Looking for someone to help with a mod...

[flakmonkey]

stuff to do today:
1.Bake lightmaps, computer is chugging away on that one now.

2. About a million little edits to the geometry, a quirk with sh3s engine, if you want an object to have hard edges you need to seperate off those faces, ie a cube with hard edges in sh3 would be 6 seperate objects, one for each face, if the cube were left as a single mesh sh3 would "soften" its normals giving it an odd appearance.

So thats what im going to be doing all day, oh and hopefully baking some of the physics driven animation from maya into keyframes...


+DD, in that animation, the whole engine is animated, it has a bit of vibration (not easy to see in that vid though) but for ease i thought for the game, of having only the animated push rods/rockers and loose the vibration of the whole block.

[Tweety]

All I have to say is WOW!!!


That looks great.

[DivingDuck]

Moin,

Originally Posted by flakmonkey

So thats what im going to be doing all day, oh and hopefully baking some of the physics driven animation from maya into keyframes...


+DD, in that animation, the whole engine is animated, it has a bit of vibration (not easy to see in that vid though) but for ease i thought for the game, of having only the animated push rods/rockers and loose the vibration of the whole block.

The vibration could be seen clearly, very well done. And I´ve already been thinking about a possible solution. Alas, as the engine block "only" vibrates" without changing geometry, it could be "animated" separately. Attaching the animation of the rockers as a child should make them follow the engines main movements/vibrations. I´d go for keyframe with the engine block and mesh animation with the rockers, although the terms are a bit misleading in regard to the SH3 engine. While keyframe animation is used to move/rotate instead of really animating any solid object, the mesh animation is consisting of a set of frames holding different stages (frames) of the animation. It´s needed for objects that change geometry (shape or position of (sub) objects). So, these are the "real" animated objects.

Regards,
DD

[flakmonkey]

Originally Posted by DivingDuck

Moin,


The vibration could be seen clearly, very well done. And I´ve already been thinking about a possible solution. Alas, as the engine block "only" vibrates" without changing geometry, it could be "animated" separately. Attaching the animation of the rockers as a child should make them follow the engines main movements/vibrations. I´d go for keyframe with the engine block and mesh animation with the rockers, although the terms are a bit misleading in regard to the SH3 engine. While keyframe animation is used to move/rotate instead of really animating any solid object, the mesh animation is consisting of a set of frames holding different stages (frames) of the animation. It´s needed for objects that change geometry (shape or position of (sub) objects). So, these are the "real" animated objects.

Regards,
DD

Could sh3s mesh animation be used for the springs? Theirs is the only geometry does actaully deform as they stretch/squash, right now in maya its done with a simple joint system, rigging the springs like a character albeit one with only 1 joint.


+its a good few hours since my last post, that lightmap i was baking is now at 52% complete, im guessing thats the only thing i`ll be getting done all day then!

[DivingDuck]

It doesn´t matter what method of animation you use in any 3d programme. I´ll just need all frames of the animation, exported to *.obj format, using the same name, numbered in an ascending order. The rest is a matter of S3D and my hex editor.

Whenever you purchase a new rig, make sure to find a distinct place for your old pc to be used for the sole purpose of rendering. Do not give it away!

Regards,
DD

[flakmonkey]

Originally Posted by DivingDuck

Whenever you purchase a new rig, make sure to find a distinct place for your old pc to be used for the sole purpose of rendering. Do not give it away!

Regards,
DD

Yup, its my old dusty xp machine thats doing all the work on this one, pIII 1.2GHz woo!

[DivingDuck]

Good then. Glad to see you´re not condemned to spend your time off the computer when you need to do some renders.

Anyway, I´m standing by to give it a try.

Btw, the new sig looks great. I hope it´s not your own living room in this pic. But I liked the old one better.

[danasan]

Well, I read this thread just when you started it two days ago. And I thought: "That would be something for DD and Tomi", because I saw all the work made by them on ubi.com forum...

Nice, you found each other to do this incredible, hopefully playable thing...

5 stars +

and keep on doing it, make it real!

[flakmonkey]

hit a slight snag, after some 6 hours computing a massive lightmap for the entire room, this is what i got ...


As you can see even at 4096*4096 theres not enough resolution to give acceptable shadows, not to say anything about that horrible maya problem of not rendering the light map all the way to the poly edges, giving everything a sort of outlined look,, well theres an entire day down the tubes

Im not sure of a way round this one, even if i break up the room into say 10 lightmaps there will still be the problem with all the mapping edges being unshaded/black.

Oh well tomorrow is a new day and right now i need sleep

[makman94]

absolutely fantastic project ,Flakmonkey ! Bravo !

[java`s revenge]

This is a project i only dreamed of. Followed always the great tomi mods and
thought why in the world aren`t made such a great mods for sh3.

Great work and don`t give up !!

[DivingDuck]

Moin FM,

Originally Posted by flakmonkey

hit a slight snag, after some 6 hours computing a massive lightmap for the entire room, this is what i got ...


As you can see even at 4096*4096 theres not enough resolution to give acceptable shadows, not to say anything about that horrible maya problem of not rendering the light map all the way to the poly edges, giving everything a sort of outlined look,, well theres an entire day down the tubes

Im not sure of a way round this one, even if i break up the room into say 10 lightmaps there will still be the problem with all the mapping edges being unshaded/black.

Oh well tomorrow is a new day and right now i need sleep

Your attack scope well showed no problems of this sort. Maybe your computer has cut the precision while rendering due to the extraordinary amount of data. A 4096x4096/24bit comes at a size of about 50MB. Don´t know what color depth you had ticked in Maya, or what texture file format was chosen. But it probably exceeded your old rig´s specifications. During the process of rendering more than just the 50MB of texture data are held in RAM. The settings for shadow casting have a great impact on the rendering speed. Try to reduce them. Or even better, give it a try rendering the complete scene again to a 512x512 ligthmap. I guess the result will not look worse than what you´ve got so far.

Regards,
DD

[CaptainNemo12]

Oh please make this happen...PLEASE!!!

[flakmonkey]

Originally Posted by DivingDuck

Moin FM,

Your attack scope well showed no problems of this sort. Maybe your computer has cut the precision while rendering due to the extraordinary amount of data. A 4096x4096/24bit comes at a size of about 50MB. Don´t know what color depth you had ticked in Maya, or what texture file format was chosen. But it probably exceeded your old rig´s specifications. During the process of rendering more than just the 50MB of texture data are held in RAM. The settings for shadow casting have a great impact on the rendering speed. Try to reduce them. Or even better, give it a try rendering the complete scene again to a 512x512 ligthmap. I guess the result will not look worse than what you´ve got so far.

Regards,
DD

I think it was just because i was trying to fit the entire scenes worth of geometry into a single uv map. Space is finite after all, the more stuff you try to have in a single map, the smaller each allocated part of the final texture will be for each bit of geometry, an example would be that with the whole scene in a single map the coffee cup took up less than 4 pixels on a 4096texture, which clearly wasnt enough to show any significant details.

As for the poly seams showing, sadly that was a stock problem with my version of maya, it was fixed in subsequent versions with an option when baking a texture to fill edge seams with a kind of bleed effect.

+ your right that 4096 texture came out at 48Mb, thats a big heap of data to shift on a rig with only 512Mb ram!

[DivingDuck]

Hmm, I´m not sure. The typeVII uses less than 10 lightmaps, some at 1024x1024, most at 512x512, IIRC. Your 4096x4096 could accomodate 16 1024s. So, this should be well enough.
Anyway, you got pm.