Ever curious how programmers deliver spectacular graphics and inspiring storylines in many of today's most popular 3D games? The heart of any game lies within the game engine, a complex set of routines designed to manage all aspects of the gameplay experience: graphics, input, output, physics, artificial intelligence, etc. Game engines also serve as the basis for low-level tasks like memory management and latency correlation.

Top-tier game developers often design their own game engines from the ground up to fully optimize their gaming platform. For us within the real world, such luxuries are not common, as a fully functional game engine can require hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars to implement. Popular commercial engine options from Remedy and id Software can scale well into the millions for development costs, not to mention licensing fees to actually extend the code for use by third-party game developers.

Unless you happen to drive a new Ferrari or perhaps your last name is Gates, then you will likely be looking elsewhere for developing your own customized gaming experience. Some hobbyists and entry-level developers opt to modify existing game engines to produce new game content, though the underlying gaming routines are still present to lower both development time and cost. Game mods are a popular choice, especially with many commercial games now shipping with end-user content creation tools to design new levels, maps, and characters.

Modifying existing games can be fun, but many dedicated professional and amateur developers are left searching for architectures that offer more customization or game control features. Game mods are a great starting point, but most commercial game engines restrict distribution or control content rights since the majority of popular game engines are not open source or general public licensed.

Enter Blender, the first and only fully integrated 3D graphics creation suite featuring modeling, animation, rendering, post-production, realtime interactive 3D, game creation, and playback with cross-platform compatibility for Windows, MacOS, Linux, FreeBSD, Irix, and Solaris. Blender represents significantly more than a simple game engine, it offers a complete 3D animation and game development environment. While originally designed as a creativity tool, Blender has rapidly emerged as a true game and multimedia design application.

The Official Blender Gamekit takes the philosophy of a generic game engine one step further. Blender requires no extensive programming knowledge, no custom coding, and a proven architecture for rendering quality graphics while offering management of nearly all input and output functions required for a quality gaming environment. Blender targets all levels of 3D professionals and amateurs with its intuitive development interface and easily scalable control options.

With Blender a game can be as complex or simple as the developer chooses, thus allowing anyone with minimal graphics experience to develop custom games and 3D animations. The Official Blender Gamekit delivers tutorials and pre-designed games to aid in development of both linear and non-liner 3D environments and models. For those with programming experience, the development path can be extended to include advanced options created through the popular Python scripting architecture.

Blender Creation Suite

The Blender development interface is designed atop a menu style interface with a myriad of buttons and slides available for all aspects of game development, including physics, I/O, and rendering. Beyond the static interface, logic bricks can be defined to permit interactive game tasks, such as object collision and object tracking. The Blender interface even proves intelligent enough that several mundane control aspects of modeling and physics interaction are automatically generated via internal routines.

The window layout is easily customizable as Blender is designed with a true objected oriented data system approach. Anti-aliased fonts are supported, plus international translation is available for many languages. The most promising aspect is a completely unified interface concept, thus all windows and interfaces are consistent regardless of the platform or operating system being utilized by the developer.

Anyone comfortable with advanced graphics editors like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp will have little effort transitioning to the Blender platform. The third dimensional aspect of design may prove confusing for some 2D artists, though the book's various tutorials relating to texture mapping and object animation will help overcome common 3D design concerns. Those familiar with Maya3D or CAD platforms should have absolutely no problem interpreting Blender's myriad array of 3D command operations.

Blender 3D Modeling

Blender supports a variety of 3D object formats including polygon meshes, complex NURBS surfaces, bezier curves, B-spline curves, meatballs, and vector fonts with TrueType, PostScript, and OpenType support. Advanced features include catmull-clark subdivision surfaces and Boolean mesh functions. Editing is available via extrude, spin, screw, warp, subdivide, noise, and smooth functions; plus soft selection editing tools are available for higher-level organic modeling. As with most aspects of Blender, editing options can easily be expanded with customized Python scripts for those familiar with programming.

Blender 3D Animation

Blender offers a superb selection of animation techniques to satisfy even demanding 3D graphics artists. Options include armature/skeleton deformation with forward/inverse kinematics, auto skinning, interactive 3D paint for vertex weighting, vertex key framing for morphing, animatable lattice deformation, and non-linear animation mixing with automated walkcycles along paths. Basic animation editing is available via character posing, and of course, Python scripted operations for advanced users.

Blender Game Creation

Blender can provide all features commonly associated with a top-level gaming engine. In fact, the options are impressive enough to compete with many commercial game engines and development suites: graphical editors, collision detection, dynamics simulation, Python scripting, scene multi-layering, overlays, game logic, artificial intelligence, physics, input, output, and 3D rendering.

Audio formatting is accomplished with the popular fmod toolkit, while graphics rendering is provided with a scalable OpenGL architecture for maximum cross-platform portability. Unlike most traditional OpenGL rendering engines, Blender requires no advanced programming or knowledge of OpenGL conventions. The developer only needs to focus upon game design, Blender intelligently engineers all underlying routines with minimal user interaction.

Blender Rendering

OpenGL provides a wonderful interface to produce dramatic effects through both hardware and software accelerated rendering options. Various transparency and map models are available, including animated mapping, reflection mapping, environment mapping, halos, lens, flares, and even realistic fog. A radiosity solver is included to speed animation design, while edge rendering, oversampling, motion blurring, post-production filtering, fields, and non-square pixels are supported to deliver maximum graphics quality.

Blender utilizes a fast scanline rendering engine capable of scaling with a multitude of OpenGL architectures. Export scripts are available for external rendering options, like Renderman, Povray, Yafray, and Virtualight. Additionally, Blender does not require comprehensive code compilation or 3D pre-processing. All content can be directly interpreted via the Blender creation interface, thus simplifying the overall development strategy.

Minimal system requirements are acceptable for even the most entry-level of configurations: a 450 MHz processor, 64 MB of memory, and an OpenGL accelerated video card. Hardware T&L is supported, a great benefit for anyone with a current generation graphics accelerator. Simple games proved adequate with integrated video chipsets, though anyone hoping to utilize the most complex options of Blender will require a substantially more powerful AGP graphics accelerator with plenty of onboard memory.

An nVidia Quadro II GTS was utilized for this review, as the Quadro series offers superb OpenGL performance and acceleration of many advanced OpenGL rendering conventions. When paired with an Athlon 3000+ and 512MB of PC-400 DDR, Blender produced stunning visuals, even with anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering enabled. Systems configured with more mainstream GeForce or Radeon video cards should have little problem utilizing all advanced features of the Blender architecture.

Blender File Formats

Blender natively saves all game data to a single .blend file for simplicity and ease of distribution. The .blend format supports compression, encryption, and backwards/forwards compatibility. Blend files can even be used as linked libraries to supply code and data to other .blend files. Blender supports read and write operations for various popular formats: TGA, JPG, PNG, Iris, SGI Movie, IFF, AVI, Quicktime, GIF, TIFF, PSD, and MOV. Import and export scripts are available for DXF, Inventor, and VRML. Blender can also create standalone executables, plus supports playback with a 3D web browser plugin for online development work.

The Official Blender Gamekit

Assuming you made it this far, then you likely fall into two categories: experienced 3D graphics professional or completely confused. If you belong in the first category, then download Blender and get to work (still buy a book to support the Blender Foundation). However, if you fall within the novice realm, then the Official Blender Gamekit is a must have support feature. The gamekit explains many of the technical terms presented throughout this review, plus offers working tutorials to explain many of the capabilities of the Blender creation suite.

The Official Blender Gamekit:

• Authors: Carsten Wartmann, Michael Kauppi
• Editor: Carsten Wartmann
• Publisher: No Starch Press
• 296 pages, black and white, with full color cover
• Quickstart tutorial
• General introduction to 3D, explaining all basics
• Introduction to Blender for new users
• Easy tutorials series, on modeling and animation
• Explaining game logic editing
• Extensive tutorial on the Bones/Armature system
• Introduction to Python
• Blender physics
• Medium and advanced tutorials with game examples
• Full reference section on all interactive 3d and new animation options
• 10 playable and editable games, created by the renowned NaN artist team

The Official Blender Gamekit is a well-authored offering, complete with a vast number of diagrams, charts, models, and thoroughly detailed examples. The tutorials offer explanations of how and why Blender features work, plus provide insights into the expansion and combination of multiple Blender options to produce your own customized games and 3D animations with ease. Unlike most multimedia design books, this text proves reliable and informative enough to explain even the basics of Blender to those with limited graphics experience.

55wheels Racing game	Squish the Bunny First person shooter	Flying Buddha Memory game	SuperG Sports game
BlenderBall 3D puzzle	PowerBoat Racing game	TubeCleaner Funny and silly shooter	E-police Third person adventure

The Official Blender Gamekit ships with ten functional demonstration games to build upon through the book's tutorials. Most demos are fully playable with common features found amongst production level games, such as artificial intelligence and user definable settings. Others provide a code base to extend game functionality through tutorial instructions to allow users to develop their own customized gaming environments and character models.

Final Thoughts

The Official Blender Gamekit provided me with a curious diversion from my standard hardware review articles. While my expertise aligns closer to the hardware side of 3D graphics engineering, this gamekit provided a great tutorial for learning about the various intricacies of 3D software development. Blender is a powerful rendering platform that can easily be adopted to produce linear animations, thus this gamekit appeals not only to gamers, but all 3D graphics and multimedia artists as well.

As with any review, the primary concern is the actual value of the product being offered. Manufacturer suggested retail for the Official Blender Gamekit is $34.95, including the book, Blender creation suite, Blender game engine, and ten fully functional game demos. The book is well authored with informative tutorials designed for even the most novice of graphics editors. The games are enjoyable and provide great starting points to establish an easily extensible code base.

Considering the cost of other 3D animation and creation software, the Official Blender Gamekit delivers a powerful development solution for little cost. Honestly, upon detailed examination, I would have expected such a great resource to cost several times more than the respectable $34.95. Honestly, anyone interested in 3D graphics needs to closely examine the Official Blender Gamekit, as the 3D tutorials alone are well worth the cost, not to mention a full-fledged development suite, game engine, and supplemental code base.

Publisher: No Starch Press
Product Retail: $34.95 MSRP