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Topics - raychaser

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1
Won't implement / Complex Sprite 3D textures
« on: October 23, 2007, 11:02:14 PM »
Just throwing in my request from another forum thread.

Let me sell this a bit: It would kick some serious butt to be able to control complex sprites as textures. Imagine: eyes, eyebrows, mouths, hell even hair on different subframes that have their animations and scripts controlling their positions etc. Change a character's tie, shirt, socks, shoes on the fly without having to re-render the entire texture. put a gaping wound or bullet hole on your character on the fly. Animate a flowing wound, tears, snow accumulating in hair etc. Every minute I spend thinking about this yields more possibilities of what we could do with it.

What I need it for specifically: Face Engine

You could do things like:
actor.mood("Happy");

mood() could be a user-defined method that would control the eyes, eyebrows, mouth etc in different ways. You could easily write a function to make the eyes look at things and have the expressions change subtly. Also the footprint would be miniscule because the eye graphic would be less than 4k and you wouldn't need a whole face texture for every eye position.

This might also pave the way to a lip-syncing ability

What is required here is that the transparency and colour be calculated from the sum of all frames and subframes.

eh? eh?

2
Scripts, plugins, utilities, goodies / Blender Export Script...
« on: October 23, 2007, 05:53:52 AM »
...is not ready yet  >:D ... Sorry

Hi folks. I spent all week poking at the blender .x export script. I would be so happy to be the hero and deliver a fully working product to this communty. If only I had another week I know I could crack this, but sadly I've run out of time and I need to get going with my actual project now.

Download the script here:
http://mattreimer.com/a/DirectX8Exporter.zip

It will look like "DirectXM1 (.x)" in the export menu of blender when you unzip this file and drop it into the scripts directory

It does work (kind of) but it will mean two or three extra steps in fragmotion before it works in WME. Why is this good? Well, it means that I can do all the modeling, rigging and animating in blender and only do simple cleanup steps in fragmotion. This is a step in the right direction I think.

Here's what I fixed:
  • Individual actions are now unique and correctly named animations in the .x
  • Material naming problem was fixed so that you can use multiple materials on a single model now. Before both materials would have the same name.
  • Added extra header information (but only the absolutely necessary stuff) into the .x file
  • I set all buttons to their required defaults so when you invoke the script in Blender don't change any of the settings. Just hit "Export All"
 
Problems still:
  • .x file crashes mview and DX SDK viewer unless you open it and export it in Fragmotion. This could be because it's using matrix keys and apparently some weird values for things like keyType which aren't in the DirectX specification but I'm theorizing here. It might be an easy fix, it might not. It's been almost 4 years since I did matrix multiplication so I'm really rusty  ???
  • The skeleton gets exported upside-down and must be mirrored on the y-axis in fragmotion. I'm SURE this is an easy fix but I never figured out where to put the minus sign
  • Empty frames are not exported.  For example if I export an animation with keyframes on frames 1 and 10 then in fragmotion it will show only 2 frames (1 and 2) and leave out the in-between ones. This is very odd because it clearly specifies the frame numbers as 1 and 10 in the .x file.

Now I'm exhausted and on a purely selfish note I have enough to continue my work in blender using fragmotion so I will challenge someone else to pick up the gauntlet and finish this so that we may all use the sheer splendour and magnificence that is Blender3D.

I have high hopes for this thread. Anyone?  ::wave

3
Not a bug / Subframe's not considered in Settexture
« on: October 21, 2007, 08:28:51 PM »
I'm having a problem whereby only the base frame shows up when I use a sprite as a texture using SetTexture. Is this a bug? It would be great to have control of subframes as well as the main frames to do complex dynamic sprite scripting and animation.

Also it seems that only the transparency of the root frame is considered.

My setup: I've got a base frame with a skin texture and then a couple of effect subframes on top. I then use settexture to assign this sprite to a material.

4
Won't fix / DirectX importing problem
« on: October 13, 2007, 05:10:20 AM »
I am using Fragmotion to model 3D characters. Sometimes when I import them into WME I get strange results. I believe this has been covered a few times here in the forums but there has never been a really satisfactory answer that I have found. I've spent some time collecting evidence and I believe the problem lies within WME.

Here are some examples. These are two ways of exporting using FragMotion
http://www.mattreimer.com/a/WME1.jpg
http://www.mattreimer.com/a/WME2.jpg

The animation that is being played when this effect happens (you may be able to guess) is a breathing animation where the breathing bone scales (no rotation, no location shift). I can email someone the .x file but I'd rather not post it on the net.

For a minute if we ignore that fragmotion completely screws up the second case the important thing is that WME displays the model differently than the MS DirectX Viewers. It seems to me as if this would be a fairly simple fix of maybe not reading coordinates from the .x file in the right order or perhaps a wrong scaling factor. The animation looks right, it just seems to be scaled in the x and z direction by a factor of 2 or 3.

Please let me know if/how I can provide more information. What do you need?

5
Technical forum / Object referencing
« on: August 16, 2007, 05:15:40 PM »
Having trouble phrasing my question. Maybe I'll give an example.

An script I have gets passed a string which corresponds to the name of an actor in a particular scene. This may be the main actor or an NPC. I want to take that string and from it find the actor's X and Y coordinates. Sounds simple...

As I see it this involves two problems:
  • How do I reference an actor object given only a string corresponding to the object name? I believe standard javascript can do something like this[str] or document[str] but I'm not sure if that is possible here.
  • Is it possible to find actors based on the scene that they are in like scene[actor] or something? The reason I ask is that each scene will have different actors and I don't want to have to declare ALL of them as global variables in every script or in global.inc since there will likely be a lot of them and keeping track of them in multiple places is a pain. The NPCs will be defined in scene_init.script for each scene but the function I'm trying to use is located in the root scripts location.

Does this make any sense?

6
Technical forum / Special Characters (especially TAB)
« on: August 12, 2007, 02:38:25 AM »
Hi,

I've had to put some further parameters into the strings.tab file and I have used tab delineation since it's already set up that way.

It works so far and when I pull the string:
NAME<tab>param1<tab>param2<tab>Text

from the file I get:
param1<tab>param2<tab>Text

so now all I need to do is split this string by the TAB key and VOILA!!

I'm using the javascript special characters myStr.Split("\t"); but that's not working.  Could it be that WME uses different special characters?

Also is there a place I could find a list of all the other special characters? Carriage returns etc?  I searched around in the help files and the forums but didn't find anything

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