Michael Betke

I really like it. One thing I noticed is the first wire segment right beside the node. It seems to not hang like it should and looks a bit like a fishing pole. The previous version had them hang correctly.

Best news about. I hope to see this editor finished. Quite some tools were presented but never finished from various people.

Over at Pure3d Visualizations we are working hard on our current project "Lashkar Gah". It will be a 4x4 km² realtime landscape viz for virtual training. Google a bit about "virtual training" to get an idea about that stuff. Basically marines are sitting in front of a computer and train combat - observed by an instructor. We did such solutions before but this time we are allowed to show the work plus even sell some of the assets after finishing the project. We were given the Afghanistan based city of "Lashkar Gah" located in Helmand province. It's an interesting spot to visualize because of the river and mix of nature. We have stony desert there but also green landscape with trees. Like in all projects the first step is to assembe the "combat area" out of Google Maps to get the satellite data. the combat area will be center of the map which decreasing detail reaching to the borders. This will give a intense and realistic feeling for the training people. Plus the coders can design missions while the artist works on the outer regions. This image will be the color map in the editor to get the idea where villages, infrastructure and vegetation has to be located. Now a lot of time goes into research of the area or similar areas. Afghanistan isn't New York so photos are limited. Especially on certain vegetation. The landscape can be split basically in rural and village like territory. Modeling wise this project could end up costing a million dollars rebuilding this city 1:1 but we have a budget for 15 buildings, one vegetation and one props set. This isn't bad because modularity is the key for such projects. Some buildings could be stuck into each other to get the impression of a long building. We also need plenty of mud walls to seperate the borders. After blocking out some buildings with just cubes as placeholders we decided to make "sectors" which consist of several buildings and wall parts. All those parts can be rotated or placed near each other. So areas are filled up quickly while taking the main-streets in account. The city doensn't need to fit the satellite map 100%. Talking about Leadwerks 2.4 we had to use "infinite" view distance because "far" isn't very far and buildings just pop up on a fly through. The ability to define the area of "farness", maybe between 500-1000 meters would be handy. While using "sectors" a feature to make groups would be very helpfully. Just selecting a group out of 12 buildings and walls would be a lot easier as selecting each manually over and over again. Otherwise the engine does a great job for now and duplicating hundereds of buildings and walls at once is stable and fast. At the moment there isn't much to see because modeling and placing the rural buildings consumes most time. For texturing the buildings a mix of vertex painting and decals are used to break up the monotounous tiling of mud on rural areas. In the next chapter you will read about terrain modifications, texturing and the first vegetation pass and props pass.

Looks good. Will it have options like normalmap power and other realtime preview stuff too?

Thanks for your response. I have to dig deeper into it but need to finish two jobs before. All I did was to export a scene into one .ase, saved out the scene in prelight, loaded in purelight and only got a grey viewport without anything in it. Before using .ase i tried .dae three times which gave me loading errors in prelight. All in all Purelight seems to be very well documented so I don't want to call it bad. I just need some more time.

This would be very helpfully! I was refering to the values. Like I place two nodes and enter my settings in the first of the two nodes. Or do I have to place, write values to node1, then go to node2 and enter the same values to make it working properly.

I'm still a bit unsure about purelight after playing around with it. It didnt work for me out of the box and seems a bit to confusing in some parts although I'm used to render programs. But I'll give it some more tries.

lol ok. Dont understand a word...

I would like to compare purelight 1:1 against other soltions now with the trial version available. I know how to export a second UV channel with arbuz exporter but how can I make it visible within the editor?

I checked the cable and it works very good so far. There are also some flaws with the node. If I move or delete a ode it seems I get two wires for some reason. If I delete two nodes the wire is still present in the editor. Do I have to set up both nodes in the same way, or is one node enough? I assume if I export a thinner model the value for thickness will make more sense?

Strange..if I enger from the forums I can't even see the purelight menu nor the new shop stuff. I have to follow the link in the Blog to get additional menu options.

Its cool. Ar the Moment im in holidays and Typung from my mobile. Will check back in à Fee days Guss but it Looks awesome. Never thought of lua beeing so powerful!

I tried your first cable download. I'm out at the moment so I cant try your lates version now. One important thing is some kind of iteration to the model. Like a spline. For example: I want to connect a house with my electricity pole. So I need two points. A and B. If I connect them I would get a straight line. But a wire is hanging a bit. To solve this I would need to place lots of nodes and place allign them each. This would take a lot of time. I would prefer to place the two nodes A and B, open properties, define the number of sides, and a "hanging" value to define the bend value of my wire. A "bend shift" to have the lowest point a bit more left or right would be the ultimate bonus. I think this would be the best wire/cable feature for most peoples needs. But like I said. I have no idea if it's possible.

I use virtualdub to join pictures to a movie. No problem with large files too.

very nice Dave.

I have no problem with passing you my 4 released asset packs. It's more than a fair deal I think.

Noone? Come on guys I know there are some specialists out there.

Dude it's not nice to post the inoffical sneak-peak of Leadwerks 3.0 without permission.

ALphatest looked very strange. Maybe I will use alphatest for posters, grafitties or such stuff.

I need someone who can do a .lua based solution to place cables or wires in the editor. This function is needed in for a project I'm working on. I need to do lots of power-cables and can't do them in 3dmax because of the irregular and modular layout of the project. Maybe someone can do something which uses the road system and I can place "cable_nodes". The wire which needs to be places should be 3-sided and have the ability of adding a material to my cable/wires. It's no need to have them physical interacting. Is it possible? What would it cost? If someone will do it for free and offer the community I would donate of course. I need this done in approximatly two weeks.

Wow with just entering by voice? What phone do you use? I found a solution with intesive searching the forums: My material file is just: texture0="abstract::mud_clean_rocks_dcl.dds" texture1="abstract::mud_clean_rocks_dcl-norm.dds" blend=alpha depthmask=0 zsort=1 overlay=1 No shader stuff in it. I have no idea why it works but I have the look I'm looking for. So I don't care, hehe. So I have the building texture based on two textures which are vertex painted. Plus the decal with smooth mudwall to brick transition.

I'm doing some models in 3dmax. Afghans rural buildings. Base texture is mud with some vertex painting for variation. But I need some decals for stains and additional dirt on the walls too. They are simple planes which I detached from the model and they get exported with the building. So no extra mesh just for decals. All in one building. It should look like the one Dave made on his screenshot. At the moment I see the bricks at the spots where I have the white alpha but at the spots where the decal should be transparent its just black. I used the same material file like Dave posted aboove. Alpha is located in diffusemap. Normalmap has specularity.

So no way to do a simple decal on a wall in the editor with stock Leadwerks? This is really annoying because I need to do some buildings with derelict look and its essential to have some dirt decals on my models.

How have you solved this issue dave? I have black spots where it should be transparent.

Maybe this is why it always worked before. Sometimes my brain just forgets stuff if I do other things for a while. Thanks mate