Making a 3D Environment
Before we make a 3D character, we need to make a new game that has a 3D world node ready for us.
First, go to the home page of the Buildbox application by clicking on the house icon in the top left corner.
Then, click “Create New” followed by clicking “Create 3D Game”.
Adding a 3D Character
Now, double click on the “3D World” node and delete the “Cube” object from the Assets Panel. You also want to click on the “Ground” object in the World Outliner directly to the left of the game preview and change the “Ground Type” to “No Ground”.
We are going to make our own character and ground from scratch.
First, we must head to the Asset Library and get the Cube and Sphere assets by double clicking on them.
Rename the Cube to “Ground” and the Sphere to “Main Character”.
The Sphere asset should be dragged into the Characters category once you have finished renaming both assets.
Creating the Ground
Now, let’s drag the asset we called “Ground” into the game preview and position it to about the center of the brackets.
In the Scale area, set X equal to 10, Y equal to 0.25, and Z equal to 10.
Now, let’s change the color of the ground (it doesn’t matter what color you make it), by clicking on the Ground in the Assets Panel and under the “3D Model” tab on the right and clicking on “Color”.
Now, we want to apply physics to this Ground asset because we want our character to actually land on something physical. To do this, locate the “Start” area on the right side of the screen and make sure that the physics is set to “Static”.
Creating the Character
After you have changed the physics of the Ground asset to “Static”, we are going to drag in our Main Character asset into the game preview. Make sure the sphere is completely above the floor.
We want the physics of this sphere set to “Dynamic” so that it is able to fall down onto the ground platform we made earlier.
Now, we are going to add some details so that our character doesn’t look like a boring white ball.
Double click on the Main Character asset in the Assets Panel to reach its Node Map.
Rename the “3D World” node to “Body” and under the “Body” node, change the color of the sphere to yellow.
After that, we are going to duplicate the “Body” node by pressing W on the keyboard. This newly duplicated node will be renamed to “Mouth”.
Change the color of the mouth to red so that we can differentiate it from the body color.
We also need to change the position of the mouth because right now it covers the entire body!
To do this, we are going to set our position coordinates to these:
X: 0, Y: -0.3, Z: 0.9
And our scale values to these:
X: 0.5, Y: 0.1, Z: 0.1
NOTE: You can preview the look of the mouth by holding and dragging the right mouse button over the preview window at the bottom right corner.
Now, we will move onto the eyes. Create the first node for the eyes by duplicating the “Mouth” node and renaming it to “Eye1”. Change the color of the eye to black and the position of the first eye will have these coordinates:
X: -0.3, Y: 0.4, Z: 0.95
And the scale values to these:
X: 0.1, Y: 0.2, Z: 0.1
To make the second eye is even easier than the first! All we have to do is duplicate the “Eye1” node, rename it to “Eye2” and remove the negative (-) sign from the X-coordinate in the position.
NOTE: When you preview your game by pressing the play button in the top right corner, remember that you can change the camera angle by clicking on the camera icon in the top right area of the game preview window.
And just like that, you have made your very own 3D character using Buildbox!