Beetle for Vehicle Destruction

[Road Kill Kenny]

Hi all,

 

Just finished the first modelling part of creating my destructible vehicle. I have finished modelling the un-damaged vehicle but I still have to do the deformed models later.

 

Anyway, as you can see the vehicle isn't one mesh but has many different parts including doors, bonnet, trunk etc that will be able to fly off during gameplay.

 

The poly count is around 30,000 tri's for the whole thing. Some may say that this is a lot but I've done my research and its a lot less than most vehicle games like GT5 where they have between 200,000 to 500,000 poly's. I also looked up many other poly counts of vehicle games and they all seem to be much more than 30,000. averaging about 100,000. So considering that and considering the environment in my game will be not big as it will be arena based PvP with only about 8 players at a time I should be Ok. Also I have LODs.

 

Anyway here are the pics. Next tim I think I'll make a less round car to make it easier to keep the poly's low.

 

Edit: This first one looks a bit funny because these shots are in Orthographic mode and not perspective... oops

[Laurens]

That looks good Ken, well done

[DaDonik]

That looks nice!

I'm sure 3DCoat will assist you well in painting this guy

[tournamentdan]

Hey Ken, very nice model. A while ago I was very interested in modeling cars and selling them to people for games. I searched high and low and could not find a legal way to sell or use a manufacture vehicle(without their permission)in a game. One example is at Turbosquid. You can buy a manufacture vehicle but you can only buy it with a media license. Meaning you can use it in a commercial,movie,advertisement,news,ect... and NOT in a game. I think the reason for this is that manufacturer's want to have control over what can be done with there product. You may get permission to make a game like yours and most likely not if you make a game like GTA where you can run over hookers and such. Before you invest a lot more of your time I would check into this. Especially if you want to make money with your game.

 

I am also interested on how you will implement the destruction. Are you planning ahead for LE3 and going to try decal tessellation?

[Road Kill Kenny]

Idk for sure how close it has to be to the real thing. However, I have purposely made different parts of the model different to that of a real beetle... of course it wouldn't be called nor badged as a beetle.. Though I don't know if that is really enough but... hehe guess I'll have to find out. Cheers...

 

No I was not planning ahead for LE3. Just gonna give it a shot

[megigames]

i like it

[Rick]

Just finished the first modelling part of creating my destructible vehicle. I have finished modelling the un-damaged vehicle but I still have to do the deformed models later.

 

I think another option would be to animate this one only. It looks like you have some bones and if not you can make bones around where you want the damage to be. Then in code get the bones as entities and then you can animate each bone by itself to deform that part of the model. Then if you needed it you could pretty easily just deform the parts that were hit by having bodies around the areas of your major bones. Giving some similar naming conventions of your bodies and bones would make it pretty simple to code "when this body is collided with, then get the bone with the similar name and animate it to show the dmg".

 

Would probably be easier and more dynamic than making new models for damaged car.

[Road Kill Kenny]

Would probably be easier and more dynamic than making new models for damaged car.

 

You are 100% correct here. I abandoned that idea pretty quickly

 

I think another option would be to animate this one only. It looks like you have some bones and if not you can make bones around where you want the damage to be. Then in code get the bones as entities and then you can animate each bone by itself to deform that part of the model. Then if you needed it you could pretty easily just deform the parts that were hit by having bodies around the areas of your major bones. Giving some similar naming conventions of your bodies and bones would make it pretty simple to code "when this body is collided with, then get the bone with the similar name and animate it to show the dmg".

 

Yes this was what I was planning on doing. Though I didn't think about coding the bone animation that is a great idea. Thanks. As for the collision bodies relating to different bones I was trying to set this up to. I had a freaking disaster of a time trying to set it up. My idea was that I could have a main body that actually handled the physics and a bunch of dummy bodies. around it to detect collision locally and assign a bone movement. However, I had a pretty hard time making them because these small bodies can't collide with the main body otherwise it will be detecting collisions. The main body can't simply be a non-detectable type because other vehicles will have the same body type which is what we are looking for in a collision. On top of that the fact that it has to be a convex hull makes it even more difficult to fit pieces around the car without touching the main body itself...

 

hehehe.... All these ideas I had turning out to be way more difficult than I anticipated... sounds about right for games development.

 

I think I'm going to get some of the other mechanics down before I continue with this damage stuff. I'm pretty sure I can get it right with a lot of optimising and tweaking but I think I'll leave it till later. The frustration is starting to burn me out. hehe

 

Cheers

 

oh btw

[DaDonik]

Nice car Ken!

I also like the idea of the mesh deformation using bones. Never thought of that, but it's somehow obvious.

Thanks for the idea rick

[Road Kill Kenny]

I also have another idea regarding making it more dynamic. From any collission u can get the position, velocity & normal of the collision

 

I thaught what if I let the velocity to set the magnitude of the bone movement and then the normal vector to slightly alter the direction of the bone movement!

 

If this works it will make way for more dynamic deformation as it will be different every time depending on the velocity & normals.. To make it even more realistic I could factOr in the mass of the two bodies into the equation.... Though this may be overkill.... Subject to testing I think