Documentation of extra functionality and updates in Blender Publisher

Blender Publisher contains some advanced funcionality only avaible for Publisher Key owners. These functionality is described in this section.

Local axis rotation

When you enter rotation mode by pressing RKEY Blender rotates the objec by default around the views Z-axis (). Pressing XKEY YKEY or ZKEY switches to rotation around the world axes.

Double tapping XKEY YKEY or ZKEY in rotate mode allows rotation around an object's local axes.

HTML compatible color input

NKEY in LampButtons, MaterialButtons, WorldButtons or PaintFaceButtons allows setting of the RGB colors using a HTML-compatible six-digit hex value.

Figure 3. HTML color input

Support for installed AVI codecs under windows

Blender Publisher on Windows now supports encoding and decoding AVI files using the localy installed AVI codecs. You can render directly to an AVI file, play back an AVI file or use an AVI file as an animated texture in the renderer.

If you want to render to an AVI file, go to the render buttons (press F10 key) and select 'AVI Codec' from the image type menu. If this is the first time you selected 'AVI Codec' in this Blender file, a window will pop up where you can select which codec you want to use and, if the codec allows it, set additional variables.

Figure 4. Choosing a installed AVI codec

Once you selected the codec, the 'Quality' button just below the image type menu, changes into a 'Select Codec' button. Press this button if you want to select another codec or readjust the codec settings later on.

If you want to use an AVI file as a texture for rendering, go to the texture buttons (press F6 key) and add a new texture. Now first press the 'Image' and then the 'Movie' button. Next click on the 'Load Image' button, browse to the AVI you want to use as a texture and select it. Finally enter the number of frames you want to use in the 'Frames' button.

Current limitations

You can only use AVI files that are stored on your local hard drive. At this moment it is not possible to use a packed AVI file (a file that's stored inside the Blender file itself) as a texture.

If you want to render your Blender file on another Windows system, you will have to make sure that the correct AVI codecs are installed on that system to enable reading and / or writing the AVI files.

If you render a Blender file that tries to ouput images using a Windows codec on another platform (Linux, SGI, etc.), Blender will print a warning message and will render an uncompressed AVI instead.

You can't rerender a part of an AVI. If a couple of frames are wrong in your animation you will have to rerender the entire AVI or use an external tool like virtualdub to edit the AVI's.

You can't use an AVI as an UV texture in the Blender real-time engine. The Blender interface allows you to use an image from an allready opened AVI as a UV texture, but the next time you open the Blender file the AVI will fail to load.

PNG file format

The Portable Network Graphics (PNG) format was designed to replace the older and simpler GIF format and, to some extent, the much more complex TIFF format. It has two major uses: the World Wide Web (WWW) and image-editing.

Figure 5. PNG filetype

To choose the PNG format go to the DisplayButtons F10 and choose "PNG" from the drop-down. To have a rendered Alpha-Channel in the image, select also "RGBA" in the DisplayButtons.

Boolean operations (WKEY)

The boolean operations will work for all objects but is really intended for use with solid closed objects with a well defined interior and exterior region. In the case of open objects the interior and is defined in a rather mathematical way by extending the boundary faces of the object off into infinity. So results may be unexpected for these objects. A boolean operation never affects the original operands, the result is always a new blender object.

The boolean operations also take Materials and UV-Textures into account, producing objects with material indices or multi UV-mapped objects.

Figure 6. Options for boolean operations

For the "Difference" operation the order of selection is important. The active object (light purple in wire-frame view) is subtracted by the selected object.

Figure 7. Resulting objects, original top, intersect, union, difference

This functionality is currently under heavy development. To make it possible for you to use this functions for your work we list here the current limitations:

Known problems of the Boolean Operations

Game Actuator

The Game Actuator that allows you to quit or restart a game, or start a game from a different file from within the 3D real-time engine, the stand-alone player or the 3D Plug-in

Figure 8. Game Actuator

Enhanced audio support

The Windows version of the Blender Publisher and the ActiveX control now uses the fmod library. This enables you to use Ogg Vorbis audio (a free very good compressing format) and a wider variety of sound formats. Beside that the library is very fast (meaning less CPU cycles used).

Figure 9. Sound Actuator play modes

The Sound Actuator (see Figure 9) now supports two new play modes for playing sound in a Ping-Pong mode. This plays the sound first forward, then backwards, which is great for environment sounds.

Figure 10. CD Actuator

The CD Actuator that enables you to play back tracks from a CD on Windows sytems. It includes control of the CD volume and pausing/resuming the playback.

Reflection mapping in the realtime engine

The reflection mapping is enabled with the sphere icon in the ImageWindow (UV Editor).

The effect can be seen in the textured views and in the game engine.

Figure 11. ImageWindow with texture and the textured view

Animated Textures

With Blender Publisher 2.25 it is possible to use simple animated textures as UV textures.

Figure 12. Animated texture in ImageWindow

This feature uses tiled images to hold the animation frames. Activate the tiles-icon in the ImageWindow to tell Blender you want to use this feature, then define with the NumberButtons the dimensions and press "Anim". The next NumberButtons define from which to which tile the animation will run. "Speed" defines the playback speed in frames per second.