92 replies to this topic

[Arcturus]

Ok, so this LWO exporter doesn't seam to work with darkmod. But this does. It exports properly material name. UVs seem to be ok. I have to check vertex painting.

[nbohr1more]

YES!!!

[Arcturus]

Unfortunately vertex painting does not load. When I import LWO back to Blender 2.70 vertex paint is preserved. Darkmod however ignores that. Are we sure that id tech 4 can read vertex paint from LWO? I assume it can.
You can only export one model. Well, you can export multiple models, but only one will be loaded in Darkmod, so you have to join models before export. You can have multiple materials inside one LWO.
There is another problem. Material name in Blender can have maximum 63 characters. That means that some longer material names from Darkmod will not fit.

[Springheel]

Are we sure that id tech 4 can read vertex paint from LWO? I assume it can.

Yes, as long as the material shader is set up to use it.

[Arcturus]

Small update. Two guys had been working on the LWO exporters at the same time. They agreed that only one will continue. So the first exporter had been updated to work with Idtech 4. Unfortunately, vertex painting will not work in Darkmod. It has some additional options, like triangulating mesh on export. It sets origin of the LWO at the origin of the model in Blender rather then at the centre of the grid like the other exporter, which is neat.

[Arcturus]

@Springheel, do you have an example of LWO with vertex painting? Maybe I'll toss it to the guy from Blenderartists forum.

[Springheel]

It's not something we use very often...I've never done it myself, but some people have done it to create texture blending on terrain models. I couldn't point out any models that use it off-hand.

[Arcturus]

Are you sure it was LWO and not ASE? Anyone remembers such maps?

[Springheel]

Sorry, I can't recall.

[Arcturus]

No problem, it's not that important.

[lost_soul]

http://www.blendswap...ends/view/74114

This is awesome. Its a highly detailed complete house, both inside and out. I walked around it for a wile, but rendering it would be extremely slow because if you want to e.g. render an image in one of the bathrooms, it has to STILL render the entire world in the background. The house isn't split up layer-to-room, its split up by windows on a layer, doors on another, ceilings on another, etc.

We need computers that are about 1000x faster than the hardware we have today. Then we can have games that use the cycles engine in real-time!

Edited by lost_soul, 01 June 2014 - 01:14 PM.

[Arcturus]

Blender 2.71 is out. Quake .map exporter is no longer shipped with Blender. That means it's no longer officially supported. Fortunately one can copy the addon from previous version of Blender into the new one and it will work.

[lost_soul]

I made my first animation tonight. Its just a simple hallway, with a window on the side and light coming in. I have a blue object traveling through the hallway, past the window. This is using Cycles. Why'd I do it? I wanted to see the kick-ass global illumination effect in real-time. As the blue object passes the window, it receives the bright sunlight, but splatters blue light onto the rest of the room as it goes by.

[Arcturus]

By the way Cycles now has baking, so you can bake all these effects to textures. Here's a thread at Blenderartists where people show baking in Cycles:

http://p3d.in/NBvYS
https://skfb.ly/zXs9

You can bake normalmaps in Cycles too. There's a feature added which was not in old renderer - a cage.

[Nic75]

I figured this is the best place to put this.

No lies, just yesterday morning I was still swearing at Blender and not much able to do anything beyond render that damn monkey (Blender users will know what I mean). An hour after that swearing session I found this modeling vid. It needs a few million more views. It's crazy how it's gotten so few, because so far this is the best Blender modeling how-to vid I've come across. Proof?

A few hours after watching that, I was looking at most of a horse. He still doesn't have a head and is still very rough (and his conformation needs tweaking: slightly pigeon-toed), but:

Spoiler

Spoiler

(caveat: sculpting in clay, wood, and stone is something I've done a lot of, so my first attempt results may reflect that)

So anyway, just posting this here as a reference in case anyone else has Blender but is still swearing at it.

Edited by Nic75, 17 September 2014 - 05:14 AM.

[lost_soul]

I understand that in games, it is bad to have overlapping geometry. Consider a wall with support beams that actually go through it, instead of stopping at the edge. Is this bad for CG in general? If I'm making an animation, is it important to not have any intersecting geometry? I've seen a lot of CG models (not for game use) made by others that have this, and nobody seems to care.

[Nic75]

The beam through the wall example is intersecting mesh, which is bad on a calculation level: some game engines go "WTF?!" and you get lag and stutter. Then there's face-count to consider-- the more faces in your model, the harder the game engine has to work. Intersecting faces, even those on the inside of the model, are still counted. The same goes for overlaps-- if the tops of your chair legs are faces, and the bottom of the chair seat has faces, and you just parent the legs to the chair seat, you now have added the faces of the leg tops to the chair seat, and the game engine will have to count those extra polys.

Intersecting mesh in a poseable model isn't a good idea, because it can make the mesh skew and stretch in ugly ways. If you want to see what that looks like, download Daz Studio (it's free), use google to hunt up a free user-made/user-morphed character, and move it around. The reason why its "skin" does very strange things is because of intersecting geometry, which affects UV unwrapping.

Then there's also what I've been learning about today: intersecting faces, if merged, result in multi-edged ngons, and reducing them to quads is essential in order to get a good UV map. I'll make my next model with edge loops (she says sheepishly).

[OrbWeaver]

The beam through the wall example is intersecting mesh, which is bad on a calculation level: some game engines go "WTF?!" and you get lag and stutter.

Maybe some game engines have a problem with it, but the Doom 3 engine does not. Other than the slight loss of efficiency from rendering extra unseen geometry, there is no problem whatsoever with embedding a mesh in a wall or floor if it suits a mapper's purpose and they don't have the time or skills to create a modified mesh.

Of course it's best to avoid overlap entirely when creating new models, because they may be used lots of times and you want them to be as efficient as possible.

[Nic75]

Maybe some game engines have a problem with it, but the Doom 3 engine does not.

That's good to know. Thanks.

Of course it's best to avoid overlap entirely when creating new models, because they may be used lots of times and you want them to be as efficient as possible.

If I'm reading "lots of times" correctly, then: 1 candlestick with overlap, duplicated 10 times in the same room/area = that overlap multiplied by 10. And yeah, that doesn't sound good.

I'm trying to learn this modeling thing right. Ol' horsie ended up looking okay, but my topology was terrible, and I won't mention how many thousand faces went into this:

Spoiler

Lesson learned: hammers are much easier than horses

[lost_soul]

@7:16, Holy crap! Look at that!!! and its real-time too...
It makes me want to cry that this never got added to the core GLSL renderer. It also seems as though this project died out, sadly.

[lost_soul]

Running with dual GPUs is pretty cool. You can use one for cycles rendering and the other for displaying, (or gaming). It gives you a speed boost because your single GPU doesn't have to display the desktop and render the physics.  It also gives you more memory to use, because that single GPU's memory isn't eaten up by the desktop/window manager.

 

You do not even need SLI, either.

Edited by lost_soul, 20 December 2014 - 07:23 PM.

[PPoe]

Im using 3DsMax, not Blender, but I can recomend you this tutorial website: Digital-tutors . Im using it pretty often and its impressive how much you can learn in so little time. Ive got a bit of 3D modeling on universitty, and it seems that this site is even better than real life tuttor. It is payed, but usually you can take a look at a few first videos from each course for free. And if that course is what you are looking for, you can either pay subscribtion, or..

Edited by PPoe, 29 December 2014 - 05:57 AM.

[Lux]

snip
 

Probably should keep this bit to yourself and off the web/not in the forums.

Edited by Lux, 29 December 2014 - 06:00 AM.

[PPoe]

I know that its moral grey area, on the other hand, in some countries the subscription is still very costly, mainly for peoples with little to no income (students etc..). The legaly payed subscription is definitelly the better way, but I decided to mention this possibility as well. Maybe that was a bad idea.. Anyway, its a great site and everyone should know about it.

[lost_soul]

I purchased DVDs from the Blender Foundation before, even though I was allowed to copy them. I would rather buy content than subscribe to anything. *EVERYBODY* wants you to subscribe to something these days: music, TV, online gaming, usage of fitness equipment... Before long, I'll need a subscription just to sit in a chair.

 

I again cannot understate how awesome using two GPUs in the same machine is with Blender Cycles. The 4 GB card can be crunching away on a render, and you still have the other card to game with or do anything else you would normally do. The machine is still super-fast, because the CPU is basically free too.

 

Also, they're making a better renderer for real-time graphics in Blender. That is exciting to see.