Blender Perspective

Introduction

The purpose of this page is to collaborate on making a single camera and lighting setup to use with Blender for generating 2D images of buildings and bobs with common perspective and shading.

Current proposals

Current perspective.blend file The test building is on layers 1 and 2. All the lighting and camera is on layer 10. The ground plane is on layer 11.

This is an in game shot with the test building. I am not quite sure that the perspective is the same as the HQ and the lumberjacks, but I would like other people's opinions before I go messing with the camera.

HOWTO make a graphic with blender

Start with the above file or any attached blender file you find on the page. But make sure that the lighting (dropped shadow) matches approximately with widelands. You can also import pre-made models into the base .blend file. Simply go to File->Append, browse to your file, append the scene you want. Switch to this new scene, select all the objects you want, press ctrl-L and select To Scene. Then remove the imported scene and you have your new objects in the first scene.

Design your object around the center (0,0,0), after this, select camera, camera-target and move them along the z axis till your object is in the center of the camera. Render a big picture without shadow (disable the ground plate on layer 11), AO enabled and high sampling rate, and on KEY render type (not SKY). Make this pic around 640x480 pixels big and save it. If your object drops a shadow, enable (shadow only) on all your materials and turn of AO, render again with your ground plate enabled. Save this pic as "shadow" or something. It only contains your background color and black spots, where shadow is.

When you resize, make sure you always turn interpolation off! In the gimp (or any other photoshop like tool) resize your picture to 24x24 for menu pictures (if it is a ware, you can get the queue_empty picture by overlaying a black layer with darken_only enabled). For the on-map pictures, resize to appropriate size, also resize the shadow pic, then copy the pic over the shadowpic - eh voila, your done. Do this for every frame of your animations.

This is just my idea, but I say using "MIR dot net"(multiple image resizer) would seriously speed things up with animations.