Shadow blinds?

[Guppy]

At first I thougth it was z figthing but after confirming in blender that I have no overlapping faces ( I've a couple that intersects but not at any of the problem areas ) I attached the default light to the player on a hunch and sure enough - it's the shadows.

 

Since it looks very much like sheite I'd like to know if I can somehow fix it

 

 

You'd normally not get that close to the mesh but it's very noticeable from a distance as you get very brigth blinds in the shadow areas as you viewing angle changes

 

 

 

ps. why does the forum sensor "c.r.a.p" ( sans punctuation ) ?

[YouGroove]

Can you upload your model ?

[Guppy]

Can you upload your model ?

 

The blend file would be a problem as it's ~70mb currently, the .mdl and textures are attached

 

I've turned off shadows in the material and the blinds disappeared so it's not z-figthing

[YouGroove]

70 Mo for one model ? it's high res version.

What is the file you give me ? Blender or MDL ? i don't see the extension, trying to rename Blend or FBXi could not open it in Blender.

[Guppy]

It's a gzipped tar.. ? Winrar and WinZip should be able to extract it just fine. It contains the MDL.

[YouGroove]

Yes, i extracted the GZ, then the Tar, but the file don't have a name. I use 7Zip ,perhaps you could make a simple zip ?

I renamed the file into MDL, but it crashed LE3 trying to open in the model editor.

[Guppy]

Tar is a container file(Tape ARchive) I'm not near my computer for the next few hours I'll attempt to repack it on my phone

[Guppy]

Here. Ironically I had to download the 7zip add-on to unpacknit on androids es explorer.

[macklebee]

looks fine to me after the normals were recalculated in the model editor

[Guppy]

You have to turn on shadows in the material, I accidentally forgot to turn it back on before packing

[YouGroove]

Also LE3 is not able to load normals informations from imported mesh ( i don't know if it has been corrected?)

 

Why is there a sub folder with same files ? what is the good one to test ?

 

Taking the root model and textures, i made a material from your textures, but dropping it on your model nothing appears.

Don't you have some UV problem ?

 

I like the design of your turret, i have some similar spider bot in the makings also.

[Guppy]

The double folder was an artifact of the android unpacking. The texture is just plain white to test - it's not finished yet, I wanted to test the normal map to make sure it looked proper in game.

 

The other texture is an AO bake

[YouGroove]

So i don' t see the problem , the shadow seems fine.

[Guppy]

And you have shadows turned on in the new material? Could you show me the settings?

[YouGroove]

[Guppy]

You are using different shaders than me, that must be it - thanks

[YouGroove]

You are right it is a problem.

In the picture i used static shader for the mode instead of animated one.

If i choose animated diffuse/normal/specular (or simply Diffuse animated) ,the model disappears.

[Guppy]

You are right it is a problem.

In the picture i used static shader for the mode instead of animated one.

If i choose animated diffuse/normal/specular (or simply Diffuse animated) ,the model disappears.

 

Figured out why your material didn't show the shadow artifact - your using shadow+animated shader which completely removes shadows from non animated objects.

 

I've attached a new version for perusal - it's the same as above but sans the confusion of file formats and shaders, if anyone care to try and help me fix it.

Spider turret.zip

[YouGroove]

If i use static shader and static shader shadow all is fine.

If i use animated shadows : shadows disappear

if i use animated dif/normal shader : model disappear.

 

All is fine as your model don't have rig and bones, it's not animated model but static one.

 

What is the problem ?

[Guppy]

That the self shadows have blinds in them that look like z fighting. If you are not seeming this it may be a Linux/ATI issue

[YouGroove]

I have Ati but on Windows.

I rotated the directionnal light and the shadow was ok in the editor and in game.

 

Or you can post a playable test map with you player postion and light settings.

[macklebee]

I see a couple of spots after i had recalculated the normals and turned the 'castshadows' on - and yes it does look like z-fighting in those areas. Without a fbx file though I cannot tell if there are actually multiple faces laying on top of each other. But within the model editor, I do see a couple of errant faces with normals flipped or just serve no purpose that I can see in other places on the model.

[Guppy]

There are no extra vertices, all the normals are poiting outside ( the black triangle is another shadow artifact )

 

I decided to try and narrow the problem down - and slim my file down at the same time;

 

my "robot" is now reduced to just the upper body = 64 faces ( 32 quads in a circle and a top triangle fan = 96 tris )

 

And I still get it those shadow artifacts;

 

 

 

I then decided to remove the uncertainty of the used material and used the default blue developer material

 

 

Attached is the both the mdl and blender file - I used blender 2.71 exported with blender exporter commit b75d03f1027b89e5adcffd0d9a41d283a5d03794 ( 20 Feb 2015 )

 

 

I'll update my blender version once I find a working PPA ( irie stopped updating last year ) but I kinda doubt that has any effect

 

 

I'll install steam on the windows test comp and try there to see if i get the same results

forum-thingy.zip

[Guppy]

Test completed - getting the exact same thing on windows ( AMD e450 APU )

[Guppy]

Seems it *is* a normals thing

 

as can be seen here;

 

 

The normals in blender are correct

 

how ever recalculating them in leadwerks produces well uhm..

 

Above: plain imported, even here the shadows are well buggy

 

 

Above: After calculate normal: "Average normal", half the faces are flat shades the other half are smooth ( split at 180* )

 

 

If I use angular treshold the entire thing becomes smooth shaded and no amount of Average normal will change that - the shadow anormaly disappeares after this.

 

after recalculating the normals the mdl file changes size from 10.5 to 6.4 kb

 

Sadly while this seems to work on the very very sparse geometry - it does not work on the big one, not only does it completely screw up the surface normals giving the model a half smooth half flat shaded look the shadow anomaly is still there