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Dynamic Effects/Simulations


Darkness_Falls

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Is it possible to use recent versions of Maya to create dynamic effects/simulations for use in TDM? Even if they're just cached sims? Sparkles, dust, smoke, steam, sparks, splashes, fluids, magic, etc.

For example, create nParticle sims (including instancers), Bifrost, and/or MASH simulations in Maya to be used in missions.

I've played around with the effects editor in DarkRadiant, and it can do some neat things. Was just wondering, though, if it's possible to use Maya sims somehow. I have a lot more experience with Maya, mainly nParticle and MASH, and just feel it would be neat to make some sims someday.

 

Edited by Darkness_Falls
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I don't think so, you can have vertex animation using MD3 files (nice for cloth effects for example) and skeletal animation but I don't think there's even MD3/5 exporters for recent Maya versions, the Doom 3 MD5 maya exporters require a very old version, Maya 6.0, very hard to find.  Again afaik there's no easy way to just import baked particle simulations into idtech 4.  If someone knows how to do that, would love to know as well. 

But if you get lucky and find md5 exporters that work on modern Maya, you could perhaps use skeletal animations to bake particle effects, but, you would need to assign a bone to each particle (not forgetting the required origin bone) and if Maya has no way to bake the particle motion into the bones, then you will need to animate each and every particle by hand...

Something like this:

  https://www.moddb.com/mods/starlight/videos

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Thanks HMart. Yeah, will be interesting to find out.

As a non-FX-related side note, I find this interesting. I see that Maya 2018 has a Game Exporter option and you can export FBX 2006 files from there. (I don't remember seeing that in Maya 2014, but maybe it was there.) I wonder if that would help let someone use Maya 2018 to make models and animations for Dark Mod somehow, since I think FBX 2006 refers to "Maya 6"? Or maybe it just doesn't matter what FBX you use, the barrier is still the MD3/5 conversion thing?

fbx2006.jpg.46ac425d060f16d49f83345638c26d23.jpg

Here's a knowledgebase article on it.

But, yeah, I'll be curious to see if anyone knows about the possibility of importing particle sims, too.

PS: That's a cool moddb video you linked to there. Thanks!

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I think it is impossible to export particle effects from Maya, because Maya has its own particle systems, and Doom 3 engine has its own.

As for MASH, it seems to be similar to the SEED system of TDM. Anyway, I think you can take the final geometry and export it as single mesh.

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Thanks stgatilov! Great info! Yeah, Blender seems a logical choice since it's free with a lot of cool abilities ;) I don't have a commercial version of Maya yet; so even if TDM could read Maya 2018's output, I have a feeling an educational or non-commercial version wouldn't be usable(?).

Interesting point on MASH. If it was a mesh, would it still need to go through an MD3/MD5 conversion? What would be a readable file format to try and export as for TDM in this case (.fbx, .abc (alembic), etc.)?

Edited by Darkness_Falls
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Darkness_Falls glad to help btw not that it matters, but FBX 2006 has nothing to do with Maya 6.0 (from 2004) that version didn't exported to FBX yet.

Now idtech 4 is a old engine, TDM team has updated it in many rendering side aspects but the way assets are imported and made for the engine have not changed that much, it was made before alembic based baked effects or baked large scale physics (like HL2 cinematic physics) were a thing, so in this engine you need to use the tools that were made for it, there's no other (easy) way, not without going through some crazy hoops, like the guy that made a Quake 4 level using Raytraced baked lighting, mixed with real time lighting (Strombine), even tho the engine has no easy support for that, but anything is possible if you think outside the box and are willing to work hard for it.  

To import particle effects from Maya into TDM you could, bake the particle rendering into a series of images (frames) and then just use a image strip or make a video animation and in TDM use a plane that always looks at the player showing the animation. Of course this way there's no real 3D depth for it nor the particle effect get affected by the lighting, but depending on the usage/effect that perhaps doesn't matter.  IMO if particle effects is what you want to work on the best is to learn the DR particle editor.

About importing models to TDM, yes you need to go through the following formats, (optional) MD3, (vextex animation and low poly static models) old quake 3 days format, MD5 the main recommended format for animations, well supported well integrated, used for skeleton based animated models only, can also be used for simple static models but no one uses it for such; (optional) LWO and ASE, two formats used for static models only, no animation supported, the first is a binary format, fast for the engine to load but "impossible" to edit by hand the second is a text based format (like MD3/5), "slow" to load but very easy to read and edit by hand, personally I recommend LWO (I use Modo...).  So you need to export from Maya in any of this formats or find a tool that converts .fbx to this formats successfully, in last resort you can try Noesis

    

Edited by HMart
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3dsmax (maybe Maya too, as an Autodesk product) has native .ase support. There are also der_ton's .ms (MaxScript) files for exporting and importing MD5 animations. They work with basically every Max version from starting from 4 or 5. You'll find them on katsbits site.

It would be cool to have reliable tools for Blender, but every time there's an upgrade, the compatibility of non native stuff breaks, so plugins have to be maintained.

Having FBX support in TDMwould be awesome. I'm using that FBX game exporter in my Unity project, and it works like a charm. The iteration is like 10x faster than with .ase. But that would probably require some major engine rework. I doubt it's something doable by one or two people.

Edited by peter_spy
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Id Tech 4 FBX discussion:

https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG/issues/344

the proposed solution is to integrate OpenGEX

It seems that Justin Marshall has FBX support in his branch:

https://github.com/jmarshall23/IcedTech

 

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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I have same problem with these formats as with FFmpeg. Too much use cases, too much bloat.
Unfortunately, we are hooked on the FFmpeg monster and cannot get out. But maybe not introduce more monsters?

Basically, this:

Quote

md5mesh and md5anim both have working plugins for blender latest version, for import and export.
I will not pretend to understand the logic behind more "bloated/feature" rich models,

The transfer from ASE/LWO to collada model format, an XML based model no less, That only adds a bigger footprint to the binary file, larger file, slower parsing, more code for things to go wrong in, And none of the benefits that collada has to offer since ID Tech does not support it.

 

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12 minutes ago, peter_spy said:

FBX has been the most common file format for years now, both Unity and Unreal use it by default. LWO is restricted to very old/deprecated modeling software, and ASE makes artist's workflow cumbersome because of extra unnecessary steps.

Then it's necessary to choose better tools or improve tools. But not load FBX directly by the game engine.

I'm not against adding some other binary model format, as long as it is something simple.
Here is one analogy: it would be great for the engine to load PNG files, but not PSD files.

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Wonder how you're going to approach it though.

Main advantage of FBX is that you can select any model in your scene and export it – modelling software and game engines will recognize its pivot point placement and rotation. Its material assignment will also be maintained when the model is reexported after some edits later.

Main problem with ASE is that it actually does what it stands for: ASCII scene export. It exports all the information about all materials used in the scene and puts it in the model. It also requires the model pivot to be at 0,0,0 point in your scene. And you have to reedit the material path manually in notepad, each time you reexport the model.

Assuming it's even possible to make ASE work more like FBX, how do you want to achieve it? People use different modelling packages, will you make tools for 3dsmax, Maya and Blender, to cover the most popular ones? Will you maintain the Blender add-on after each Blender update?

Edit: I didn't even mention animation, as with FBX you get unified format for both static and animated models, which resolves the problem with ancient plugins for md5.

Edited by peter_spy
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Quote

Main problem with ASE is that it actually does what it stands for: ASCII scene export. It exports all the information about all materials used in the scene and puts it in the model. It also requires the model pivot to be at 0,0,0 point in your scene. And you have to reedit the material path manually in notepad, each time you reexport the model.

The material path can be replaced automatically. We can talk in more detail about it.

As for the pivot point, I'm not sure what you mean. The coordinates of the model in world spaces are usually defined by the entity origin, not the model. If you are talking about choosing a point in model coordinates and saying "this point must match entity origin", then it all boils down to transformation. It is also doable.

All of these are small inconveniences which are fixable with simple formats like ase/lwo/obj. However, FBX adds lights, cameras, animations, video clips, maybe particles, etc, all the trash which cannot be loaded. On top of that it is proprietary, binary, etc.

 

Quote

Assuming it's even possible to make ASE work more like FBX, how do you want to achieve it? People use different modelling packages, will you make tools for 3dsmax, Maya and Blender, to cover the most popular ones? Will you maintain the Blender add-on after each Blender update?

Maintaining a plugin is the right way to go. That's what ID did.

If you want to import models in FBX, then it is necessary to create an maintain a Blender plugin or an importer. The latter is quite unlikely though.

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This is pivot point, it works like that in all modeling software. ASE uses 0,0,0 point (scene origin) as an absolute pivot point for any model you want to export.

1 hour ago, stgatilov said:

However, FBX adds lights, cameras, animations, video clips

Yes, and that gives you a unified format for both static and animated meshes, so you don't have to maintain separate plugins for md5 (which are outdated or hard to find as well). The same will eventually happen with any user-maintained plugins as well. And IIUC, you don't have to support all the options e.g. lights. Never seen any options on video clips though. You can embed media, but that means texture files, not videos.

1 hour ago, stgatilov said:

On top of that it is proprietary, binary, etc.

It is proprietary, although Autodesk provides C++ SDK with format description and header files for readers and writers. It's not true that it's only binary, you can save FBX either as binary or as ASCII.

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Just my two cents, don't know if is a perfect conversion, never tried it my self, but I know noesis has the capability to convert some fbx formats to md5, imo is a option to try for those 3D artists that really want to go through fbx. 

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14 hours ago, peter_spy said:

We're talking about streamlining and simplifying the asset workflow, so using FBX just to add another conversion step defeats the whole purpose.

I know but while there's no fbx in TDM (if ever) is the only option you have, so I wouldn't dismiss that so fast.

Edited by HMart
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  • 1 year later...

PBR Doom3 engine is released. Is it possible to port this over TDM?

https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG/releases/tag/v1.3.0

Irradiance Volumes aka Light Grids

RBDOOM-3-BFG 1.3.0 brings back the Quake 3 light grid but this time the grid points feature spherical harmonics encoded as octahedrons and it can be evaluated per pixel. This means it can be used on any geometry and serves as an irradiance volume.
Unlike Quake 3 this isn't radiosity which is limited to diffuse only reflections. The diffuse reflectivity is built using all kinds of incoming light: diffuse, specular and emissive (sky, light emitting GUIs, VFX).


PBR Texture format
Filmic Post Processing
TrenchBroom Mapping Support

[VULKAN]

    NOTE THE VULKAN BACKEND IS STILL NOT FINISHED!!!

    Fixed GPU Skinning with Vulkan

    Fixed the lighting with stencil shadows with Vulkan and added Carmarck's Rerverse optimization

    Added anisotropic filtering to Vulkan

    Added Git submodule glslang 7.10.2984 -> stable release Nov 15, 2018

    Vulkan version builds on Linux. Big thanks to Eric Womer for helping out with the SDL 2 part

    Fixed Bink video playback with Vulkan

    ImGui runs with Vulkan by skipping all Vulkan implementation details for it and rendering ImGui on a higher level like the Flash GUI

 

68747470733a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f6a386e59596c732e706e67.jpg

Edited by madtaffer
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  • 1 year later...
On 12/16/2021 at 10:10 PM, madtaffer said:

PBR Doom3 engine is released. Is it possible to port this over TDM?

https://github.com/RobertBeckebans/RBDOOM-3-BFG/releases/tag/v1.3.0

Irradiance Volumes aka Light Grids

RBDOOM-3-BFG 1.3.0 brings back the Quake 3 light grid but this time the grid points feature spherical harmonics encoded as octahedrons and it can be evaluated per pixel. This means it can be used on any geometry and serves as an irradiance volume.
Unlike Quake 3 this isn't radiosity which is limited to diffuse only reflections. The diffuse reflectivity is built using all kinds of incoming light: diffuse, specular and emissive (sky, light emitting GUIs, VFX).


PBR Texture format
Filmic Post Processing
TrenchBroom Mapping Support

[VULKAN]

    NOTE THE VULKAN BACKEND IS STILL NOT FINISHED!!!

    Fixed GPU Skinning with Vulkan

    Fixed the lighting with stencil shadows with Vulkan and added Carmarck's Rerverse optimization

    Added anisotropic filtering to Vulkan

    Added Git submodule glslang 7.10.2984 -> stable release Nov 15, 2018

    Vulkan version builds on Linux. Big thanks to Eric Womer for helping out with the SDL 2 part

    Fixed Bink video playback with Vulkan

    ImGui runs with Vulkan by skipping all Vulkan implementation details for it and rendering ImGui on a higher level like the Flash GUI

 

68747470733a2f2f692e696d6775722e636f6d2f6a386e59596c732e706e67.jpg

God I wish. PBR in TheDarkMod sounds too good to be true: I accepted the idea graphics may never improve past a certain point. Hearing about this now though... the need hurts!

I know there's at least one challenge to proper PBR: Many textures will need a metallicity map they were never given upon design. The good news is that's particularly ones who combine metal with non-metal surfaces... those that are all metal or non-metal can use a simple yes / no shader setting I imagine. Specular textures would need to be inverted and used for roughness which shouldn't be a big deal.

Main benefit I believe would be having proper reflections; We still use a simple specularity system, anything else currently requires a cubemap blended in with marginally better light probes being considered.

Oh: When I clicked reply on your post I saw December 2021 but somehow my brain interpreted it as being last month forgetting it's 2023 already. Already wrote my reply at that point and since it still feels relevant why not bump this: Would definitely love an answer as to whether porting this system from BFG may be an option :)

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