Custom Block Shapes
Terasology has a easy-to-edit shape format for blocks allowing anyone, with a small amount of learning, to create new block shapes that can be easily used in the game. While the block shape format is hand editable and you could write a block shape by hand, there is a great addon for the free, open source 3d editor Blender (Blender's Home) that allows you to easily create block shapes in a visual WYSIWYG environment and export them for use in Terasology.
- Download Blender. Blender 2.60 was used when developing the addon, but as it has been updated for Blender 2.63, you need Blender 2.63 at least.
- Download the shape plugin from https://github.com/MovingBlocks/BlenderAddon/releases. There are two zips that can be downloaded one is for the md5 exporter and the other is for the block shape exporter.
- install the zip as a Installing Blender Add on.
- additional example shapes can be found here
A block shape in blender is a set of mesh objects corresponding to the various parts of the block shape. For each side and the center part of the block shape, a mesh object with the corresponding name can be present: Top, Bottom, Left, Right, Front, Back and Center. Additionally, extra mesh objects can be used to define the collision bounds for the block shape.
When creating a block shape, you need to keep the following in mind:
- Blocks should be created centered on the origin
- A standard block is half the scale of a new Blender cube
- Blender axes are different from Terasology's axes, and instead, correspond as follows:
Block Sub-piece in Terasology / Direction in Blender
- Center
- Top / +Z axis
- Bottom / -Z axis
- Front / -Y axis
- Back / +Y axis
- Left / +X axis
- Right / -X axis
- To avoid problems later in the creation process, scale in Edit Mode instead of Object Mode.
- When UV mapping, you should map against a single 16x16 texture.
- To preview your shapes texture after unwrapping, you can switch a 3d view in Blender to Textured shading. Additionally, having mipmapping turned off will give a display very similar to what you will see in-game. To disable mipmapping:
- Go to the user preferences (File menu).
- In the user preferences window, go to the 'System' tab.
- In the middle near the top you should find a checked option that says 'Mipmaps'. Uncheck this.
The Terasology Block Shape addon adds two panes to the 3d view properties side panel in Blender.
The first pane, Terasology Scene Properties, contains settings that are universal (not based on what mesh you have selected):
- Author - Your name here
- Collision Type
- Is Collision Symmetric - Is collection unchanged if the block is rotated? If checked, then definitions using this shape will not have a block generated for each rotation.
- Use Billboard Normals - For flat, vertical billboards, this causes the normals to point upwards so they are lit correctly by sunlight.
The second pane, Terasology Mesh Properties, contains settings that apply to the currently selected mesh object:
- Full Side - Does this side fill the block's space - this will cause the side of blocks facing it not to be rendered.
- Collider Type
Example properties screen (may be outdated):
Once the model is ready open File>Export>Terasology Block Shape(.shape).
TODO:add shape preview