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31

Technical forum / Re: How to make a 3d character work on WME.

« on: December 18, 2006, 02:50:47 PM »

I had some screen captures lying around that I took for an internal document so I took a little time to create a wiki page on exporting with Pandasoft.

Hope this helps

Oh yeah, here's the link: http://wiki.dead-code.org/wakka.php?wakka=ExportingWithPanda

32

Technical forum / Re: Image quality

« on: December 12, 2006, 06:27:05 PM »

In Mozilla the images are exactly the same, but with Internet Explorer one is slightly brighter. Not a lot but still noticeable.

33

Technical forum / Re: Wide scenes and 3D actors

« on: December 12, 2006, 10:59:03 AM »

I think that it multiplies all the matrices of an object into a single matrix, so that its pivot point is positionned at the origin and is aligned with the axes.

In the other 3D engines I've used it was always the first thing to do before exporting an object. That and collapsing the modifier stack (in case you wonder what modifiers are, they're tools that you apply to an object and modify its properties, sometimes its appearance too but not its geometry. So when you collapse the stack the transformations caused by the modifiers are applied to the vertex positions and UVs and everything, it make the exporter's job easier but you can't edit the properties anymore. Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.)

34

Technical forum / Re: Wide scenes and 3D actors

« on: December 11, 2006, 04:46:34 PM »

the 3D geometry is lower than the backgound picture and it doesn't spread all the way to the left or right.

"Reset Xform" on all scene objects but the camera fixed this. The 3DS exporter in 3DS max is a piece of crap 

35

Technical forum / Re: Wide scenes and 3D actors

« on: December 07, 2006, 11:05:43 AM »

Thank you, that will help a lot.

36

Technical forum / Re: Wide scenes and 3D actors

« on: December 06, 2006, 06:24:04 PM »

...getting back to this:

m_FOV is the FOV read from 3DS file, or the overriden one.

This doesn't match with the results we are getting. I'm no expert but I think that 3DS files use a 3/2 screen ratio and a horizontal FOV. How do you convert the value read from the 3DS file to your own FOV ?

We're having a lot of trouble with scrolling 3D scenes at the moment. The rendered backgrounds with a 8/3 ratio do not match the collision mesh at all, even if we override the camera's fov and move the background in the scene.

We're planning to write a tool that converts the camera parameters so that they match the scene, but that will be *way* easier if we know what you do on your side.

Thanks,
  Olivier

37

Done / 3D actor animations in Scene Edit

« on: December 06, 2006, 12:51:06 PM »

Hi Mnemonic,

I think it would be an interesting feature to select the animation that is run on a 3D actor in Scene Edit. At the moment, only the animation called "idle" is played, and it can't be overriden in the actor's script with IdleAnimName. When we want to place an actor precisely for interaction with the world (eg. opening a drawer or picking up an object) our only options are to re-export the animation with the name "idle" or to edit the .X file by hand and change the names.

Could it be possible to play the first animation listed in the .X models, in case where "idle" cannot be found instead of nothing ?

Cheers,
  Olivier

38

Technical forum / Re: Animation channels

« on: November 23, 2006, 12:35:11 PM »

The animation channels are working well now. The reason why they didn't work before is because I'm stupid.

Thanks for your help, Mnemonic

39

Technical forum / Re: Animation channels

« on: November 22, 2006, 06:14:59 PM »

I think that the Pandasoft X exporter creates frames for all nodes, that could be the reason why the secondary animations don't play...

Perhaps for this purpose it would be simpler just to adjust the .PosY attribute of the pendulum "actor"..? You'd have to set its .DropToFloor property to false though.

I don't think that would work. For the moment we are trying to stretch the wire and I can't see how that would be possible with an object that just moves up and down (we can see the top of the wire)

I'll look into particles ans see if I can use them for this...

40

Technical forum / Re: Animation channels

« on: November 21, 2006, 07:33:28 PM »

That is what we do except that we use dummies instead of bones.

The object I'm trying to animate is a pendulum that goes down on its wire every once in a while. We have a main looping animation where the weight goes left and right, and several non-lopping animations where it goes down a few centimetres. The effect I'm trying to achieve is to have the pendulum go down at any point of its oscillating cycle.

We're using dummies and not bones because we want them to be animated independantly, and bones always have some sort of IK chain. But we tried bones anyway and it didn't seem to change anything: the main animation plays, but not the channelled ones...

We just put "buffer" dummies to the hierachy to make sure that no dummies influenced their neighbours, but it doesn't change anything. We also made a special animation with just frame 0 to be extra extra sure that no keyframes are shared by the animations but it still doesn't work.

Any ideas ? Or maybe there is a better way to to what I want ?

41

Technical forum / Animation channels

« on: November 20, 2006, 03:14:54 PM »

Hi again,

We're having trouble with animation channels, I just can't get them to work. Is there something specific to be done before we can play several animations on the same object ?

Thanks,
Olivier

42

Technical forum / Re: Wide scenes and 3D actors

« on: November 20, 2006, 03:08:56 PM »

Hi, Mnemonic

Could you let us know how you compute the projection of the 3D scene into the 3D screen and vice versa ? Knowing this would help us when we design animations that need precise interaction between the 3D actors and the 2D scene.

For the moment there is a lot of guess work when making animations. We would like to be able to see what the final animation looks like directly in MAX by setting a 2D background and using the same camera as the game uses, but the camera parameters in the game are not the same that we put in MAX before we export our 3DS scene. They're close (except in the case of scrolling 3D scenes as we said earlier), but not exactly the same.

Another problem is that the character 3D positions always match a 2D position on screen, so not all 3D positions are valid ones, and for better results we need to design our complex animations (like a character climbing a 2D tree for example) starting from a point that matches a 2D position. An insteresting thing to do would be a MAX script that snaps an object to the closest matching screen position. But again that's not something that we can do without the exact camera parameters.

Alternatively, if this difference between WME and MAX is caused by a bug that you don't have time to fix, as I believe it is, we can help fix it if you want.

Thanks,
Olivier

43

Technical forum / Camera roll in 1.7b1

« on: November 15, 2006, 06:29:45 PM »

FIX: Camera roll value is now properly read from 3DS files generated by 3D Studio Max.

Hi Mnemonic,

This is not working in SceneEdit 1.6.091 (the one from 1.7 b1 and from wme_latest.zip). In our 3DS scenes exported with MAX 8 the camera does roll, only in the wrong direction. I haven't tried it yet in the game but I can do it tomorrow if you want me to.

With the SceneEdit.exe from 1.6 the camera does not roll at all in our scenes.

Cheers,
 Adonf

44

Technical forum / Re: Wide scenes and 3D actors

« on: November 10, 2006, 04:23:28 PM »

Yeah, I noticed that, but I'm not really sure why it's happening.

I believe that FOVs in 3DS scenes are given using the camera's diagonal, but in WME you seem to use vertical FOVs. Maybe your conversion routine assumes that the screen has a 4 by 3 aspect ratio ? Just a wild guess...

45

Technical forum / Re: Wide scenes and 3D actors

« on: November 08, 2006, 10:51:00 AM »

And if you're not using scrolling 3D scenes then as long as your main layer's size matches the screen resolution it shouldn't change anything...