Adding shadows to custom ballparks with Blender

[low]

Man, that stuff is sexy.

[Flying_Canuck]

The final step is done in Blender, right? (the baking part) The effect is really cool. This is something we should all learn but I never got around to it. I kinda gave up mid way through...... Thank you Eriq for doing this and sharing your progress. You are the first one to have some real success!

[eriqjaffe]

Lots and lots of Blender, yeah.

But I just now finished writing up tutorial. With pictures and even some example models you can look at!

https://eriqjaffe.github.io/blender/

And here's some fully baked stadiums. I might re-think how I handle "non-baked" elements to make it a little less clunky, but as the tutorial is written, everything seems to function. A couple of the night textures have some odd green speckling and I don't know what's up with that, but that's a topic for another day.

[Deft]

Originally Posted by eriqjaffe

Lots and lots of Blender, yeah.

But I just now finished writing up tutorial. With pictures and even some example models you can look at!

https://eriqjaffe.github.io/blender/

And here's some fully baked stadiums. I might re-think how I handle "non-baked" elements to make it a little less clunky, but as the tutorial is written, everything seems to function. A couple of the night textures have some odd green speckling and I don't know what's up with that, but that's a topic for another day.

I can't get the sketchup importer to work. I dropped it into the Blender extension folder. Any insight?

It says it was installed but doesn't show up.

[Flying_Canuck]

Originally Posted by eriqjaffe

Lots and lots of Blender, yeah.

But I just now finished writing up tutorial. With pictures and even some example models you can look at!

https://eriqjaffe.github.io/blender/

And here's some fully baked stadiums. I might re-think how I handle "non-baked" elements to make it a little less clunky, but as the tutorial is written, everything seems to function. A couple of the night textures have some odd green speckling and I don't know what's up with that, but that's a topic for another day.

Oh boy! That looks so good! This inspires me to try it out. But I already know (from past experience) that it will be a painful learning process I am a complete NOOB when it comes to Blenders. I have trouble just navigating around. Sketchup feels so much more intuitive to me. Anyways, this is still something that's worth learning. Thanks once again for leading the charge.

[eriqjaffe]

Originally Posted by Deft

I can't get the sketchup importer to work. I dropped it into the Blender extension folder. Any insight?

Hmm. Not off-hand. I've never had any problems installing the importer from within the Blender preferences. If you go to "c:\users\<you>\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\5.1\scripts\addons" there should be a "sketchup_importer" folder with a bunch of files in it.

[eriqjaffe]

Made a few changes to the tutorial based on some things I ran across when I was going through that full night bake. The tutorial SketchUp model has also been updated but I haven't replaced the Blender models.

[Deft]

Originally Posted by eriqjaffe

Hmm. Not off-hand. I've never had any problems installing the importer from within the Blender preferences. If you go to "c:\users\<you>\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\5.1\scripts\addons" there should be a "sketchup_importer" folder with a bunch of files in it.

Fixed it by dragging the files over to the directory. Thanks!!

[eriqjaffe]

Originally Posted by Deft

Fixed it by dragging the files over to the directory. Thanks!!

[Deft]

I am realizing I need to cleanup a bunch of construction geometry and creating components of similar materials is a good method for organizing components.

[silvam14]

Very cool work! Any screens of what it looks like in OOTP?

[Deft]

Originally Posted by silvam14

Very cool work! Any screens of what it looks like in OOTP?

that is in OOTP

[Deft]

Getting better but definitely needs some sun manipulations.

[eriqjaffe]

Playing around with it, the simplest thing to do might be to play around with the exposure settings (Render -> Color Management -> Exposure).

edit: unfortunately this only works for the viewport and renders, not for baking.

[Deft]

I like it! I am struggling with night baking the actual lights. Any suggestions?

Some more notes:

Smart UV Troubleshooting
Occasionally the Smart UV in default settings struggles with long and thin surfaces so clicking the auto-scaling or changing to horizontal or auto-axis aligning resolves this issue.

Fixing Sketchup Issues after Importing into Blender
If you have a component that is not what you want went in blender, you can delete the component from your blender file, and reimport the updated sketchup file. It will show up as a new Loose Entity (Loose Entity.001 usually). You can delete the top level new mesh (Loose Entity.001) and the sub-meshes will collapse into the original imported meshes. Find the new component you want to modify and follow the regular operations and then delete all of the new duplicated component usually identified with .001 suffix.

[eriqjaffe]

Originally Posted by Deft

I like it! I am struggling with night baking the actual lights. Any suggestions?

Some more notes:

Smart UV Troubleshooting
Occasionally the Smart UV in default settings struggles with long and thin surfaces so clicking the auto-scaling or changing to horizontal or auto-axis aligning resolves this issue.

Fixing Sketchup Issues after Importing into Blender
If you have a component that is not what you want went in blender, you can delete the component from your blender file, and reimport the updated sketchup file. It will show up as a new Loose Entity (Loose Entity.001 usually). You can delete the top level new mesh (Loose Entity.001) and the sub-meshes will collapse into the original imported meshes. Find the new component you want to modify and follow the regular operations and then delete all of the new duplicated component usually identified with .001 suffix.

Good notes, thanks!

I haven't yet figured out how to handle making the actual lights look brighter in Blender. Probably the simplest thing to do would be to just edit the light tower's night texture(s) in Photoshop and just adjust the levels of the section containing the lights until they look "lit" since they won't really be affected by shadows anyways. TBH I'm still trying to figure out the best way of doing this.

One thing I came across that is kind of cool is the "Sun Position" addon, which can help with creating accurate real-world shadows. Provide a latitude, longitude, date, time, set where "north" in the model is, and voila!

https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/sun-position/

[eriqjaffe]

I've updated the tutorial with Deft's notes in the FAQ and also added a couple of utility scripts packaged as an addon:

https://eriqjaffe.github.io/blender/...rk-toolkit.zip

It will add an "OOTP" menu into the 3D Viewport when you are in Object mode with the following actions:

• Clean Scene & Isolate Materials - This will loop through all of your components and make the materials in each component unique to that component so that you don't have to keep changing things in the Shader editor every time you come across a shared texture. It will also remove all of the "DefaultMaterial" instances it comes across.
  
  
• Clone Nodes to Component Materials - This will clone the selected nodes in the Shader editor to all of the other materials in the selected component. So after you've added the UV Maps and bake target nodes to a material, select them all and then run that script to instantly duplicate those nodes throughout the component. You'll still have to go through and re-link the nodes for each material, but it's a start.
  
  
• Set Up OOTP Material - This will help speed up the importing of the baked textures by deleting all material slots from the selected component and create a new material slot with a UV Map and Image node already in there and linked. All you should have to do is load up the baked texture into the Image node and it should immediately be visible in the model (well, assuming you're in Material Preview or Rendered view).
  
  
• Export Ballpark to OOTP - This will export the OBJ (defaulting to the same directory and filename as your Blender model) and MTL files, with the Path Mode set to "Copy." It will then also edit the .MTL file to replace the crowd textures with the relevant OOTP crowd textures. This assumes your crowd texture materials are named properly. At the very least, it works for me. If you're using silvam14's green, red, blue, and gray crowd textures it should work flawlessly. If your crowd textures don't match, then they won't get edited.

There may be more in the future, but these are the convenience things I've done so far. You install this the same way you installed the SketchUp Importer add-on.

[eriqjaffe]

With the help of Gemini AI, I've updated the toolkit addon with some significant changes.

1. Prepare Model. An expanded version of the "Clean Scene & Isolate Materials" script that will loop through all of your components and perform the following:
   
   
   • Removes all "DefaultMaterial" instances it comes across.
     
     
   • Makes the materials in each component unique to that component so that you don't have to keep changing things in the Shader editor every time you come across a shared texture. Each material will have the component name appended to its name. So the "C-field" component will have "grass-field" and "dirt-field", and so on.
     
     
   • Creates a named UV Map for each component and sets the UV Maps up for UV Unwrapping as described in the tutorial.
     
     
   • Creates a named 1024x1024 image for each component to act as a bake target. The image name is the component name with "_bake" appended as a placeholder and to ensure it won't conflict with any existing files.
     
     
   • Iterates through each component's materials and wires up the Shader editor properly (using the UV Map and image it just created) as described in the tutorial.
   
   This will skip any components with "nobake" in the name.
   
   
2. Clone Nodes to Component Materials. This will clone the selected nodes in the Shader editor to all of the other materials in the selected component. So after you've added the UV Maps and bake target nodes to the material material in a component, select them all and then run that script to instantly duplicate those nodes throughout the component. You'll still have to go through and re-link the nodes for each material, but it's still faster than copying and pasting. Likely not needed if the "Prepare Model" script works as expected.
   
   
3. Bake All Bakeable Components. This will loop through each component not tagged as "nobake" and will sequentially bake them with user-defined settings. It will default to 128 Max Samples but you can set it anywhere from 1-4096. It also has a toggle allowing you to choose if it's a Day or Night bake. The resulting files are named accordingly and saved in the model's folder. This will allow you to quickly do test bakes to make sure everything is baking properly and then do a batch bake you can walk away from since it could take a while.
   
   
4. Set Up OOTP Material. This will help speed up the importing of the baked textures by deleting all material slots from the selected component and creating a new material slot with a UV Map and Image node already in there and wired up. All you should have to do is load up the baked texture into the Image node and (if you're in Material Preview or Rendered view) it should immediately be visible in the model. It should automatically pick the right UV map but you may need to adjust that if the texture looks wrong.
   
   
5. Export Ballpark to OOTP. This will export the OBJ (defaulting to the same directory and filename as your Blender model) and MTL files, with the Path Mode set to "Copy." It will also edit the .MTL file to replace the crowd textures with the appropriate OOTP crowd textures. This uses regular expressions so it requires your crowd texture materials to be named properly (this is why the "Prepare Model" script bypasses textures you've tagged with "nobake"). At the very least, it works for me. On the bright side, if your crowd textures don't get recognized, then they won't get edited. Additionally, any materials in components tagged with "nobake" should be explicitly copied into to the model's folder, hopefully avoiding the "black" texture issue in OOTP without cluttering the model's folder.

These are optional and may or may not work for you, but they work for me and may save you some time.

https://eriqjaffe.github.io/blender/...rk-toolkit.zip

[Deft]

Originally Posted by eriqjaffe

https://eriqjaffe.github.io/blender/...rk-toolkit.zip

Fantastic! One thing that is rather clunky is after is trying to test baked images into the OOTP model such that you can go into OOTP to evaluate blurry on nodes that might get wonky from making quadrangles. Is there an automated script that could save the model as test clear all of the materials and apply the baked images and then export to obj?

Also, how are you handling live scoreboards with your scripts?

[eriqjaffe]

There's a manual "Triangulate Faces" command you can run if you want beforehand - it's basically the opposite of the "triangles to quads" command, and it's even right next to it in the menu. The export script passes an "export_triangulated_mesh" flag as a part of the process which should do the same thing though.

I'm not handling live scoreboards at all, that's still a manual process. But as long as the texture's filename is consistent with what OOTP is expecting that should work the same way as it did before.

And since the naming should all be consistent thanks to the other scripts, I've replaced the one-by-one "Set Up OOTP Material" script with one that loops through all components that aren't tagged "nobake," creates the new material like the old script did, and then attempts to load the day texture since if you used the bake script, it should exist. Ran it against the tutorial model and it took like half a second. It's not tied to the export script so you'll still have to run that one separately. I'd like to keep things relatively compartmentalized.

Link for the updated addon is the same as above.