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[tefalo]

Notify doesn't give the same actions. Posting allows you to use "Show new replies to your posts." whereas notify sends an email. I don't want an email.

Oh, okay. Don't mind me then.

[nbonaparte]

I'm very interested in this, and I have significant Blender experience. I'd love to help. You said you had a Wave set up, I'll PM you my info for that if you'd like.

[Huggz]

Some feedback from questions in the Visual Fortress thread:


As to the exporters, I'm only going to start with something like povray. The modular nature will hopefully allow anyone to write any exporter for any format they want to, without needing to touch the core visualizer.

As for the geometry, I'll be implementing the constructions etc. as procedural geometry, like in Visual Fortress, meaning they are generated by applying certain rules to the tilesets. These rules will be done in Lua, so anyone with a text editor will be able to change how statues are oriented, how the crenelations of open topped fortifications look like, etc.

You want murder holes in the roof of your barbicon? Add a procedural Lua script that inserts them, triggered by a marker tied to a burrow, so on and so forth.

Another idea I've got is to do periodic recordings of the whole map's tileset info into a compressed stream, which can be exported as a series of scene files, which you then run overnight through a raytracer and encoder, and voila - you have a time-lapse movie showing the construction of you mega-dam/tower/castle

I'll make the tools - its up to you guys to make the awesome with it.

Sounds amazing! Lil request: Could you make stairs spirals so that large central staircases look alright? Thanks.

[Crunch]

Lil request: Could you make stairs spirals so that large central staircases look alright? Thanks.

Nifty!  I hadn't thought specifically about stairs yet, but that would certainly solve the problem of having an up/down starwell that extends for 50 z-levels...

If you're interested, here's a sneak preview of a model I finished last night.  It's a first-draft (so expect changes in the final project)... but it is rendered using OSG.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is a finely-crafted Prepared Food Barrel (mahogany) <#27>. 
It is encircled with bands of steel. 
This object menaces with spikes of almost 6,000 polygons.

[sizeak]

Ahahaha love the comment underneath. Nice barrel! Can I haz bump mapping?

[Askot Bokbondeler]

Replying to track the thread.

[Crunch]

Can I haz bump mapping?

OSG Composer (a generic program used to render that image) doesn't do bump-mapping.  But the official Obsidian renderer will (if I remember correctly). 

tl;dr:  Yes, but you'll have to wait for it. 

[Askot Bokbondeler]

isn't that too many polygons for an object that will appear by the thousands on every fort?

[sizeak]

Models for games etc are generally made with LOTS of polys and then the count is slowly reduced till they have an acceptable number

[Askot Bokbondeler]

i used to mod for warcraft 3, i'm used to thinking low poly :\.

[Bloogonis]

when people started talking about models for VF I think they were working on a number around 100-200(maybe 500? cant remember) triangles tops. so 6k polygons = 12k tris thats huge no matter how you look at it. and seeing how I tend to have a stockpile of over a hundred barels in it full of booze and food that makes it over a million triangles for the barrels alone. Im already cringing and telling my computer to not worry and that it will be ok .

[Crunch]

Lol, it will be okay. 

On the modeling side, the way the barrel was made, it is literally as simple as dragging a slider, to control how many polys are in each sub-object.  It's like... this example.  (Except, instead of a sphere, it's a bunch of bent cube-shapes that make up the boards; and two ring-shapes that make up the metal bands.)  The number of polys is almost meaningless right now; the settings I used were just picked out of the air and can be tweaked later.  But it looked pretty, so I thought I'd post it.

In the end, we'll have models with the "right" number of polys for this engine (whatever that number turns out to be).

[Djohaal]

I'm currently sunken to the head in surgery, stiches, hearts and lungs, so it'll take a while for me to sync-back in activity (and let's not mention I still have a human brain to slice milimeter by milimeter in the lab!)
For the barrel try to simplify it into a tapered curved cylinder with some smart bump mapping instead of bent boxes, that is way too much detail for a simple barrel, even with progressive LOD.

[Crunch]

For the barrel try to simplify it into a tapered curved cylinder with some smart bump mapping instead of bent boxes, that is way too much detail for a simple barrel, even with progressive LOD.

So... I take it you're not gonna like my higher-detail version, complete with modeled knotholes and small polygonal splinters?   

[peterix]

For the barrel try to simplify it into a tapered curved cylinder with some smart bump mapping instead of bent boxes, that is way too much detail for a simple barrel, even with progressive LOD.

So... I take it you're not gonna like my higher-detail version, complete with modeled knotholes and small polygonal splinters?   

Actually, if you make such a detailed model and then use the details for creating bump/normal maps for the simplified model...