I do realise that I have been neglecting this blog but I had a lot of coursework going on and yes, believe it or not, I have a life too.
While working on our video game the other day Adrian and I decided we should take the next step and start working on a game for a three-dimensional environment. In two-dimensional environments only sprites are used to render graphics, but obviously in a three-dimensional environment far more complex ways of rendering, including models are obviously needed. <sarcasm>Being a huge fan of open source software,</sarcasm> I decided to use the free and of course highly powerful modeling tool Blender - the Linux community’s alternative to proven modeling systems such as 3ds max. Since I believe that software should be intuitive to use, I did not bother actually reading tutorials or anything, I just thought I would learn it as I go. Funny.
After opening Blender, the first thing that came to my mind was “Wow, this is gray”. In fact, I have never seen such a gray program in my life. Not the pretty, warm, easy-on-the-eye gray that you find in the great operating systems such as Windows 95 or even the ultimate solution for a stable, efficient, low-cost workstation environment Windows ME, but a harsh, mean, unfriendly gray that immediately gave me a sense that I was not liked. But this did not deter me. The next thing I noticed after I looked beyond all the gray, was a myriad of buttons, all warmly decorated with a non-aliased sans-serif font, giving you the same warm fuzzy feeling you get when you look at badly designed javax.swing.* GUI-based applications using the Java default look-and-feel. On these buttons, there were words. No, wait - words can be read. There was gibberish. Some of this gibberish was more readable than other parts of it - great letter combinations such as “< 1 Mat 1 >” or “OB:Cube” sprung to my eye. And even high definition 16×16 icons with full 4 bit colour-depth could be found on certain, presumably special, buttons (I assumed they were special because in my programs not every button gets an icon, only amazingly cool buttons do so).
Inspired by this warm, user-friendly interface, I decided to create my first model - nothing sophisticated, only a small missile constructed from a cone, with a cylinder on top. Does not sound too hard, does it… Well, Blender proved me wrong. After a quick ten minute search in the jungle of Blender’s user interface, I finally found a menu that apparently add predefined shapes to your model. Ecstatic in triumph after apparently adding a cylinder, and fighting my way through a few prompts which were apparently in English - not that I understood them - I decided to have a look at the model I had just so swiftly created. After investing another five minutes into searching for a function which rendered my model, I examined my creation. Looking at what I had created, Blender made me double my knowledge of geometry. I thought I had created a cylinder, which is by definition round. What I saw was not a cylinder, as it was not round. It was a cube. Angered and confused I thought I would solve this problem using a classic Windows software debugging method - just clicking everywhere and pressing random buttons on the keyboard. And after about twenty-five thousand clicks on randomly selected buttons on the interface, the perspective suddenly changed and I realised that for some reason my cylinder was in a square. Now I had no idea why this was. So I tried selecting the square and prayed to get some feedback. I realised that it was actually because Blender had inserted a square automatically into the environment, but it was invisible because Blender decided to colour it gray, just like the rendering background. Wonderful! At this point I decided to give up and just use a usable program: I use Milkshape and life is great, because it is easy to use. Whilst in principle I do not dislike complex software, I do believe that software has to be intuitively usable, at least to certain extent. Blender epically fails here.
After a quick look at the collection of all human knowledge, Wikipedia, I quickly found out why Blender is open source - the company that created it went bankrupt and decided to just throw it to the worlds biggest collection of unemployed programmers - the Open Source Community. Cheers!
