Modelling for XNA with Blender Part I
March 10, 2008
In this series, we will look at using Blender to build models and assets for use in XNA games. In part I, we build a cube, apply a texture to it, and export it to fbx format.
Note: the Blender/XNA series is intended for coders who have every intention of hiring/finding an artist to build their assets, but would like to know enough about the basics to whip up some crude, textured, and animated models to use in their tests. If you would like to learn Blender in more detail, or you are an artist looking for a richer how-to document for Blender, I recommend the Introduction to Character Animation tutorial which can be found on the BlenderWiki. This series of articles covers only the bare essentials, and may be used as a companion to the previously mentioned tutorial.
When modeling for XNA you’ve got a lot of options. Since XNA readily accepts models in the fbx format, pretty much any 3D modeling package you can find is ready, right out of the box, to be used to build models for your XNA games.
With that said, you’ve got four classes of packages to choose from:
- Top dollar software (Maya, 3DS Max)
- “Free” versions of top dollar software (XSI Mod Tool)
- Low budget software (Wings3D, trueSpace)
- Free software (Blender)
Most of us with limited budgets are going to wipe the top dollar offerings right off the plate. For me, not only is the cost prohibitive, but I’m not even an artist — I’m a coder. Why would I spend thousands on software that there isn’t a chance in hell I’m ever going to figure out how to use, just so I can whip up some half-way decent models to use in my unit tests until I can pay a real artist to build me some good ones?
The “free” (note the quotes) offerings like Maya PE and Mod Tool, unfortunately, come with some severe limitations. Maya PE is not going to work because you can’t export, and Mod Tool comes with the caveat that you can’t use it for commercial works. What if your game starts turning out really good, as in, I can charge for this? You’re going to run afoul of the license.
For me, personally, the low budget offerings would be fine, except for one small factor: there is a full-featured, awesome piece of open source software that blows them out of the water, and with a total price of free. No cost, no restrictions on what you can do with your creations. And a positively huge community of helpful users. C’mon, there really isn’t any better alternative. That software, of course, is Blender.
Now, you might have heard some bad things about Blender. Actually, you’ve probably only heard one bad thing among all the good things people have to say about it. And that one thing is, the interface stinks! I’m going to be the odd one out. I’ve used a lot of 3D modeling software in my time,and I haven’t been able to figure out any of it. It simply doesn’t make sense to me. Blender, however, immediately made sense to me. I don’t know why, but something just clicked when I was using it the first time.
Again, I’m a programmer, not an artist, but wow are these programs complicated. When I’m building something for a game, all I want to do is build up my model, texture it, maybe add some bones to it and animate it. Right? So why is it so hard to accomplish such a simple task? The answer is that most modeling software wasn’t designed for you to build animated models for XNA. It was designed to do everything, it just so happens to be capable of building animated models for XNA. Your task is to navigate through all the options you don’t need to get to the stuff you do. Luckily, Blender seems to make finding all that other stuff kind of complicated, which is great for me, because I don’t know what any of it is. Everything I need is right in front of me, which cuts down on my anxiety. That’s a really good thing.
We’re going to go through four stages of modeling using Blender for XNA. We’ll look at:
- How to build a textured cube
- How to build a UV textured model
- How to add bones to a model
- How to animate a model
That’s pretty much all you need to know to use Blender for your XNA project. In fact, you only need 1 & 2 if you just want to build furniture, vehicles, weapons, and so on for your game. We really only need 3 and 4 to build more complicated stuff like players and NPCs.
So let’s get started. Begin by downloading the latest version of Python at http://www.python.org, and then Blender at http://www.blender.org/download/get-blender/ and install them in that order.
Note: I’ll be using Blender 2.45 for this demo. Blender seems to have this weird habit of changing things pretty dramatically between minor releases, so get your learn on while the interface still looks like I’m about to describe!
Now fire up Blender. You’re presented with a default scene, which contains a cube. This is the start state for Blender, and you should see it whenever you start the program. A word of caution here: Blender’s interface was designed for efficiency, and what that means is that you will be doing almost everything using keyboard shortcuts. Good luck remembering them all!
Even though we’re going to just render a cube here, let’s delete the cube and recreate it. Hit A to select everything in the scene, and then DEL. Now hit SPACE and select Add->Mesh->Cube. We’ve got our cube back. You might have noticed a little cross hair in the middle of the window before the cube appeared. That’s the cursor, and it defines where the center of the new mesh is going to go. You could have moved that around if you wanted, but we want it in the center anyways.
So how come it doesn’t look like a cube? Because we’re looking at it square on. If you want to change your viewing perspective, hold down your MIDDLE MOUSE BUTTON and wiggle the mouse around. We’re now changing the perspective, so we can look at the cube from an angle. Looks like a cube now, doesn’t it?
So now we want to texture this thing. Let’s use the same texture we used in the Silent Hill Cube render example. You should see it off to the left. It’s a 128×128 square jpg. It could be a different size, but for a small cube like this, smaller is better. Just make sure whatever you use is a power of 2 in dimensions, i.e. either 32×32, 64×64, 128×128, 256×256, etc.
Where should you save your texture? You should save it to your XNA project’s Content folder. I like to make a subfolder called Textures and stick all my textures in there. You don’t have to, but it’s important that XNA knows where to find your texture when you build your project.
Now back to Blender. How do we wrap this texture around our cube? Well, we need to do what is called UV texturing. But we’re going to do a really, really simple version of it. In part II of this series, we’ll be tearing our model apart and actually mapping coordinates of our texture to our vertices, but since all we have here is a cube, we just want to apply the texture to each face of the cube.
To do this, we’re going to work in two separate windows. We need to split the Blender window into two separate windows. To do this, click the MIDDLE MOUSE BUTTON where the modeling window meets the menu bar at the top. A menu will pop up, so select “Split Area” and move the vertical divider to the middle of the window. LEFT CLICK to set the split. Great, now we’ve got two windows that look the same.
Underneath the right view window, you should see a little drop down that says Edit Mode. This is where you choose what mode this window is in. We actually want to be in Object Mode, so select Object Mode from this drop down.
Now we’re ready to texture. Hit F5 to bring up the shading window. You’ll see it at the bottom of the screen.
If you aren’t in the Materials buttons list, click the Materials icon (its a red ball). Click Add New. You just added a material to your mesh.
Now look on the right, and you’ll see a panel with a tab that says, Texture and one that says Map Input. In the Texture tab, click Add New. You’ve just added a texture to your material. You’ll notice that an entry named Tex appears in the list on the left.
Now select the Map Input tab. We’re going to tell Blender how to map this texture to our cube. Click the UV button. Awesome, that’s done.
Review what you just did: you created a mesh, added a material to it, added a texture to your material, and told Blender to map the texture to your mesh using UV.
Ok, now go back up to your view windows, where your cube is sitting. In the left window, change the mode to UV Face Select. We’re going to tell blender which of the faces to do the UV mapping on. We want to do it on all of them, so make sure every face is selected. The quick way to do this is to hit A.
Now in the right window, change the Window Type (not the mode, the window type) to UV/Image Editor. (See the image at the left for what the window type selector looks like). The window should change to a flat square. This is your texture — well, it will be! We need to tell Blender where our texture is. So select Image->Open from the menu (the menu on this window), and navigate to your texture. Open it, and the square should now display your texture. You should also see that your cube on the left has received its texture!
Again, let’s review. After we got our cube all set up to be textured, we imported a texture and applied it to every face of our model.
Well, we sure seem to be done, don’t we? All we need to do is export our model to fbx format. On the main menu, select File->Export->Autodesk FBX. Save the fbx file to our content directory.
Are we done? Well, not quite. We still have to make sure that our XNA project can handle all of this. Add the FBX file to your content pipeline using the Add->Existing Item option in Visual Studio. Now we need to do one last thing. We need to make sure our FBX file really points to the texture. Guess what? It doesn’t. Nothing is ever easy, right?
Open the fbx file in any text editor (use vi you apes!) Search for the string RelativeFilename. There should be two instances of this line in the file, which look something like this:
-
RelativeFilename: "fbx/mytexture.jpg"
Not good! We don’t even have a fbx folder. We need to change this line ever so slightly:
-
RelativeFilename: "../Textures/mytexture.jpg"
And we need to do that in both places. That’s it! Now render your cube as you would any model in XNA, and you should see it all nice and textured.
Next time, we’ll look at building a more complicated mesh, and applying a more complicated texture to it. For now, here’s a neat-o video of our textured cube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BduAEENF2xw
Modelling for XNA with Blender Part II
March 11, 2008
Last time we built a cube and laid a texture over it. In part II, we’ll build a more complicated mesh, unwrap it, and build a UV map to map our mesh’s vertices to a custom texture. We’ll look at some basic Blender modeling techniques along the way as well.
Note: the Blender/XNA series is intended for coders who have every intention of hiring/finding an artist to build their assets, but would like to know enough about the basics to whip up some crude, textured, and animated models to use in their tests. If you would like to learn Blender in more detail, or you are an artist looking for a richer how-to document for Blender, I recommend the Introduction to Character Animation tutorial which can be found on the BlenderWiki. This series of articles covers only the bare essentials, and may be used as a companion to the previously mentioned tutorial.
If you’ve ever dug into the content folder of your favorite 3D game, you may have come across a bunch of textures. Usually these are pretty self-explanatory — stone, brick, asphalt, grass. Maybe a cloud texture that gets used on the skybox. Most of them look pretty standard, like something you might use as a tiled background on a website (assuming it’s 1993 and we still use tiled backgrounds on websites).
But then you come across a horror show. You find the character textures.
Why do I say it’s a horror show? Because they look like something out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Like you took a human body, skinned it, and laid the flesh out to dry.
Ok, all joking aside, that description is actually pretty accurate, and we’re going to look at what goes into building one of these textures and then wrapping it around a model. The process is called UV mapping, and it is essentially tearing apart your model so you can lay it flat over a 2D texture, and line up each vertex just so, in order to properly map a complicated texture — such as a human figure — over a basic, low poly mesh.
To begin with, we’re going to have to build something a little more complicated than a cube. This time around, we’re going to build a human head.
Now, if you go scouring the net for examples of and tutorials about modeling humans, you’re going to turn up a lot of stuff about high-res, awesome models that look photorealistic. But we’re not building CG characters for multimillion dollar movies, we’re building a game. That means we want to minimize the number of polygons that make up our mesh. That’s ok, though, because if we do it right, the texture we apply to our model, and the lighting and other effects we do in game, are totally going to sell it. The basic idea is you can get really detailed with your model, or you can get really detailed with your texture and lighting. Since performance matters for us (we’re rendering this thing on the fly, after all), we are definitely going to want to opt for the latter.
Now keep in mind, as I’ve stated before, I am not an artist. So don’t expect anything super awesome here. It’s up to you to paint really great textures for your models so they look great even though the actual meshes you apply them to are relatively simple.
If you’ve ever taken a figure drawing class, you’ve probably seen the basic idea of sketching a head. It’s pretty simple. You basically start with a deformed sphere for the top of the cranium, and add a rectangle at the bottom-front for a jaw. Then you sketch in a little prism shape for the nose, and maybe add some half-discs for ears. You should start to imagine how we can easily do these things in Blender. We know how to add meshes, all we need to know how to do is tweak them, move them around, and then merge them into one shape. This should be quite easy. And we’re not going to get much more complicated than that, primarily to keep this tutorial simple, but also because its a game we’re working on, and we want to keep our models simple.
So fire up Blender and start a new scene. Select everything (A) and delete it. Let’s start with a blank canvas.
It might be useful to you to split the work area into several sections, each with their own view. Remember, to do this, click MIDDLE MOUSE BUTTON at the edge of a window, select Split Area, then drag the divider to where you need it. A good plan is to split the window into four viewports, and set one to top, one to front, one to side, and one to user. This will give us 3 set points of view, plus one we can drag around at will. You can set these on the view menu for each window. You might also want to learn the shortcuts, as well.
Now add a sphere. But wait! An icosphere or a UVSphere? It doesn’t matter. Try both and see the difference. I’m using a UVSphere because The points are a little easier to work with.
Now what we want to do with this sphere is stretch it out a little bit. To do that, we are going to use a couple shortcut keys to let us do some things really quickly.
- To get a rectangular edit tool we can use to drag-select a bunch of vertices, hit B. The use the LEFT MOUSE BUTTON to drag-select.
- With our vertices selected, we can move them around with G.
- With our vertices selected, we can scale them with S.
- With our vertices selected, we can extrude them with E.
Don’t worry about extrude for now. Just select some verts, move them around and scale them until our sphere is more oblong looking. Look at the sketch of the head up there for a reference. That’s what we’re going for. Notice how its a little more of an egg shape, coming to a little bit of a point near the rear. You can grab half of the vertices and pull them back, then scale the ones at the end down to quickly approximate this.
Now what you’ve got at this point probably isn’t great. Don’t worry about it, we’re just learning. Do your best, and let’s move on.
Now we can add the rectangle we’re going to use for the jaw. But instead of just dropping in a big rectangle, we’d actually like it to taper off near the chin. The cheek bones should be wider than the chin. To achieve this, we’ll use the extrude function.
Add a very small cube near the sphere. Before you do this, you might want to reposition the cursor. Use your three perspective windows to position the center of the cube you’re going to add just under the front-bottom of your deformed sphere. Make sure your cube isn’t touching your sphere. We’re going to build this part of the head separate from the cranium, then merge the two together eventually.
Ok, we’ve got a cube, but we wanted to start with something smaller. With your cube selected, scale it down until its top face is about the right size to drop in the sphere and form the top of the jaw box.
Now, hit B and drag-select the bottom 4 vertices. Use G to move them up and flatten out the cube into a rectangle. Now we’re going to extend it back downward using the extrude tool. To use extrude, make sure those bottom 4 vertices are selected, hit E, and drag downward to extend your vertices downward. Notice that we’re making new copies of these vertices, and extending the rectangle in the process. You should begin to see how useful extrude is. You can start to rough out pretty much any shape starting from just a cube using it.
Continue downward until our rectangle has about four segments. At each step, use the scale and move functions to make your jaw look more like a jaw. Again, see the sketch above and use it as a reference. You should go for a more trapezoidal look, flat in the front, but extending backward as you move up the backside.
Looks kind of like a jaw, right? Come on, cut me a break here. I’m doing my best.
So what we want to do know is merge this jaw structure into the egg.
Now, there are no doubt much better ways to do this. I simply don’t know them. Hopefully someone will add a comment suggesting a better way. The way I do know how to do this is to follow three steps:
- Remove a section of the egg where the jaw will fit in
- Remove the back faces of the jaw
- Go around the seam and merge vertices
It’s easy to delete vertices. Just select them, and hit delete. Do this for the vertices on the bottom-front quadrant of our egg. Now grab your jaw and move it in. You might find you need to remove more vertices, or you added too many. The key thing, to keep things simple, is make sure you don’t have faces overlapping. We’re going to glue everything together eventually, so for now just make things kind of close, without overlapping.
Just keep using the tools you know about to get as close to something resembling a head as you can. Again, don’t sweat the details, just do your best.
Now we need to merge some vertices. You might want to introduce yourself to a new button at this point. On the menu bar for each view, when you are in edit mode, you’ll see, at the right, some select option buttons. These let you say if you want to select vertices, edges, or faces. There is also a button that determines if drag-selecting will select “hidden” vertices — that is, vertices that are behind the faces you see. When you want to be really specific about which vertices you want to select, it’s a good idea to turn this off. That way, you’ll only be selecting those vertices you can see. You may also want to stop using drag-select here, and start selecting individual vertices using RIGHT MOUSE BUTTON.
Ok, now let’s get merging. There are a couple tools we’re going to use to do this:
- With two vertices selected, we can merge them by hitting ALT-M and selecting At Center (that’s a decent enough option, but experiment).
- With two vertices selected, at either end of an edge, we can add a new vertex in between them by hitting W and selecting Subdivide.
The idea here is to stretch the skin of one mesh (the sphere) and glue it to the edges of the skin of another mesh (the jaw). Move around the game between the two meshes, adding vertices and merging vertices until you close them up in a good looking fashion. Inspect your model well to make sure there aren’t any weird overlaps, of holes, or anything like that. Make it smooth. As you move around the gap, remember to de-select all vertices between merge/split operations. Things can get ugly if you have vertices selected and you don’t know it.
Once you’ve closed up the gap, you can then add a nose. Just find a good edge somewhere on the center of the face and subdivide it to get two points for the tip of the nose. Then grab them and pull them out to form a nose. Tweak the vertices until it looks passable.
When you’re ready to double check everything, switch over to object mode and make sure all the holes and gaps are full again. If you find any holes, you can select three vertices and hit F to fill them in by creating a face out of them.
So how did I do? Ok, that’s definitely not great, but it’s good enough for a non-artist. Definitely came out better than I have any right to.
So now we need to texture it. Recall the process of texturing a cube in part I. This is pretty much the same, except we have this extra step of unwrapping our mesh and getting really specific about which part of the texture gets mapped to which part of the mesh.
Switch to the two window mode we used last time. The window on the left should be in UV Face Select mode, and the window on the right should be a UV/Image Editor window. Only this time, we’re not going to load in a texture just yet.
Let’s let Blender unwrap the mesh and see how it does. Select all faces in the left window, and hit U then select Unwrap. One of three things is going to happen here.
- Nothing
- Your mesh will get unwrapped, but it will look like a huge mess
- You’ll get super lucky and it will unwrap perfectly
Disregard #3, its not likely. #1 happened to me. What do we do?
W e need to tell Blender where it should slice our mesh when unwrapping. We’re basically giving it some hints about where might be a good area to cut it open. Ideally, we should do this somewhere that would be easy to hide the seam when we paint our texture. In other words, don’t do it right down the middle of the face. How about the back of the head?
The first thing I’m going to do is switch the left window back to edit mode (TAB), and hit the edge select button. Then I’m going to move along the back of the head, selecting edges to form a seam up along the base of the head, up over the top, and down to just above the brow. I then hit CTRL-E and select Mark Seam. I’ve now finalized one cut.
Now unwrap again. This time, unwrapping actually did something.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look that great. That’s ok, we just need a few more cuts. You can basically keep cutting wherever seems logical for your particular model. Unfortunately, this is a really tough process and requires a lot of practice to get the hang of it. I’m nowhere near good at it, myself. But let’s see what I can do.
Keep in mind that if you make a bad cut somewhere, you can always select your edges again, hit CTRL-E and remove the seam. Another helpful thing to do is to load up a special texture file that will help you see what you’re looking at.
The image to the left is one you can use. Click it to view the full size. Open that texture, and you’ll better be able to visualize which parts of your mesh are mapping to what parts of the texture.
You can also select vertices on the UV map and move, rotate and scale them. Sometimes this is helpful for tweaking things and getting them to work.
For simplicity sake, I’m going to do this the braindead easy way. I’m going to cut around the face, and then along the back of the head. I won’t care much about the back of the head. I’ll primarily want the eyes and mouth to line up. The rest is details.
Ok, see that there? I’ve completely failed to do this very well, but at least I can see the two sides of the face, the front of the face, and the top and back of the head. GOOD ENOUGH. Wow this part sucks.
Let’s start painting.
Blender will allow you to export this map so you can paint over it in Photoshop. To do this, switch your left window to a Scripts Window. From the scripts menu, select UV->Save UV Face Layout. Select the size you want (I stuck with 512), give it a name, and save. Now open it in your paint program and start trying to build a face. HAHA good luck.
For comedy effect, and because it’s late and I want to wrap this up, I decided to paint a totally ridiculous texture. There it is off to the left.
I wanted to show you how doing textures right can compensate for the lack of detail in your model. Instead, this texture is showing how a bad texture can highlight exactly how low-fi your model is. Two sides of the same coin, I guess. I would recommend Googling for some example character texture maps and study them. Try to understand what the artist was doing to add shading and depth to the model.
Anyways, all that’s left to do in Blender is open the texture image in the UV/Image Editor window, switch the left window to a 3D View window, in Object Mode, and switch to Textured view.
If all looks good, we can export to fbx as before, making sure the fbx actually points to our texture, and load it up in XNA.
Witness the atrocity below. It’s like Tron on acid.
It’s hideous, but it should illustrate how the UV map mapped the vertices to the texture. Look at my unwrapped model, and then look at my texture. See how the face pieces lined up to the face, the sides lined up to the side of the head, and the little ball thing mapped to the point of the egg.
With practice, you should be able to improve at getting the right level of detail in your model, and the right quality in your texture, to make your models look really great in-game.
You now know pretty much everything you need to know to build static objects for your game. As you can imagine, a chair or a couch, even a car is going to be a lot simpler than a head. Any non-animated model you need is going to be built this way. You’ll want to explore Blender a little bit to learn some of the tools available to you.
To get you started, consider adding a plane and extruding it. This will let you build a shape of your choosing out of square faces.
What if you want to make a symmetrical duplicate? One way to do this is to switch to edit mode, select your object, and hit ALT-D. This duplicates your object. To move it to a mirror position around one of the axes, hit N and set ScaleX (or Y, or Z) to -1. You should suddenly see two of your objects, reflected about the axis you chose. This will make a linked duplicate. That means its actually one mesh, so if you edit one of them, the changes will show on the other one. If you create a mirror image, this is pretty much what you want to do for, say, a head.
Explore, learn more of the keys and shortcuts.
Next time, we’ll look at adding bones to a mesh as the first step towards animating.
Written by stromdotcom · Filed Under XNA
Modeling for XNA with Blender Part III
March 13, 2008
To this point, we’ve covered some basic modeling and texturing concepts. You should now know how to build a model and UV texture it. In part III, we’ll add a skeleton to a mesh in preparation for animation.
Note: the Blender/XNA series is intended for coders who have every intention of hiring/finding an artist to build their assets, but would like to know enough about the basics to whip up some crude, textured, and animated models to use in their tests. If you would like to learn Blender in more detail, or you are an artist looking for a richer how-to document for Blender, I recommend the Introduction to Character Animation tutorial which can be found on the BlenderWiki. This series of articles covers only the bare essentials, and may be used as a companion to the previously mentioned tutorial.
Since we saw the extent of my artistic talent, I’ve decided to take an actually good model and modify it. I’ve used the blue alien guy model from the Introduction to Character Animation tutorial and modified it somewhat. That tutorial goes into some material, texture and lighting concepts that are a little different from what we’re doing here, because that tutorial isn’t specifically for game development, and definitely not for XNA game development. For our purposes, we would rather do the UV unwrap and texture routine on a character model. And so I’ve done just that. I’ve taken Ryan’s untextured model, removed the eyes (so I’m left with just a single mesh), unwrapped it, and layed a ridiculously simple texture on top of it. You can see where we’re starting from in the video below:
Once again my pitiful artistry has taken a pretty cool model and turned it into something rather sad, but I think it will work great for what we’re going to do here. First of all, Ryan has already done the hard work of making sure the model has vertices in the right places, and because I chose such a simple texture, it should be pretty easy to see what’s going on.
In Part III, we’re only going to add a skeleton to our mesh, and play around with it a little bit. We’re not going to build any animations until Part IV.
In short, here’s what we’re going to do:
- Add an armature to our model
- Add bones to the armature in a sensible way that will allow us to be able to do the kinds of animations we want to do
- Link up vertices in the model with bones in the model, so that moving a bone causes the model to move (we’ll use weight painting for this)
- Talk about inverse kinematics and forward kinematics, and see how each of them affects our model
One thing that I think is interesting to keep in mind: although bones in the 3D modeling sense are nearly analogous to bones in the biological sense, the relationship isn’t exactly 1-1. For starters, we don’t move around because our bones start moving around, we move around because our muscles start moving around. The bones are just there to structure everything. That’s ok though, because you can think of your mouse as a muscle system, moving your model’s bones around and relying on the joints to keep everything in place. The most important thing to keep in mind is that sometimes you’re going to want more bones than you think.
I looked at a model of a large woman earlier today that had the typical skeleton you’d expect, plus a giant bone right in the middle of her chest, apparently so you could animate her breasts bouncing if you wanted to. It sounds pretty ghastly to have a bone there, but that’s what you gotta do if you want to animate a part of your model that doesn’t usually have a bone. Some less disturbing examples would be vehicles, which might have a bone for each of the wheels, or a character wearing a robe — you might add bones for the robe, so both the character and his clothing can have their own motion.
Basically, just don’t get too locked into thinking that your model of a human should have all the same bones as a real human. A lot of those bones are going to be redundant, and you may end up needing bones that don’t exist in nature. Millions of years of natural selection have resulted in us having the bones and muscles required for the movements we need to do. Any more or any less wouldn’t make sense. Similarly, your model is going to need only the bones required for the kind of motions you are going to animate it into. If you just want your model to stand there and wave, it’s not going to make a whole lot of sense to add a bunch of toe bones.
Getting Ready
First of all, we are going to want our skeleton to be symmetrical. You could build the bones without any sort of mirroring, but since you probably built your character model using a mirror modifier, you will likely want the skeleton to be symmetrical as well. So first of all, let’s position the 3D cursor at the center of our mesh. To do this, enter edit mode, select a vertex somewhere on the center of your model (this should be somewhere on the seam of where your model was mirrored), and hit SHIFT S. Select Cursor->Selection.
Now switch to object mode. Add an armature with Space->Add->Armature. You should see a little bone starting from where you positioned the cursor. Bones have a root and a tip. We’re going to want to build a bunch of parent-child relationships between our bones, so its important to know which is which. The fat end is the root, and the skinny end is the tip. If we extrude a bone from the tip of another bone, it will become the child of the first bone. If we extrude a bone from the root, they’ll be connected, but not exactly in the same way. We’ll see what that means later.
Now before doing anything else, look down in the buttons window. In the edit buttons, you should see a box for the armature we just added. Give it a name (Armature is a fine name), and then click the X-Axis Mirror and X-Ray buttons. The first button will make sure we create mirror bones whenever we extrude a bone along the x-axis, and the second button will make sure that bones show through the surface of the mesh.
Now you can get as detailed or as simple as you want in how you build your skeleton out from here. I’m going with simple, because I just want my guy to do some basic stuff. I don’t need him to bend at the side or anything crazy like that, so one big bone is going to be just fine for the spine. But if you wanted your model to bend realistically at the waist, you’d need a more complicated spine.
Ok, so go into side view, select the entire bone (by right-clicking somewhere in the middle of it), and G to grab it. Move it down so its root is in the pelvis area. You might notice that the bone isn’t inside the model, so in side view, move it to roughly the center. Now grab just the tip, hit g, and drag the tip up to about shoulder level. Don’t go up to the neck, because we’re going to extend the arm bones from this tip.
Now we’re going to extrude ourselves a neck. Select just the tip, hit E, and constrain to the z axis. Drag up to make a little neck bone. Repeat the process again for the head bone. You can make the head bone jut out of the top of the head a little bit, which will make it easier to grab it.
Now, a couple interesting things here. First, every time you extruded a new bone, it was automatically made a child of the original bone. So we’ve basically built up a little chain here. Second, each of these bones was given an automatic name, and it’s a good idea to rename these bones as we go along to something that makes sense to us. So far, I’ve got bones named spine, neck and head. You’ll agree that’s a bit more descriptive than Bone, Bone.001 and Bone.002. I don’t know if XNA and/or the fbx format have the same problem as DirectX and/or the x format, but I seem to remember these bone names being very important. As in, the . in the auto-generated name screwed things up pretty badly. I’d just advise avoiding any punctuation in object names period.
Now we can extrude a couple arm bones, and hand bones. Here we’re going to take advantage of that x-mirror thing from before. Select the root of the neck bone (which is the tip of the spine). Switch to front view. We don’t just want to extrude now, we want to symmetrically extrude, so instead of hitting E, hit SHIFT E. Move to the right and you’ll see, magically, we also get a left bone. Place a bone for the shoulder, upper arm, forearm, and hand, and name them all appropriately. Mine are named shoulder_l, upperarm_l, forearm_l, hand_l, upperarm_r, etc… However you name them, just use the same naming convention. So don’t do something like Left_Upper_Arm and upperarm_r. They should match up if you want blender to know what you’re trying to do.
Remember you’re free to use G to move things around to get it just the way you want it. Just don’t do any rotation or scaling unless you know what you’re doing.
At this point, if you switch to Pose Mode you can start playing around with your bones. Have fun, just remember to undo everything you did. As you move things around, you’ll notice that moving a parent bone causes the children to move as well. That’s probably what you expected. Keep in mind that this kind of relationship is called Forward Kinematics. It basically means that when you move one bone, the motion is carried forward to all of the child bones.
You can also play with Inverse Kinematics. To do this, go to the Armature panel in the button window and click the Auto IK button. Now move around a bone. Things are very different this time but, oddly, more natural. Inverse kinematics basically means that when you move one of the child bones, the motions is pushed inversely back to the parents.
A way to think of this is to reach your hand out. Imagine someone grabs it and starts shaking it. In forward kinematics, only your hand moves. Your arm bones, being parents of the hand, don’t receive any of the motion from your hand. They just sit there. But what actually happens if someone grabs your hand and starts shaking it? Your arm starts moving in a rolling, wave-like motion. The parent bones receive some of the momentum of your hand and move as well.
For this reason, IK is probably going to be easier to deal with when posing. You can use FK to get more specific with your poses (when you are just focused on the specific position of a single bone).
For simplicity sake, we’re not going to deal with the lower body here. We’re just going to be animating the top of this guy. In part IV we’ll add a couple animations to him — a wave, and a salute. For the lower body, the process is more or less the same, with a couple little gotchas when you need to keep the feet lined up during walking/jumping/crouching, etc. But you can figure it out.
So we’ve got a skeleton, but moving it doesn’t affect our mesh. How do we link the two?
We need to create an armature modifier. If you’ve used the mirror modifier, or the subsurf modifier, you know how to use modifiers. If not, it’s simple. Switch back to object mode and select the mesh (not the armature). In the edit buttons window, click the Add Modifier button, and select Armature. In the OB: box, type the name you gave your armature earlier. Unclick the Envelopes button.
Now if you select the armature and switch to Pose Mode, you’ll notice that nothing seems to have changed. That’s because we haven’t told Blender which vertices go with which bone. We’ll do that now.
Weight Painting
Select your mesh and switch to Weight Paint mode. Your mesh will turn dark blue. Weight painting is a very simple concept. You select a bone, decide how much influence you want that bone to have on a vertex, and then “paint” the influence onto your mesh.
Look at the buttons window. You’ll see a Paint box down there now. Set Weight to 1.0. Set Opacity to 1.0. Turn off All Faces. Turn off Vertex Dist. Leave Soft on, and Turn X-Mirror on. We basically just said we want to paint heavy influence wherever we set down the brush, and we want symmetrical bones to be painted automatically in the same way for us.
Select the left hand bone. Paint the hand, all of it, but only the hand. You might need to do a fair amount of zooming, panning and rotating to get everything. But be as thorough as you can. If the bones are getting in your way, go down to the Armature panel (in object mode) and switch the bone draw mode from Octahedron to Stick. That will turn your bones into thin sticks that are less likely to get in the way.
Now select the right hand bone. Whoah! It’s already painted for you! That’s what all the symmetrical stuff was about (and the bone naming stuff). So just go through your model and paint the vertices that should go with your bones. One thing you might want to do is to grab your bones and move them around. Make sure the right verts go with them, and none get left behind. If you drag the hand, for example, and the hand goes with your bone except for one vertex, you can just paint over it to make it snap into place. Moving bones around is a good way to make sure you got everything, as well as to get at verts that are hard to reach. Just move all the painted ones out of the way, and keep painting.
What if you want to erase? Simple. Either hit CTRL Z or go to the Paint window and click the Sub button. This will subtract the 1.0 opacity wherever you paint. Check out those buttons while you’re there so you know you have them available to you.
You don’t need to use weights of 1 and opacities of 1. You can mix and match weights and do all sorts of crazy stuff with weight painting, but for our purposes here its enough to basically say “yes, this bone affects this vertex” or “no, this bone does not affect this vertex.” As long as everything moves around normally when we grab a bone, we’re good to go.
I actually find this process to be the most intuitive of the entire modeling-texturing-rigging-animating process. It just makes sense to me. I move the bones around, and paint the vertices whenever something doesn’t look right. Eventually, it all just looks right, and I know I’m good.
One note: When weight painting with an eye towards exporting fbx files for XNA, remember that every vertex needs a weight associated with it. When I first added this model to my project and tried to build, I got an error: BoneWeightCollection does not contain any weighting values. Apparently this means that my mesh has bones, but some vertices aren’t weighted to any of the bones. For whatever reason, this causes XNA to freak. It makes sense, but it’s still kind of annoying. So just make sure you paint every vertex to some bone. In our case, since we’re only rigging the top half, I just painted everything in the bottom half to the spine.Ok, now finish up painting. You know you’re done when you can go into pose mode and move your model around without any weird tearing or other strange behavior.
Since we’re just learning the bare minimum here, let’s call this sucker done and get ready to do some animation.
If you want to, you can pose your model in object mode, and export to fbx. If you load your model in XNA, you should see it all posed. Here’s what mine looks like:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXsakGoRlK8
Modeling for XNA with Blender Part IV
March 16, 2008
In the final part of the Blender/XNA series, we add two animations to our textured model, load it into the SkinnedSample using the new content processor, and switch between animation clips.
If you’ve been following along thus far, you now know how to build models in Blender, apply UV mapped textures to them, and build armatures with which you can pose and animate your models. Now it’s time to finish the whole process off and animate this thing.
I’ve again switched models. The simple guy I used in Part III was fun, but I wanted to use something a little simpler this round. To that end, I’ve built a really simple worm out of a couple cylinders. Our worm has two bones, one in the back and one in the front. We’ll be giving him two actions: a wiggle animation with which he lifts his head and shakes it left and right, and a squirm animation with which he does a sort of wave motion with his entire body. This looks a little bit like a crude walk.
Let’s take a look at what this is all going to look like in XNA:
Ok, before we begin, we should review. Here are the steps you need to get ready to animate in Blender for XNA:
- Build up your model in Blender.
- Apply any modifiers to finalize your model.
- Use the UV/Image Editor to texture your model.
- Add an armature and any bones you need to pose your model, making sure to rename your bones logically and responsibly (i.e., get rid of all the .001 stuff)
- Weight paint your model’s vertices making sure to paint every vertex. If you have vertices that you don’t want to move ever, give your model a bone that you aren’t going to touch, and weight those vertices to that bone.
- Add an armature modifier to your model, but don’t apply it.
If you’ve done all that, you’re all ready to create animations for your model. Our process is fairly simple at this point:
- Modify our workspace for animation.
- Use pose mode to pose the model, and use the keyframe editor to lock down our poses into frames.
- Add new animations as needed and repeat.
- Export to fbx, and load in our XNA project.
Let’s begin.
Modifying the work space
You should already know how to split a window and change the window function. We’re going to need two new windows for this.
First, we need an Action Editor window and a Timeline window. You probably want to split your 3D view window vertically to make room for the action editor, and split the buttons window horizontally to make room for the timeline.
In your 3D view window, change the viewport shading mode to Textured (optional), and select your armature. Switch to Pose Mode.
Now we’re all set up to animate.
Building Animations, aka Actions
In the action editor, add a new action by clicking the arrow button next to BAKE and selecting ADD NEW. Give it a name. This will be the name you’ll use to reference this animation in XNA, so pick something descriptive. My two animations are called wiggle and squirm.
Now, we’re just covering the basics, remember, so I’m going to walk you through the easiest way to build an animation without thinking too much. You should get familiar with the keyframe concept if you aren’t already. But it’s pretty simple. When a bone changes, either its location, rotation or scale, you add a keyframe. If it doesn’t move, you don’t need to create a keyframe. But — you may need to create keyframes between two exact LocRotScale settings to say “don’t move here, but move after this”.
Anyways, again, we’re just looking at the basics, so here is a braindead easy way of animating with keyframes.
- Move to frame 1.
- Pose your model.
- Select all bones in your armature and hit I. Select Insert Key->LocRotScale.
You now should see a keyframe added for every bone in your armature.
Now, move to another frame. Pose and repeat. Continue doing this until you’ve worked through your entire animation cycle.
One thing to keep in mind: XNA is going to expect that your animations work at 60 FPS. You can manually adjust your animation to occupy more or less frames by moving keyframes around in the action editor. The same basic edit tools apply — Grab, Bounding box select, etc.
When you are done with your animation, you can play it back in the timeline. Just set the last frame to the last frame in your animation, rewind, and hit play.
We’re going to create two animations, so we’ll do this whole process twice. Add a new action, give it a name, and repeat. When you make a new animation, Blender automatically copies all the keyframe data from the last animation, so feel free to delete all of it if you need to.
One thing you might want to be aware of. Do you see a record button in the timeline? That button will automatically do the key framing for you. Just create an initial keyframe in frame 1 for all of your bones, then move to the next frame and pose. Blender automatically updates all the keyframes.
Another thing to keep in mind: most of your animations are going to be loops. One way to accomplish looping is simply to copy the keyframes from frame 1 into your final frame. To do this, unselect all the key frames, hit B to bounding select all the keyframes in frame 1, then hit SHIFT D (duplicate). You’ll automatically enter grab mode, so move your duplicated frames over to your final frame.
That’s all there is to animation. Now we need to export.
Before we do that, though, here’s another example of a Blender built animated model — the dude from part III animated to do a little dance:
Just in case you didn’t think my worm model was cool enough. That animation took me about 15 seconds to set up, which should give you an idea of how easy this all can be once you set everything up properly. Just add talent (which, again, I lack when it comes to modeling and animating).
Exporting
You’ve probably heard that Blender 2.45 has an improved fbx exporter that works great. Well, not for me. I had to use the exporter created by TripleB Games, which you can find here. Download that, copy it to your scripts directory, and restart Blender. Now we’re not going to use the built in exporter anymore, we’re going to use the Modified for XNA exporter instead.
Exporting is simple. If everything was set up properly, just run the exporter, select All Scene Objects and All Actions, then click export. As before, you will need to manually edit your fbx file to point to the texture map you used.
At this point, we should be able to load our model the old way — i.e., adding it to our project, and creating a Model object in XNA. If that much doesn’t work, go back a couple steps and try again.
Importing in XNA
Now for the good stuff. We want to display this in XNA, right? Open the SkinnedSample project. Add your new model to the project using the Add Existing method. Here’s the catch: we need to change the content processor we want to use for this model.
View the properties for your newly imported model. You should see a field named Content Processor at the bottom. Change it from Model - XNA Framework to SkinnedModelProcessor. This new processor will go through your animated model and build a tag for the animation data it includes.
Now, just look at your LoadContent method. Change it to load your model instead of the original dude:
-
currentModel = Content. Load<Model> ( "Models//MyWorm" );
Note that currentModel is just the plain old Model class we know and love.
Now change the method to load one of the animations you created for this model:
-
AnimationClip clip = skinningData. AnimationClips [ "wiggle" ];
Build and run. You should now see your model moving around.
In my worm demo video, I created two AnimationClips, one for each of my two animations. I then handled keyboard input to switch the active animation on a specific keypress. That’s why you can see two different animations cycling in the video.
And that’s all there is to it! That’s everything you need to know to build textured, animated models in Blender for XNA.
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