Adventures across the 3rd dimension

That hurt my eyes but thanks, at least I can find it now.

381 faces for the finished house doesn't sound too bad. Though with flat walls it would be even less, of course.

It seems every step of every thing I do in Blender I come across something that I can't figure out or that's just not working like the tutorial, or it's not explained clearly enough where the hell it is... *sigh*

I decided to try a smaller item, just to see if I could get everything right and actually make a mod, add it to the game and see if it's too big, too small, work as expected etc. First it took forever to realise that when I want to edit something, I first have to select the object in object view then go to edit view and then select everything again, if I wanted to do something that affects the whole damn thing. Because selecting something once just isn't enough.

Then I decided to make this smaller thing in bforartists instead to see if it is indeed more intuitive but apparently I have already learned too many of Blenders shortcuts because now I couldn't do almost anything and things that were quick enough in Blender (just click Tab) I had to click manually on drop down menus in bforartists.... Then I tried smoothing the edges of a simplified cylinder. Well, that was a reminder to select everything twice.

Eventually I just returned to Blender. Made a super simple model. Tried to follow a tutorial on how to make an ambient occlusion texture. and... There's supposed to be a "bake" button. There is no such thing. Manual doesn't mention any baking in regards to AO. The only image I can manage to make is a pitch black one. Yay. I'm sure that's super useful. If it exists and isn't just a black hole type doorway into the abyss.

I don't want to end up giving up and I'm not there yet but what the heck?
Not to mention there seems to only be the options of smooth or flat. I'm used to being able to set the actual value for what angles will look smooth and which ones will be sharp enough to remain flat. Not that it matters on a cylinder where all the angles are the same, but the sheer absence of any kind of number for the smoothing... I just think it looks a bit too smooth... *whines*

I gave up on trying to do an AO image and decided to make the texture as well as the AO image in ArtRage. That done, I managed to add the texture (looking rather pale-ish...). But I still can't figure how to apply the AO texture. I've watched some videos and all I can say is.... lots of boxes. Boxes and little lines between boxes and way too much to keep track of...and videos that are too fast and images where the text is too small and things that are not named the same thing in the videos as they are in my version of Blender...

uhm no I think it was uhhh.... a texture editor thingy? Mapping? shading? rendering?
They just seem to have everything in several places and sometimes you can use any of the places and change one thing and at other times you need to make changes in ALL the places for that one thing to happen. I just don't get it. And no, I don't know how to know where all those little connections between boxes should go, either...

The shading environment is a node editor. Those boxes are nodes.

oh. In vrml pretty much everything were nodes. Geometry, materials, etc... Wasn't sure how it was used in Blender.

We're all racing towards that deadline with nothing to show for it, aren't we?

and yes, I did have a vague memory of Banj removing my previous 3D discussions from the usual threads

This is as far as I have come on making models for Founder's Fortune. No colour, no nothing. I am a bit tempted to make it an ffasset file so I can check it out in game and see if you can tell I've removed faces that I don't expect to be visible and whether the size is what it should be. But I'd need to change a bunch of json files too, for that, so I'd rather try when the model is complete. I have a hard enough time learning one thing at a time