Spring RTS Engine

Hello guys - i started making 3d modells with Blender. i want to make the content potentially usable with springrts. in short i want to know "what can i do in Blender and what i cannot do there" (i want to know which steps of unit development i can do in Blender and for which steps i have to use eventually othere programms)

i consider 3 steps (pls correct me if there are more things do to which i dont see right now):
1. 3d Modelling (this should be no problem to do in Blender i guess)

2. texturing??? (can i make full compatible texture and colouring with Blender?)
first i thougt "no problem" then i read some things at wiki (https://springrts.com/wiki/3DModels:Textures) about texturig and now i am not sure anymore. especially those 2 texture thing - can this be done with blender?

3. animation???
till now i have no idea about it maybe someone can enlight me.

I'm not qualified to talk about #1 and #3, but as far as texturing is concerned you should absolutely be able to do texturing in any software that supports it.


Texture2 is rather simple concept:

• G channel specifies reflectivity. If you use modern PBR texturing pipeline, this will be equivalent of metallic/metalness.

• R channel specifies emission strength. In the editors emission is usually represented either with 4 channels (RGB as color, A as a mix strength) or a single channel that specifies amount of emission from base color. The latter is what you put in G channel of texture2. The former cannot be done with primitive spring texturing system if emission color is different to the base color.

• A channel is a single bit value. To keep it simple value of 0.0 means that fragment is not rendered, value of 1.0 specifies that the fragment is shaded.

All in all, tex1 + tex2 allow to get basic Blinn-Phong shading going, that most editors should still support. If you want something fancier and up-to-date as far as modern rendering standards, I suggest you look at my PBR implementation for spring models: This introduces much more modern Cook-Torrance lighting model and slightly better shadows. Most importantly, though, the texturing workflow used in the PBR implementation should be 100% compatible with the current modeling/texturing software, including Blender.

You can do all three, though with caveats on 3 in particular. You should ask Anarchid / search the forum for his blender-animation-to-lua stuff.

I highly recommend that you snip the bits of code from otherprojects that make texture 2 much more useful in separating specularity from reflectivity. Effectively, R channel = glow, B channel = Specular, G channel = Reflectivity.

at the moment i don't need to make fancier stuff. at first, i want to learn the workflow. i already made some units but i stopped it because like i said i need to get a whole understanding to make a unit work in spring. For that reason, i actually experiment just with a cube. making uv mapping => export to upspring. Here i stuck at the moment cause cube is black in upsring. textures doesn't show up correctly and also uv mapping in uspring seems to have a problem with the exact coordinates (i used .obj file format) - so someone could give me guidance here i would appreciate.

anyway: if i understood right i could make (with the right knowledge) the whole workflow including double texturing and animation in Blender in a way that units will work in Spring. Is that correct?

last question for this moment: is there some possibility to test if unit works correctly in spring? kind of programm with spring test enviroment?

Spring is its own test environment. If you upload the .obj somewhere I will take a look at it.

@Flozi - i can send you the .obj with discord. but my test object is only a cube because the material/texture is actually the problem and this is what i want to understand now.

is it a problem that the cube has a self made texture? i have seen also that blender creates a .mtl file along with that .obj file. i guess thats where the data of the material is saved. u need this too?

just tell me exactly what u need and i will send it to you via discord. i can change the texture also for an BAR texture if that helps

Just the obj should be sufficient, I don't tend to use discord but I suppose I can hop on if you don't have an alternative

i can send u with anything u want. email if u send me your contact. can i attach a file also here? i dont see anything just image and url - maybe i am blind.

my email: timoschoefer@web.de so send me your contact there if u want.

See https://github.com/springcabal . A lot of our games are made in blender and exported in .dae (collada)

The obj you sent me has no uvs, would explain why the texture was black So question becomes why does it have no UVs, how did you export it to obj?