Intro
Recently I’ve been seeing posts where people are having problems with Blender, especially exporting meshes and importing into Studio, such as this topic. So, I’ll be going over some basics of Blender to help those that are getting started!
Just as a bit of ethos, I have nearly 500 hours on blender (this does not include render times, as I don’t ever render content). I’ve been using it for roughly 1.5 years and constantly trying to improve.
So first off, we have the opening screen to Blender. From here you can open recent projects on the right side of the popup and check out updates and other links from Blender on the left.
By clicking outside of the popup you get to your workspace.
If you Right-Click on objects, you select them, and then by selecting an object and pressing the “Tab” key on your keyboard, you enter Edit Mode. You can also do this by clicking on the popup menu that reads “Object Mode”.
Key binds
Some common key binds that can help you get started are as follows:
Shift+A: Add New Object - A popup menu appears and you can select multiple different kinds of objects, such as meshes, empties, Cameras and Lights, and more.
E: Extrude - You pull a new vertice out for each one you currently have selected.
F: Fill - You fill a face into the vertices you have selected
G: Grab - You grab the vertices or objects you have selected and move them with your cursor.
Alt+M: Merge - A popup menu appears to merge vertices that you have selected.
P: Separate - A popup menu appears to separate faces that you have selected into new meshes. This is very useful for exporting.
W: Specials Menu - This menu shows you stuff like Subdividing, Flipping Normals, and more.
Numpad Keys(0-9) Camera Controls - 1,3, and 7 all set the camera to Axis areas. Every other key moves the camera by increments in its corresponding axis.
SpaceBar: Search - If you ever forget a key bind or need to look up something, press the spacebar and a menu will pop up with a textbox. If you enter a word that corresponds with an action within Blender, you can select it and the menu for that action will appear.
For a more in-depth Key bind guide, check out this topic which showcases an image with every key bind for Blender
I recommend watching YouTube video tutorials on creating content that follows what you’d like to make as everyone’s style is different and I cannot cater to all of them.
A really great thing to make it easier to export later down the line, is to create objects for each color that you’d like to have in Studio, because Studio cannot import Blender’s material properties into 1 object and so you must either A) texture the object or B) export each material separately and import then readd materials in Studio. Option B) is very simple with the P key bind.
Exporting
Once your object is created, delete the camera and any lighting source you have. Then, press Ctrl+A to select all objects in the layer and press Ctrl+J to join them all into one mesh, then enter Edit Mode, and Ctrl+A again until everything is selected. Then use the separate bind, P, to bring up that menu and choose “By Material”.
Now that they’re separated, you can go into the exportation screen and get ready to bring it into Studio.
Personally I prefer using the .FBX file, but .OBJ’s are good if you’re exporting into an engine that can use Blender’s material file.
This is the exportation screen. From here, you can change the name of the file, marked in Yellow, you want it to be saved as, similar to an image. You can also change the destination folder, marked in Blue, to where you want it sent to. These two items are quite important to remember when exporting so you know what to import later. However, the more important piece is the “Selected Object” check on the bottom left, marked in Red. This is what the separation was good for.
Select 1 object at a time, go to the exportation screen, make sure the Selected Objects is active, (marked with a check mark in the box) and export it with the button across from the destination folder on the far right. Once you have exported all the objects you have in Blender, open a studio place.
(This section will go through as if you have experience with studio, as this is a blender guide.)
Once you have a meshpart, go to it’s properties and click on the Folder icon within MeshID and a folder explorer will open. Go to the folder location you saved your meshes to, and click on a mesh, press Open. Normally a popup will come up in Studio asking if you want to change the location and size of the Mesh. If they do not, this is not a problem.
Location: Press YES, as you do not want to change the location because this can often misaligned your meshes and can create some problems because it will have gaps.
Size: Press NO, if you resize the mesh, the same problem can occur as with the location, it can create gaps. These gaps can be very hard to fix.
Repeat this process until all of your meshes are imported. Once they’re all imported, you can select all of the objects in studio and resize them together and there should be no problems as long as the objects do not get smaller than the threshold for parts.
Conclusion
I hope this guide was useful for you and if you have any other questions, I will add them into this and answer them as best I can, but Blender has it’s own wiki which is very in-depth and complete and I recommend checking that out first for specific questions on things like key binds.
Edits: 1: Grammar changes, 2: Added a quote from Nurgenius
