A Goddamn Squirrel

So I realised I haven't really put anything up here about my trip to Ultra Music Festival in Miami in March 2013. I don't really have much confidence in my own ability to retain any form of physical journal but I'm pretty sure google will use its overkill approach to ensure my useless data is recorded, stored and indexed for all eternity, so I'll post up a couple of things I thought about my trip. There is also another trip coming up so I am thinking about travel more and more recently.

I kept an ad-hoc diary of my exploits, and here I'll try to piece together the emails, notes, photos and facebook conversations (it's all first person current tense).

Multiple .qc compile at once - Blender SMD tools

I knew there was a way to batch compile .qc files with this plugin. I have been making multiple models and modular sets that require a lot of tweaking and it sucks to compile the .qc files one by one. I finally recovered how to do multiple compiles straight out of blender (by looking at the SMD tools page on the VDC durr...).

All you do is select your qc directory, and then append the first few letters of your .qc files, followed by an asterisk (*) onto the filepath in the "QC file path" box. Observe:

You're welcome.

The Current State of Modding

Modding has gone through a few iterations, waxing and waning over the years, and I have been having conversations with some steam friends about it over the past few weeks so I think I'll do a post about it, to get my ideas down on "paper". As usual, I'm just rambling here but I know some people take their scene history to heart so take it with a grain o salt. Also for the sake of understanding this article I would like to define four camps in the games development biosphere. The two in modding are the scene - the mod creators - and the community - the mod consumers. In "the industry" there is the indies and the AAA.

Video Tutorial: Models from Dota2 to Blender

I made this one as much for myself as for anyone else.

Rendering a transparent background (alpha channel) in blender 2.6

So after scouring the net for this and getting quite frustrated, I figured it out myself. Short and sweet: In your render panel (the camera) under 'shading', change the 'alpha' dropdown box to 'Transparent'. Et voila. Render with a transparent background (you may need to make sure you have the 'RGBA' button pressed in the 'output' pane on your render panel as well).

EDIT: If you're trying to bake alpha from one mesh to another, you'll need to create a new material on the lowpoly mesh, scroll down and tick the 'Transparency' box, and slide the 'Alpha' down to zero.

Decompiling Portal 2 Models

I have been trying to decompile some models recently and I found out it's harder than it used to be. Luckily this guy has it sorted. I'm going to copypaste that post here, just in case that one gets deleted or something.

X tips for blender I thought everyone knew

I have been using blender for like 9 years now (although I only count the last 3 being any good) and have never really gotten involved with any blender-specific communities. I have been somewhat of a silent learner, watching tutorials and googling for tips rather than getting involved in the community. I don't know if this is a good or a bad thing.

The thing is, I just finished a blender-related-forums web surf and I was surprised to see how many things people don't know about blender. So I'm going to do one of those "6 things you can do to lose fat RIGHT NOW" lists for blender features. I have no idea how many of these I'll do, hence the X. Rather than being a cunt, I'll start with the best first.