PinkDot
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Posts posted by PinkDot
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I have a wish...
It's something everyone probably thought of at some stage of map editing and preparing assets for TDM. I'm thinking of an inteligent material editor. (possibly used for other def files as well.).
It could be separate window with three main sections:
1) on the left - a list of all materials (let's stick to material editor at this moment) available in the opened .mtr file. Basically, when we open a file, editor would go through it and look for every definition. Then, you could basically select the one you want to work on by clicking it's name.
2) on the right (main section) - text editor for definition. It should be color-coded, like most script/language editors are, so key words in diffrent colour, material name in diffrent, paths in another, comments in another and so on.
3) a toolbar at the top - there would be a number of buttons, which would place a text in the declaration for specific action, without the need for typing it by hand. For many of them a small dialog window would pop up with options available. So, there would be a button for diffuse stage, normal map, specular map, filter and so on, another for frob hightlight, another for ambient stage, another ones for shaders like heat haze and so on. So making material declarations would be as easy as several clicks and choosing the correct path. It could be even inteligent enough to find automatically _local and _s textures for specified diffuse map.
And you still would be able to place manually any change to a value or write something really specific. But editor would automatically look for any typos and syntax errors.
Wouldn't it be great? No more looking for an appropriate file, no more scrolling through definitions, no more tedious and annoying looking for errors....
I know it's a lot of work, greebo is busy with other stuff, but just maybe one day? Who knows..?
Oh, and if this sounds impossible, then please - implement at least "Go to definition" feature in DR. While having selected a texture, you just press a button and it launches a text editor of your choice (set in Preferences) and looks for the material, so you have it on screen in one second.
Thanks.
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Hi! How is work on Head Selection UI going? I also think it's a great feature.
btw. how hard would it be to go one step farther and displaying actual body with a head, as it's not only about choosing the right head but also choosing the head that matches nicely rest of the body.
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Hi,
Installation of the mod was smooth and painless. But unfortunately I started experiencing some crashes. There are several cases, when it happens:
- when I die
- when I load a saved game, being currently in the game (I can load savegame only once - right after the start).
- when I quit mission
- when mission is completed.
When it happens, screen goes black, but not completely - like 95 per cent - I can see a bit of very dark colour, where bright torches were (so it doesn't leave 3D display). Then it hangs up for about 5-7 seconds (mouse coursor appears) and it goes to desktop without any message.
Strange thing is, that I was able to reload quicksave, quit mission and install another one, I could see death screen as well. So something has changed meanwhile. I naver finished any FM properly though - I got that crash even with the first finished FM.
I have Win7 64 bit system and I didn't touch any config settings.
I would appreciate any suggestions. Thanks!
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Alt+tabing Doom 3 in windowed mode doesn't work for me, but that could be a win 7 issue. I only see the taskbar on toplevel, but cannot access anything else. But the Snippet works perfectly and most notably without those gamma problems, you got going in good old quake 3 times. It doesn't change the resolution though when switching to windows, so you get the best results if you play on the same resolution you got configured in windows. I am going to compile an executable from that little code later, that will start the tdm_launcher instead of doom3.exe. I guess I will just have to alter the ShellExecute- and FindWindow-lines.
Anyway, I thought Minimizing support would be a nice little bonus-feature for your Launcher. Maximum comfort and so on...
I'd like to try how it works. I have to turn off Aero to be able to switch between fullscreen and window mode (otherwise Doom/TDM goes grey). Alt+tabbing is also sometimes tricky for me in Win7.
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I hate using the word "skin" when rigging meshes to joints. I associate skin with changing a mesh's texture/material.
I used to use term 'rigging' for assigning models to skeleton too, but everywhere I see people using word 'rigging' for a process of building a skeleton - 'rig', and 'skinning' for assigning vertices to that rig. It may be just diffrent terms in diffrent software...
@Baddcog - I forgot that you're a 3dsmax user too. Great to hear it is possible.
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Thanks for all replies.
I understand that such a tutorial would take a lot of time to create and I don't expect it soon. Once I know, that I would be able to create and export characters from 3dsmax, I could sleep at night again...
I wouldn't have time to learn animating in Maya now... Unless I could export stuff from Max to Maya and then using your workflow.The problems with the importers are that they tend to import only the rigged joints (the new proguard rig has 71+ joints, if the rigging only used 65 joints then the importers would only use those)
I'm not sure what you mean by 'rigged joint'? If joint is part of the skeleton it's rigged then, isn't it? Or do you mean skinned, like with some vertices assigned to it? In that case it wouldn't import any dummy joints for binding stuff to character, am I right?
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Modeling, skinning and animating are the tasks I am familiar with. What's unknown for me is the process of getting characters into engine and replacing/customizing some animations.
Can I take skeleton from one of characters included in TDM v.1.0 or it should be a separate file, which you have in your work files?
I work with 3dsmax btw. I know that you've done yours in Maya or Lightwave but maybe some of other team members know of some converting tools that work with 3dsmax?
Are you planning on writing a Wiki tutorial on this topic at some stage, so people could make their own characters too?
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Hi,
I'm just wondering how difficult it is to add a new character to TDM currently? As far as I remember, this was one of the most problematic tasks in mod development. How does it look like with the current state of the mod? Have you established some proven workflow or is it still a painful experience?
I don't know how relevant information in the animation section on the Wiki is, but some of those articles look quite old, refering to old skeletons etc..
It would be great to have a one comprehensive article/tutorial elaborating on all stages of importing characters to engine, including:
- where to take the skeleton from,
- what software/tools are necessary
- what files to put where
- writing def files - making character working in game
also
- assigning new animations and voice scheme
- etc...
I know it sounds like an technically advanced question for the just released mod, but I'll better know beforehand what I could or could not achieve with my map.
Thanks in advance!
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That's pretty much my bible
I told you, it's not only me!
There are some sneaking walks in that book as well. You could take a look at them, for your suspicious walk animation. I don't see any tension in the last version. I think that legs should be bent, body tilted slightly forward, hands slightly up (not loose! he's afraid of danger) and he should make a small pause (or significantly slow down) after each stride (at the moment after he puts his foot down).
I don't want to sound like an expert (which I'm not), but as you surely know, there's always something to change or improve in walk animation...
Another great book is The illusion of Life which is still on my wish list.Do you know anything more about this book than what's on amazon's page? Is it mainly for 2D? Or maybe you have any other book to recommend for 3D animation. Can be for specific software.
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This is absolutely a must for anybody who seriously thinks about animation. You'll find there not only how the standard walk should look like, but also plenty of variations in limb movements and their impact on the overall look of animation. Anf it's not only about walk, of course...
I'm currently devouring that book. (but it's not only my opinion!).
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There are some self lit but they look over bright and they are red whereas I prefer a greenish light mostly for mushrooms. Seems to me they grow in cold dark places so a cold colour feels appropriate.
There was green selflit skin for mushroom AFAIR. And beside that - it's actually only one - white texture for additive blend, so you can make your own shader if you like, using red, green and blue parametres.
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Timber edges look better when they're not mathematically straight, and also gaps between timber and mortar adds to organic look in that reference picture.
Otherwise - nice textures.
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The most interesting things are happening between bricks and timber. If you just put timber beams on top of bricks without any "interaction" between those materials it looks a bit artificial.
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If you want the raven to be fully animatable in the future, its wings should be modeled as well. From what I see now, they are a solid part of the body at the moment.
@Badcog - your way of mapping models is really a painful way - it's actually the opposite way it should work. As Crispy said - you don't have to detach model into pieces - you just select faces, give them rough mapping coordinates (planar, spherical or cylindrical) and then tweak the position of vertices. (using Unwrap UVW in Max).
@Springheel - I'm not sure how advanced you are but usually people use some checker type texture while unwrapping. This gives you an idea of the way pixels are stretched and scaled on the model. When you're happy with UV layout, (pixels are relatively same size and not stretched too much) you paint a texture in Photoshop according to it.
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.Also, how do objects generated in CAD, such as the picture below, work out in the doom 3 engine, because the CAD works on double-sided polygons and in some programs it causes faces to load reversed and not visibleIt probably depends on the software individually, but I work with some building models exported from ArchiCad and it's basically one big mess. Plenty of unnecessary polygons, weird triangulation, unwelded vertices and so on. Cleaning them for game engine would probably take longer than doing them from scratch in 3d app.
As Springheel mentioned - there's no need to model such stairs. It's easier to do them in the editor - it's quite powerful. Mainly some organic and irregular shapes need to be modeled.
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All game engines support smoothing... maybe Quake 2 did not - I can't remember now...
Yes, LWO files give you bigger control over the smoothing. It can be done also in some convertion application (like Deep Exploration). So even if you don't work in Lightwave you don't have to deal only with ASE files.
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Tree looks OK, but it's still too high poly. You don't really need to model those thin branches. They should be texture with alpha channel. That will give you nicer fine detail to the tree (if texture is good, of course) with lower polycount.
If you're not used to game art it might take you a while to accept the compromise you have to go for with the details of a mesh. Texture is where you can/should put all detail.
Bird looks like built of several meshes. I'd say they would look better (and probably animate better) as one continous mesh. (wings are just sticked to the body at this moment).
Oh, and try to post images of smoothed models - that's more how we see them in game.
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I'm just sending you a file, Baddcoq. I cleared it a bit, but it's still a bit messy... Hopefully not too messy...
Another thing, that could be done, actually I was going to do it myself, but if you feel like separating some masts into individual models (extra models, I mean), this could be useful for building own ships, I'd say.
Thanks again for your help!
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Yes, and I found an interesting (perhaps obvious, but not to me) link: I was later working in DR, and when I browsed and applied any of the galleon textures to a brush, the editor slowed to a crawl! When I place any other texture on the same brushes, the framerate went right back up. The galleon textures are no bigger than any others, so what's the difference? This is the first tangible evidence I've seen of any individual texture really punching performance, and hard.Now, that's interesting. I don't know what's wrong. The only thing I can think of is that I made two sets of those textures - one is _noshadows_ set - this is meant to be used only on galleon model, as it has its own shadow mesh. For brushes normal shaders should be used.
Also - on the topic of my galleon textures. I had a strange problem with deck texture (and only with this one). It wasn't working after conversion to DDS. Even after some changes to it, like the reason was in the name of it...!?! I don't know... I left it as TGA. Did anyone have similar issue?
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OK, I'll send you that in the afternoon, when I'm home.
I see your plans are ambitious, but what I'd be afraid is that optimizing this model might take longer than creating it. For an actual map, I would probably just turn reflections off to make fps acceptable, but if you like doing this sort of stuff than I'm not going to discourage you...
Origin point for hull is somewhere at the deck level (slightly below, so props alligned to it are unnoticeably sunk rather than over it. The origin point of rigging is exactly the same - for easier positioning. It doesn'nt have to be the same but the offset must be multiplication of some grid size. Well, I'm pretty sure you know that already.
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I didn't look too much at in in the editor yet other than to see it was one piece.
If it helps would you mind if I did that PinkDot?
Of course feel free to do it.
The ship is two pieces actually - hull and rigging. And some props like steering wheel are separate. (probably not included there).
I also wanted to split it into several more parts. I wasn't sure which though. Maybe all back windows as a separate one. Any more ideas?
Just keep in mind that it might not be easy. The model is already multilayered - there's simplified collision and shadow mesh, which makes any making changes to it quite awkward.
If you want, I can upload a source file, since you're also 3dsmax user.
FPS is sometimes low, but there's water reflection and moonlight shadow there. Inside, fps is pretty good, I'd say.
but the flickering sky bugged the fuck out of me.Yeah, that sky... I'm not sure even when and why it got like that.... Just don't treat it like a regular map - more like some test map...
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I'm glad you like it - I will be happy when I see just one map with that model, before I die...
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Looks great, but I wonder how that would work as loot? Would the player frob the gold texture?
To be honest, I didn't even think about it. I made it mostly as a static prop. Grabbing all that stuff, no matter how technically well done, would be just ridiculous. You can put some goblets or whatever else on top of it, to let player grab anything from that chest.
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How was the trip to Cracow? And where are those promised photos?
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This model took me about..... 2 years to complete!
Finally it's on SVN. (chest_old_body and chest_old_lid). There's also a skin without coins.
Coins are a tileable texture, so can be used with any other container as well.
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Anyone tried docks. map with enterable galleon? It's waiting for someone to make a prefab out of it (and probably add another lower deck since I've never finished it).
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Wow! Thanks Mortem Desino - I didn't know about that. It's a long time I haven't been using DR. That's like half of what I was thinking for - and it's colour-coded already!
That's definitely a useful feature, but it doesn't give us possibility to edit that, unfortunately. And some easier, smarter and error free method of editing material declarations is what I am mainly looking for. Some people may not even know, how to implement some material effects, and if they have it under one button that would make their life a lot easier.