blengine | 
06 10th, 2008
GLSL shading is now in blender, thanks to the work of our rockstar coder Brecht. Just enable it in your preferences under System & OpenGL, and change to the shaded draw type. Among other amazing things, this means normal maps in 3d view!
Along with this also comes the ability to paint multiple textures directly onto your objects using texture paint mode in the 3d view. Because with glsl blender can draw materials with texture stacks that contain stencil maps, splatting grass and dirt onto your terrain is as simple as using texture paint mode with a stencil map assigned to the uvs. It’s such a beautiful thing. Watch the video to learn how this is done. The idea is that this same texture stack will then be exported to crystal space for splatting for the game.
Download the .ogg file
Download the blend file from the video
Oh now this is sweet news! Thanks Brecht!
this is ‘excellent’!!!!! great !!!!
Nice! Blenders bodypaint. xD
Go Brecht, Go!
awesome! 🙂 but why is it much darker in the viewport than on the render? (i could only watch the video without sound at the moment…)
@horace: probably because of the light setup 😉
Really great stuff!
Keep it up guys!
My first reaction: OMG O_O. That terrific!! Really, one of the things i always wanted to see in Blender.
Heh, “what i’m about to show u may blow your mind”, how modest ;D But i understand because it did blow my mind 😀 I felt like watching idTech5 demo. U know, i got a feeling that as soon as Apricot is done, Blender and CS really gonna rock the game dev world. Time to go to the basement look jaw 😉
Great stuff 😀
The blend that keeps on blending!
What bothers me:
Brecht has just ONE fan club website! That’s a shame! :))
This system give us very precise previews, it’s incredible…
Thank you Apricot!
AMAZING!! Thank you Apricot team (+ blender and CS) for carrying such a bright vision for open source gaming design
All I can say is Brecht, dude, your da man!
I love you man!
Brecht! Brecht! All your fans are scream your name! I’m holding a sign with your name in the third in somewhere! you are a rockstar!
Holly crap! This is amazing! 😀
Thanks to Brecht and Apricot!
Just one little question: will be a 2.48 version??? 😛
I can wait until 2.50 is out but… 😀
Why did you release 2.46 :(!
Are these GLSL features supported by the Blender Game Engine too? (When you press P?)
Because it would be weird if you would have cool graphics in object/shaded mode and no cool graphics in the engine. 😀
better and better every minute…
Love this feature.
SuperAwesomeBlenderness.
Apricot is blooming, thanks to all the devs and the team.
Blender takes my breath away, every day.
Wow! Thanks Apricot team!!!
Awesome….
when does http://brechtvanlommelfanclub.com/
get updated?
Msn I look foward to using that easter egg in my games. 🙂
Cool.
awesome.. some great tools getting developed. Does the GLSL normal map view support depth maps too? I was playing with the Apricot release and I could get normal maps etc but not parallax mapping? Also with the texture paint.. will we see it painting correctly around UV islands? Thanks for the hard work guys!
from your video it looks like texture paint mode may actually be usable, for me its always been very slow(paint -> 10 seconds later texture is updated). looks great:)
very, very nice feature. Hopefully that will all fit into the pipeline using ogre instead of CS after all… ;). Abstracting from the grafic engine would be nice!
Jonny.
GLSL rock! Go Apricot Team!
Can i will use multiple stencil and more than 2 color map? i.e. for ground,grass and stone etc.
@Jonny: not really! This feature is nice for every kind Game Engine rendering preview. GLSL for normalmaping is standard…
CS will benefit in short term but other engines will follow this aproach soon!
I second Squareline’s question, is it possible to use more than two color maps with multiple stencils?
Yeah, you can use multiple stencil and color maps.
I used to do this using an alpha map but this is much faster, and now I can see results in realtime, as opposed to rendering to see a result.
Thanks Chris.
I try the multiple stencil, but i cant activate the second one. How can i do this? The second stencilmap only works if i painting on it in Uv editor not in 3d.
“GL Shaded Mode” isn’t avaliable on my Blender 2.46 (Windows) 🙁
@squareline, listen to the audio, Chris explains this! 🙂
You showed two layers in the video but can you scale this up? For example could you do sand->dirt->grass->rock->snow?
@ Andrew Fenn:
I quote Chris,:
“Yeah, you can use multiple stencil and color maps.”
this system is awesome 🙂
Yes i listened it a couple of times, but my English is a bit poor :).
But in the end i understand:
need to switch edit mode than select faces and select secondstencil.jpg from uv editor. Thats easy as a breeze. 🙂
Most games use vertex maps for the ‘stencil’ (mask is what it’s usually called).
Can you use vertex maps also?
Eh.. anyone caring about my question?
Are these GLSL features supported by the Blender Game Engine too? (When you press P?)
@ William, yes you can.
@ Christiaan Bakker(AniCator), no :(, its only for Blender’s 3DView.
edit: BUT!, a little bird told me that “they are looking into it” 🙂
sweeeeeeeeeeeet… i was anticipating most of the blender stuff was gonna be from peach but it’s amazing how much blender is getting from the apricot folks! freakin’ awesome work guys!
a fresh splatting test:
http://img399.imageshack.us/my.php?image=splattingtestmj1.jpg
Too bad there is no place for nurbs in game art 🙁
I think it would be great if Brecht would code a full real time editor like in many game engines. This would be great for animation as well, seeing as animators could see dumb down versions of particle effect and animations in real-time. We could make real time adjustments to physics, movements, etc.
P.S. Brecht should post Coding tutorials on Vimeo or somthing… 🙂
Wonderful !
Now we’ve got a problem with Blender. With so many cool features we need a way to remember that they exists when we need them. 🙂
Great job.
This is amazing, really good work guys 🙂
@venomgfx: Give that bird a few good looking female birds and some more seeds. 🙂
Or is it a she? 😛
I hope it will be made possible since that would improve the game engine a lot too. Now that a lot of leaks have been fixed it would be very nice if the graphical capabilities would be extended and enhanced too.
I would be willing to help documenting the new features when they come available but I still have to learn a lot about writing shaders.
thanks!, *any* kind of help is well received 🙂
just contact us, cheers!
This is a little bit off topic but,
Are you using the blend2crystal plugin thing to build the whole game?
Or are you using CS and a programming language?
Sorry if it dosent make sense, im very new to programming.
Pablo Vazquez or venomGFX 🙂
Can i use material based splatting?
i.e. i would like use a normal-map only for rock area and a different normal-map for ground and for grass without normal-map . This is possible somehow?
This is what I have been waiting for. Finally I can see the model as I should in workarea also. I don’t wish for a 2.47 version. I wish for 2.46.1 with only difference being the adding of GLSL functionality published today. =)
This makes a world of difference in usability of Blender.
Great work, Apricot team!
Noice m8!
would this work if i assigned four different splattable textures to the colors RGBk? 😉
I have the same problem as John. I don’t have GL Shaded Mode in my blender 2.46
Hi, I stumbled on this gem while going to “class” (those video tutorials sure work well!) this morning, and swapped programs frantically in an attempt to keep up with the video. However, as a few other people here noted, the GL Shaded Mode button doesn’t exist. 😛 I just wanted to clarify, is there anyway to implement this feature without waiting for a new Blender release?
Wohoo! It’s really there. Textured shaded lightchanges in realtime.
Apricot Branch + Game Menu + Blender GLSL Materials. Really nice!
Erm, I don’t know what build you use, or where to download it, but when I texture paint, all goes White, shadeless, so I don’t have a clue of what I’m painting..
Cheers
I don’t have GLSL in my blender v2.46, or maybe I do but the button to activate it is not in the user preferences (under “System & OpenGL”). Help please. 🙁
Does anyone know where I can find some Blender game engine tutorials? (not the simple ones, maybe with python…)
And what is this crystal thing?
TY for answers!
Hey, you can to download one of the latest blender builds with glsl from http://www.graphicall.org
Does it support parallax bump map too?
Wow Brecht…You ARE the future of Blender !
Thank you ! And thanks to all the developpers !
more goodies in GLSL! 🙂
http://venomgfx.com.ar/apricot/blender_glsl.jpg
Brecht is a son of a gun! while readig this article on sunday i was so happy, an now it´s in the GE too! thank you, thank you, thank you!
I downloaded the latest apricot build from the graphicall link, but can’t see a GL Shaded Mode button.
Do I need to install other OpenGL things for it to show and run?
Wow! Man this is so awesome. I can’t believe all of this is finally happening! 🙂
I think my crad wont support it..
I have an NVIDIA GeForce 9300M G
I dont understand, when I want to vertex paint, my object goed white, shadeless..
Hi. A dumb, perhaps out-of-place question: I have blender 2.46, and there is not a “GL Shaded mode” button in the User Preferences window. Also, this blender version draws everything _very_slow_ on my machine. Previous versions (2.45 and older) ran pretty nice. I have a NVidia GeForce FX 5500 with the lastest driver. Any insights?
Thanks alot!
Ups. I’m on Linux 🙂 xorg-server 7.2
i’ve done everything the same as you have Brecht but it just wont work do you know how i could fix this issue.
and yes i’ve done everything correct >:( EVERYTHING
why don’t i have the little button that you say to click?!
Hi
It looks great but when I press P, GE starts but I can see white terrain :(.
Anyone know which build I should install? I would prefer one with Grease Paint, the new icon set, and most of all, the GLSL shader.
Anyone? Thanks! 🙂
Aha, smart people told me how to get the shader working:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?p=1286320
Activate GLSL in menu: ->”Game”->”Blender GLSL Materials”.
Then hit “Alt+Z” (textured mode).
Voila.
i have laptop acer with nvidia 9300m gs 256 but i have lil lag in graphics :(( i know nothin about nvidia this is my 1st tie to use it any solutions ??
Is there a html or pdf version somewhere?
(my comp blocks all vids)
None of the BGE DVDs/book published/sold by Blender shop work with the new Blender 2.5 releases. Could someone simply publish an example or 2 of the the new API. Maybe a conversion script could be published like the that was done for the 2.48 to 2.49 conversion. Even a short tutorial with a converted BGE script would be helptul.