3d models development

[barter1113]

Why never come? It is almost finished only need few death animations and finish missed items. If you want you can pay some cash to 3d experts and they can do it easy and fast. Or asked someone to help us finish these low poly models.

[Haraldx]

Talk all you want but people have been saying for months now that 3d will never come.

Which is pretty much what I said in my previous post. -_- Also, who are these "people" who say that? On a more serious note.

Why never come? It is almost finished only need few death animations and finish missed items.

Pretty much yes. Most stuff has been done. We do not have some armors tho, which is a rather major concern, but I'm pretty sure it's possible to leave some (most) critters 2D. After all - CA, LJ, LA, CLJ and their variations are done (except for Tesla). Those are pretty much all the armors used by players and I'm pretty sure for early testing purpose we can easily leave helmets alone. Still, the movement towards 3D has a huge gap - server stuff. The whole game server may need to be "remade" to function like it is supposed to.
I remember about a year ago there was a huge gap where absolutely NO progress was made for about 5 months. It's not that bad right now.

[barter1113]

I think Tesla Armor is finished too. I saw in in Karpov's update movie.

[Luther Blissett]

[a picture of an enclave hat]

This is nice. Could you either :
a) upload it, and I'll rig it
b) Try rigging it yourself like this and see if it works

[Haraldx]

I highly doubt we need that, but oh well. I'm gonna try out your tutorial once for all and try rigging the Enclave officer cap.
EDIT: I just did everything as said in the tutorial (well written by the way), I didn't try it in the SDK as I'm just too retarded to use it. Here are the files in any case. Clickidy!
Included regular .obj file with texture and .mtl.

[Mike Crosser]

Look I know you are all busy in your own way but can anyone update the trackers?
Because I've seen a ton of stuff on the forum that is not on the tracker.

[Haraldx]

Look I know you are all busy in your own way but can anyone update the trackers?
Because I've seen a ton of stuff on the forum that is not on the tracker.

It may also mean these things on the forums are not uploaded (for example Nasty Khan's stuff as far as I know).

[Mike Crosser]

Ohh sorry then

[Luther Blissett]

A lot of it is uploading, but particularly for armours and stuff, also rigging them (otherwise they stay as "pending"). A lot of the rigging ones are sort of my fault, sorry It's on my list of things to do as soon as possible.

Anyway, Haraldx - you did it Hat was rigged and aligned perfectly.

Ignore the clothing, that's just an existing one that seemed to match closely enough for a screenshot.

After what you'd done already, I simply copied the files into these locations :
.x file into \Client\data\art\critters and renamed as armor_male_enclavehat.x (for simplicity with other files)
.png file into \Client\data\textures renamed as armor_all_enclavehat.png

Added this line into _FOHuman.fo3d :
  Value 36 Root Attach armor_%anim%_enclavehat.x Texture 0 armor_all_enclavehat.png

in game that was ~param 0 154 36 (though Karpov has worked out the location of the game object > reference to model, so we can start replacing this param stuff with wearable objects - though we do need to create a number of new objects for these).

I've not added any specular stuff to it or anything, but yeah. It works

[edit] FAO : Graf
I've uploaded this to the 3D test repo, in \ARMORS\HeadWear.

[Haraldx]

Badass... Actually, if you can explain me what do all those connection strengths do I might try rigging something more complex.

[Luther Blissett]

Difficult to explain without doing proper diagrams - you might be able to work it out just by playing around with the settings yourself. Anyway, in basic terms a single vertex (dot) can be connected to multiple bones. It can be connected at a total of 100% connected. This could be one bone at 100%, or 2 at 50% each and so on. It doesn't have to be 50%/50%, it could be 10% and 90% (or any other number).

This isn't the best example, but it was the quickest one I could think of, and involves a hat (which you've already done) :

A hat is simple
Every vertex of the hat is connected to the head bone, at 100%. If the head moves forwards, the hat maintains its relative position exactly. If the head turns left or right, the hat will turn left or right as well. Any movement applied to the head is applied to every vertex on the hat. No other bones influence it.

A hood
Now imagine a hood. The hood covers the whole head, and a section of it rests upon the shoulders and neck. If we attach the whole model to the head, then when the head turns, the shoulder and neck sections will "cut through" the model. If the lower sections were only attached to the neck, then the top half would stick to the head and the bottom half would stick to the neck - so when the head turned, the model would sort of twist strangely, and probably have a load of glitchy polygons sticking out everywhere. Therefore the top half of the model could be 100% connected to the head, and the lower half could be 50% connected to head and 50% connected to the neck. This would mean when the head turned, the lower half would turn slightly - it would half-follow the movement of the head and half-stay where the neck was. This would mean there was a softer movement in the lower part of the model, so it would twist slightly, but seem much more natural. You may find further that parts of the model should move when the shoulders move, so you may want to connect part of the model at 33% head, 33% neck and 33% nearest shoulder.

Here is an awful MSpaint diagram :

Not the best diagram I've ever made.

I can make some clearer diagrams in the "more advanced rigging" tutorial, but it's going to take a little time to create and collect all the proper screenshots and bits and actually write the thing. The main areas you'd need to use the connection strengths would be with any clothing item which crosses a joint (i.e. elbow, shoulder, knee, waist, hip). The easiest way I found to test them was by loading in some extra animations and seeing how it moves (in Fragmotion, this is "merge animation", then select walk, run, use etc).

Here is quite a good example (from this post) :



See those shoulder bits, and how his arms "cut through"? The shoulder pads are connected only to the spine bone. This works great for walking and so on, but when his arms move like this, it clashes. Some combination of these connections may be needed to make the shoulder pads "move up" when his arms do (i.e. 75% spine bone, 25% arm bone) - but without making them move down too much when his arms are lowered. It's tricky, and so far I haven't solved this myself.

The easiest way is probably to cut the shoulder pads off and have them as separate objects which rotate along with the arms, or to alter the model so they are slightly higher at the front.

Karpov has done a brilliant job with rigging some of the existing models (and the base human, of course) so a good thing to do would be to load up some of those models and study how the weighting is done. Pick the existing armour which is closest to the one you want to rig, and roughly copy the layout. After that, you tweak it until it works.

Hope that gives you enough to get started anyway. Good luck, and ask me if you've any little questions

[Luther Blissett]

Completely unrelated point - a little update on some stuff I was playing with recently :

I was testing some weird texturing research/technique things a little while back. After looking closely at some of the comparison images from previous tests, I was trying to work out a way of identifying the position of various bits and more specific colours on some of the models, to make more accurate textures.

These aren't really intended to be the actual textures themselves, but I tried them anyway out of interest. Anyway, I'll show a few pictures first. Here a few little Where's Wally? pics for you to check.


You can probably tell pretty clearly which is which, but the overall colour is a lot closer than it was previously, and the 13 is in the correct position. There's quite a few glitches on the texture. To be honest, it's a right mess (but it sort of looks right).

Here's a little version of the actual texture:

The full res one is linked here

Basically, I exported a "idle pose" version of the model, so the arms were down, set it up in one of the 6 views and "projection painted" the equivalent sprite onto it. I did the same for the other 5 views, then sort of... consolidated them into one "combination texture", using the front from the SE and SW views, the back from the NE and NW views etc. It's sort of difficult to explain. Anyway, what this has produced is the messy texture you see above. It sort of works in-game with the existing shaders I was using etc, but on a technical level it's horrible, and will be very incompatible with the final lighting / shader effects. All the shadows are painted onto the model, for example, and if you look at the actual texture, you'll see it's sort of gibberish.

Obviously that might leave you asking "So why did you bother to do that?" - well, basically once I've tidied it up a little, it serves as a sort of marker or template. I'd had problems getting the shading and colour right on some of the test textures I was doing a while back, and this seemed a good way of identifying those things. This one is the Vault 13 character, obviously - but I'm doing the same with a handful of others - getting the outline of Vic's waistcoat, the V neck in the "green coat man", the correct position of the tribal "chest band" etc.

This particular example gives us the positions of the yellow stripes and the number (which would be very easy to replace by another number if needed), the outline of where the hair should be, a clue to where some "non-engine" shading needs to be painted on (i.e. that very dark line under the chest) and a hint as to where the specular lighting needs to highlight. It also gives us a pretty accurate colour to work from. In a weird way, once it's tidied up a little - it also gives us a rough idea of how the texture corresponds to actual pixels. In a sense, it gives a sort of translation of those sprites onto our models, so I can better understand where and how it all fits together.

Anyway, ultimately it's a weird little experiment - I wanted to see what it did, but I think the results might be useful, at least for me

[Lexx]

This looks damn good. Very close to the original.

[Luther Blissett]

Yes - it's certainly getting nearer. My plan is to use these "template" ones as a base to adjust the colours and minor shading on the "proper ones" from the current 3D repo - then go through the process of checking with newest engine shaders / shadows / effects and tweaking them. A similar process should work for predicting "good locations" for the specular lighting on the metal armour and others, whilst also improving my abilities for texturing any new models I make.

Essentially, it's mostly a "study tool" for me to get a good understanding of the layout of things - but as I said, I tested them in-game out of interest, and was surprised that they were actually quite effective, so thought it was worth a couple of screenshots. Of course, due to the amount of "painted" shadow on these template pieces, the actual shadows are double-shadows, and highlights not so highlighted, though that won't be a problem with the "real ones".

Another little bonus is that it should help me get a grasp of an "equivalent palette" for the textures - the colours in Photoshop do not equal the colours in game - but the adjustment between these is roughly similar - so if I want something to be "Ian's trousers light blue", I will have the adjusted appropriate colours ready to use.

[edit] Have some tribal screenshots whilst we're at it :

This is a few different angles from the tribal - it might clarify what I mean by "double shadow". If you look at the top left picture, you'll see his back is far too dark - because it's got engine shadow and painted shadow from the "interpreted texture". The same is notable under the arm in the lower left. Obviously that's a case of "don't paint shadows in those places onto the proper textures". A few other bits (and overall colour) look pretty good however, so their positions will be noted, and the relevant areas on the proper skin texture can be slightly adjusted accordingly. The hair isn't quite right, but it's position can be calculated from the darker areas on the head, which should make it pretty easy to put an accurate "tribal hair" model in the right place.


Obviously, as it's 3D I may as well see what he'd look like wearing a "tutorial beret", without having to draw 10,000 pictures to find out. I think it suits him

[Surf]

Super Super cool Luther, once again you are doing an amazing job at....... amazing myself!
If it would not be for the slightly different pixels of the Vault dweller head and the bit less saturated yellow on the VDs front stripes on your first screenshot - I could not have seen any difference.

Aweseome!