Panda3D Part 5 – Introduction to Blender

In the previous parts of the Panda3D series we created a basic Panda3D game that does… nothing. But it works. It’s time to add some models and actors to it. The distinction between models and actors in Panda3D is that models are static and actors are the characters, which are usually animated.

Here’s the video version of this article:

We’re going to use Blender, a free but powerful 3D modeling software, to model our assets. This article is a very short introduction to Blender. In the following articles in the series we’re going to cover some basics of Blender. This is not going to be a complete tour of Blender. We’re going to model our assets, texture them and then rig and animate them so that they are ready to use in our app. If you know the basics of Blender, you may want to skip this and the following couple articles.

File Format

In this series we’re going to export our Blender models to the gltf format which is commonly used in graphics. We can do it using the gltf exporter Blender ships with.

Installing Blender

So, the first thing we have to do is install Blender. To do so, go to the blender.org website. There you will see the latest stable version of Blender.

The installation of Blender is pretty straightforward. You can grab the latest version from the download section. In this series I’m going to work mainly on the 2.91 version of Blender.

Anyway, after installing Blender, just launch the program and you will see something like this:

Naturally, it may differ if you have a different version of Blender. If you click anywhere outside the popup window that contains some shortcuts, the window will close:

Blender is ready to use. In the next part of the series we’ll be talking about the Blender GUI.