Guild of Writers

Hi everyone,
when playing around with region sensors yesterday, I found that the "exact" option actually gives the same result as "hull".
The red line indicates where the region triggers right now although it is set to "exact".


And here you can download the 3D MAX FILE if you want to have a look at it. Perhaps I've simply set it up incorrectly.
Would be great to get your feedback.

Stefan

Indeed i'ts pretty weird ...
But you can alway's make 3 box regions and asign 3 regions to the responder

Well, I got similar problems with Blender (although there's no "Exact" or "Hull" option AFAIK).
For example, I created two swim regions; when ENTERING the region, everything worked as expected: The Avatar began to swim when entering one of the regions.
BUT, on LEAVING one region, it seems that the hull of a second region caused a signal "left" (or whatever you like to call it), and the avatar just dropped down to the sea floor. Funny, but not as expected.

So, I get the impression that it's just the Plasma engine which causes strange behavior of regions.
The workaround which worked for me: Just making the two swim regions only one region (it can have any shape, if not too complex, no need to make it box-shaped) and control "swimming or not" by the shape of the swim plane itself.

Acording to this article:

Now, there are some limitations ... regions can be ANY shape ... BUT ... (by default) are "convex hull polytopes" in shape in URU.

So it seams, that MAX plugin don't help in bypass this problem.

"Hull" or "Convex Hull" type of bounds is like having a duplicate of your shape that acts like a collision where every faces is and where every face would be. Meaning if you had like a face on the end of your region missing there (like a doorway), you'll still get a collision there. Cyan's docs describe it as "Plastic Wrap" that covers the object.

"Exact" (which is the same as "Triangle Mesh" in Blender), is suppose to be just that: exact, so if you had faces missing, there would be no collision there.


Now as far as the "L" shape you got there, triggering in the area it's not suppose to, even with the bounds set to "Exact" or "Hull", I've run into before myself with Blender.

Normally what I ran into was the region's shape being very irregular or too many faces on it. This caused the bounds to act slightly strange.

However, You don't see too many "L" shaped regions in Uru, unless it's because there is a object in the inside of your "L" there. In which case the problem is moot.

Let's say it's a footstep region though. Let's say your green plane there is grass, but where your "L" shaped region is, is Stone. You'd have a problem there, but as suggested, you can fix it by having 2 regions, both boxed shape for the footstep sounds. It would work just fine.

Where you might have a problem is if the region is a trigger for something much more complex than footsteps or sounds. Using 2 regions then might not work out too well.
This is where careful planning of your Age before you build it comes in handy.