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TheConceptBoy

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Posts posted by TheConceptBoy

  1. Greetings. I'm currently experimenting with 3D model rig of an FPS gun. Is there a way to update only the animations of a rig without having to re-import the entire model? I've got a hand model with about 3 materials on it. Some models will be more complex with more materials. every time I import an updated FBX file, all my materials get cleared. Is it possible to only import animations without breaking the mode?

    There  IS an option to "load animations" but it only accepts an .mdl file, which is a file that Leadwerks generated after an FBX model has been imported.

  2. 5 minutes ago, Josh said:

    If speed is not a big priority to them, there is no way to win them over anyways. If they are doing anything VR it is critical, which is why I am focusing on those people most.

    If that's what it takes to keep the project alive then by any means. Just hoping at some point in the future I can create the same stuff as easily in LW as I did in UE.

    • Like 1
  3. 4 hours ago, Rick said:

    Do you think the indie person messing around (the main client base of LE) really cares this much about speed? I can get all the speed in the world but if I have to jump through all these hoops to get gameplay then it doesn't matter to me. I care more about less effort on my part to get something good up and running than I do speed. It doesn't matter how fast my game runs if I don't really even have a game because it takes so long to do certain things or the things aren't easy to use or flexible enough for my use case.

    This one part I do have to agree with to a degree. To put it into another words, It's great that the engine out performs any other engine else. But if it takes a rocket scientist to operate it (and by it, i mean the shader part), then it's kinda a moot point. With that being said, it is really only relevant for the Indie game dev market which Leadwerks is trying to win over. I'm sure your top tier industrial clients (who are funding Leadwerks none the less) have the technical know how, on how to create nice looking shader materials in code and thus, for them, the presence of that material editor will be a moot point. 

     

    Just for an example, these materials took me perhaps 15 minutes of experimentation to make:

    I wonder how long it would take to create that same stuff in LW using GLSL.. There's all sorts of stuff here, tessellation, additive blending of a couple noise textures, animated parameters etc.

     

  4. 9 hours ago, Daemoc said:

    I don't use Blender, but it looks like the guns object origin point is not zeroed. I would guess you imported the gun, move/rotated it into position, then attached it to the bone. The exporter is probably driving the mesh from the import position. I would check the export settings. Failing that, make sure your gun "object" origin matches the "mesh" origin.

    This is easy to do in the software I use, but I have no experience with Blender.

    That's what it was, yest. I had to clear transforms and them place the center point at the mass center of the model. Took a little but of experimentation but I go it.

  5. 11 minutes ago, Josh said:

    But you said all you need is to rearrange some channels. It sounds like there is a lot of functionality more that would have to be implemented to be useful.

    (I'm just trying to get a good understanding of where you are coming from. Thank you for the input.)

    Well yes, its most likely not as simple as taking a Red Channel, which is a value between 0-255 and plugging it into Metalic, which takes god knows what values, there will be a lot of in-between compatibility that Turbo would have to handle for the user.

    7 minutes ago, Josh said:

    It looks like there are thousands of different options in that thing. Seems like it would take a very long time.

    It is indeed and I most likely would. Hence why I suggested doing a kick-starter for the additional feature, perhaps you'd be able to get some hired help. But I hope that the potential of this tool is visible at least. There's a reason why Both Blender Unreal and possibly unity (Which I do understand are engines developed by large dev teams) offes so much flexibility and have such a colossal abundance of on-line resources  available. These node based tools have a very low barrier for entry. The key selling point is - easily create stunning materials and effects.

     

    It's either that or investing what is possibly an equivalently large amount of time into creating an extensive library of shader materials/effects with Uniform parameters to cover for that flexibility.

  6. 7 minutes ago, Josh said:

    This does not seem very good at all. Why would you create all this complexity?

    Well.. how many people on this forum / Leadwerks users have created something spectacular in terms of a visual presentation and aesthetic using leadwerks? The Bar for entry to getting stunning visual effects in Unreal Engine is pretty stoupendously low because they went through the trouble of creating the Material Editor that  anyone can use. Take a look at youtube. It's Filled to the Brim with material tutorials for all sorts of effects. Same thing with Blender Shader Editor (also Node Based). 

     

    Now take literally any other engine that relies on the users bare extensive knowledge if shader coding for creating these effects. And then search the Internet for any sort of effects made in that engine. It's a matter of accessibility. The Bar for Entry into shader effects / materials is pretty high.

  7. 5 minutes ago, Josh said:

    Okay, I believe now we are talking about a different thing. The output of a system like that is going to be a custom shader. So for that we would want something that reads your settings and generates a new pixel shader. I can see where that would be useful, but I don't think we need to go through that whole process for all our materials.

    As far as I know there are all of only one or two shaders in in UE, but it's their flexibility of the routing that makes them versatile in any sittuatuon. You want Alpha? Plug in an alpha map into the Transparency Input of the node. You want some roughness on the red bits of that firetruck? use an RGB node to separate the 3 color channels and use the red channel in the roughness input. 

    Image result for Unreal Engine materials

  8. 7 minutes ago, Josh said:

    It saves a material file and a few DDS files, wherever you want.

    Well the format in which Turbo will use these textures is really inconsequential. If that format is more reliable and efficient, Then go for it. The main thing (unless this conversation trailed off the original subjects matter of my first post) is how the data is routed. I'd love to be able to, for example use the red channel of the diffuse map to drive some properties. Perhaps the red channel can be used as a scalar value to drive a metallic intensity and now I suddenly have a very shiny metal that only reveals the metallic property on the red parts like this generator here. And I didn't even have to use a dedicated Dedicated Metallic Map. Not every object needs ALL 5 maps. Why not re-use some of the data from other textures to fill in the gaps. This is where the UE Material editor shines. You have the flexibility to use the data from textures as you please. re-use data etc. 

    Office - generator room.png

  9. 9 hours ago, Josh said:

    Ah but, we have an overarching design goal: speed. :)

    Vulkan strongly prefers static structures of settings. Therefore we will do things in a way that optimizes performance.

    I mean that'll put the entry point for Turbo a bit higher than other engines when it comes to being able to create effects and materials. Can't you figure out a tool bar that will prep the materials with that sort of a workflow and convert them to a static resource for Vulcan at runtime?

  10. 34 minutes ago, Josh said:

    So we all drag a bunch of lines between squares that represent color channels because we can’t make up our minds where to store each value? ?

    It's the fact that you have the option to separate them. I've used textures as drivers that way, red was driving one parameter while blue controller another. It's very flexible.

     

    1 hour ago, Josh said:

    What is the Blender layout? Allegrorithmic seems to prefer RGB occlusion/rough/metal although I can’t get a straight answer and no one seems to have any idea at all.

    I'd recomment looking into what is generally used in software like Blender, Maya (Arnold Renderer), Substance Painter and Designer. Etc. Pick the most commonly seen attributed and the rest is a cherry on top.

  11. 5 minutes ago, Josh said:

    Also regarding height, why is it not just common practice to pack height into the alpha channel? I have never seen displacement maps with more than one component.

    It's more the terms of flexibility. Yes you could combine them all into one and it would make it easy but the whole idea is to have the option and flexibility of routing and committing

  12. Well yes. I understand that this sort of a functionality would be best put into the new engine, I'm all for that. 

    Also I'm glad this sort of lines up with your plans and you're at least considering this. :D Looking forward to Turbo. Starting to put savings away now.

     

    If you're not sure what layout to use, then base it on Blender / Unreal. Both of their PBR material layouts are highly versatile and offer great flexibility.

  13. This honestly may or may not appeal to the more seasoned Leadwerks users who've been around the block but I find the unreal material editor in UE or Shader Editor in Blender to be the only existing things in this universe where I can not only forgive the use of Node based programming but that I even welcome it. The ease and speed of material creation in either cases simply trumps even veteran shader programmers. The sort of stuff I was able to create in UE with materials was simply stunning.

    This would open LW5 / Turbo users to a whole new world of accessible Visual Effects and experimentation.

    • Like 1
  14. AND YES IT IS. IT'S IN THE DAMN ENGINE FILES, But it's NOT in the docs. 

            virtual void SetCharacterControllerAngle(const float angle);//lua
            virtual float GetCharacterControllerAngle();//lua

     

    @Josh How come so much useful stuff is undocumented? Do you need help getting documentation for some functions in the docs. A well designed Documentation that's easy to traverse and search is the hallmark of an engine for new arrivals. Game Maker Studio is perhaps an example of, what I'd say the worlds best documentation for their engine. 80% of what I've learned, I've discovered in their help by typing in a keyword like "draw" and I'd get ALL draw related functions.

     

    Seriously, if you need help documenting some stuff, perhaps we can contribute on our spare time?

    • Like 3
  15. I should mention that I'm not using the Editor to create the character controllers. I'm using C++ to loop through all the enemy models I placed in the level and create the Actors that way. 

     

    EDIT:

    well actually this also works even when I'm attaching the character controller in c++. Thanks. 

    I do wonder if there is a C++ function for this, seeing how its in the editor and the editor has got to call some sort of a function.

  16. Good day, everyone. The title is purposefully simplistic since when I goggled for this issue, few relevant posts popped up.

    Currently I have a model of an enemy and it gets a PhysicsMode(Entity::CharacterPhysics) assigned to it. When the model moves forward using the input() commands, the character model is facing sideways. 

     

    Now I can fix that in two ways: 

    1) I can Create a Dummy Empty and set that to a character controller, then parent the model to the dummy and rotate it in local space.

    2) Or I can rotate the model in the modeling software to face the right way.

     

    My question is, is there a third option? Something in the properties or perhaps orientation function for making the model face the same forward direction as the forward movement of the character controller? I've scoped the docs for any appropriate functions but alas the top two solutions are the only ones I've found. Decided to ask just in case.

  17. 4 minutes ago, Josh said:

    I've done one test against Unity and performance was *significantly* faster in our new engine. Of course I want to wait until we are closer to release before I make these publicly available.

    Can you tell us what did the test actually competed against? What sort of performance is it that Turbo performed better at?

  18. Good day, everyone. 

    I've gotten a hang of setting up a fresh blank C++ project without much issues. But it is doe by completely wiping the all the code from the Main.cpp, importing the Leadwerks.h library and working my way up from there. When a project is created like this, "from a blank page", this destroys all the Lua connections to the engine and you are no longer able to use Lua in the engine, right? I think Lua has it's place, it's like blueprints in Unreal and I wanted to see how do you go about proceeding with the game development from that blank project? It seems as if this block here is where the app window should be created: 
            

    	App* app = new App;
    	if (app->Start())
    	{
    
    		Map::Load("Maps/city01.map");
    		while (app->Loop()) {
    		
    		
    

    and in the while loop, is where you game logic would go. But that seems to not be the case. The app starts, blanks the screen and closes immediately. I would like to see if I can get a C++ project running without destroying the initial Lua interpreter setup. Where am I to look for the clues?

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