Door Size

[Springheel]

Our plan is to have only a couple door models that can use multiple skins. But I checked our existing door model against the pro guard and noticed it's barely tall enough for him to fit.

 

 

This means the door needs to be made taller, doesn't it?

[Springheel]

Not only that, but at the moment guards wouldn't even be able to go through the door, due to the size of their bounding box.

 

[Ishtvan]

The bounding box is currently too big, and I think we also decided the Pro guard is too tall. How does the door look with the D3 Hazmat guy?

[Springheel]

I'll have to test that.

 

But the result of all the size discussions was that the player model needed to be made about 10% larger, but that the AI were probably ok in size.

 

It would be a heck of a lot easier to change the size of the door than the AI (since resizing them messes up the animations, as I understand it).

[Springheel]

Hmm, after testing it with the hazmat guy, it appears like the door is the perfect size. It's just that our AI models are too tall.

 

 

Actually, the hazmat guy looks a little on the short and stout side, so I can live with the Builder Guard being that size. But the pro guard -definitely- needs to be shrunk to about the same size.

 

The elite city watch is really on the edge. He's not that much taller than the builder, but he does look awfully big compared to the door.

 

 

 

Whatever we're going to do with height, it needs to be done now, otherwise Dom is just wasting time with the animations.

 

Opinions?

[SneaksieDave]

The pro guard (first pic) is the only one that strikes me as over the top. As the occasional tall guy, it would even be okay; but an army of those?

 

We have to make sure not to lose the intimidation factor though. Perspective issues tend to make everything - even big guys - look too small, in game.

[Ishtvan]

Well, our options seem to be shrink the AI and reanimate them, or move our camera height up and redo all of our other models, and also mess up the physics, and maybe cause problems we haven't even anticipated. I don't personally like the idea of changing the well thought out camera height and unit scale to match some arbitrary AI size (no offense to Odd).

 

I still don't quite get how shrinking the AI means they have to be entirely reanimated? The md5 anims seem to be plain text files with vectors for where the joints should go. Why can't we apply the same scalar multiplication to all coordinates in the model and in the anim? Is it the rigging that's the problem?

[Springheel]

I don't think moving the camera height is an option--it just would open up too many potential problems.

 

With the camera height staying where it is, then the Thief model definitely needs to be made 10% larger. I think there's no question the Pro Guard has to be made about smaller -- 9-10% would be about perfect.

 

The elite city watch, I don't know. It would be nice to shrink him an inch or two, but he IS supposed to be rare, and I don't know if it's worth redoing the animations just for a couple inches.

 

edit: firing up warehouse again, the elite watch really don't look too tall to me. I say we leave them.

[Domarius]

A simple re-size won't mean the animations have to be re-done, don't worry. As long as the number of verticies don't change, the anims will still work exactly the same.

[Springheel]

Oddity said the model would have to be re-rigged, however.

 

You'll have to detach the mesh and rerig them, re-weight the verts and then apply all thre animations agin.

 

How much work is that?

[Darkness_Falls]

With one of Dram's early maps, I remember commenting on how the doors looked too short. I'd stand and look at one, and it was almost like I was looking down on it. Not really, but you know what I mean. I'm not sure if they size has changed since then; or if a shorter player model has been implemented. I'll need to test again in-person to see if I get the same impression nowadays. I'm away from my home computer... on business trip. So can't test until weekend, but maybe else can corroborate my story? NCP models aside, do doors just *seem* too short when you stand and look at them, by any chance?

[Domarius]

Oddity said the model would have to be re-rigged, however.

How much work is that?

No way! You should be able to scale the skeleton with the rest of the mesh.

 

Actually I said something wrong before - I meant that if the number of verticies change, then you have to re-rig it.

 

As far as animating goes - as long as its the same SKELETON, the animation doesn't have to be re-done. Just re-exported probably.

[Springheel]

No way! You should be able to scale the skeleton with the rest of the mesh.

 

Well, you'll have to tell him that. I'm just restating what he said here:

 

http://forums.thedarkmod.com/index.php?showt...=3723&st=25 (near the bottom)

 

Is this something that you know how to do, Dom? It's become quite important that we get it sorted out, especially for the player model, and I know Ish has at least four other things on his plate besides figuring out a resize hack.

[Domarius]

Yeah I should be able to do it.

[Springheel]

Would you mind starting with the player model? We need to get that into the game before we can go back and fix leaning, test collision box sizes, etc.

 

 

 

The player's eyes need to be raised to the height of the camera, which is 68 units. A resize of 110% should do the trick.

[Domarius]

Actually that's good if you can give me a figure like that (110%) - I'm not sure how to get the door model into Maya.

 

Actually that would be perfect if I could - because then you could get a pic of the door and a character, then resize the image of the character to be the right height in relation to the door, then just show me the final image of the resized character and the door.

 

Where can I find the original file for the door?

[oDDity]

I thought Ishtvan had solved the sizing problem with coding?

THere's no way I know of to scale a fully rigged mesh in maya, it causes all sort of fuck-ups.

You will have to rerig them all anway if oyu want to change the surfaces for the armour hit areas it seems.

[Springheel]

Actually that's good if you can give me a figure like that (110%) - I'm not sure how to get the door model into Maya.

 

You don't need the door. The player model has to be sized properly for the camera, not the door. 110% should be almost exact.

 

As for the proguard, I'll have to measure again, but I think it was about 92% to make him the same size as the builder guard.

[Ishtvan]

I thought Ishtvan had solved the sizing problem with coding?

 

Not exactly. I've been trying to fix it, and have gotten the render model to scale down sometimes, but there's a problem where the physics clipmodel keeps popping back to the original scale and I can't find what's causing it. Until then it's not really working since the scaled down AI would behave as if they still had the physics of the original scale, so arrows would hit that you'd expect to miss and vice versa. Also there's the potential problem that Domarius brought up about the normal vectors not scaling with the rest of the model.

[Domarius]

Looks like we are looking at re-rigging then. It's not hard, just tedious. Better now than later.

[Dram]

Hey Ish, do you think it'd help you to have a look into the UT1 code?

they had scaling and worked perfectly.

[oDDity]

Well, if you ahve to re-rig them for this, then you may as well set up the armour surfaces while you're at it.

When you detach the mesh, export it, convert it to lwo, and in lighhtwave, put the different armour surfaces in a separate layer and give them their own surface name, then save and import it back into maya for rigging.

IN fact, this is a job that anyone who wants somehting to do can handle, you don't have to be an expert.

Of course, it may actually be more convient to rergane the texture images in such a way as they only show the different armoured parts, since they may areayd be split up inconveniently, so you may and up wiht a charcater point to a lot of different shaders. THere are also complications wiht some parts of the mesh needing to have selfshadow on, so they have to be a separate shader as well.

Everyhting that is a separate shader, has to have a unique surface name, and has to have a unique layer.

Also, to furthur complicate maters, it has to point to a unique image as well, but only at the lightwave and maya stage, once you have exprted it to md5, you can point two or more shaders in the md5mesh to the same material.

[Springheel]

That makes sense for the proguard.

 

We'll still need to start with the player model, and luckily we don't need armour zones for him, so it's just the resizing and rerigging.

[Ishtvan]

Hey Ish, do you think it'd help you to have a look into the UT1 code?

they had scaling and worked perfectly.

I doubt it, Id's physics setup is completely different. I know what I have to modify and have done so, but something in the inner workings of physics keeps setting it back, because when Id wrote the code they assumed that the axes would not be scaled at all so they could use stuff like the Identity matrix to reset them.

[sparhawk]

IMO the physics code is completely exposed, so it should be possible to fix it.