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something I am working on.

Posted: 12 Jul 2008, 23:15
by rush2049
Well just thaught the 5 hour mark was a good place to stop on this. I used the old texpages to map onto the new geometry...
temp.jpg
before adding any subsurf it has 232 verticies and 268 faces. --hope modern computers can handle it.
temp2.jpg

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 04:23
by psychopompos
thing is, not many people here have computers that modern...
there is a thread on it somewhere.
i think there are limits in the game engine too.
at least, i read something like that.
having that level of detail up close may be pretty, but last i checked, wz doesnt have scalable lod like homeworld, so this could end up crippling many computers.
you could always release it as high res gfx mod.

but i dont know if it could be played in mp without both people having the mod...

does look good though.

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 06:28
by rush2049
I know the limits and I can say that this is well within what a more modern computer can do. It will definitly make the game have a required 1ghz+ computer requirement, but now a days it is hard to find something that slow. Let me know what everyone thinks, I am going to work on the green part next and then modify it for the medium and light versions of the cannon turret.

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 11:16
by Ianator
rush2049 wrote:turrent
:gonk:

I dunno about the super-fancy one... Just making the "After" one's muzzle see-through-able(?) would be perfect, in my opinion, for making this look awesomer while not making my computer asplode. Besides, I'm of the mind that until WZ's draw-in distance is raised a bit, I'll leave the eye-level commanding to Dawn of War.

That said, you really do have a pretty nice turret barrel going on there.

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 11:54
by elio
hi

nice model i like it :)
but it's definitely overkill for the game. if every model has this level of detail you could render a movie O_o
in my opinion especially warzone's structures (factory, power gen, lab) need overwork..

now for the model try to reduce the amount of detail, for the circumference (?) use something like 12 points, thats really enough

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 12:08
by DevUrandom
Maybe you could model in this resolution, and then render the detauls into a texture + bumpmap and reduce the model details. (Like done for the id-Tech-4 engine.)
I'd be willing to add bumpmapping to the engine to support that work. (But not before a month from now, since I still got other high-priority projects ahead.)

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 15:22
by rush2049
The outer circle has 16 points the inner one has 8, trust me this will not make the game be dog slow. I could have went crazy and applied subsurf to the mesh, but I left it as is.

for instance here is the wire's of each model.

edges from 12 to 524
verticies from 8 to 232
faces from 5 to 268

It really isn't that much detail, after applying the texture it looks like it is a ton of detail, but really it isn't. And if after testing this in the engine and it really is too much then I am willing to reduce the poly's by making the barrel not hollow. That would cut it by a third.
temp3.jpg

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 16:32
by wari
It's definitively an improvement, but the barrel looks very short.

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 17:18
by elio
you can surely delete the polys inside the pipe
when you finished could you also add an 3d file? pls

elio

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 18:36
by rush2049
I am trying to get kage's blend2pie exporter to work, I will attach both the blend and the pie file once I am done with both parts the barrel and turrent section(s).

I am having a problem with the exporter, when executing it in blender the console has an error about not finding pie_common.py, so I point the script path to the exact directory that has all the warzone scripts and blender crashes with no error message when I try and run it, maybe kage could tell me what I am doing wrong.

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 19:54
by kage
I don't see any issue with modern computers handling that many polys (as long as that kind of level-of-detail doesn't go over to everything else as well), and even with the rendering performance in wz, 20 or so of those tanks on screen probably wouldn't be too much of an issue. however, with the wz engine, since there aren't lod-models, everything sometimes looks pretty crappy when zoomed out when a model has that much detail, because of all the aliasing that's introduced.
rush2049 wrote:I am trying to get kage's blend2pie exporter to work, I will attach both the blend and the pie file once I am done with both parts the barrel and turrent section(s).

I am having a problem with the exporter, when executing it in blender the console has an error about not finding pie_common.py, so I point the script path to the exact directory that has all the warzone scripts and blender crashes with no error message when I try and run it, maybe kage could tell me what I am doing wrong.
pie_common.py, along with the others, should be in the same script directory with all the other scripts. pointing it at a script that's not in the scripts directory will probably work fine as long as it doesn't have any dependencies on other scripts (the importer/exporter definitely does). also, even though i don't think the importer/exporter have any dependencies on other blender scripts, blender itself may depend on those, so changing the global script directory may be depriving blender of what it needs, causing it to crash (that's just speculation) -- i would definitely recommend just copying all the scripts into the blender script dir ( ~/.blender/scripts/ on *nix, though somewhere in the blender.app directory for OS X, something like C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\.blender\scripts on windows).

also, there is a well written 3ds -> pie converter that i think was written, at least in part, by Devurandom (please correct me if I'm wrong) -- exporting to 3ds and then using the converter should work, and it has support for multiple LEVELS via separate meshes, from what i can tell (which makes it feature-equivalent with the blender exporter, besides pie 5 support, which doesn't exist in the engine anyways, afaik). I'm sure a lot of people will find 3ds2pie to be a much more friendly utility.

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 20:41
by DevUrandom
kage wrote:also, there is a well written 3ds -> pie converter that i think was written, at least in part, by Devurandom (please correct me if I'm wrong)
The converter was written by Per; I wrote the GUI.

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 13 Jul 2008, 22:35
by kage
DevUrandom wrote: The converter was written by Per; I wrote the GUI.
ah, thanks. i'll remember that now.

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 14 Jul 2008, 04:00
by rush2049
Nope I put them in the warzone scripts directory and it still crahses, had you gotten it to work before?

Here is my blend file, the new barrel is on layer 2 let me know what I am doing wrong.

(heh seems the extension .blend isn't allowed....)(geuss I gatta zip it)

Re: something I am working on.

Posted: 14 Jul 2008, 08:54
by kage
rush2049 wrote:Nope I put them in the warzone scripts directory and it still crahses, had you gotten it to work before?
lol, i'd hope i've gotten it to work before, being as that i was the (most recent) developer. can you explain what you mean by "warzone scripts directory"? you need to put the blender-pie (import/export/etc) scripts in the blender scripts directory.

i tried it with your blend -- the exporter requires that you have a parent object (generally an 'empty') named PIE_* (such as PIE_PRVTL4) -- children of this object must be other objects named LEVEL_*, like LEVEL_1, LEVEL_2, etc, or CONNECTOR_* (eg. CONNECTOR_1). for all of the above, any .001 stuff at the end doesn't matter, so LEVEL_1.003 is perfectly okay. anyways, after renaming it, it crashed on me, so i'll have to look into that.

this naming requirement is a bit clunky, and hardly in line with what blender artists like to do -- i plan to rewrite it all from scratch at some point when i get the time, to be much more intuitive, and perhaps packaged in a source zip that is directly usable if possible (fewer script hassles). also, the last blender version i can recall successfully testing the scripts on is 2.44 -- i'll try to make sure it's compatible with the newer stuff. anyways, i'll try to get this set fixed in the next few days.