tournamentdan

Tessellation adds and subtracts polygons and you base that on how close the camera is, so LODs and tessellation are very similar. They both help you cram as many polys as possible. ATI has supported tessellation for years on their GPU's just did not have the tech to unlock it. So I do not see a problem with hardware. And what I am finding, you use displacement maps for the calculation of the tessellation. For instance instead of me creating multiple LOD's. I would only create one high poly model with a displacement map. The tessellation would then add and or subtract depending on the distance from camera. So it would be MUCH easier to create one model and one displacement map than to create a bunch of LOD's. You could create a displacement map of your terrain, so I do not understand the problem for that also. Using tessellation for terrain is going to be a huge difference in performance. Here is a list of some games that use it. Metro 2033 Stalker: Call of Pripyat Civilization V HAWX 2 Dirt 2 Alien vs Predator Crysis 2 Also here is some info I found from the GDC of 2008. EDIT:: photo is now Attached. This is also a nice blog post from a couple years ago with info on tessellation.

Ok great. So just to be clear on your answer number 2, controlling tessellation will be just like controlling a LOD. Like example for terrain.

In LE3 will we have the ability to have LOD and tessellation. I see that tessellation is good for some things and not for others. And will we have the ability to control the tessellation on a per object from the distance from the camera or will it be everything at the same time in the camera view?

Does anyone have any good info on tessellation and displacement maps used together. I can only seem to find general info. And would it be possible to change textures on models on the fly.

I thought LE3 will only allow 256 players, or are we talking about using raknet to make a mmofps. And I hate to bring up a sore subject but how is it possible to create a mmofps with out multi thread.

Thanks Rick for the info. I was kind of hoping to have custom characters for the players, so I would not be able to do it that way. But I guess if I have to compromise and only offer a few different characters, it would not be the end of the world.

Wow!!! Everything on that list looks great. Especially Networking. I was hoping We would have the ability to create large multi-player maps. Has anybody seen if Josh has or has not decided to allow loading models on a separate thread. I was wondering, If we can not load on a separate thread does that mean also for networking that a player could not join a game in progress. Everybody would have to sync together when the game is not running, right?

Very nice. I especially like the ground texture. Keep up the great work.

It is kind of confusing. I have been checking it out. To get the discount price you need to subscribe. If you pay 89.97 for three months you get one month free. You also get four credits to buy clips with. You can not pay for the custom characters with credits. Each clip will cost anywhere from one to four credits depending on complexity. After you use those credits you can then buy clips at the discounted price. It does not give the exact credit price for clips but I can only guess it would cost four credits for the $25 clips. $39 for a pro character $89 for one to four clips and a opportunity to buy other clips at the discounted price. So if you use four credits for one clip and then buy three more at say five bucks a piece. It will cost $143.00 per character. Yes you have to buy the same clip multiple times for different characters. They have excellent tools that I would love to play around with. To me it just sounds a bit much. If everyone is fine with these prices I may have to rethink what I might charge.

All of Mixamo animations are done with motion capture technology, which is what I will be doing also. You are absolutely right animating by hand is very hard and time consuming. But you can stream line things and use what tools there are so you can sell things at a cheaper price.

I am still looking in to this rig add on for blender. A new version just came out and I really do not know about the previous versions but this rig does not work with bones so I do not think any mo- cap files will work with it. It is a cage that deforms the mesh. It will skin and rig a character very quickly. It also will give you a ik,fk,hinge and stretch rig. You would have to animate your self and export but looks promising.

In the future I plan to sell characters fully rigged(face also) with some basic animation(walking, running, smile,anger ect..) for less than their pro character which is $39. Custom characters will be more, and I would think five dollars or less for a 2 second back flip clip would be fine. I think a lot more people would buy things like these if you made them a little more affordable. Which would give you more profit.

Absolutely animating and anything else that has to do with the creation of games takes time and effort. Of course time equals money. I just feel that $25 for a 2 second animation is a bit much especially if everybody and their mother can have the same animation. I just went back to their site and noticed two prices. One for non subscribers and one cheaper if you subscribe. The cheaper price is a lot better but I kind of do not like the subscribe part. Again I am totaly on board for anybody making money for what they do. I just recently bought some mo-cap software for face and body and will probably offer a service some point in the future with no subscription and very affordable.

I seen it before and looks nice but the animations are kind of expensive.

I think the game portal is a great idea. That alone will take you over the top for traffic. I guess we all need to get busy and get these games cranked out.

Using a flow graph to control verts is interesting and I can see how it can or could get expensive when it comes to performance. I have not messed with it yet but have done a little reading on shape keys in blender and accentually what you are doing is creating a library of different face shapes. Happy face,sad face, mean face ect... Each individual shape key is just another model . I bought a tutorial through blender and it came with all of the model files. I was playing around with one of their characters and noticed that it was eating up a lot of memory. Did some digging into the files and found that the library of shape keys were most of the data. Around 17.MB So this would probably not be ideal for real time either. Some times(most times) I like to be lazy and find the easiest ways to do things. Yesterday I found nice motion capture software. It would take a lot of playing around but you could probably get some nice results.

To Josh, sorry about the confusion. I do not know what happened with the earlier post. It must have been my fault.

Thanks gamecreator. You can add detail a couple different ways. You could find a picture of the detail you want to place on your skeleton and place it in a normal map generator.Or import your skeleton into a 3d modeler(like blender) add a lot more polys to it and sculpt the detail and then bake a normal map from high poly to low poly. And yes I created the models pain by pain, or I mean plane by plane.

Well I have been able to work a couple more hours this week on my characters. I seem to be all over the board when it comes to work flow. A little here a little there. The base mesh for the body is done and with hair weighs in at 4,620 triangles. I am happy with the detail with the normal maps although the one on the mesh right now can be unwrapped better to get rid of the bad pixelation around the eyes and mouth. I just threw it together to test. The high poly character is around 55,000 triangles and is only good for making texture maps and cinematic scenes. I was thinking of using this base mesh for the top LOD, but since I was able to cut the polys down I think I will add one more LOD higher and place a higher poly head(around 5,000) on the base mesh body so in the future maybe play around with facial animation in game. Below in the first pic is the low poly base mesh on the left and high poly head on right. I know you can see the scalp between the hairs and I plan to just place a material the same color of the hair on the scalp cap. Next one The low poly has no normal map so you can see the difference. Any comments questions are welcome. EDIT: forgot wire frame pics http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/uploads/1305046483/gallery_570_95_58848.png http://leadwerks.com/werkspace/uploads/1305046483/gallery_570_95_266193.png

I will have to agree here. Like Josh has stated before. Sony can be picky on who they give a license to, but I am sure they are like everybody else and like to make money. If you make a kick bum game for the PC I am sure they will jump on the band wagon.

Thanks pixel, I imagined more bones in the face. So that will take some tinkering with. Thanks again Everybody.

What kind of format is the animation? Is there any way I can see a pic of the rig. I can not find to many good examples.

Is it possible to animate a face in game or would if be to much and bog down the engine. Around 8500 triangles for the face and 3700 for the rest of body.

How about xbox. I think I remember a maybe there also.

Thanks again Pixel. I have been out of modeling for quite a while so I am relearning and a lot is mostly new . I was thinking of weighing all cloths seperate and seeing if I could parent to the body mesh. Not sure if it can work that way but I was going to give it a try.