—Blender 3D: Noob to Pro/Beginning Tips (Wikibooks: Blender 3D)
This is just what I was looking for.
I’m still trying to decide whether I should go for broke and introduce my “New Media Projects” students to 3D design for Half-Life 2, where the results will be stunning but the process more fragmented, or be less of a trail-blazer and take advantage of the existing EduFrag community (using Unreal Tournament 2004, which features a more advanced IDE that integrates the design tasks, thus cutting down on the number of times students will have to use little stand-alone applets to convert graphics files and such).
I still want to use the Half-Life 2 system for my own work, but I’m beginning to think that the less-complex UT2004 system will still teach the concepts I want to teach.
Thanks for the encouragement. The Unreal tools look very easy to use — much easier than the HL2 tools. I’m working on sample games in 3 or 4 other toolsets right now (one for text adventures, 2 for arcade games, and then the Half-Life one). So Unreal will be next on my list.
Sure I would be happy to help anyone interested in the EduFrag project. Unreal Tournament has a fairly simple editor and the textures used in the free educational version can be imported easily into the full commercial version with weapons. By defining specs for textures, it is possible for map developers to work independently from the content providers. I don’t teach game building so contributions from my students are often limited to content, consisting of 256×256 pixel bitmaps. For details on specs see here
http://edufrag.wikispaces.com/ut2runtime
What kind of variety in character models can you find?
I wasn’t thinking of asking my students to design characters from the ground up, but it might be nice to let them add T-shirt slogans or change hair color and such.
The facial expression editor and lip-synching capability of Half-Life 2 makes it very attractive for the particular educational game I’m planning (I hope to get some support to work on it next summer Reading body language and expression will be part of the educational experience. I’m also thinking about doing things such as randomly assigning racial characteristics and perhaps recording the same dialoge with male and female actors, so that I can randomly assign gender as well.
I noticed that Unreal Tournament 2004 is selling for about $14, so it really wouldn’t be a burden for me to make it a required text… but the latest episodes of Half-Life 2 aren’t selling for much more.
The IDE for Unreal looks very good, however — with tools for creating bitmaps all in one place.
Hey Jerz:
I really like the Unreal maps; they are pretty simple to make, and they get the job done. The non-weapons version isn’t as fancy as the shooter version, but students seem to prefer playing any video game over me lecturing (again) about commas, commas, commas :-)
I am working on an interactive fiction game using the Unreal maps, and hope to have that up by the end of the summer. I am also taking suggestions for other grammar games.
Jean-Claude Bradley, the mastermind of the edufrag project, can help get folks started (http://edufrag.blogspot.com), and I can pinch hit, as well.