Home Engine - Blender Export & Model Loading

Some progress in my home engine has been had, first of all multiple geometry rendering through my fixing up and better understanding both render passes and descriptor sets.

All of this is nuts and bolts, what I want to get to; just like the DirectX 11 rendered version; is to play with 3D geometry and placing objects into a scene.

To this end my hand written geometry is no longer hacking it, and you will have seen from my raw game engine posts I did use Milkshape 3D.

Milkshape, lovely as it is to my eye, is not a modern well featured 3D suite and sadly does not let me easily plug into the geometry live within it (one can only export and perform post-processing).

To that end I delved into how one might write a Blender add-on to export your own format...

Long Story short, here's my text intermediate output from just such a plug-in written in python.

The plug-in is far from robust, I followed the lines of another open source plug in and applied my own, copying it into blender with a batch file and clearing the pycache each time I perform an edit.

But it is doing the job I initially want, and I get my own format of file output.

And indeed I can load these into my engine...

I can work on the axis for the data output and start to ensure my camera system from the main client works as expected in vulkan; since the maths here is exactly the same code I don't anticipate any issues.

This should free my mind up to think about a lighting system and to finally get back to where I was with the coloured cubes in the DirectX 11 version and ultimately onto a full scene.

I have four constant things in the world, a ground plane, a skybox and a center marker flag (showing X, Y and Z axis respectively) with a quartet of boxes in the center of the scene.  This is the test scene for the "world" loaded into the scene graph.  And it's where I want this to be this time next week perhaps.

Since progress has been much quicker now I'm past the deep dive into learning the initial set up of vulkan.

I can also appreciate much more why folks just pick up an off the shelf engine, I myself make little prototypes in Unreal Engine 4.  But this kind of denudes me of the walk through these technologies.

For the most part creating an engine like mine, which is planned to have solid shaded low poly vehicular combat, well it's a solved problem, so I'm enjoying following in a lot of well trod foot steps to better my understanding of the processing, memory, mathematics and challenges in writing a game engine.

Ship Diorama Build Blog : HMS Rodney : Pt1

The eagle eyed of you will have seen the slew of short model videos going onto my YouTube Channel, and the great and good among you will have subscribed there already, if not the YouTube link is always right there in my blog.

But my new project is a blog exclusive, I'm not planning on filming much of this build, instead we're going to use more high-resolution photographs taken on my phone.

It's also going to be one of the biggest "things" I've ever built.  I've returned to modelling as a hobby in my middle age, but as a kid I was very keen model maker and I had literally hundreds of planes in zoom poses hung from my bedroom ceiling.

But I also had a small fleet, I had the HMS Belfast, HMS Hood and HMS Illustrious in 1/600 by Airfix on my window sill.

In fact in my mid 20's I actually bought and build a second HMS Belfast, which I actually left in my then rented house when I moved out, as I could not find anywhere to put it, but couldn't bring myself to throw her away.

Anyway, I've now decided to start a new fleet and I've decided to go with a 1/700 build of one of my favourite ships HMS Rodney.  Historically this lends some symmetry to my old HMS Hood, as the Rodney exacted terrible revenge by helping to sink the Bismark.

This smaller scale is perhaps my challenge, and the level of detail I want to bring to the model is going to likewise be a challenge.  And I am on the hunt for more detail sets and photo etch to put into use before I get started.  As such, I need to start the model somewhere other then itself, and I've decided on making a diorama.

I can't possibly use epoxy, it's too cold to go work outside and working in my office, I have to be able to put my model making kit all away, so a long cure time is out of the question.  I'm therefore going to start small and simple... I can after all lift the ship back off this base at anytime.

The first step was to use the included base as a template, I tried on card, but immediately saw the materials I had at hand would cause it to disintegrate.  So I found this piece of 2 inch thick polystyrene from a package, and started to mark out the outline.

Next I cut the large sheet to roughly the right size and broke off the excess material.

Next I needed to do some preparation work, I decanted some of my PVA into a spare jar, which has a lid, putting in about 60g of the glue and 80ml of water I shook them vigorously until I had a quite runny PVA mix.

I also retrieved a single piece of aluminium foil roughly the size of the whole base, and I started to roughly layout and gently manipulating the foil to fit like the first layer of my wave effect.

Once I was happy I slipped these aside and painted a layer of neat PVA quite thickly onto the base and then started to place the foil back in place.

making sure to let the foil fall as it liked.

Once it was completely covered I then took single sheets of toilet paper and the PVA water mix and started to layer them over the foil, with the aim of softening the harsh lines, but keeping the pattern random and natural.

Once complete I did a test fit of the plastic base.

And from that alignment started to layout very thin lines of paper and foil atop the current layers, to make an inflection of a bow wave.

A quick test fit.

And once I was happy I got the acrylic paints out, very dilute with water I started with a deep aquamarine gloss from Revell.  Adding a hint of green gave this strong bold colour a real flare of effect.

But, this is only a hint layer and so another layer of toilet paper, single ply this time, was used with the watered down PVA to activate the paint and bring it through.

This further softened the overall wave effect, this is notcable most in the left of field and in the bow wave being much softer and appearing to roll.

A final smattering of watered PVA and I set this whole thing aside.

My plan going forward is to let it dry completely, then trim the excess foil and paper from around the edges, before hitting the glossy acrylic again, but that will be softed with white/grey.  And I'll gloss varnish after that, before picking out the waves with white and giving everything a second gloss varnish.

I've seen a recommendation to use a high gloss varnish of another type, so we'll see... either way, for my first base ever, I'm happy so far, and... it's kept me out of trouble for two and a half hours making it.

See the other parts here:

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4