Steam-Powered Blender

StTheo

StTheo

Well-Known Member
So, a couple weeks ago a Steam employee reached out on the Blender mailing list, hoping to add the program as one of the programs downloadable through Steam:
Hi everyone,
I work for Valve (http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/). We would like to make our digital distribution platform Steam (www.steampowered.com<http://www.steampowered.com>) one of the places where you can download Blender. The long-term goal would be to make it easier for people to build their own mods for PC games with Blender and share these mods with other gamers.
So I was wondering if there are any Blender users on this list who are interested in PC games and could see themselves working on an integration between Blender and PC games that offer official modding support such as DOTA 2.

Long story:
Valve is a company that is built on modding. The original Half-Life was built on a modified version of the Quake engine. All our major games since then started out as mods which we found cool, hired the people who built them and released them as major game titles. This is true for Counter-Strike, the original Team Fortress, Day of Defeat and DOTA 2 (Portal was not technically a mod but a student project - but you see the pattern).
Similarly, one of the most successful features of our Steam platform is the Steam Workshop (http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/), which is an interface for users to share, discover and install mods for their games. Essentially, you can publish your mod there and other gamers can bring your mod into their games with a single mouse click.
This is something that we think would be a cool feature for Blender to tap into. Like modeling a sword in Blender, pushing a button and having it available to all users of Skyrim. But we bet there are more creative ideas out there than this one.
What we are currently looking at is offering a completely vanilla version of Blender as a free download on Steam that is completely the same as that offered on other websites. We'd hope that this will get enough of our users exposed to and interested in Blender so they will be inclined to work on Blender plugins that would talk to Steam's backend services such as Workshop.
If you think you might be interested in being part of that, we'd be happy to hear from you!
Best,
Jan-Peter
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Ton Roosendaal, the original creator of Blender and the chairman of the Blender Foundation added:
Hi all,

To put this in perspective - I've been in contact with JP and others from Valve
(they added a donation system, to mark a percentage of sales going to Blender
Foundation).

Valve was very interested to find other ways to support Blender, and I
suggested them to more activily involve users of their platform in a
stakeholder role. That could be by adding forums there, maintaining todo or
issue lists, inviting people to contribute to Blender (C or with add-ons).

Game modding is a popular 3d activity online, and Blender for sure has a big
following there. Their requirements probably won't differ much from game
artists in studios either - it's all about getting the tools well defined and
functional, and ensure I/O is as smooth as possible.

JP's suggestion for platform integration I cannot judge really... nor how much
it would be a priority or how it can be delivered license-compitable. I'll
leave that to the experts here.

-Ton-
Click to expand...


For those unaware, Blender is a open-source, cross-platform 3d modeling program. This makes it perfect for modders who don't want to pay for (or pirate) expensive modeling programs for simple modding. It also functions as an animation program with several official open movies (Elephant's Dream, Big Buck Bunny, Sintel, and Tears of Steel), and as a game engine. I've used blender since I was in high school, and am really excited to see it being given more attention, especially with something as popular as Steam. What do you all think about this?
 
Blender is an awesome program. Best of all, its free !

I should have learnt how to use it long ago instead of dumbass sketchup or 3ds max.

Commit to Blender and you'll probably make good money modelling 3d items people pay for because they want to be fabulous.
 
I think it's awesome. Blender has always been a fantastic tool in my eyes and it's great to see that it's being given more attention, especially by a company like valve.
 
I've been using Blender for a while. Admittedly, I'm rather horrible at it and should probably dedicate much more time towards it. I'm currently working on modelling entities for a custom, private Minecraft server I host for a few of my IRL friends.

I'm rather interested to see where this dialogue goes.
 
Blender's insanely difficult to use but this is awesome
Positive gaming streamlining
Make new future
HL3 confirmed
 
Vorsprung said:
Blender's insanely difficult to use but this is awesome
Click to expand...

Yeah, I spent several years getting comfortable with Blender's GUI. Then came the 2.5+ GUI. Key bindings were switched around, the layout of the buttons panel thing was rotated 90°, you had to learn a new way to get to each setting, and some commands were completely renamed. For me, it was like dvorak. Technically better, but way too much of a hassle to learn. Plus I started messing around with Quartz Composer at the time, so I didn't feel the need to learn the new GUI. I wish the cycles renderer could use OpenCL though - I have an AMD GPU, so Cuda is worthless to me.
 
cR2mYiL.png


:o
 
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