Every so often somthing so fantastic happens that you just find yourself jumping up and shouting YES! For those of you in the indie game and open source development crowd, like myself, this is one of those times. Our good friend Angelo or Angjminer as you all know him, has been hard at work and I do mean hard at work on the brand spankin new version of CryBlend, version 3.1. Because of the recent 2.63 Blender release, I was almost not able to write this news for you today but Mr. Angjminer worked right though the weekend and at 4:46 PM PST today he was done with the port. I have tell you that this is a phenomenal addition to the open source arsenal of tools, dare I say that with this and one other tool I will be writing about in a future article you can now produce a game 100% free! So lets get to it shall we, there is a great deal to cover.



First your probably wondering where can I get this tiny slice of awesome? Well through the technical wizardry of the the Internets it is brought to you at the bottom of this article, just click the link and wait 3 or so seconds. This thing is dinky 25K zipped and 192k in all its Python glory. Once you have it downloaded there are a few simple steps to get it up and functional. Read on to learn more...

Installing the Add-On

• Unzip CryBlend_3.1.zip to a location you will remember
• Copy the io_export_cryblend folder entirely to \Blender\2.63\scripts\addons
• Open Blender and select file > User Preferences
• Select the Addons tab and then game Game-Export catagory
• Check the box in the upper right hand corner
• Now the add-on is activated
• I like to save as default so the add-on will always be active

Activating the Add-On

• From the CryBLend Menu in the top tool bar in Blender select "Find the Resource Compiler"
  
  
  
  
  
• Navigate to the location where you placed the CryEngine SDK
• Select rc.exe located in \Bin32\rc
• Click the "Find the Resource Compiler" button in the upper right hand corner in Blender
• Now the add-on is ready to export to CryENGINE 3

Now that you have CryBlend installed here are a few tutorials you can run through to get you started. The following video turtorials were put togther by Angjminer they should help to wet your whistle a bit, then you can move on to bigger and better objects. I suggest running through these just to get the hang of the work flow. It is not complicated but it is very specific which matters a great deal. If you have any questions Angjminer has been more than helpful in the development thread for CryBlend and I wager we will see more of the same in this one.


CryBlend intro and Basic Cube primitive export



Adding a Physics Proxy



Setting up a Pick-able Object




Now that we have the basics covered I want to talk a bit about one of the unique features that comes with CryBlend 3.1. Angjminer put in a tool that will find and highlight degenerated faces. Degenerated faces are only edges which are not part of a tri or quad. These can be a pain to track down and he has made a tool that will show you where they are and highlight them. The tool is careful not to take any action, rather it highlights them so you can decide what you want to do with them. A very cool bonus feature for sure.


Find Degenerated Faces Tool




Feature List

• Model Export - Blender to CryENGINE 3
• Material Physics Support
• Degenerated Face Finder
• Full Support for N-Gons (B-Mesh)
• In Add-On rc.exe location

Angjminer has done a stellar job with this tool. With it you can build all your art assets in Blender and get them into the Sandbox editor following a few simple guidelines and a couple of menu selections. Angelo has quite a few more plans to leverage some of the new features in Blender 2.63. The next version of CryBlend looks to include skeletal animation export and deeper integration with the rc adding the capability of running the dds conversion from the uv/image editor. This will offer the ability to convert generated textures, normal, specular, and more directly from Blender. Angelo has put allot of time and effort into CryBlen 3.1 all in the spirit of the open source community development, so be sure to show him your thanks how ever you see fit. With this release of CryBlend Angjminer has significantly lowered the barrier of entry for game developers that want to tap into the raw AAA power off CryENGINE 3 and do not have a AAA budget to do it with. Until next time...

~ Have fun making games



Download

Related LInks:

• Original Thread: future of cryblend
• Blender 3D: Download
• SDK User Defined Properties: Refrence

Maya, 3DsMax and now Blender : )
so.. what's about the last real thing: CryC4D!? :')

edit: and XSI of course, sorry..

Hats off to you Angjminer

This is AMAZING!! It will make a huge difference to CryEngine indie developers!

Thank you Angjminer!!!

I'm consistently impressed by the progress on this. Tutorials too? Excellent stuff.

Darn it, if I see you in real life I would give you 5 dollars to show how appreciated that I am.

This is Fantastic! Thanks Angjminer.
I do have a problem though, the first time i exported just to try it it worked fine but now when ever I export something and place it on my map I can walk right through it? This didn't happen the first time did I unknowingly skip a step?

Thanks for the help and Thanks again Angjminer!

+1

Installed Maya just for conversion of static meshes from C4D.
Besides, it works...
Compared a lot of 3D-Programs I can approve, Maya is the absolute #1 over-killer in this field. But even of this high complexity it's so unhandy and overloaded for the most necessary of simply object-creation and animations.
Anyone has his favorite tool, so I thing I'm not the only one who would love to see an official support (plugin) for C4D. Not at least because like the CryEngine itself, it's from Germany! go Crytek!! ^^'
(sometimes I could simply cry for it :')

u r not alone...

Why making plugin, we need CE3 support the industry standard format like FBX, DAE or ASE.

UDK and Unity already support those format.

@pxlntwrk
glad to know. : )




Your named standard DAE is the primary and only format that is used by CE3.
In my opinion the FBX is the most friendly and universal 3D-format today. The CryEngine use his own very strict plugin for exporting the meshes (with some optimizations), because you have to set some attributes before get them running in the engine. This plugin doesn't exist for C4D, one of the most popular 3D-programs on the marked.

An DND-solution like in UDK or Unity (which is able to generate the folder-structure and separate the meshes and textures automatically) would be just awesome, that's right.

if you look at an fbx and dae of the same model the info contained within is almost identical,
i didnt have a useable collada exporter to go by when i started writing this addon,
had to rely on the datablocks, and fbx exporter to get the job done,
hardbody animation is all mine though, that piece of happiness just flowed for some reason.
the goal is to be comparable with the maya and 3ds exporters.
on a side note, why dont one of you get the sdk for your prefered app and write an exporter?
if it allready has a collada exporter you should be able to get the code for that, look at some exported dae , and add the needed info/utils. shouldnt be that hard to do.
a quick look shows python support,
http://www.maxon.net/support/developer-support.html
thats what this exporter is writen in.
just think,
when i started the addon 2 months ago, i never did anything with python,
and now here it is, an almost complete, very functional exporter.
any way thats my 2 cents.

Hi and just forgot to say, very well done with the „CryBlend“ angjminer! One of some expedient addons for the CE3. Maybe Crytek could suprise you and so we would see your work in the next SDK-version : )

C4D: Never writen something like such an exporter before, so I can’t appraise the complexity for this employment. But it seems you’ve right, so it’s possible to do it over python. Thought I have to deal with C++ for this.. (I'm not expert in)
Cinema4D supports COLLADA 1.4, 1.5 also FBX 6.1, 7.1, 7.2.
The tree-structure (names) of objects is perfectly compatible with Maya. The C4D-Tex-Tags are your Tex-ID's in Maya and works as well.
If you wrote your plugin in python so maybe you could easily port it to Cinema4D. *khem.. Give it a try

Let me make the first step for you.. : )

but i dont own c4d, and 30 days is not enough time ,
although, i am sure that my addon could be ported without a lot of fus, just have to keep the tags , the data is what would be different(how it is accessed from c4d)