So, Blender Is A Bit Of a Clusterfuck

[aidakeeley]

Yeah that fixes things up quite a bit; the cloth even.

 

A quick neophyte question:

 

Are all 3d models "rigid" or is this something that can be adjusted by one of these (semi)interchangable (to this neophyte) terms such as "material" or "skeleton" manipulation/mapping? IOW, specifically, can one make a sphere that has spontaneous elasticity in the virtual-physical system? ...Like a bouncy ball that compresses? Or would this require animation?

 

(Well, the question wasn't quick {short and to the point} but the answer hopefully might be )

[Arcturus]

Yeah that fixes things up quite a bit; the cloth even.

 

A quick neophyte question:

 

Are all 3d models "rigid" or is this something that can be adjusted by one of these (semi)interchangable (to this neophyte) terms such as "material" or "skeleton" manipulation/mapping? IOW, specifically, can one make a sphere that has spontaneous elasticity in the virtual-physical system? ...Like a bouncy ball that compresses? Or would this require animation?

 

(Well, the question wasn't quick {short and to the point} but the answer hopefully might be )

 

I don't know much about it yet, but yes, Blender has a physical system. Example

[SneaksieDave]

Yikes. Take that, Lightwave!

 

(then again I don't know anything about LW to say that)

[Serpentine]

Interestingly enough, articles about Blender say that it's the y axis that's different in different applications.

 

Yup, that's correct - most baking or generating type applications will have this 'flipped Y', like blender. But its often able to be changed in the options, FilterForge and xNormal used to call this "OpenGL style" iirc.

 

I was wondering why in your baked images the nipples seemed to be in a strange place...

[aidakeeley]

Wow, that's some array of wicked demostuff there... Obviously well beyond me. I haven't even any concept of how that, any of it, could or would be translated into gamespace. Looks like a bunch of rendered scenes. I guess what is being demonstrated on some level though is a series of "packagable" objects with material aspects beyond shape and color.

 

Thanks. Quite daunting.

[Arcturus]

I made an animated tree model.

 

Here's a video:

 

 

1672 tris. Yes, I know that's a lot. Currently it's not solid. To be solid I think it has to be a monster. I made a simple AF file but I don't know how to setup def files. I could also make a static collision model but branches are animated so that wouldn't be a perfect solution.

[Tels]

I made an animated tree model.

1672 tris. Yes, I know that's a lot.

 

Very cool. But 1672 isn't a lot - it could be even more for a closeup (as from below you can see it is simply details).

maybe split up the trunk and the animated branches into sep. models and give the branches more tris and the make an LOD model for them?

[Serpentine]

Looks very cool!

 

maybe split up the trunk and the animated branches into sep. models and give the branches more tris and the make an LOD model for them?

 

Does our LOD support doing this for MD5 anims? I'd think you'd increase resource use quite a bit even if the fps increases for relatively simply scenes.

 

Do we have any control of anim playback speed? I'd like to see what something like this looked like if it was slowed down quite a bit - would it look like a slow breeze in comparison? If that could be adjusted via spawnarg, might make something like this pretty sweet

[Nosslak]

It looks pretty good, though you should probably make each branch out of two non-parallel triangles as that would give it a lot more depth.

[Serpentine]

@Arcturus

 

Could you upload the .blend (and any additional files or include them in the blend) along with the md5 mesh+anim? I'd just to check my converter is doing an accurate job from blender - at the moment I've just been converting between between some existing md5's, not exactly realistic use

[Arcturus]

Link to blend file: http://www.2shared.com/file/qgx2_aRp/animated_tree.html

password: clusterfuck

 

I uploaded the files to repository. The biggest issue is the collision. I added to def

 

"CombatModel"    "1" 

Now arrows stick into branches and even swing with them. Nice. But when try to walk to the tree the game crashes. Adding

 

"size" "40 40 350"

does not help. Whenever I touch the bounding box game crashes.

[Baddcog]

You said you hadn't done an AF yet? Or very simple one, the AF is the issue. I haven't worked on them for awhile, but a bad af dec will make you crash when you touch it.

[Arcturus]

I made AF but it's very simple, only 3 bodies with fixed constraints. Branches are visually a little off and don't look like they should (probably because of too little bodies) but the ragdoll seems to work. I can drag it in AF editor, shoot arrows in it and nothing bad happens:

 

 

 

Also I thought AF matters only for moveables?

[Serpentine]

And for once, an upload site that doesn't suck horribly, mmm!

 

Thanks Arcturus

[Baddcog]

Sorry I can't be more help, maybe post shots of the bodies tab and properties tab and I'll see what the problem is.

 

Also you could open the lantern bot and compare bodies.

 

There is something about mass that will crash if you touch it, projectiles don't count same as player. Even when the lantern bot was non-solid it could crash by touching it.

 

I think mass needs to be -1. That's a start, post some pics though.

--------

 

AF's are collision for Md5's. So moveable or not, if you have collision detection they gotta be set-up right.

 

They also tie into the ragdolls, but in the def file there is a distinction.

 

See if you can find an animated Doom3 def file, use that as a base. The def files are quite complex and it might be something in there (ie: the af points to ragdoll in the def file, the ragdoll points to the model, ... it's like a maze)

[Flanders]

Nice.

Concerning blender and trees, I saw this video some time ago: http://www.blendergu...stunning-trees/ . It shows a blender script that can make trees from tubes and spheres!

[Arcturus]

Thanks for the tip. This is useful script.

[Serpentine]

3D Coat Tree Generator

 

It's made by one of the 3D Coat devs, it's a standalone app and it can make some pretty cool low-poly trees rather easily if you spend a few minutes playing around - export's to obj.

[Arcturus]

More md5mesh fun:

 

The model has 336 triangles and 7 bones. It's a square patch, about 225 x 225 units, in the video copied 49 times which gives together 16464 triangles and 343 bones. The impact on performance is quite high. I could make the model much bigger without adding any polygons or bones, but for potential mapper smaller patches are more convenient, of course. I think it looks nice, but there are serious drawbacks. It looks fake when seen from above and the model simply disappears when there's still part of it in the corner of the screen visible (sometimes). Still, this method may be useful.

 

The good:

 

 

 

The bad:

 

 

The ugly:

 

[Baddcog]

I think it's just too uniform, from above it looks like a grid. From the side it looks lawn mown. No variety.

 

The disappearing act, no idea.

[rich_is_bored]

If you darken the green channel of the normal map, it will receive light from above. It looks a bit odd with grass directly under a light source being dark.

[OrbWeaver]

If you're creating this as a model, I guess there is no particular reason why the polygons have to be in a regular grid. Dividing them up and applying some noise-based displacement might improve things considerably.

 

For general map use, it might be better to have a couple of varieties of much smaller model (perhaps with only a few polygons each) and have the SEED/LODE system spawn them randomly based on required detail levels.

[Arcturus]

I think it's just too uniform, from above it looks like a grid. From the side it looks lawn mown. No variety.

There's much room for improvement. I'll try to make proof of concept map this weekend.

 

If you darken the green channel of the normal map, it will receive light from above. It looks a bit odd with grass directly under a light source being dark.

Thanks, I'll try that.

 

If you're creating this as a model, I guess there is no particular reason why the polygons have to be in a regular grid. Dividing them up and applying some noise-based displacement might improve things considerably.

 

For general map use, it might be better to have a couple of varieties of much smaller model (perhaps with only a few polygons each) and have the SEED/LODE system spawn them randomly based on required detail levels.

It's easy to use more polygons and / or more smaller models make the map look great but with poor fps. But as I said there's room for improvement.

[Tels]

If you're creating this as a model, I guess there is no particular reason why the polygons have to be in a regular grid. Dividing them up and applying some noise-based displacement might improve things considerably.

 

For general map use, it might be better to have a couple of varieties of much smaller model (perhaps with only a few polygons each) and have the SEED/LODE system spawn them randomly based on required detail levels.

 

Also, since the ModelGenerator can update such models in realtime (although it is a bit slow if the models grow huge), it shoulnd't be impossible to make them "sway". The reason why I didn't add this feature is because A updating is very slow anyway, and B is done by the CPU, wasting precious cycles. (the md5 animation does the same, wasting CPU time to do this)

 

It is much better to make the grass sway on the GPU.

 

Either by "shifting" the texture with a shader (but then all grass shifts into one direction, which I think needs more shader-fu than I possess to make this semi-random "per model" as in the combined sense, all "models" are the same model seen by the shader, so you need something like "vertex colors" that tell the shader the shift-random-seed per model).

 

Another possibility is the sway done on the GPU with a vertex shader by manipulating the actual polygons.

 

I think I might (after Easter) come up with a proof of concept of the texture sway (use random vertex colors for models, the model generator can already do this, used f.i. for random grass, then write a material stage that uses that random vertex color to intialize a random generator, then use this as sway offset). But the vertex shader manipulating the vertexes (like heat or water distortion) is out of my league. (it should be possible, tho)

 

In case people are unsure what I mean, here is a screenshot showing models with random vertex-color-per-model (in addition to different skins):

 

[OrbWeaver]

I think I might (after Easter) come up with a proof of concept of the texture sway (use random vertex colors for models, the model generator can already do this, used f.i. for random grass, then write a material stage that uses that random vertex color to intialize a random generator, then use this as sway offset). But the vertex shader manipulating the vertexes (like heat or water distortion) is out of my league. (it should be possible, tho)

 

I didn't realise that you could manipulate vertex colours at runtime, this does indeed sound like a potentially powerful technique. In this case, can you modify UV texture coordinates too? If you could do this, it might be possible to simulate swaying by gently translating the UV coordinates at the top of the grass polygons from side to side.

 

Alternatively, maybe it is possible to write a shader similar to heatHaze but simpler, in that it would not take a normal map for per-pixel displacement, but simply accept displacement values as vertex parameters and interpolate them across the surface. This would achieve much the same thing as the UV displacement, except that it could be applied as a post-process shader which modified whatever was visible behind it.