Thursday 15 May 2014

Weirdo Lee Does Like Kettles

It's been a day of testing our internal build and it has gone well. We found three show stoppers, all fixed and the latest build (BUILD D) is almost ready for our internal alpha testers.  It creates, loads, saves, plays and edits fine and although I am sure there are still gremlins in there, it's solid and worthy of a wider field test.

Speaking of fields, here is my field of organic Kettles. Don't ask me why I created it, and why I shared it. I just wanted to make lots of kettles.


I've currently been struggling with the issue of why one of the models we are working on for the new Zombie Pack is exhibiting strange tangent and bi-normal vectors. After much ado, it is not the normal map or the base geometry which leaves the generated TN and BN vectors.  Going to go back to school now and learn all about them, and the various methods used to generate from a model that did not start with them, and how an arbitrary normal map can take advantage of them to create gorgeous art!  

One day I will succeed in creating the ultimate Kettle entity, employing state of the art shaders and textures, and most importantly, able to brew a nice cuppa.  Along the way we might augment it a little to make it roll about the landscape shooting steam at passers by.  When we say you can create anything your imagination can conceive, we mean it literally!

For more information on this insane project, visit Reloaded at: www.fpscreator.com as it occurs to me in all these blogs I don't mention the site at all ;)

10 comments:

  1. One step closer to Reloaded making my coffee for me...genius.

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  2. Argh! Too much bloom! Bloom does NOT instantly make a scene look AAA!

    If you went and stuck a hundred kettles in a field, even on a sunny day, they're just gonna look like normal everyday kettles, not neon space-kettles. Sure, they'll shine and sparkle, but these ones look like they're made of a fluorescent material! -__-

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    1. Ok, so I decided to examine the picture closely and attempt to identify what really makes these kettles look silly.

      Ok: The kettle at the very bottom of the screen, the one you can only half see, is the only one in the scene that looks realistic. I THINK the rest look unrealistic (aside from the over-bloom) because they don't appear to be casting shadows.

      Are they indeed not casting shadows? If they ARE, then the shadows are far, FAR too faint (which they are in Reloaded anyway; shadows are normally quite solid and dark in direct sunlight). If they're NOT casting shadows, why not?

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  3. Is there any one program you might suggest to create these kettle objects from scratch our self?

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  4. Any 3D modeller that exports X files would do it, but before you can use the X file you will need the Importer we are working on to get this into Reloaded.

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  5. You Brits and your Tea. ;)

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  6. Unfortunately most programs I use to create the *.x files I get a file error and crash when importing into Reloaded. : (
    It seams that MeshX is the only one that works, but very hard to work with.

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    1. I highly recommend Blender 2.49b (good .X exporter), or if you want to use 2.6x, use this exporter from the TGC forums, dedicated to exporting .X from Blender for DBPro:

      http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=166987&b=3

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  7. As a programmer, I've just recently starting getting into working with model files. And one thing that few models do in their files is they include transformation matrices that are apparently applied in different ways after loading, just to get the model to initially appear as intended. It seems to me that such transformations should be done on the vertices themselves before they're stored, rather than including transformation matrices and having the loader do it. Anyway, funkiness with those matrices and apparent inconsistencies in the DarkGDK code handlers make working with such models a pain, and in some cases not possible (yet) without screwing them up.

    So something like that might be what's causing the funky vectors showing up - if they're related to a particular frame that's transformed uniquely or something.

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