To summarize my predicament: I am working on an animated short. Its deadline is around July 15. Character animation will be done through traditional (2D) animation, but I wanted to use some sort of 3D software to help me create the backgrounds.

Things I want from this software:

  • The ability to create terrain/landscapes in an intuitive way
  • Custom textures
  • The ability to create lakes, rivers, waterfalls, natural arches, forests, sand beaches, paved roads, tunnels, fences and buildings (exterior and interior)
  • Lighting (optional)

My original plan was to use the Hammer Editor for this, but the Hammer Editor is (1) not FOSS and (2) doesn’t natively work on Linux, and getting it set up on Linux is a pain and not guaranteed to work.

Hammer++ and Rathammer also either don’t work, or seem like a pain to set up on Linux. Trenchbroom actually works pretty OK, however as a Quake/HL1 map editor it doesn’t have displacements, which means it’s very tedious and clunky to do terrain.

Godot is unintuitive. The voxel engine Luanti isn’t really what I’m looking for insofar as I couldn’t figure out how to do smooth terrain with it given it’s a voxel engine and all. Blender I haven’t tried yet but is almost certainly going to prove very unintuitive for the basic tasks I want to do.

The Far Cry 2 map editor I managed to get working on my computer, and is fairly close to what I want… but it froze and crashed when I tried to save the map. Dessuten “close” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades, as they say.

So if Blender ends up being too much of a pain in the butt, and I can’t get any better ideas for what to do from this thread, then I can either try borrowing a Windows computer and using Hammer on that (which would sacrifice my pride as a Linux Weirdo), or I can just give up on the 3D backgrounds idea altogether and draw my own crappy backgrounds in GIMP.

  • lizard_thing [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    28 days ago

    Blender is by far the most realistic option, but since it seems you really like Hammer, i’ll tell you that Hammer++ works perfectly fine for me on Arch with default wine, with a lil bit of setup:

    Install the windows version of whatever Source game (properties > compatability > use any proton version) and then follow the normal Hammer++ setup instructions. Everything seems to Just Work™ for me.

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      2·
      28 days ago

      When you say “default wine”, what do you mean? Because I have something called WineZGUI. I’m on Linux Mint, I should say.

      I followed your instructions, then double clicked hammerplusplus.exe, then found the location of the .exe when WineZGUI prompted me for it, clicked launch, and then nothing seemed to happen. I also tried apt installing wine through the terminal but I get 0% [waiting for headers] and Ign lines. For that matter installing Blender through the software manager seemed to get stuck (in fact this seemingly caused my computer to run out of memory? dmesg says Out of memory: Killed process 93515 (packagekitd)). Could this be related to the DDoS against Ubuntu/Canonical? The Ign lines all involve ubuntu.com. If so then I can probably get the stuff I want through a different mirror. I don’t know how to do that but it shouldn’t be too hard, right?

      Edit: Going to software sources and changing base (noble) mirror to a different site seemed to fix the [waiting for headers] issue, so now I’ve installed wine and wine64 through the terminal.

      Edit 2: Running wine hammerplusplus.exe from the folder gave me an error so I tried installing wine32, and now it’s telling me wine: '/home/erika/.wine' is a 64-bit installation, it cannot be used with a 32-bit wineserver.

      Edit 3: Tried running sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386 and then sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade once again for good measure but still nothing.

      Edit 4: Deleted .wine folder and tried again, now the terminal says

      Application could not be started, or no application associated with the specified file.
ShellExecuteEx failed: Bad EXE format for Z:\home\erika\.steam\debian-installation\steamapps\common\GarrysMod\bin\win64\hammerplusplus.exe.

      Which I’m guessing is because when the .wine folder regenerated, it was as a 32-bit installation instead of 64-bit. Given hammerplusplus.exe is located in a folder called win64, obviously I want to use the 64 bit version of Wine. How though.

      Edit 5: Ran sudo apt install wine64 again, then deleted .wine folder again, then ran wine hammerplusplus.exe from GarrysMod\bin\win64\ again, and now I’m at least back to Wine Debugger giving me a Program Error Unhandled exception: unimplemented function tier0.dll.CommandLine called in 64-bit code, which is… progress? But so much for Just Works™. I once again find myself thinking “I don’t know why, I don’t want to know why, I shouldn’t have to wonder why” — of course you’re an Arch user. :P

      Edit 6: And soooomefuckinghoooooow all this rigmarole (probably changing my package mirror?) broke my install of ibus-m17n which made my computer lag and my keyboard get stuck in Japanese. Thankfully a restart got me back to the Norwegian keyboard so I could reinstall ibus-m17n and reinstall all my keyboard layouts. Ughhhhhhhh

      • lizard_thing [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        2·
        28 days ago

        ok that’s… a lot. As for the package manager issues it sounds like you just needed to sudo apt update, if it’s been a few days since the repos were updated then it gives 404 errors sometimes.

        Everything else… I wish i could help you further but it sounds like your mint installation is pretty fucked. It really was just “install wine, install Hammer++, double click the .exe” for me 😭 i didnt think my arch-user aura was that powerful

        edit: and ‘default wine’ meant “i installed wine from my package manager and that was it”

        • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
          2·
          28 days ago

          As for the package manager issues it sounds like you just needed to sudo apt update, if it’s been a few days since the repos were updated then it gives 404 errors sometimes.

          Seems like it, I switched back to archive.ubuntu.com and now it apparently works perfectly.

          it sounds like your mint installation is pretty fucked.

          You aren’t the first person to say this…