Since there popped up some very blender specific questions in the NL2 ask and 3d modelling threads the idea was to have a bundled thread about blender to search for and ask question about this software, which will most likely be related with creating assets for NL2.

Maybe one might follow with Sketchup, 3ds max, Maya, Cinema 4D, ... threads, too.

Learning Resources

I will try to collect some useful learning resources here, feel free to post or private message me some more suggestions.

* My own very informal quick crash course tutorial video how to create and export your first textured object with blender. With many jokes inside about blender 2.79 and what first time users may think of it to give you a first overview, thus all best practices about modeling and tools that would speed up the process in blender are neglected there.

* Blender fundamentals from the official blender YouTube channel that give a more detailed overview over all parts of blender

(playlist)

* Blender beginner tutorial series by Andrew Price that cover more blender as a whole including rendering inside blender

(playlist)

* Blender immediate tutorial series by Andrew Price that has more a focus on one of the usual workflows for creating high quality objects with custom normal maps good practices when modelling objects of professional quality

(playlist)

* Level Of Detail tutorial for NL2 objects and custom tracks by secretimbecile. It shows a way to use level of details, a useful method to manage the performance impact of your objects while maintaining a good visual quality. LOD tutorial by secretimbecile

And I'm answering to this post here now:
The tools tab only becomes available when there's uv information present for the current object, this happens as as one starts to unwrap a face, assigns an image to a face (which triggers the unwrap for that face) or when one adds a uv map manually (which will automatically happen in both previous cases)

(no uv map available)

(uv map is present)

(managing and checking the existence of uv maps and the possibility to manually add one can be done here for the selected object)

When you just delete every light source (lamps) all faces show the assigned textures without any shading (like black shadows) coming from the lights when the shading mode is set to "textured".

I think these books can help, but even during the 2.7 release cycle some menus and available settings like on the dae file export changed a little bit. Another good source for quickly searching for specific questions and hopefully answers is also the blender stackexchange.

Hello,
some things does now work better. But there is one more problem when i export it as DAE-file. If i say File->Export and set UV-Textures and directly under it i check "Copy" (copy texture files to same folder as dae-file) and i copy dae-file and texture files to NoLimits, it works, i see object with textures. Blender has now copied texture files from subfolder to same folder as dae-file and dae-file uses this files. But for Blender i have put texture files into a subfolder and when i uncheck "Copy" so i want the dae-file refer to texture files in subfolder. If i then copy dae-file and subfolder with texture files to NoLimits, i can also add object, but i get object without textures.

If i have more than one object in a subfolder of park, it is confusing if you have a lot of texture files together with the dae-files and nl2sco-files. It will be much more clear when texture files are in separate subfolders for each object. I have not found a solution to export dae-files with correct reference to texture files in subfolders, the same subfilders i use for the texture files for blender itself.

I think there must be more transforming functions than translate, rotate and scale. E.g. for bending, scaling dependent on height (that makes a pyramid with cutoff top from a cube), thickens the middle (makes a barrel from a cylinder) and so on. I do not know the correct names for these functions in english so i cannot find these functions. Also extruding along a defined line (e.g. spline) etc. Tomorrow the blender book shall arrive to me, i hope i can find then more... The most difficult question for me seems to be the missing reference to texture files in subfolders.

Best regards

Since the possibilities when exporting the textures directly from blender are limited anyway (and while actually you should be able to keep them in subfolders without needing to copy them, this does not work very well, too), I think the best solution would be using the textures with a nl2mat file that is assigned to the material that you set in blender.
This will override all exported properties, without this it is not possible to set NL2 specific options like transparency, bump mapping or using specular or the newly added PBR map functionality of nl2 anyway, since there's no standard as far as I know in the DAE format to specify things like this, I guess the same holds for 3ds and low format. (see Jack Kelly's excellent materials tutorials for more details).

For the transforming options ensure you are in Edit mode, then you should be able to see a bunch of options for transforming the individual faces, edges or single vertices. The symbols that will be used in blender 2.8 will hopefully explain by themselves what the functions do. Here's a comparison of both tools (left 2.79, right one of the latest 2.8 development builds). So maybe this helps getting familiar with these functions.

Hello,
ich have made a short look to the tutorials, but i have not seen how the UV mapping is done. I think, you must make the texture mapping with blender as before and in NoLimits you have to replace the blender textures by the material textures. I have not seen the material editor until now, i think, you select texture files (and here it is possible to select them in a subfolder?) and add specular, bump mapping, transparency etc. Is it possible to load additional texture files for bump mapping, transparency etc.? I have shut down my windows-PC for today, tomorrow i will try.

Waht i meant with deforming function was different to the transforming functions (below "extruding"). I have seen that before. My little test project was a barrel, i started with a cylinder and found in properties under the wrench symbol a lot of "non destructive" defoming functions. They are usable only for finished objects. So i could squeeze my cylinder so that it becomes wider in the middle. After texturing it with wood textures (for the cylinder i have special barrel textures made of wood with metal rings) and exporting to dae-files, i could load the barrel in NoLimits.

I hope i will find in the book hints how to add or delete single vertices or edges so that an additional edge splits the face to two faces and an additional vertex and additional edges do also split faces to more faces. Also the revers way should be possible, deleting vertex and deleting edges results to less faces. There will be restrictions, if resulting faces will have vertices not lying on a plane or if you try to delete an edge between two faces that are not in the same plane etc. Perhaps "remove doubles" will do somthing of this.

Best regards

Hello,
after reading book (the chapters needed to make an object, no rendering, light, amination etc) and some days practizing i have made a building, a saloon that can be used as restarant or shop near wooden coasters. If i copy all files to the park file, i can see the saloon completely. I have only 4 texture files, all of them are used several time, on about 50 times for single parts. Blender has made copies from this texture files for each part, so i have more than 50 texture file - most of them with identical content but different names (ascending numbers added to name). If i want to assign in NoLimits the references in material files, i have to make more than 50 material files, then i need only 4 texture files.

The Problem is, that blender makes so many copies from texture files. Every time i want to add an texture to another face, i select in UV-Editor the texture file (mostly the same), then i click unwrap and select shape and size of UV-texture. Is it Possible that blender uses the same texture file and do not make a new copy? Can i change my design without making it completely new, so i have "only" to open each face in "3D-editor"->"edit" and assign the correct texture file without adjusting the UV coordinates, rotating etc.?

Best regards

For me it was not very clear from the text how you exactly textured it and where the problem might come from.

So the following are just guesses what might have gone wrong, I'm not sure if I got your problem, if not I guess posting some screenshots could probably massively help. I also guess that you are exported as Collada (.dae)?

I just tried a little bit to force blender to export multiple same looking textures, the only way I could achieve this was by forcing it to duplicate the opened image data blocks, otherwise it automatically recognized the opening of the same texture file when I opened it again from the file browser.

(by pressing this you can force blener to create a duplicate of the opened texture which will also be copied on export)

But the fact that you ended up with 50 materials is also somewhat confusing. Despite trying both available texturing methods (UV texture and material texture) blender's dae exporter exported only one texture file in both cases.

You can check how many copies of the texture files blender uses internally for example in the uv / image editor. If you use UV textures that's also where you could reassign it with the same texture for the case blender should have created a new internal copy every time you opened it from the hdd (although this actually should not happen).

(selecting an already opened image as a UV texture)

When you used material textures instead you should also make sure that you reuse the same material and not create a new copy for each piece. Although even when I did it and assigned a new texture for each material blender did not automatically created new copies of the texture files.

(reusing an already existing material with its assigned material texture)

Hello,
the problem was visible in the UV-editor as in your 2nd screenshot. When i select texture file, suddenly i got more than one texture file for the same texture. But now i have an idea: i have made copies of a lot of parts after i have assigned textures to the first (e.g. some beams, complete windows etc.), i think here blender has made the copies of the texture files. The objects i have made first (not as copy) have assigned the original texture files. The only way to change back is to select each face and assign the original texture file as in your 2nd screenshot.

But for the future i want to know if it is possible to make copies of parts with already made textures so that these parts use the same texture file? Perhaps a link will do but sometimes i have made copies and changed the copy, e.g. change the length a little bit. I have only textures, no materials because for exporting dae-files i have to select between them, it seems that it is not possible to use both. Also i have no bump maps etc., just diffuse maps. I have understood from you, that this has to be made with NoLimits nl2mat-files.

So first i have a lot of work to reassign a lot of faces to the same texture files. Is it possible in NoLimits to use nl2mat-files in a subfolder relative to the nl2sco-file? I have tried this without sucess, with nl2mat-file in same folder it works, but it is possible that i have made a mistake. It is best, when i have all files exept nl2sco-file and dae-file in the folder for objects (e.g. named "buildings"), if i have more than one building, the folder itself is not full of other files and i see in "Scenery"->"Choose" only one subfolder (inside it subfolders for each building subfolders with all texture files, nl2mat-files etc.) and a list of buildings like the other folders coming from the NoLimits library. I have found some additional objects for NoLimits (some trees, stones and a lot of flatrides) that are organized this way.

Momentary i am on another PC without blender. Screenshots are possible, but it is a lot of work because the PC with NoLimits and blender has no internet connection. I have to copy the screenshots to an USB-stick and copy it to the internet-PC (Mini-PC running with ubuntu). Also i have no server for uploading images to post it here. Most upload server has too much java script and advertising so they are difficult to use with uBlock origin and noscript...

Best regards

Actually blender should not copy the textures when you copy objects, I don't know why this happened in your project, I was not able to get blender into doing this, but now you can at least fix it when it happens again. ;-)

Yes, putting nl2mat files into subfolders actually should work without problems, for example like that:

No Limits object 0.nl2sco
No Limits object 1.nl2sco
/resources
	/models
		mymodel_0.dae
		mymodel_1.dae
	/materials
		mymaterial_0.nl2mat
		mymaterial_1.nl2mat
		/textures
			mytexture_0.jpg
			mytexture_1.jpg

In this case you probably do not want to enable "copy" when exporting the object for the texture and just use the save as function in the UV / Image editor to save a copy of your source image at a destination of your choice. I would recommend this anyway to avoid some hassle that might come up when exporting the material directly like it just happened and you can also change the image with the inbuilt image editing / drawing capabilities of blender without accidentally destroying the original source texture.

Hello,
the first scenery object from blender is nearly finished (the saloon). But in Jack Kelly's tutorial there should be a parameter "shininess" in the material editor, but i cannot find it. i have selected ""Lighting" in "RGB Color" (there is no "Phong Lighting", but there is "Simple Lighting" as in tutorial, so "Lighting" should be "Phong Lighting"), but there is only in "Basic" "Override Glossiness" with a slider labeled with percentage. This cannot be the phong shininess because that is a number from 4 to 128. Has something changed in NoLimits since tutorial, is tutorial for NoLimits1? Exept Glossiness there is no other parameter, all other things needs additional texture files (bumpmap). I can select colors for color and specular but with glossiness i cannot regulate the size of specular, only intensity.

For the saloon and most other objects i do not need shininess, as wood, rusty metal etc has no or very little shininess. But for other objects in the future i want to know more about material files as written in doku.

Removing double texture files in blender was easier than i thought. It is sufficant to select object (mostly modified cubes), change to edit mode with face select, select all (key "A") and than select correct texture file. This selects texture file for all faces of object at once. At first i have selected each face one by one (necessary to tilt view for faces on rear side) that was much more work. But the problem remains, that for copies i get double texture files (texturename.jpg.001 etc.). The same is for adding other blender files with "File"->"Append", the textures are also copied. So if i append another blender file i have to reassign all texture files for all faces for this.

Best regards

The shininess box was changed to the slider "override glossiness" after I wrote that tutorial, but its function is still the same. A low percentage for matte objects, a high for glossy ones.

I know this might be a bit of a dumb question, but is there any sort of timeframe for when blender 2.8 comes out of beta? I had a little look around and it feels like it will be a lot easier to learn, but since its still in beta and stuff keeps changing there isnt a proper tutorial for the new UI and such yet

The first release candidate is planned for the 20th of October. (https://code.blender.org/2018/06/beyond-the-code-quest/)

I think one should definitely wait, since many basics are currently under heavy change and some controversial discussions are also going on, especially affecting keyboard controls and menus.

Hello,
after a long period of retries i suceeded to use the array modifier for generating multiple parts arranged on a circle. This is useful for weels etc. You must use an empty object that is placed at the position of the first next part with the correct angle orientation. And the same scale as the original part has! (this was not mentioned in all books, even not in the official blender handbook) I have tried it until now just with primitive objects like cubes (scaled different for x, y and z), cylinders etc., not for complex parts.

Now i can see the correct object and exported it to dae-file. But in NoLimits there is only the first element of the array, all other copies are missing! The same problem occures when i use linked copies (imported parts from other blender files with link, not append). All linked copies are missing in dae-file. If i use other parts with append, they are visible in NoLimits. When i can not use the array modifier i have much more work: i have to copy&paste the parts and than rotate it around midpoint (set 3D-cursor to it and rotate by 3D-cursor) for each part separately. If i have used textured for this parts, i have to reassign the texture files for every part because i get copies of these texture files. If i have e.g. 12 parts, i have to make 11 times copy&paste and i have 11 copies of texture files.

Are there solutions for these problems? For missing linked copies in dea-files and for unwanted copies of texture files when i make copies of objects (with append or copy&paste, not links)?

Best regards

For exporting the array or any other modifier, just enable the "apply modifiers" option in the dae exporter settings. Just be careful when doing this with linked copies, since you must use single user meshes to export different modifier configurations, if you do not ensure this manually, the result will probably not what you expected, which also happens to me sometimes, but which is actually kind of logical since neither the dae file format nor no limits 2 does know the concept of modifiers like blender does. So you would export a new mesh for each different modifier setting.

That means for example that an object using an array count of 4 and another with 8, but both referring to the same pieces, that one of the two settings would be applied to both objects that link to the same mesh when the "apply modifiers" option is selected.

For linked objects I guess there's a bug preventing the exporter from exporting it when "selection only" is active. I think this will be quickly fixed, without that it works fine here for now, I'm not often using objects linked between blend files. Actually I think I should also warn that linking whole objects instead of the data (meshes, materials, etc.) could potentially also cause some trouble during export since you could have two objects with the same name but different content, which could confuse NL2 since as far as I know this is not allowed for dae files, but blender would export it.

Hello,
after reading about modifier, i have searched for the "stack" of it and asked myself, why the export to dae-file works with objects where i have used boolean modifier ("subtract", e.g. for holes). But then i remember, that i have clicked "apply" in modifier. Modiefier is "applied" at once after celecting and setting some parameters with out clicking "apply". Then you see these parameters, this is the "stack" (i had only one entry until now). If i click "apply", modifiers becomes normal objects (in my case meshes). But then you cannot alter modifier parameters any more so you have to make adjustments before "apply". It is like converting text to mesh, then you cannot edit text any more too.

With "array" i have not clicked "apply" because i saw the result before. Then export to dae does not export additional objects. But if you click "apply" for modifier, then export works. So for me and this problem it is solved.

Not solved is still the copying of texture files for copied objects. I can reassign texture files by hand, but it is a lot of work.

Best regards

But I would actually recommend to keep the modifiers unapplied, for a non destructive workflow. What also works pretty good with this is using the smartjoin addon for exporting, which automatically converts even multiple objects to new single meshes while keeping the individual parts editable.

As I said, for avoiding problems with the textures I would not export the textures directly from blender at all.

Hello,
i do not want to keep most modifiers, e.g. holes for windows and doors in walls. Then i must keep the cubes used for bollean difference. If i make "apply" for the modifier i can remove the cube for the hole or move it to the position for the next window. I make just objects for exporting them as dea-files, not for animations or reusing with different parameters in blender itself. It is not possible to make objects, that are dependent on parameters like the station in NoLimits, its length and shape is defined by distance of type separators and track shape.

Until now i have only used modifiers "array" and "boolean" to make fixed objects easier. Does the smartjoin addon also make dae-files, but with unapplied modifiers?

Best regards

Hello,
i have found a simple solution for the problem of unwantet copies of texture files for copied parts: do not use CTRL-C/CTRL-V, use SHFT-D. With SHFT-D part is copied, but texture files remain the same as set in user options. But CTRL-C/CTRL-V copies all, inclusive texture files. I have read this in a blender forum after searching a lot by google, nothing in the books about differences between CTRL-C/CTRL-V and SHFT-D. For export dae-files to use it for NoLimits, all objects must be their own meshes, not linked copies. In NoLimits all textures are first missing, editing nl2sco-file lists all textures that scenery object needs. You have to assign material file to it, if there are no files, you can make new ones and assign texture files there.

I think, you have always to use textures for objects used in NoLimits, no materials. If i export dae-file, i can select between textures or materials, but not both, so i have used sometimes a small texture file with only one color to make a "pseudo" material to use together with other texture files. I have not tried to export objects that have only materials and find that in nl2sco-file to make an material file in NoLimits.

For objects "appended" from other blender files i have not found a method not to copy texture files, it is best to combine all meshes using the same texture to one by method->boolean->union->apply in that blender files so you have to reassign texture files for less parts. E.G. a blender file for a window used several times in an building. I have made the frame to one single mesh from several parts using wood textures with individual UV-rotation and scale. This works and i have to reassign only one wood texture for each window, not more than 10 textures after "appending" this blender file for window to the file for the building.

Perhaps this helps other people.

For smartjoin i am searching for a doku, i found only a very short youtube video. But no hint how it helps to export to dae-files also linked objects. If i have made something with linked objects, is it possible to join it all together and than exporting it to dae-file will work to imoprt it to NoLimits with all parts, even the linked parts? Without such a "join" all linked parts are missing in dae-files.

Best regards

Hello,
i have a new problem, i have downloaded this model (a Delorean from Back to the Future):
https://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/68371
After some hard to solve problems i was able to import a fair good model in NoLimit. First i have all converted to meshes. Most objects are 2-dimensional objects that have only one side with material, if you look from the "wrong" side, you can see trough. I solved it by copying these objects with SHFT-D, switch to edit-mode, select all faces and flip them. Now each face is double with its own material, so you see it from both sides.

All parts could be made visible and after making a lot of material file for NoLimits, i can adjust each material. Exept one object of the Delorean, the "Main_Dashboard". It remains invisible in NoLimits, even if there is a copy with flipped faces. If i make a Copy by CTRL-C/CTRL-V and move this copy over the car and import this, i can see the car in NoLimits (without main dashboard), but not the copied dashboard above the car. If i copy the seats the same way, i can see them in NoLimits, the seats have the same material as the dashboard.

If i import the dae-file with blender, i can see the dashboard again, the original and the copy... I have no idea, what is coing on. The material cannot be the reason, because the seats have the same material and are visible. Only difference: the seats have only one material, the dashboard have three materials for dirrent faces. But all faces of the dashboard are invisible. My idea was to make a copy of the dashboard and use this copy, but all copies are also invisible. Any idea? Is there a switch in blender to make an object invisible? But in blender i can see it. How can i make a copy of the mesh only, just the mesh geometry, i hope that i can use this copy as replacement for the original dashboard. It is sufficiant if this new copy has only a simple diffuse material, the material itself is not critical.

The properties of the dashboard and for the seats look the same, i cannot find any difference, even the properties for the material. I cannot find any constraint for both. So frustrating because the model is nearly perfect but only one object is missing.

Edit: i get an error message "caanot decode float value NaN" when i import it to NoLimits. I have made a test copy of the car with only the dashboard remaining and still have this error message. So this error belongs to the dashboard. But i do not see, which value has become a "NaN" and why. It is not a division by zero (that gives "Inf", not "NaN"). The Mesh is complicated like a lot of other objects in the car, it is difficult to delete parts of the dashboard until i find the bad part. Blender itself has no error message, even if i import the dae-file. If i select the dashboard and swich to edit-mode and select all faces, some of the edges are not black but cyan, what does that mean?

Best regards

^ That object is in no way suitable for realtime rendering. Don't use it.

Hello,
if you make videos, it does work, otherwhies you can remove it from scene. Now i have found also a "dirty" solution: I have made a copy of the blender file from the car, removed all exept the dashbourd and found, that this was also invisoble in NoLimits. I have removed all faces exept three bigger of them - still invisible. But bounding boxes in blender are much greater than these faces. If i extrude the faces, i see now some additional edges. These edges are coming from some isolated vertices. But before extruding, these vertices are not visible in blender, you cannot select them and not delete them.

So i have taken the complete dashboard, exportet it to dae-file and opened the dae-file. The small dae-file for the three faces revealed ca. 10-20 NAN numbers in file, these seems coming from the isolated vertices. In the dae-file of the complete dashboard i found also these NANs, i replaced them by "0.0". Now i imported the changed dae-file in blender and found some additional wrong faces all having a vertex at (0,0,0). These are coming from the changed NANs to 0.0. I have deleted all these wrong faces and stored the dashboard as blender file. In the blender file of the car i deleted the dashboard and applied the new dashboard and stored this blender file. I exportet this car to dae-file and imported it to NoLimits. And now there is no error message (no NANs anymore) and i can also see the dashboard. Now i have to adjust the material files so the surfaces looks as i want.

This car is for the very big park containing a wooden coaster with a length of more than 7000m (there are more roller coasters, one has a time machine theme, the wooden coaster has a western theme). The supports of this coaster need the most calculating power of my grafic card, the delorean car does not add so much more, it is much less than 10%. Since i have the ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX1080Ti-11GB, this big park is now running much smoother as before with my old graphic card. There are some moments where the frame rate goes down, but it is not, when the car is in camera direction, it is when a lot of the supports are in camera direction.

If i make videos, they are smooth, making the videos need now about twice the time than the ride itself, with the old grapfic card it was more than five times the ride time... Making 4k-videos and scaling down to full-HD with video editor reduces some aliasing, the videos looks very good, even on my 2m screen of my home cinema.

Best regards

I finally have blender working and loading on my PC, only problem is the software is really really laggy, as if I had 3 NL2 sims running at max graphics with high poly objects. Any ideas how to fix this?

First of all, when dealing with graphic related issues like this: Are you sure your graphic drivers are installed correctly? Did you tried to reset all settings (with making backup of course if you use any specific) and to completely reinstall the latest graphic drivers or maybe even tried older ones? Do you have the same issues with other software like blender (for example wings3d or any other software that uses openGL for real time rendering?)

I've been through graphics drivers and the problem persists, I used to use a trial of sketchup and that ran better than blender by far. But I dont have the money to pay for sketchup