More animated obj/texture chit chat/ I been thinking

[Baddcog]

I've just been thinking of some animated stuff lately as we haven't really got anywhere with this yet. (nothing finalized)

I know we've discussed quite a bit but I thought I'd update what the best options seem to be/ what we still need to accomplish. Sorry if it's a slight regurge.

 

 

--MODELS--

I've finally come around to believing that seperate objects really is the best way to make animated objects for the most part.

However I've decided that it needs to be a combination of static and animated meshes as opposed to a bunch of seperate static meshes.

 

Here's what I'm thinking.

 

Say we have a machine. On one side it has a single gear rotating. This is easy enough to use 2 objects. machine and gear and set a script to rotate gear.

 

But what if this machine has 3 gears one side and 5 on the other? 9 objects? too much.

So having a machine and an animated gear set that matches is the way to go.

The benefit of this is using a prefab to unite them as one entity for the author to place.

This could go 2 ways.

1-The static mesh machine itself could have a collision box that encompasses the gears (on objects where animated objects stay in relatively the same spot) That would be slightly generic as you could place something on collision box and it wouldn't move with gear. But easy.

2-We have an AF for the gears. (at least this way the whole machine doesn't need af model, collision mesh will be used and more accurate)

 

This would mean the grandfather clock would have 2 animated texture faces for the moving hands.

It would be an entity with an attached animated pendulum. In this simple case maybe the pendulum should indeed just be a static scripted obj. (to my dismay, I really wanted easily animated working objs, oh well, you guys were right )

 

 

Vegetation. Alot of the plants, flowers, ect can be animated. The player won't collide but that's OK. So we can make them sway in the wind. I'm a little leary that using animated textures would give a good result for this.

One thing I have found though when animating Springheels bush (I will finish and upload soon) is that the material string twosided does NOT work with an Md5 animation. So any of these plants WILL have twice as many polys as the non-animated ones. Should be fine as they aren't really high poly anyway and the renderer handles them fine.

@Spring... I'd like to see an animated bush using the texture technique, I should be able to upload the animated bush this weekend, I'd like to do a side by side so everyone can voice opinions on which way we should go.

 

--TEXTURES--

I'm still a little in the dark on how to animate textures. I kindof suck at all the material files, scripting ect anyway...

 

I know we can rotate a texture on its polygons. Can we translate it across the polys? And make it tile so if we made a conveyor belt the tex would slide 'off' one side and at the same time slide 'onto' the other?

What other options can we do with animated tex?

Knowing this will help determine future models and how they are made.

 

--

A little something to chew on...

[sparhawk]

For simply animations, like rotating wheels a script is still the best choice. Don't about performance though. If you have to animate hundreds of wheels this way it might get hard. This can easily happen. If you have a huge map, and you place 10 machines throughout it (which is not much), where each of them alread has 10 wheels, you alerady have 100 wheels to rotate. Not sure if those scripts will be discarded when they are not in view though, but I think not.

[Springheel]

@Spring... I'd like to see an animated bush using the texture technique, I should be able to upload the animated bush this weekend, I'd like to do a side by side so everyone can voice opinions on which way we should go.

 

If you do a search in the public forums for "sinusoidal shearing", you can probably find Gildoran's examples of grass that sways using animated textures. There is also a tree that we were given by EOC that uses animated textures to make the leaves move.

 

I don't know a whole lot about animated textures myself--I've used them a few times in menus, but that's about it. I know that you can scroll side to side or up and down, which works like a conveyer belt if you have a tilable texture. You can also rotate the texture. The speed of motion is customizable, and you can also make the texture go forwards and backwards (the swaying effect). I'm pretty sure you can also increase the intensity of the texture (a 'pulsing' effect).