Michael Betke

Nice references there. Today I didn't had much time to work on the pack because of a project finishing but this evening I did the first batch of single-rocks and also a test for a dark lava-kind rock. I think it turned out like a meteroid or so. I like it for some reasons..don't know why. I could imagine it will do well with some others of this kind near a lava-stream. I will now do some land-slides and large formations with them and turn to the next batch. Maybe the round river rocks from the photo or a batch of smaller to use as vegetation support.

I will do a mix for different sceanrios of course. Roundish rocks will also be included.

Really nice. I think we will see nice CSG levels and its so usefull for blocking scenes (as long a you can export to .obj or another external format).

Hi I want to share a little teaser for my new model set I work on. It will be called RocksHD and feature lots of new rocks, stones and cliff models for your game-world. This time I really want to push it further and do the best I can with my current knowledge. Each rock will be seamlessly textured, baked from a sculpted high-res ZBrush, have an individual 2048px texture map or a good looking repeating texture for the large cliff sets (maybe with decals to break up tiling). I will use Nvidia physics in 3dmax to make landslides which look naturally fallen so you just need t odrop it into the editor and have natural looking geometry. For now I set up a good workflow to bake my normals,AO and Cavity maps from it before taking it to Photoshop and viewport paint all teh stuff together. Like usually I will use it in my own projects so I don't want to produce **** for you. If you have any wishes you can add them here to the thread so I can take care and include them if its not a glwoing fantasy gem.

I have a projected texture light entity. but it only projects a texture and does not play the caustic animations? How can I change it to play the caustics frames from leadwerks?

Wow this is great.

It works very well with max2012. I sue it with single materials an multi-mat material. Seems you did something worng with your material name. From material editor your material has to be the same name like your .mat in leadwerks. Another thing: I have the same problem with smoothing groups. I export with FBX2012 from 3dmax, disable export smoothing. With FBX I get face errors after the .gmf export from UU3D. Only .ase works at the moment with the mesh.

For some reasons my model imported well into UU3D but the export to .gmf doesnt work properly because some polygones are scattered and stretched several meters over the scene. Only .ase import to UU3D and then to .gmf works fine without face errors. I use two UV-Sets and .obj doesnt support it I think? Today I will try your recommendation with the Autosmooth faces.

A quick and not eadwerks related in first place but Unwrap3d. Everytime I export my model to .gmf I get a smoothing group applied all over my mesh. In 3ds max I have a smoothing wit Zero. But as soon as I import it into UU3D I get this 90° smoothing everywhere. And also in my .gmf later. Can I change it somewhere in UU3D? I wasn't able to find a function there.

Terrain arctic should be fast. Its only one tree and two or three terrain textures. I think Josh did it for showing Billboards.

I made a quicky with some plants from my shop. Still 45fps with default vegetation settings and around 12 vegetation types.

Yes colors are too saturated and your ground misses a lot of cover like fern if you want to match your reference pic.

There are some reasons why you want closed geometry. 1. In CryEngine2 for example breakable trees only worked if you have a closed mesh. This is why the palm trees were breakble and not other trees with multiple branches. A palm is basically a bend cylinder. And the 2D leaf and brach textures are connected with an invisible cubic volume. 2. Closed meshes are used for vegetation objects which are direct in players focus. So called "hero objects". More polygones, crisp textures, and mostly a unique UV texture without tiling. Like a big tree in a gloomy forest or so. A focus object. Its also used a lot in arch-viz where you have a fly-by a tree where polycount doesn't matter. 3. Closed geometry is also used a lot if you use ZBrush for doing the trunk and branch and paint the texture in viewport and export the maps seamless. Basically for unique meshes which need to look awesome. In general you can add a seam on top of the branch and use pelt mapping to have it nicely unwrapped so it looks good. Projection mapping can be used if you make a CG only tree. If you stick the branches into each other you can allign the mostly cylindrical unwrap to make it a good transition. In Leadwerks I used vertex paint to cover seams or decals with floating geometry on a trunk. Like a Baobab african tree I had to do some time ago. Bottom line: Do unique trees if you want maximum visual fidelity and the player notices it. Do "common" trees with tiling textures for most kinds of projects where a player passes by quickly. Its still the most used technique around and less time consuming. In terms of performance a tiling texture with a slight overdraw is always faster as several unique trunk textures with more polygones and even some decals and vertex paint.

Nice topic, I used the Ivy stuff all few years again. Lately in 2009 in a real-time project: I had to do this small Ivy groings there which I did with the GW Ivy plugin: http://guruware.at/main/ivy/index.html Its the same like you use but integrated into 3dsmax. I also had to do a large fencing with grown ivy. Around 500m long. I solved it in two parts: A: Grow the ivy on my object (the transforamtor house as a unique object or at one fence which I used later modular) B: Bake the wood/roots to a texture. They are the most highpoly elements. I used the planes without modification. C: Now I had my baked root texture and my leaf planes which I used as a main model in realtime. D: For Lod1 I baked the original grown Ivy to a texture which switched in a certain distance. Like a Ivy-Billboard of the complete plant. For me it worked very well for the project. You can fine tune the leaves if you dupicate or delete some of them and use different material-ids.

I have seperate objects but the export with arbuz tool itself doesn't work. I tried UU3D because its suggested here a lot. It works in some way but sometimes the mesh was really messed up after using the .GMF exporter. And textures are not on my model too... My next step is to check with the mesh a bit more. The main problem are meshes I get from architects, 3d stores or CAD. All stuff I model myself from scratch works lol.. Isn't there a tutorial or anything about a functional export pipeline??

I'm a little bit frustrated. I have a nice scene but Arbuz exporter doesn't export it or it takes forever... Now my approach is to export to .fbx and then use fbx2gmf.exe It works a bit... I think I do something wrong there maybe. All I get is a model which is way too large, has a smoothing over 90 degree (all edges are round) but I would prefer it to not have any smoothing at all. I also have absolutly no materials applied. My model is editable poly object, has no smoothing applied at all and one global material as a start. But even this basic stuff doesnt work. I export as FBX2009 in ASCII. Any suggestions, hints, tutorials, advises???

Where can I download this nice addition? How does it behave on bright surfaces? I think this is often a difficult scenary because it makes edges look a bit blurry.

Yes I also like it very much. Last eyecandy I could imagine is a blend into a night skymap.

what do you mean with aliasing problem? If you "cut" your lines into the runway model and apply the lines as a multi-material all should be smooth. I used it a lot last year. LOD is for geometry reduction in first case. Your mipmaps reduce the texture load. You could also use other material on your LOD model. Like only a diffuse so the normal/spec isnt rendered when viewing from a distance. But I think Leadwerks loads all textures at once so I dont see a benefit. Newer engines are streaming which means only the textures in camera view are loaded as far as i know.

Looks good. I recommend to apply a generic square box mapping as default. Like a box with 1m x 1m x 1m as a default. in 80% of all hard-surface models this is a good start for mapping an generic props. I even have a script in 3dmax which applies me such a box with a maxscript because its so often used and looking okay. For further tweaking/tiling the tile functionality would be used.

You could just place the lines as splines in your 3d app, and "shapemerge" (compund object) the lines into your runway terrain model. it will generate more tris of course but you have no zfighting and you need no alphamap. the engine can deal good with high polycount so it doesnt matter a lot.

I like this front view but if I look at a 45degree ortho-view it looks to wired to my eye. I work all the time with perspective view in 3d. I think ortho is more used at Ingeneering and not games. ZBRush got perspective view a few releases ago because people demanded it. So I vote for: Perspective.

I use nothing...only editor and what's able out of the box because I mostly present the viz from editor to change things with clients on the fly.

Which material would I use for it? You mean a second mesh over my pool walls like a moving decal? I can do it in editor only, without coding.

How can I make a nice pool water for a swimming pool? I can use a simple river with refractive water material but how do I get the Leadwerks ocean caustics working? Easiest way would be to use a material with the animated caustics for me. But how to do it?