MBU Asset Pak for Blender

Helloy, I've posted bits and pieces of this before, so here's a demonstration of what's done so far with my MBU asset pack for level creation in Blender.


I'll do a proper writeup of everything too (with cool gifs like MIU did!), but that will be at a later date.

This is so god damn coooooooooooooool holy shit

Blender has always seemed intimidating but I keep telling myself I'm gonna try it one day, seeing stuff like this is insanely impressive to me

This is absolutely incredible! Not only does this look like it makes level building more efficient and prettier to look at, it looks so much faster too. I just assumed this was a timelapse, but then I looked at the clock in the corner and realized it was a real-time recording. Hats off to you, this is seriously impressive stuff, and I can't wait to see more!

Not to mention that Blender is actually a modern and capable program which runs natively on new hardware, unlike Constructor. So that's a great reason to use it too.

It's so good, turns out having a procedural methods to build levels was all that was needed in Blender to ease the level building process, instead of alternative editors.
This does motivate me a bit to work on updating the blender plugin and fix existing bugs.

This is AMAZING! I might be the biggest champion these days for Constructor and god knows I and everyone else needs something better to use. So excited for when this comes out.

Would the procedure for adding textures from other games be complicated?

Thanks Nockess, I was going to ask about other texture packs (especially PQ) but forgot.

And based on what RandomityGuy said, it sounds like Blender doesn't make it easy to do something like build a MB level on your own? So this is more than just a texture pack, and actually makes it easier to build MB levels? That's even more impressive and exciting! I remember people talking about how tedious and annoying it was to put trim on your levels, but this makes it look so easy! Imagine how much time it'll save once people start making huge levels.

For exporting, adding another texture might be as simple as clicking a button and writing the name. For seeing it in Blender, you'd also have to select the image file. So, it's more involved than Constructor, but the asset browser (in the video) could make reusing textures a little faster.

I am not sure why people have considered Blender unsuitable for making levels in the past, but the main thing seems to be that CSG modeling like Constructor has (including the way textures are mapped to the model) simply lends itself better to the usual MB style than the usual polygon modeling of Blender and similar software. Exporting was another problem.

However, Blender has a new feature called geometry nodes (a few examples of its use are here ). It came out in 2021 and has been receiving extensive updates since then. It is basically programming with flow charts; the data you work with is objects, models, and their attributes. The video here uses geometry nodes to dynamically add volume and trim to platforms, to make supports and platforms with curved joints along specified paths, to make supports terminate at a specific depth, to assign textures, and to map textures to surfaces. I used geometry nodes for some simple things in my renders (like the gem beams and restoring volume lost from smoothing out the items).

As of the latest io_dif update, you also have the option to use the material name itself as the texture name instead of having to assign a texture to it. But definitely an asset browser would make things easier.

As for the rather lack of interest in Blender by the community, it seems to be more of the software being too overwhelming for users to the point that some need to watch/read tutorials for it. It's not something you could just jump right into it and gain an intuition of how it works by fiddling with all the keys and settings; this part is infeasible due to the massive amount of options and shortcut combinations it provides. Additionally, UVing has been an issue as well since it does not behave like Constructor UVs, some extra setup needs to be done to replicate those.

Geometry nodes are indeed a really cool feature, a set of level building tools built using these would aid the less knowledgeable in simplifying their level building workflow.

In conclusion, the current state of Blender for level building has a relatively high skill curve due to lack of tooling as well as Marble Blast-specific tutorials.

Thanks for all the kind words about this project
I've gone ahead and uploaded the current version of the asset pak (called the marbleBlastToolkit from now on... probably.)
it's pretty much what's shown in the video, but i've also gone and created Tools for use directly in edit mode; i.e certain operations you'd probably wanna do on select parts of a mesh and not the whole thing
as well as new tools
they're all documented on the github page located here!
have fun blendering