1. Blender UI Overview

Here you can see an overview of the default blender 2.91+ user interface

  1. Your objects, in objectmode, change with TAB
  2. The 3d cursor, new objects will spawn here, can be used in (3)
  3. Change the pivot (origin) point for rotation and scaling
  4. Workspaces, gives you different UI layouts, try UV Mapping!
  5. This is called the outliner, here you find your collections & objects
  6. Here you find my addon, toggle it with N
  7. uv maps and smooth shading in Normals settings are here
  8. Here you will manage your materials (example: dirt)
  9. The timeline for animation, remove it or change the layout with (10)
  10. Window type of the area, here it is a timeline...

2. Basic Interactions

The interaction with objects (edges/faces/vertices) are mostly done with shortcuts, get used to it... fyi, MB stands for MouseButton

  1. Interactions are applied with ENTER or LMB
  2. Interactions are ignored with ESC or RMB
  3. G for grab, move your selection around
  4. R for rotate, rotate around your choosen pivot point
  5. S for scale, scale from your choosen pivot point
  6. A to select all, AA to delesect all
  7. H to hide selection, ALT + H unhide all
  8. Q for favorite actions, add them with rightclick in menus
  9. M to move your selected objects to another collection
  10. SHIFT + A for adding new objects, mostly MESH and EMPTY
  11. TAB to toggle edit-/objectmode
  12. SHIFT + MMB to move your camera
  13. MMB to rotate your camera
  14. SHIFT + S change cursor location
  15. CTRL + SPACEBAR will end-/fullscreen your active area
  16. Z to toggle between view modes (wireframe, solid, ...)

3. Edit mode

In the editmode you can change the geometry of your selected objects

  1. Change the selection method, 3 face, 2 edge, 1 vertex
  2. Your selection, manipulate with G S R
  3. Your mark seams for uv mapping, add with CTRL + E
  4. E for extend your selection
  5. F to create a face/edge between 2 different selections

1. Materials overview

Materials are necessary to connect texture and geometry data

  1. Material applied on your object
  2. Materials need to be created with my addon
  3. Materials can be managed here, you can use multiple
  4. ... in editmode you can assign geometry to a material here
  5. Name: give your new material a name
  6. Game: choose which game this material is for
  7. Collection: choose your environment
  8. PhysicsId: choose a physic for your material
  9. Gameplay: choose a second physic, only for tm2020
  10. BaseTexture: choose a custom texture (only maniaplanet)
  11. Model: in combination BaseTexture, define your texture model
  12. TDSN stands for Texture Diffuse Specular Normal
  13. O means the texture can have 1bit alpha, B means 256bit alpha
  14. I stands for Illum, it adds the glow texture _I.dds to your model
  15. TIAdd is the model for alpha glow, only _I.dds is used!
  16. Link: this refers to a pre defined nadeo material, (vanilla textures)

1. UV Maps Overview

UV Maps are the 2d representation of your 3d geometry, textures are projected

  1. Selection mode, 1 vertex, 2 edges, 3 faces, 4 islands (groups)
  2. Your texture (only for editing, this is not linked to the object!)
  3. UV Layers, BaseMaterial name is required and used for the texture projection
  4. Color mode, choose what type of color you wanna see
  5. Your 2d uv selection (not synced to 3d selection, activate with(1)
  6. Your selection in the 3d viewport, only this is visible in the uv editor
  7. U to unwrap selection, mark seam edges(CTRL + E) defines the cuts

2. Lightmap

UV Layer which is used to compute the lightmap of you object

  1. Rendered Lightmap example with red light
  2. UV Island overlapping clearly visible
  3. actual affected partby the red light
  4. Overlapping will affect the roof here too, bad lightmap!
  5. ... avoid (2) island overlapping
  6. ... and keep your margins between islands
  7. ... else neightbor islands will get affected by false lights

1. Outliner structure and waypoints

The collections in the outliner can be nested, they are used for folder structuring if they contain children collections

  1. The colortag of your collection defines the waypoint type, blue for checkpoint, red for finish, green for start and yellow for startfinish(multilap)
  2. All your Objects have to be in a collection
  3. This is the _socket_xyz object, the location and rotation data is used for the respawn point
  4. This is the _trigger_xyz object, driving through this geometry will trigger the waypoint
  5. ... with SHIFT + A you can add a car spawn, it will give you the right data
  6. ... the socket and trigger object should not have any uv maps or materials
  7. ... you can name your objects just socket and trigger, _ will get added automatically (necessary for the nadeoimporter)