112 réponses à ce sujet

[ShadowM]

I will get some stuff out not this monday but the next one. Are you animating you mesh, looking at in nwnmax it look like it. Mine are single tile size, but making a big one like yours is great too. This will be a lot of fun to mess with . Could you just make it the size of the tileset and use the area's skybox?

[lordofworms]

what about no skybox sphere at all>?
first it just seems off a bit that the clouds would rock back and forth along with the ocean like that.. would it be easier and be more useful as just the tileset feature with the rocking/animated ocean?. let the mod builder just use fog/limits color blending to put it together nicely and use the built in skyboxes.

don't take the critique badly, this is surely waaay cool!!! I got excited just looking at the first concept!

[OldTimeRadio]

@ShadowM - I'm looking forward to seeing those.  Yeah, I'm animating the mesh with 2 animated Wave modifiers right now.  I had some Noise modifiers on the stack but they don't seem to play too well with the way I have them set up currently.  The Noise modifiers don't loop like I'd expect them to so they don't come out seamless but they make great random sub-waves.  As far as discarding the skybox, there's a download link below which contains a version of the model without the skybox as well as a video of that model in action.

@LordofWorms - It's all good!  The original request was for something simulating a big ocean storm and so the choices I made were with that in mind.  IMO, the sky rolling with the sea causes a sort of mental distinction that separates the ship from the other two.  It's an illusion after all, so the more things I can stack up to enhance the effect help.  The water waves on their own are kind of weak so the sky and things like the bow wave help.  Below this is a video of leaving out the skybox entirely and you can download the modified model to check it out yourself:



There's still room for improvement but because we're dealing with a standard skybox (with the skyblurpoly shell), we can bring fog back in and the edges look much better.  I like it quite a bit, actually!  I'm going to try to polish things up a bit over Spring Break but what do you all think?  I like the rocking sky but I'll trade it for not having to deal with the edges where the water meets the sky.  I'd still like to do some combat at sea and I don't know if this will make it harder or easier but for just plowing through the ocean it's pretty sweet- and you get control back of the skybox scripting for changing weather, etc.:

Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 26 mars 2012 - 04:05 .

[Karvon]

So very cool work!

Now, if it were walkable water so I could toss sea monsters and swimming PCs out there, I'd be in heaven

Karvon

[Frith5]

Outstanding!

[Vipre]

The clouds not "rock[ing] back and forth along with the ocean" ruins the illusion of the ship rocking though it does create an illusion of sea swells.

If you have the sky-sphere rocking one direction and the water plane rocking the opposite it should create both illusions at the same time and with half the rock. That or just make the player seasick.

Modifié par Vipre, 26 mars 2012 - 10:42 .

[lordofworms]

seeing the two side by side (I dl both) I cannot really choose. I think the skysphere one gives more of that Motion sickness effect, great for setting specific instances of sea travel.
but the one without your custom sphere, also is good and gives the sense of just 'sailing' ...

I think I would add both of these, an adventure at seas start with the no custom sphere, and when you run into a storm,load the skysphere one(with all sorts of dark ominous sky)...

you really do inspire people here. Since your thinking and manipulation of the nwn engine is always so cool and outside of the box...and best you happily give out all the hard earned work like you were handing out candy at Halloween.

[Jenna WSI]

I'm really impressed. Didn't think NWN was even capable of this.

[ShadowM]

Damm cannot get the texture motion to work in gmax uggg. where joco to fix it for us gmax users. If anyone can get it to work let me know. I guess I have to do my work without it and them maybe have one you add the rotation.

[Zwerkules]

Sadly animated meshes don't work in gmax and I guess there's no way to make them work with scripting.

[KlatchainCoffee]

I was going to say something about using both, but lordofworms said it all for me.

OTR - thanks for doing this stuff & for showing the way to taking a nwn sea adventure to another level.

[OldTimeRadio]

Zwerkules wrote...

Sadly animated meshes don't work in gmax and I guess there's no way to make them work with scripting.

I haven't tried scripting them, I don't think anyway, but here's how to make an animated mesh in GMax from scratch.  Works fine.  Check this out and see if you're doing something differently:



I'll bet you're clicking on the AniMesh modifer after setting the number of samples?  It blanks out the number of samples and you have to re-enter it.

File outputted from the demo:


I'm stil working out some more ideas so I don't have anything more yet.  I encourage everyone to play around with this themselves and see what they come up with.  Post screenshots or videos!  If any modder needs help with the basic effect, just post what the problem is and I'll see what I can do to help.  But I'm almost a  fish out of water in GMax.  Very used to Max.

Thanks for all the positive comments! 

I don't have a response yet to some of the suggestions, but I will reply when I do.  You guys rock!

Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 27 mars 2012 - 05:20 .

[Zwerkules]

Thank you for the tutorial, OTR. Adding the animesh works in gmax. If if save the scene and load that instead of exporting it as a mdl file and importing it, maybe I can work with animeshes. I haven't tried if they export, but importing a model with animeshes doesn't work. The modifiers on the animeshes are gone. Not only the animesh one, but also the Aurora trimesh modifier.

[ShadowM]

No, I can animate the mesh. I talking about the texture (See Baba Yaga's excellent demo of the effect here and Bannor Bloodfist's tutorial on reproducing the effect.) The one that make the texture move. It seem like it will not export that kind of data in gmax. Thanks for the mesh demo though that nice. . Well my idea was going to do it with a skin mesh give you more control on the waves and allows you to match up crest emmitters to match up the animated water better.

[OldTimeRadio]

@Zwerkules - Oh!  AniMesh won't import back into NWMax.  Animesh is a one way street like that.  The reason why is that no information is stored with the vertices to explain how they got like that.  Does this suck on some level?  Yes.  But in return you get the ability to capture the effect of any modifier or modifiers.  This is some powerful black magic.  I've captured exotic and intensive things like cloth modifiers, no problem.  You can stack 15+ modifiers on a mesh to achieve the desired effect (if that's what you want) and then bake it down to AniMesh.  And you can tune the number of samples you use so your exported model does not necessarily export to a large file.  Compile that model and sometimes you can halve the size again.  The scrolling texture model below, uncompiled, is just 19k.

@ShadowM - Take a look at this video for scrolling-texture animesh in GMax:



I'd really like to see how you do that with skin mesh!  In my mind I know what you're talking about- and it looks cool- but I haven't been able to make it look in Max how it looks in my mind.

You can download the output from that video (including the texture) here:


NOTE: In my demo video the texture's scrolling does not play back perfectly smoothly.  This is because my animation frame range is 100 but my animation only runs to frame 90.  It plays back perfectly in-game.

Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 27 mars 2012 - 09:09 .

[ShadowM]

Thank you, I was adding the Animesh first and that seem to cause me all sorts of problems but like in your video if I did Xform first it worked better. Now I dealing with the out of memory error, but if I keep the samples down I can get it to export. Now I just have to match it up skinmesh animation better with the boat and do some emitter test. I was suppose to mess with this stuff this weekend but could not resist

[ShadowM]

ok here a link to module / hak / gmax file with some emmitters attached. They need work but just more work in progress stuff.
LINK

[lordofworms]

Hey ShadowM. Just letting you know that link is unavailable. Says 404 forbidden for myself when trying to follow link. just FYI.

I have been messing with this concept myself and should have something to show by the end of day.

[lordofworms]

one question/thing maybe someone more knowledgable in setting up scrolling textures can help answer.

I been messing with this idea for several sea variant tile features based on the microset. (medium/low/high pitches, side-side rocking,etc)
the only problem I seem to run into is the scrolling texture always seems to 'skip' when transitioning from end frame to beginning frame.

when I autokey from beginning I am setting .25 for each block of animation (i am using 4 keys currently) (1 at 45, another at 90, another at 145, and lastly 189)

from what i understand I want it to start at 0.0 and then through the course of the animation end up at 1.0 for its v coordinate in UVWxForm.
how can I get a smooth transition from frame 189 back to frame 0.
it seems that autokey kinda jumps the UVW xform a bit so that when going through the frames , frame 0 is at like 0.0025 instead of 0.0 for its v coordinate.
any advice?

[OldTimeRadio]

lordofworms wrote...
I been messing with this idea for several sea variant tile features based on the microset. (medium/low/high pitches, side-side rocking,etc) the only problem I seem to run into is the scrolling texture always seems to 'skip' when transitioning from end frame to beginning frame.

You're trying to do this as a tile animation, is that correct?

when I autokey from beginning I am setting .25 for each block of animation (i am using 4 keys currently) (1 at 45, another at 90, another at 145, and lastly 189)

You can get away with using less keys, though in some circumstances Max/NWN will guess incorrectly about which direction things are moving and you'll have to use a few more to clue it in.  If you look at the last video I posted, you'll notice I don't lay a key down at 0, my first key actually goes down at frame 45 (of 90 frames) and GMax/Max automatically places they key at frame 0.

from what i understand I want it to start at 0.0 and then through the course of the animation end up at 1.0 for its v coordinate in UVWxForm.

Yep.  For the most basic kind of animating like this, that's right.

how can I get a smooth transition from frame 189 back to frame 0.

Could it be that the length of the animation you define in the tile base does not have the correct frame range?  There is also the possibility that the frame range for that animation is hardcoded by the engine.  I'm not sure if that's the case or not.

it seems that autokey kinda jumps the UVW xform a bit so that when going through the frames , frame 0 is at like 0.0025 instead of 0.0 for its v coordinate.

In most cases this is due to having set the frame range wrong in the tile's base.  However, if you attempted to reimport the animation back in via NWmax (which is bad, don't do that), NWMax will adjust your animations so that your animation actually starts at frame 10 or something like that.  This can throw things off.  NWMax was built with some ideas about how things should be done and it appears that (on reimport) it tries to fit things into that mold.  In this case IIRC, the reasoning behind NWMax mucking with the animations on reimport (if that is, indeed, what you're dealing with) has to do with NWN always needing a key of some sort at frame 0 and the convention of starting animations at frame 10.  I'm not sure if that accurately reflects how the NWN engine works, today, but some of these issues were reported in the distant past and it appears that some functionality may have been implemented in NWMax to account for the behavior.  All of that is purely if the issue you're dealing with involves getting screwed keys on reimport of animesh.

I also saw the above behavior when reimporting animation keys which were simply baked starting at frame 0, so it's not just animesh.

Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 29 mars 2012 - 05:34 .

[ShadowM]

I put it with my HR project, I think you have to be logged in here to download it. I will set up another link. Some helpful advice with NWmax animation, sometimes when you copy over the start animation to the end animation so you can close you loop it does not copy properly. So make sure to run you animation to see if they match up. If it does not delete and recopy again. I had this happen a number of times.

To fix the texture animation, take the texture and put a line in it to better see it in nwmax, that what I doing right now to fix the jump effect.

Some more ideas with this system is a lava version on the high lava seas, lava rivers, just plan lava pools.Ok uploaded to the vault now too I post the link when it up.

Modifié par ShadowM, 30 mars 2012 - 02:01 .

[ShadowM]

Ok, it up on the vault. Ok fixed the other link above also.

Forum download link
LINK


Vault
Link

Modifié par ShadowM, 30 mars 2012 - 05:04 .

[OldTimeRadio]

@ShadowM - LOL! You goofball!  Get my name off that submission.  And change the module and the hak's name too.  I realize you were just trying to be respectful but that's not even my model, it's the horrible thing that happens when one imports my model into NWMax and then exports it again.  Your have my blessing to replace OTR with ShadowM and call it yours!

Just please don't call it mine! 

I like your emitters though, especially the ones at the bow.  IMO the ones along the side need to have splat turned off if it's turned on.  The pitch cycle on your animation node is broken and the water moves way too fast on the animesh, IMO.

I'm still working on my WIP so I don't have any screenshots or videos or anything yet.  I'm trying to make it so the same placeable has both the "sunny day & normal waves" and "stormy day and more frequent waves".  Not sure if that's going to work.

[ShadowM]

OldTimeRadio wrote...

@ShadowM - LOL! You goofball!  Get my name off that submission.  And change the module and the hak's name too.  I realize you were just trying to be respectful but that's not even my model, it's the horrible thing that happens when one imports my model into NWMax and then exports it again.  Your have my blessing to replace OTR with ShadowM and call it yours!

Just please don't call it mine! 

I like your emitters though, especially the ones at the bow.  IMO the ones along the side need to have splat turned off if it's turned on.  The pitch cycle on your animation node is broken and the water moves way too fast on the animesh, IMO.

I'm still working on my WIP so I don't have any screenshots or videos or anything yet.  I'm trying to make it so the same placeable has both the "sunny day & normal waves" and "stormy day and more frequent waves".  Not sure if that's going to work.

Well you the one that put all the information together for all of us so I figured you should be the one that should put up a product for voting etc.. I just wanted to put a sample so others had a gmax version to play with. I saw the texture movement topic but skip over thinking was only good for 3dsmax so you showing me how that worked in gmax thank you. LOL funny I think the emitters look bad, I just tossed though together. I think I fixed the animation skip pretty good. LOL You think it fast now, when I started it was really flying fast hehe I was thinking of maybe making differant speed version, but yeah I been trying to slow it down and keep it in sink. I will work on it some more late sunday and monday, I also try and find my old placables waves (on another laptop, hope they not lost. Ugh) and post some pic.
(ok made some changes to the vault submission)

Modifié par ShadowM, 31 mars 2012 - 03:40 .

[lordofworms]

www.youtube.com/watch




I dont know how to make the cool auto-inserts like OTR did, but here is where I am at with alpha-stages. These will be uploaded to vault when complete.

Modifié par lordofworms, 31 mars 2012 - 04:09 .