Blender Animation Part 2: The Environment

After having written down the Plan on the previous blog post, the first order of business was to bring the environment into Blender. Summoner's Rift.

So the first thing I did was look up a 3d model of said map. I expected multiple results because of the sheer popularity of the game but it was quite shocking that there was really only one 3d model on Sketchfab and it was quite buggy. The textures were acting weird in the sense that you could see through them like an X Ray but without them actually having any transparency, and when you turned all transparency off then all the trees would be blocky. I tried a lot to fix this because there weren't really any other options, but I didn't really succeed in making it usable.

So I thought to myself, maybe I could use the map of DOTA 2, another game quite similar to League of Legends. I could make the environment different but keep the characters and story the same. I had thought to myself that this would be easier to do because DOTA 2 is a game made by VALVe, the same company that made Team Fortress 2, Garry's Mod, Counter Strike: Global Offensive, the Half Life franchise, the Portal franchise, and Source Filmmaker. Every listed product here, especially Garry's Mod and Source Filmmaker, are well known because they're amazing products, but the other important thing they all share is community support. VALVe has allowed consumers to make their own designs and 3d models and upload them to an online database called the Steam Workshop, where anyone can download any custom creation and use it at their own will. The amount of community support and drive these products have is insane, to the point that the company that made these products don't even have to make something of their own anymore. It's like opening the door to the kitchen and letting the customers make anything they want, free of cost!

Enough fanboying, the point is that I expected DOTA 2 to let me easily bring its map into Blender because it too has a lot of custom creations for it. The HAMMER Map editor was the program necessary to make changes and adjustments to the map. It's quite versatile, learning it made me realize just how fun making an environment can be. But there was one very...very big problem.

Technically you could bring maps from these VALVe games into Blender very easily, through various community plugins. The reason DOTA 2 was different however, was that instead of the traditional .bsp format, it instead used a .vmap format.

.vmap is recognized by Hammer and can be opened and edited freely, and Hammer can then export to .dmx, .obj, and .FBX. The latter two of which are both officially recognized by Blender.

But exporting to those formats then bringing them into Blender....pretty much broke them. It not only took 25 minutes to even bring them in, but the textures were missing, objects were gone, and it looked nothing like the actual map. No matter what settings or format I did, they didn't look the way they were supposed to.

So after doing some research I found out that DOTA 2 shifted to the .vmap format in 2015, in a project called DOTA 2 Reborn, meaning that it must've used the traditional .bsp format before that era. Digging around I found an older archive of the game, and brought in the .bsp directly into Blender using the plugins. It worked....kind of. The textures were missing and the meshes were still quite messed up. There would have to be a lot of fixing required to make this work, and at that point I might as well go back to Summoner's Rift as even that was in a much better state than whatever I was looking at.

But I thought to myself....Steam Workshop has all sorts of creations. Weapons, Cosmetics, and Maps. DOTA 2 was different because of the overhaul project in 2015, but the other games have remained fundamentally the same since their release. So what if DOTA 2's map is available in the Workshop for another game that I could bring in?

I was right. Counter Strike Global Offensive did in fact have DOTA 2's map in the Steam Workshop as an option. But I now had to do an 18gb download to actually install it, then have access to the map, then bring it to Blender. But after an overnight download, I did it, used the plugins to bring them into Blender, and finally, it was there and it looked magnificent.

Is what I would have said if it was actually that simple. But noooooo I just HAVE to experience more pain don't I. The map suffered other mesh problems and texture bugs, and caused Blender to crash consistently. It wasn't usable.

At this point I had given up hope and just decided to use the Sketchfab map and fix it, but then wondered, if DOTA 2's map exists in Steam Workshop, what if Summoner's Rift did as well?

Doing a global search, I found ONE map. A proper, 3d Summoner's Rift. But it was for the only game that actually needed to be purchased: Garry's Mod. So I bit the bullet and spent the 10 Dollars. Taking into account inflation and conversion, this was enough money to feed 10 people. So I really really hope it worked.

I installed the map, played it in GMod, it worked fine, about as expected. Then was the moment of truth of whether or not bringing this specific .bsp file into Blender would actually work. And....it did. It actually did and finally I had Summoner's Rift.

It was missing grass and towers, but those were available in a separate 3d file, I just had to bring them in and align them myself but it....works. At long last. The only problem is that beyond the edge, there's nothing. So I have to keep my camera angles such that it's not visible or it's not the main focus. But I'm ready for that compromise because it.....is so relieving to finally see it working.

6 days for this. I really hope the rest of the animation goes well.

Summoner's Rift