Sword of Moonlight > Devs

EXIT: Making ''modeling'' software

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Holey Moley:
Here is the result of two days work on converting control-points in the MDL files to actual points in the MM3D file.

It works for animation too. I am focusing on soft-body animations right now. I assume at some point I will add code for the rigid-body animation.

CPs don't really have a coordinate-system like these points do, but in the MDL files I've looked at the first vertex in the triangles they use to represent points makes for a nice right angle basis to match with the direction the triangle is facing. The other points don't. Hopefully this is something its artists were aware of.

(In the MDL conversion code I rotated this vertex to the middle position so when the triangle is flipped over according to conventions it should have a better chance of survival.)

To tell points from regular "nodes" I chose for the CP names to be wrapped in parentheses so they look like a round point, and chose to call the cyan point C0 (which you can read as center if you want) and the red points R0 and so on. Red points are paired with even and odd numbers. They are so-called particle-emitters. I don't know where the particle originates of the top off my head but in theory since these new points know about direction they shouldn't require two CPs for this, so the CP files can probably generate the second CP automatically. (I would like to end use of CP files.)

The other CPs (which are not used and I think are even displayed erroneously) are named like "(1,2,3)" according to the 8-bit "RGB" color value. MM3D doesn't have a vertex-coloring facility that could be used to make the old-style CP without assigning unique material-properties to every CP.

You might want to make future C0 control-points line up with the character model instead of point upright like this one's. The particle-emitter CPs tend to be this way already, but the C0 ones tend to sit on the ground.

Holey Moley:
Random Post

I'm just filing this post here since it doesn't really belong anywhere. I want to keep this place feeling alive.

I shared the following image in my KF2 dev log topic/thread 5 day ago.



Right now because I accidentally misspelled the name of a CP file I found the subroutine that queries the control points. And I found it in ObjEdit first because it was crashing when I tried to edit my profile, but it turns out there is an identical subroutine in the player, which means there is likely identical code in all of the tools for working with the 3D models.

I think this is as good a place as any to start finding my way around. I've also identified a glitch in how soft MDL animations are displayed for "objects" that is my first point of order to fix. I don't know if it applies to NPCs or not. Because the animations seem to begin at T=1 instead of 0 the soft animated object is shown as if the animation starts at T=0 so that for example the secret cubbyholes in KF2 appear to be recessed into the wall by one frame of animation.

It looks like maybe I will be able to just use MDL files for my KF2 project. If that's so then I probably will for expediency sake, at least throughout 2020.

Holey Moley:
Update

For the record I've updated this continuously (off and on) for the past 5 months as I work on my KFII project. At this point I think it's pretty reliable and I've had time to use each feature to find out if it actually works or not. Very often things don't work, but through enough patching it's stabilized.

https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/releases/tag/win32-demo2b

There's also now still early, but complete tools for converting the MM3D files to and from SOM's model file format and making CP files from the MDL files. I haven't published those programs but I can attach copies by request.

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