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Hi map/terrain/environment/world… makers, this is, after working at BI/BISim for almost 10 years, my first topic created here at BI forums. In my defense, I’m mostly active in Arma 3 Maps Terrains Skype’s group, but the topic I want to share with you deserves to be discuss here(skype has short memory and is not as comfortable as forums, for such kind of discussion). The Topic? It’s of course the bLandscapeTools(bLT), an addon for Blender I’ve been already working on for the last 8 years. The main reason I started this addon was: already knew Blender wanted to improve my python scripting skills, as I like to automate or at least speed up processes many handy world creation features were not available back then, are not available now and will never be implemented in BI/BISim world creation tools Necessary to note that I never intended to write a tool which would take over the world BI/BISim tools, but rather try to fill gaps(small/large) in terrain development. Blender is a 3D modeling tool(and much more), but you can’t expect fancy features which can handle big chunks of terrains with millions of objects on it, it has its own bottlenecks and limits, but even back then I could see, that the advantage of having possibility to import terrain mesh and its textures to Blender and start placing environment content much more easier way(comparing to Buldozer) or even modeling content over a terrain is a feature that will never come into Terrain Builder/Buldozer. By sticking together Blender’s default features like sculpting, painting + powerfull API I was basically able to add many time consuming and “Visitor4/TerrainBuilder hard to get implemented” features into Blender. Let’s stop talking for now… check out my talk at BlenderConference2016 about the Blender Terrain Tools(Edit: just currently I changed the name to bLandscapeTools) so you guys can make an image of what I’ve been working on. There are some features which will be really hard(almost impossible) to release because they are closely bound to BI dev content like raw(non-binarized) P3Ds, but on the positive note bLT has some handy features not even mentioned in the video(like quality assurance tools) Why now? After the conference I got contacted by individuals and even teams, asking me where they can download the addon as they would like to have their hands on it and give it a try. So I decided to start releasing the tool bits by bits to people so they, hopefully, can have a fun time play around with bLT. Also, the fact that this year(2017) it's going to be 10 years at BI/BISim or in other words working with the RVengine, as well as, Paul Pelosi(bushlurker) suddenly passing away, made me to do this decision and release the tool. It’s also going to be a challenge and something new to me, releasing my tool to other people, it needs a change of thinking about the tool, fix some parts of the pipeline..etc. and that may take some time. How? There’s plenty of how in the front of me. I need to figure out a way how to share the tool with you guys. Github, Blender market I have in my mind right now. As mentioned already, there are features hard to release(raw P3Ds). In this case I’ll have to ask someone here in BI, if company would be willing to release let’s say at least last LODs of assets so they could be imported into Blender and used within bLT. I use Blender for over 10 years, so I’m pretty comfortable with its workflow, but this doesn’t have to apply to a newcomer. Therefore, I’ll have to take some steps to make bLT even more user friendly than it is right now. I plan to make quite some tutorials how to use Blender and bLT to user’s satisfaction. Currently, Blender development is at the stage where quite a big major changes are being implemented and to be released with Blender 2.8. There’s going to be plenty of great new features such Viewport update(supporting PBR shaders), new Layers, Workflow system and much more. This means that I’ll have to re-think some of the bLT features to support all these new improvements once they’re released. Therefore I don’t want to do any major touches into what exists in bLT now. I hope that the improvements done for 2.8 will take bLT a few steps further again, as it already happened with the transition from Blender 2.4 to 2.5+. So once again, I’d like to ask you to have a look at my talk, if you have any questions please don’t hesitate to ask. It will help me to move on with releasing the tool as well as to know how the features should be done to help you create a map for any RV engine related project. When? Release of the '0-th' or 'Introduction' version is planned on the end of summer holidays. Progress will be tracked here. Subscribe to my personal youtube's channel here. Tools Github's here. Twitter Cheers, Miro