XFogset and 3DSMax

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Re: XFogset and 3DSMax

Postby Sirius » Mon Oct 07, 2013 10:20 am

You mean, a bit like in Ahnonay's 2nd sphere (the path you use to get to the tower) ?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, you want to fill an invisible region with mist (a bit like capturing a fire's smoke into a glass container).
This is not what this fog is about... Think of it as depth behind your screen. The only parameter influencing how much fog you can see at pixel X is how far from the camera the object drawed at pixel X is. The only thing the region does is trigger a change in the thickness of this fog for the whole screen.

(some game engines can create real "fog regions", but Plasma can't :( )

If you want to make an Ahnonay-like fog, you must fake it. You must put a planar mesh with a cloud alpha texture applied to it (a bit like you would create a water mesh).
Then, you must manually make the vertices under the fog whiter (this can be done with a texture or with vertex painting).
But it won't look as good, since the white-ness of an object won't be calculated depending of the distance to the camera...

Another solution would be to fake the fog (so that it looks like in Ahnonay's sphere seen from above), then use another Python script that would gradually increase the fog density as the avatar walks down into it. The mist would be applied to the whole screen, but it would look good enough.

Hope that clarifies things a bit...
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Re: XFogset and 3DSMax

Postby rocketdog » Mon Oct 07, 2013 12:23 pm

this is a link to the info I have been looking at. Is this tutorial wrong also?

http://wiki.openuru.org/index.php?title ... n_Your_Age

He says "What I'm going to show you is how to set it for a certain area of an Age. If you want to use this to simply set the fog for you ENTIRE Age, then all you have to do is make a Region Box that covers your entire Age" is he wrong in this?
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Re: XFogset and 3DSMax

Postby Sirius » Mon Oct 07, 2013 1:52 pm

The tutorial is correct, but it doesn't explain how the game engine calculates the fog...

For the game engine, the only thing that visually exist in the 3D world are meshes. It doesn't know anything about fog.
When it renders the scene, it does the same thing a camera does: register colors on the pixels of an image, before displaying it on your screen.

Calculating the fog, for him, is like editing these pixels after they were registered. Think of it as putting sun glasses in front of your camera. These sun glasses will modify the color of ALL seen objects... but will affect more objects that are far away.

When you walk into the region, it "asks" the engine to change glasses. The region itself isn't visible and doesn't contain anything visible, it's just something that will detect the avatar's presence. That's what would happen in this case:
Andy wrote:Something to keep in mind: if you are using this to set the fog in just a certain area of your Age, you will need to set the region up so that the player triggers it BEFORE they see it. Else the fog will suddenly pop into existance


In Minkata's case, the code triggered by the region is a bit more complex: when you're in the region, every 2 seconds, it asks the game to change these sun glasses, and make them more opaque as the avatar walks away from the cage.

It's all a bit technical, and not easy to understand... ;)
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Re: XFogset and 3DSMax

Postby Karkadann » Mon Oct 07, 2013 1:53 pm

You may wanna try messing with the FogDisTweener, settings fog mode, computer dimensions, and fog style, with point A set at 0 or no fog
In theory you should be able to do that with fogdisttweener, or you can set up several regions with fogSet each one with a different fog density like I did in the Walking Maze
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Re: XFogset and 3DSMax

Postby rocketdog » Mon Oct 07, 2013 3:10 pm

Sirius,

Thanks, I do understand what your saying, it totally makes sense. So one last question for you then, If I were to walk into a RegionSensor area of an age and turned on the fog would all the other players in other parts of that age see the fog tuned on as well? Or can this be blocked between players?

karkadann,

Thanks for the suggestion I'll see if I can get it to work.

Again, thanks to all who have helped me with this problem, it is greatly appreciated.

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Re: XFogset and 3DSMax

Postby Sirius » Tue Oct 08, 2013 9:41 am

The fog settings should always affect the local avatar only :)


If you want the mist to get more dense as you walk down, then the settings for the xFogDistTweener should look something like this:

Fog Mode: any of these three (the difference is hardly noticeable)
Compute Dimensions: Z axis
Fog Style: any of these two (I'm not really sure there is a difference)
Refresh Rate: how much time in seconds you want between two updates of the fog. I'd recommend low values such as 0.1 (10 refresh per second)
Point A object: this should be an object in your scene, which must be just above where the mist starts to get denser.
Point A color, density: mist attributes when at the same height as point A. On complete chronicles, use the Offline KI /fcol and /fdens to get an idea of what it will look like.
Point B object: another object of the scene, which should be at the lowest point of your fog region.
Point B color, density: same as point A
Only operate in region: true.


The fog trigger region should encompass the area in which you have fog, but the upper face mustn't be higher than Point A (otherwise the mist will also get denser with height).

Happy modeling ! ;)
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Re: XFogset and 3DSMax

Postby Karkadann » Tue Oct 08, 2013 11:54 am

also a lot of these tutorials are not age specific, they are basic "how to" I find its best to use them as guide lines, for instance

when I first started with Max/Plasma the start point dummies z axis was at horizontal and I kept falling sideways until I found out it had to be vertical, I often wondered If I could make the av walk on the wall instead of falling sideways to oblivion.
then I read one of Andy's tutorials on subworlds and I took bits and pieces from tutorials and adapted it to a test age and found myself walking on the walls, and ceiling, Now there is nothing that I know of in that tutorial about getting the AV to walk on the wall but the tutorial had enough info for me to take what I stumbled on when I first started and make a walkable wall
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