• Watch CGCookie’s Unity Basics.
• On a 1/4 sheet, answer the following questions:
  • I have a Game Object that I want to focus on in the scene editor. What keyboard/mouse actions do I take to zoom in on it?
  • We learned in the videos that Game Objects edited while playing the game revert back to their earlier settings. It’s very easy to forget this, make a bunch of changes, and then lose them. Unity supports changing the color of its interface during play to make it more obvious that your changes are temporary. How do you do change the color?
  • What component is common to all 3D objects—but not 2D ones? What is its purpose? Click on the book/documentation icon to learn more about it.

Note

Today we’ll briefly review some Blender shortcuts that you should have learned about from the videos. For our lab activity, I present to you a series of objects made in Blender, and its the responsibility and a lab partner to reverse engineer and reconstruct them.

1. A capsule. For maximal learning, make the caps fit exactly.
   
2. A flattened octodonut. Use the operator panel to control the subdivision.
   
3. A stack of beveled boxes. Use a bevel modifier. Use the Duplicate tool or Shift-D to duplicate an object.
   
4. A hexagon of cylinders. Position these exactly. One could type their locations in by hand, but that’s too much work. Instead add a circle. Use the operator panel to make it a hexagon. Hit TAB to go into edit mode. Right-click on a vertex to select it. Hit Shift-S and move the 3D cursor to the selected vertex. Then hit Shift-A to add a cylinder. Set the radius to 0.2 in the operator panel. Repeat for the remaining 5 vertices.
   
5. A bowl. Use boolean modifiers. Try naming your objects to make identifying them in the hierarchy easier.
   
6. A smoothed cone and rectangular prism. Use the subdivision surface modifier. The object on the right started off as a cube.
   
7. A Suzanne net. Check out the subdivision surface and wireframe modifiers. What order do you want them in?
   

If you finish these early, make something for a friend!

We’ll do these together:

1. A gizmo.
   
2. Add the gizmo into Unity and make it spin forever!