Llantern

[N. Sigismund]

I just figured out how to increase the quality of lightmaps, and the results are EXCEEDINGLY NICE:



(Turns out if you tell 3DS Max to render shadows via "Shadow Map", then increase the resolution of said shadow map, it passes over to export for amazing visuals!)

I also found some really nice deciduous tree models, which you can see on the screenshot. They're between 500 and 1500 tris EACH, though. I'm not running on the newest machine, but I'm reasonably sure that I'll end up optimising the hell out of this thing so that people can enjoy it.

At the moment, the push is to get every model into the game and "textured", or more accurately, bodged into some kind of UVW map! Oh, and to find a way of modelling those cliffs convincingly but without pushing too many polys. I might ask over at Polycount (of the TF2 contests) for advice on that.

[Chacal]

Now that's nice!
Your deciduous trees on top of the cliffs could be 2D billboards, no one would notice the difference. See Eder Delin.
Your cliffs could be very low poly, it's amazing what texturing can do. See Noloben, Er'cana and the City.

[N. Sigismund]

Thanks Chacal!

The trick IS the texturing on the cliffs. I've used many, many textures for those cliffs over the summer as I've learned 3DS Max and got this far, and not one is just right. I suspect I'll have to use a high resolution to make it believable, as tiling becomes really obvious on such large and screen dominating models as cliffs.

I'm testing out different skydomes today. Lots of fun, and it means I can put off working on most of the waveset stuff in the hope that we get a SceneViewer soon!

[N. Sigismund]

Yellow is indeed the best colour.



Two things left to do with that water:
1) Get a good reflection going. It reflects weirdly at the moment (that rock it's reflecting on the left is a good example)
2) Figure out how shores work. There's no tutorial for shorelines in 3DS Max at the moment.

[N. Sigismund]

Today's screenshot!



Lots of D'ni stuff is going to litter the age, some of it in better condition than others. (Textures are not fixed and they're sort of stolen from Uru so I've got an incentive to change them!)

Note the palm tree's trunk on the right has a normal map. ForceRTLight component, Plasma Multipass, second pass Plasma Bumpmap.Nice effect, as it seems to be very inexpensive and really adds to the model up close I'll use it quite a bit.

[N. Sigismund]

I've been thinking about the SceneViewer option in the Plasma drop down menu in 3DS Max today.

As the plugin is for the latest version of MOUL, I've been messing around with placing my client path into a copied version of my MOULa install. As expected, this allows me to export using all the .age files present in MOULa. The thing I do not understand, however, is why exactly the Sceneviewer appears to be converting the age, then as soon as it begins to "Make Physicals" it throws up an unknown plConvert error. Why? (I also early on in my tests got an error informing me that the name of my age wasn't valid and the plugin would assign a temporary number... It doesn't pop up now, though)

To be honest, I was hoping that there was some way to make the Plugin use the MOULa files as some kind of sceneviewer. This probably was always doomed to failure. I'm going to email Chogon to see if I can get an answer to what exactly is needed to get the Sceneviewer option to work. I'll not expect an answer soon, though - I can accept that everyone at Cyan has more important things to do than answer possibly hard-to-answer questions for a nobody like myself.

The Sceneviewer option is interesting, though. From the options, it looks like it has an auto-refresh function, so you'd have it running in the background and as you moved objects around in the age, you could alt-tab into it to test out the new location. The practical application would obviously be enourmous. I just wish I could figure out a way to make it work.

EDIT: Derp. I really should have done a bit of research. Ah well. Obviously, once you do a search for "Sceneviewer" on the MOUL forum you can easily spot that Chogon explained that Sceneviewer has never existed - "a bad dream."

I feel all kinds of stupid now. >_>; Overenthusiasm for the loss.

[Paradox]

"I also got to add the coolest feature I implemented in my time at HeadSpin/Cyan, a Max plug-in that opened a Plasma window to display the current scene in the engine, then updated the Plasma scene dynamically as objects changed in Max." -- http://www.gamearchitect.net/Articles/MyHistory.html

[Brice] at times we had versions of plasma that ran directly in max
[Brice] but it was pretty unstable
-- http://www.guildofwriters.com/Brice2.html

Also, SceneViewer requires an internal debug build of Plasma, which we don't have

[N. Sigismund]

Okay, Paradox asked me for a copy of what I had so far to test something, and so I decided to allow anybody who's interested to have a look at the EPIC FAIL that I have currently managed to create:

http://rapidshare.com/files/419847187/L ... V.001a.rar

The models are a bit naff.
The textures are bad.
The waveset and shore... I don't want to talk about the waveset and shore.

But I pledged openness to be my watchword in this project, so the above link is for people who want to help me out with advice. How would YOU do the texturing I'm doing? What would you add next? WHY IS THIS WAVESET AND SHORELINE STUFF SO HARD?!

Anyway, that's my update for the weekend. More work soon, although university is looming quite large now - I'll need to be getting back to academia soon.

[Whilyam]

The Age is incomplete, I can't load it. There's no .sum or .fni file so Uru gives and error.

[N. Sigismund]

Derp.

It's not been converted to POTS format. Paradox was testing something which needed a MOULa age. You'll need to convert it to POTS format - you can do that using Drizzle.

It's only some really basic stuff which for the most part isn't complete or remotely polished. It's a lot of tech testing (blending, normal maps, wavesets) with no real content. The door doesn't even work - you just walk clean through it as if it wasn't there! I just wanted to provide a link for everyone it as I was uploading it anyway.

I'm happy with some of the basic stuff. For example, the arch - the model isn't complete (it's not detailed) but it's roughly what I want it to look like, with the planks of wood (nailed invisibly atm) providing a very nice lightmap for the cave beyond. The palm and deciduous trees are also very good (they're not mine, though) and the cliffs are roughly what I'm looking for. However, there are major glitches, such as the huge seam on the lightmap for the cliffs (something I'm unsure how to fix).

Note: As far as I'm aware, model wise everything in the age is either mine or royalty free. Textures? Not sure. However, everything I'm doing is in the public domain for others to use. There will be a .max file at some point.