I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on using blender as a content creation tool. I have never used it and I was wondering how much work is involved in moving a model into XNA along with the proper textures, skins, bones, animation and scripting. Thanks in Advance.

I have been learning to use Blender for about a month now, and partly finished a spaceship model.

I'm currently using the model in XNA using the FBX export from blender. also I've tryed the Direct.x export, and it works too.

Hope that helps..... JLE

I personally like it. You will find though that alot of people will be giving the interface grief and will tell you that it sucks.

When using Blender the Interface is a bit trange to get used to but after a small ammount of time you will find that it is easy to use. As it sounds like you are just starting out I do not think ou will have a problem with it. One thing to remember is that the interface has been designed and layed out so that you can keep one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard.

If you do have any questions you can always drop me a line here, or though my site and I might be able to lead you in the right direction.

Functionality = Great.

Learning Curve = Steep.

User Interface = Ugly.

Cost = Free.

Blender = Worth learning if you want to make your own 3D games.

Mark.

There is a free md3 content handler out there for XNA, and a free MD3 export tool for blender.

Combine the two and you have your animated characters.

I have had problems with the .X exporter in blender, it doesn't always work with XNA.

I seem to remember it has something to do with materials.

I also have been looking for an example of an animated fbx working in XNA, but so far I have seen nothing that works.

Anybody else seen one?

When I export to FBX I have no issues (other than aniamtions), have had problems exporting to X but that was in an earlier version and have not tried as of late.

An FBX animation....check out the skinned animation samle here, it uses an FBX mesh, you can also use it with an X file too.

To this day my biggest problem with Blender is I have no idea how to do certain things with it.  I can build a mesh, but I can not figure out the material or texture features.  I stumbled upon it now and then but not reliably enough that I can use it.

Instead I have been using Wings3D merely because I like the intuitiveness of "stamping" a texture on a model.  No, it's not as precise, but I can't make the precision tool work, so...

I scoured the Internet for tutorials that would definitively help me get a model made and then I figured I could get it into XNA, but none existed that I could make sense of (programmer, not artist here...).

That's all that has stopped me from using Blender.  I would prefer it because of the strong animation support and the idea that the skinned animation sample was out there waiting to take advantage of it, but I figured if I can't learn these simple first steps, I'll never learn the rest.

Can't argue it's an attractive tool... but I would agree the learning curve must be steep.

Blender is definitely my XNA modeling tool of choice for 3 major reasons:

1. The price is right

2. There are a plethora of tutorials spread throughout the web for everybody from beginners to stuff so advanced I'll never get there

3. It works with XNA (for the most part)

The interface is definitely unique and takes a loooooong time to master. But it is extremely powerful and can really speed up modeling once you learn your way around.

I have actually successfully been able to create and load a Blender animation in FBX format in XNA. I don't recall the precise specifics but I had to manually modify the .fbx file to correct the parent bone's parent to get it to work.

I have not been able to successfully get "advanced" fancy materials/textures applied in Blender to show up on the models when rendered in XNA. But I've been working around that by taking my models up through UV maps in Blender and applying 2DTextures to them in code.

E Man:

1. The price is right

partly OT: After spending many hours in search of best exporters for blender. I started searching for dynamic content loading. At the end I am exporting everything to xml described binaries. I learnt python doing it. It took about 3 days... Now I can export whatever I want, import whatever and whenever on any machine, using language I want. heh... it's all that easy. So ppl - don't be affraid of doing it in different way than through content pipeline. In my opinion content pipeline really sucks right now. I spend some time using it and all I got was new disappointments. Idea, and code behind, is of course great. But limitations... are much bigger. Creating "good" editor with it, is suicide. Creating really dynamic content is impossible (almost, but it still sucks).

I do love Blender. I already wrote about "genuine, but different" interfaces in some different topics. Blender got great, but "new" interface. It means you have to learn a new not standarized UI, and waste some time. I already learnt Blender UI, so I can say that blender is massive... but whatabout rest? Ehh.