Hey there, Babylon community!
I’m terribly sorry for the dumb question. I know something similar has been asked before (mainly here) but I want the opinion of how the majority of seasoned folk would do this.
It’s rather simple. I’m trying to recreate the following landscape, something like this:
and I’m not sure on how the process to attain this would be. How much should I do in Babylon JS or use Blender? All the tutorials and documentation I’ve perused usually has flat terrain but I’m not sure if there are advantages of doing the terrain, each object (rock, for example, or grass) on Blender and then merely import it into Babylon.js. Any performance issues on doing most of the work (map layout, objects) in Blender in lieu of Babylon.js?
Any pointers regarding shaders or if this is attainable in Babylon.js?
First and foremost, welcome to the Babylon family! We are sincerely honored to have you here.
Second - you don’t have to apologize at all! There are no dumb questions here! All questions and people are welcome!
As you evolve in your Babylon.js journey, you’ll find that there is never one single way to do anything. There are always lots of ways to accomplish desired visuals in Babylon.
To answer your question - It kind of depends. MOST people create levels and scenes using a DCC tool like Blender or Maya/Max then bring their level into Babylon for rendering and real time interaction. So you’d do your modeling, uv layout and texturing in the DCC tool and use Babylon for the interaction.
That said, there are definitely times when using Babylon for the creation of elements is easier…take creating a dynamic/procedural real time shader for example…that’s probably easiest to do in Babylon.
It really all depends on the specifics of what you’d like to accomplish, and your experience with the different tools, but if there was such a thing as the most “popular” path, it would definitely be using a creation tool for creating assets, and using Babylon for rendering and interaction.
Hope that’s helpful…and again, welcome to the Babylon family!
Thank you SO much for the reply, it is thoroughly appreciated! I’ve read that Babylon’s community was absolutely brilliant and supportive and it’s really overwhelming how true it is!
Your answer makes sense! I guess I’ll give Blender a whirl to create the assets and terrain. I know it has a steep learning curve but that’s part of the path!
Thank you for the warm welcome, you’ve cleared my mind fog
Totally! I 100% agree…this is one of the absolute best communities out there.
There are a TON of ways to create terrain. I definitely encourage you to try out Blender. There are a ton of great tutorials out there regarding creation in Blender.
That said…I’ll give you one resource to check out about generating heightmaps in Babylon. Just in case you (or others) are curious about actually pulling some of the creation pipeline into the Babylon side of the fence.
Also in the coming weeks we’ll be posting a new video series that walks through the ENTIRE process of diving deep into Blender and then using those assets to do some crazy cool stuff in Babylon. Sorry for the tease, but keep your eye on our YouTube channel. The first video will be coming soon!
o_O if you take the time and energy this whole scene but the characters could be made in BJS. Id recommend taking JCs approach though as it takes some wizardry to make whole scenes programmatically.
I fully support the wizards approach because it should package wise be eons smaller then using assets.
You might even be able to do those characters, but that would be something I have not decided to dive into yet with BJS so I cant speak on that.
Hey @PirateJC !
Thank you a lot! I’ve seen some of these videos and I’m eager to give them a whirl! I’ll probably need to find some more resources on how really the style of the picture I sent is called (it’s kind of “cel shader” but not quite?) and how to do this on Blender. It seems simple, I’m just having trouble with the terminology here hehe. But thanks a lot for the help, it is thoroughly appreciated! You rock!
@Pryme8 That was my fear in the beginning and I thought it was a daunting task, to be honest! I was really lost on how I could do this programmatically and if it was even doable. Now I’m more relieved that I see Babylon as not a 3D editor but rather a renderer, and do more of the modelling on the Blender side of the fence! But thanks a lot for your input, mate, it is mighty appreciated!
