Wijitmaker

I think we are getting closer! Zaggy I took a look at the blend file and your right, those props are messing up the hierarchy. So I excluded them from the export. Now the bones all come in a lot cleaner into blender 2.5. My question now is, how do I attach a ridged object to a bone to make it follow the bone? Once that is answered, the prop points just need to be attached to the appropriate bones and we can try exporting again. Please take a look and see what you think now dude_3.zip

Playing around in Atlas, you can paint with the left mouse button or the right mouse button and get different results. You can make block like patches and more organic shaped patches, depending on how you paint. You should be able to smooth out some of those zig-zags in the beach screenshots, but I'm guessing that was from a random map?

Great thanks, I just got back from vacation. I'll take a look at this in the next few days

I think this is an art issue, not a programming one. If someone has the means - they should grab the terrain blends from AOM and throw them in the game to see if the issue is as noticeable. See here for a method on making another set of blends from scratch. http://trac.wildfire...t#TerrainBlends Like Philip mentioned in the trac ticket, it would be good to have blends for different purposes, roads, sands, grasses, rocks... etc. That would also improve the look. Atlas used to have the ability to turn on the grid lines on the map which would make it easier to pick out which blends need some improvement.

Are there .dae files for the horses yet or are they still .pmd/.psa files? If so, I'd like to get those exported as .dae files. Making a horse stomping animation wouldn't be to difficult with the existing models. Adding more geometry to the existing models would be easy as well.

Nice! Could I get a copy of that .blend file after you fixed the origin. I'm not sure what your looking at deleting, but I don't think you want to delete the prop points for the model. So just be cautions of that. There are things like "nubs" that are a 3ds Max thing that could be deleted. I'd like to work the skeleton xml file. I would think they would be there, wouldn't they? Because the animation works in blender at the shins and forearms? Or are you talking about in the game after the export?

0 A.D. will be compatible with any 3D software that is capable of exporting a .dae file. It is just as easy to export from 3DS Max as it is from Blender, Maya, SoftImage XSI, sketchup, etc... Bryce might even be able to export .dae files? If not, it could probably export a .obj file which could be imported and used to export a .dae file from another program.

I use 3DS Max, if you have more specific questions please let me know.

Aye that is impressive. It would be most impressive it moved with the trees Would performance be helped if it was thinned or the quantity of it lessened? Or perhaps if instead of applying directly to terrain, it could be applied to an object that could be placed on the terrain by a map designer.

Great! Do you think the mini bones would be hard to lengthen without disrupting the skeleton/rig?

I forgot about this but I thought you guys might find this interesting. I had some copies of an old game developer's conference that was held in 2005 with the AOE3 lead and senior programmer. They were talking about the new graphical engine features prior to the release of the game. You can see the slides in my attachment. There is more commentary here: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&u=http%3A%2F%2Fgamepro.tistory.com%2Farchive%2F20060329%3Fpage%3D1 If you had a membership and access to http://www.gdconf.com/ you could probably see the whole bit there. There are some details shared there about AOE3 cliffs that might be applicable to the terrain displacement discussion going on here: http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=16197 About the grass... how would that work, you won't want to have grass everywhere? Would you have to have a grass masking map for terrains that would get the grass? Could you color the grass to match the pixels of the terrain, and perhaps use RGB pixel values to define height variation (greener = taller)? These are the questions that popped in my head when I saw that video. aoe3gdc2005.zip

Ah, yep... that was it! I thought it had something to do with the new "My Media" button - but I guess it doesn't. Cool, thanks Erik - I think I'm good

Thanks guys, I had a chance to work on this a bit and I think I've found some success. The files you posted Amish had that same odd error I was getting before with the bones shooting out the back of the unit. So, I didn't spend to much time with those. I'm sure the edits you made to the mesh were an improvement. I can take a close look at those later. I wanted to focus on getting the skeleton structure into blender though. And I think I sort of got it... Check out this file, it contains a .blend file and a .DAE file. I exported the .DAE from 3ds Max version R7 with the plugin recommended on our trac wiki. Then I imported it into Blender 2.59 which Ben suggested might work better. It seemed to work! The only problem in the animation is in the root of the animation. It also did some weird things with the bones still. They look like points and not bones in many places. But, maybe there is something in blender to alter their appearances? Please check out the files though in your version of blender. Maybe there might be hope in getting this to work! Unfortunately I can't figure out how to add attachments (maybe I'm over my limit?). So, I'll email the file to Erik, and he can post it.

Splendid! myconid, DUDE - who are you? You certainly aren't the average programmer that visits our forums. What is your story? Are you a student? Working as a programmer? Do you work in game development? Your making this look to easy (not that I'm complaining - because the game is going to be forever better because of the additions your making).

That is great! Maybe I could take a look at the .dae it exports and help get a skeleton created in xml for it. Would you mind posting the blender and .dae file your trying to export?

Ok, thanks for the feedback guys. I think my first task will be to re-export all of the existing animations out of max again, but not as .psa files... instead as .dae files. I think you'll find that there are actually quite a few animations. I'm not sure what happened, but several years ago someone went through and "cleaned up" the folder structure for animations. A bunch of (now empty) folders were created and a lot of the files were moved around... I believe some animations may have been lost, while others were duplicated. So, hopefully that might fix one of the issues mentioned above. Then I'll see if I can learn blender enough to get a template created. I'll probably need some help at some point, and I'll ask Zaggy for some assistance.

Yep, sure would - great idea. As an aside - For guys who have been around a while (like me) I think there is a level of irony that a windows .exe of your patch hasn't been readily available for testing purposes. 6 years ago, we were struggling to find people to build the engine on a linux on mac computer. A sign of the times I suppose - and a sign of being a part of the OS community

Yeah, that is the problem. Unfortunately 3DS Max doesn't export .bvh files. I did a quick google search and it looks like there are some hacked scripts that might do the trick though. The bvh file is intended to be a motion capture data file. So, the 3DS Max developers didn't plan on exporting motion capture data - instead they only needed to import it. Once the animation is in the software, it uses a format called .bip that saves the animation (or you can save the whole scene as a .max file). There are a few other formats that are supposed to be cross compatible. One being .fbx which is pretty much an industry standard, and also .dae... Unfortunately .dae files don't import properly into blender. I think the best option to pursue is... someone mentioned in this thread that an older version of blender imports the .dae files better. I think I need to try that, and see if I can get that working. From what I understand it won't have the IK, but I think you should be able to add that on later in Blender. At least you would have the bones and the rigging (I think). Can I just backup and ask a question though... what is the ultimate objective here (acknowledging that the low poly body meshes needs some upgrades - which is a separate topic)? Is there some animations that are so poor that they just need to be replaced, or are there just a handful of animations that are missing and need to be created? Or is our target to create a good template for future Blender animators to use for mods and slight animation adjustments? Help me out here, what is the todo list of things you want to see done in terms of humanoid animation.

The effort kind of stalled because this discussion got split into 2 different topics. I think the consensus was that we were going to up the poly count. I was waiting on some more direction before I went any further. I hadn't heard anything more, so I thought maybe I was off the hook. New models and a common universal baseline rig for blender could really be developed in parallel. Perhaps some attention in the Blender world would bring someone to the team who is capable of doing animation and rigging in both max and blender and could us set up a new default template in blender that is capable of using .dae existing animations and a blender rig.

Did you guys know that there was an actor made years ago for testing? Check this out if you have time: binaries/data/mods/public/art/actors/flora/trees/pine_animated.xml (hopefully it still works) See what kind of performance issues you might have if you load a map up with these actors as a comparison (probably poorer?). This test tree was also made to animate a fall on "death" (they should actually fall when first attacked). I like myconid's method a lot better though, no animating required and I'm guessing better performance

Maybe somebody could make this topic public. But, this is seven years in the making (made possible by myconid), and it is a beautiful thing to behold The two UV channels is such a huge advantage in comparison to that combined light/shadow and diffuse texture map previously used in that thread.

Yes, it is really noticeable on the stairs and the deep interior portions.

Sweet, yep I think we are on the same wavelength. Cool, that would do the trick.

I guess, the reason why I'm asking is because if there was some control - it might be visually advantageous to increase and decrease the intensity of the AO map. For example, in a wintery (lower light) fog atmosphere I would think the levels of the AO would be less intense. The human eye would dilated allowing you to see what is the shadows better than if it was a high noon on a bright sunny day, where the contrasts of the shadows would be much greater (which I especially notice now in age as my eyes are getting older).

Yeah, that is great. Would it be difficult to give the engine have the ability to tweak the level of contrast in the AO map? Perhaps giving map designers the ability to save a deviation from the default setting in the map file?