3d Modling Question

[gleeful]

It does if you use ASE models.

 

no, it doesn't. i just gave it a try. if i export an unsmoothed ASE from max, it will look just as unsmooth in doom. if i add smoothing groups it is smoothed.

 

kind regards

gleeful

[oDDity]

There is no such thing as a smoothing angle on vertices. This is a toggle. You either set it on or off, and that's it. You can look up the OpenGL standard to check it out yourself if you don't believe me.

 

Balls. Doom does support degrees of smoothing angles from lightwave. Here is the evidence. The top ball has 0% smoothing, the second has 20% smoothing and the third has 180%.

[OrbWeaver]

no, it doesn't. i just gave it a try. if i export an unsmoothed ASE from max, it will look just as unsmooth in doom. if i add smoothing groups it is smoothed.

 

I guess that depends on how the smoothing is implemented. If exporting from Blender you have to physically unweld points that must not be smoothed.

 

It is possible that this is due to the exporter, but I am fairly sure the script does export a MESH_SMOOTHING key based on the setting for each vertex.

[oDDity]

It's not a problem in LW if you want different smoothing on the same object. Unweding the verts is not the best solution.

IF you have a ball, and you want the top half to be smoothed and the bottom half unsmoothed, you just give the top and bottom half different surface names, set their individual smoothing, then write two duplicate shaders in the mtr file with the names of the top and bottom half. YOu have your separate smoothing on the same model with all verts welded.

[sparhawk]

Balls. Doom does support degrees of smoothing angles from lightwave. Here is the evidence. The top ball has 0% smoothing, the second has 20% smoothing and the third has 180%.

 

Sorry I can see almost nothing. If you wanted to prove a point, then it would have been wiser to use some lights as well.

[oDDity]

We all know you have problems with your vision, you can't seem to see anything in any picture - ghosts, veins or degree of smoothed edges.

I think this is selective blindness to avoid admititng you're wrong. DO the test yourself if you want, you can clearly see different amounts of smoothness applied in doom depending on the smoothing angle in lightwave.

[sxotty]

We all know you have problems with your vision, you can't seem to see anything in any picture - ghosts, veins or degree of smoothed edges.

I think this is selective blindness to avoid admititng you're wrong. DO the test yourself if you want, you can clearly see different amounts of smoothness applied in doom depending on the smoothing angle in lightwave.

 

Yet I agree, on my crappy laptop at school I had to wiggle it around to see 'em, now it is much more clear.

[sparhawk]

Now it's better. But I wonder why you choose different lightings for the balls. This looks more to me like that the faces are differently visible because of the light and not because of an smoothing angle. What exactly would a smoothing angle mean? There is no such thing as a little bit smooth, a little mor smooth and so on, and if it were then it would need a scale between 0 and 1 and not an angle. Maybe you can adjust the normal and call that a smoothing angle?

[OrbWeaver]

I guess a smoothing angle would be the amount that the normal vector is rotated as it approaches the edge of a face - if there is no smoothing it is always perpendicular, if it is fully smoothed it is averaged over the adjacent faces, and if it is a little bit smoothed (20%) it is rotated slightly towards the edge but not enough to produce complete smoothing.

 

I know nothing about how the Doom 3 engine calculates normal vectors though, so this is just speculation.

[sparhawk]

These are two different things. The normal defines how the light is reflected. Smoothing defines wether the light is uniform for a givejn surface, or not. It's a toggle by it's very nature. You simply can't calculate only haf of a surface or 10% of a surface, because a triangle is the smalest unit in a renderengine. And it doesn't make sense to set an angle on smoothing because it can just say or no.

[OrbWeaver]

Yes, but the effect of smoothing is achieved by modifying the normal vector - standard Gouraud shading for example calculates the lighting at the vertices (based on vertex normals) and then interpolates the shading over the face to create a smooth effect.

 

It is already possible to modify the way the vertex normals are calculated (with the unsmoothedTangents global keyword), so it is not beyond the realms of possibility that the algorithm could be further modified by a property in the mesh.

[FishFace]

The smoothing angle is a threshhold, and faces that have an external angle of more than that to the next face will be smoothed. For example, if you set it at 89°, everything up to right angles would be smoothed.

 

Percentage implies something like a degree of smoothing, however, which sounds odd.

[Unskilledlaborer]

OK I got the Blender and i have v=check out lots of tutorials and have started to create some small lamps and things i will use in my mission. But I need to be able to export them into one of the various formats accepted by doom3radiant. Problem is i have searched and searched and searched but have not found an importer/exporter that works correctly.

 

I have set up the path for blender

I have downloaded goofos scripts for ASE exporting (worked once ) couldn’t get it to work again

 

i have been messing around with the blender 2.37 (and 2.4alpha) even tried downloading python 2.3x and 2.4

 

does anyone have script that they know works that has a for importing and exporting lwo or ase or md5 (actually imports textures uv mapping and all the good stuff) one that you use regularly...

 

please forgive my ignorance

 

unskilledlaborer

[Arumakani]

That picture of the model of a keeper that Oddity did the one in a sort of blue or turquoise robe looks weird. ALl the other models etc are seriously cool.