Yep... I'm blown away. That looks incredible. With lots of different plants, it'll look insanely amazing - you'll be able to tell what kind of biome you're in by looking at the plants, correct?
Thanks!
Hopefully, yeah, you'll be able to tell biome based on vegetation.
I've done some 3d modeling work, but I doubt any of it would be of any use to you... What are the models made in, out of curiosity? Maybe I can help make what you're missing.
Any help would be much appreciated!
These are the trees/plant models I found. Each model is in a bunch of formats, so you should have something that should be able to open them. They're more...region-specific, rather than species-specific. My plan was to just roughly assign the models to what real life tree they more or less look like. So, I'm not quite sure what the gaps are yet. Any fantasy, non-real-world tree or plant isn't going to have a model yet, obviously. It's insanely difficult to find decent low-poly tree models. Reading through the Visual Fortress thread, I discovered that Baboonanza had the same trouble as me, and never did find free tree models that he was happy with.
I'd absolutely love to have a different model specifically for each species of tree, and have it be distinguishable, but for now hopefully these will work.
The resulting 3D model has to be in Ogre's own .mesh format. Honestly, getting it there is half of the challenge. I finally found a method to convert the Loopix trees last night. If you're interested, here's the process:
- Open up the .ms3d version of the model in a trial version of Milkshape 3D
- Export everything about it (including material, tangents, etc.) to a file. Exporting animation and skeleton data is required, even though the trees have none.
- Use OgreXMLConverter to decompile the exported .mesh file
- Open up the new XML file in an editor, rename the material to something more appropriate, and delete all lines related to skeletons or animations
- Use OgreXMLConverter to recompile the XML file into a new .mesh
- Edit the exported material file to match the name you gave it in the model XML file, add the line "alpha_rejection greater_equal 128" to the pass, and add "alpha" to the end of the texture line.
Yeah. Don't ask me how long it took to figure that one out.
I'll be spending most of my night tonight doing that to each loopix plant model, so hopefully by tomorrow we'll be able to post some screenshots of all sorts of vegetation in Overseer.
Anyways, that's for the Loopix trees. I've been making my own models in Blender, and have found that it works quite nicely. Whatever works, really, there's an Ogre exporter for almost every major modelling program -- it's just that the process of importing and then exporting tends to screw things up.
So that's really not much of an answer to your actual question, but I should know that better by tomorrow.