Vertex Blending Expanded?

[nbohr1more]

Time to begin speculating on expanding Vertex Blending, expanding vertex normal Smoothing, improving Alpha test, etc?

 

Let's start with Vertex Blending:

 

1) Can Brushes and Patches be given Vertex color attributes that the engine will render and thus

the only impediment is an editor function to modify that attribute?

 

2) Is the Vertex blend interpolation done on the CPU or GPU?

 

3) Would it be possible (practical?) to have blending interpolation between more than two

materials per surface?

 

4) Alternatively, since SEED can generate models "on-the-fly" could you create a SEED spawn method

that automatically converts a group of brushes to a model and applies some sort of "in-editor created meta

UV map" with Vertex Blends?

 

5) Does anyone "on staff" have the requisite knowledge to answer any of the above?

 

 

6) Do any of the above advancements warrant a Bug Tracker entry to look into expanding Vertex Blending?

 

 

7) Fun thread?

 

8) Nachos?

[Bikerdude]

all I know on this subject is the ability to blend textures and so I choose option 8) Nachos :-)

[Serpentine]

<p>1. Geometry already can already have its vertex colours changed - that's what the rgb/red etc keywords do. This is not all that handy as it can only do a single colour, tho maybe you could do some funny stuff with vertexColor stages. At the moment vertex colors usually end up correctly, however its possible for some unexpected colours to creep in (ASE models can specify both a base colour and then over-ride vertex colours, or just default).

 

2. CPU, rendered on GPU.

 

3. One material per surface, there's a lot of stuff that requires this to be true. It's not really a limit to much tho, vertex colours will give you the graphics, just use no-clip or whatever to map the sound.

 

I made a little proof-of-concept (ages ago, and it's pretty useless/broken; I plan to re-implement when I'm more familiar with things) vertex colour transform, to allow patches and simple geometry to be given vertex colours to represent specific uses. I.e a material could specify 'deform path' or something, which would change the edge vertex' colours to black, and then using vertexColor stages later in the material, blend your path textures. This could then be fairly easily implemented in DR, avoiding the need to actually offer vertex painting - since that is not stored in the map format anyway.

 

i.e a patch would have a path material applied, which would then be transformed like :

Which would then be textured with the blending:

 

It's low on the to-do list; Far bigger fish to fry first.

[grayman]

all I know on this subject is the ability to blend textures and so I choose option 8) Nachos :-)

 

8) Nachos and CHEEEEESE, Gromit!

[nbohr1more]

Wahoo!!!

 

It might be small to you, but to us folks in the peanut gallery (I'll include Fidcal because of his multi-page Grass Edge threads) this is

cool stuff.

 

Thanks for the clarifications, I hope you get a chance to return to this concept when you've tackled the harder stuff.

 

[Bikerdude]

cant view the images, in fact cant view any images on this forums atm...

[Serpentine]

The images are hosted by me, and dont require any js or anything for the forum to give you the correct url - so I'm not too sure what would stop that from working.

 

That said, I really wish IPB would give me the options to just edit/post in plain text with bbcode markup. This mixed html/bbcode/plaintext is so annoying :/

[Bikerdude]

can see them now,

[RPGista]

Serpentines' blended edges sound pretty sweet... I guess mappers without huge experience in modeling and texturing will have to just keep drooling at the ability to blend and paint textures at will...

Edited May 30, 2012 by RPGista

[Serpentine]

Serpentines' blended edges sound pretty sweet... I guess mappers without huge experience in modeling and texturing will have to just keep drooling at the ability to blend and paint textures at will...

 

Nope, this is what it solves in part, if you need pathways or randomly blended (like, blotches of textures), you will be able to use it by just applying the material to a patch and dragging things around. The idea is to give an alternative to the traditional models.

 

The trick is finding what type of blends would be most useful, and then how to work out how to code the right logic for selections - i.e we need paths, how do we paint the outside vertices one color using some logic - this then just gets made into a keyword in a material and the mapper needs to know nothing of the magic behind the scenes.

 

Doing it directly in the map, with vertex painting is near-impossible and would require some insane refactoring of so many components and low level assumptions that at the end of the day, its simply not worth starting on imho.

 

As for making the materials, they are actually fairly simple when you look at one.

 

At the moment this is just an idea - as I said, the implementation that I did was very crude and it could not be completely feasible. But I plan to throw some time at it in the next week or two.