Pixel Perfect

Good point Laurens, that appears to be one of the drawbacks to using the chatroom. If people simply use it to get solutions to their problems no-one else gets to benefit from those solutions apart from those in the room at the time.

That sounds very strange. I have no experience of Vista (I never upgraded having seen so many issues with it initially). This does sound very much like a graphics issue though. Have you tried changing your graphics driver?

emailed you the two files, lets hope these work for you!

My findings are, from my testing tonight, that using the torusforphygen.obj file with the 2.26 tools obj2gmf.exe and obj2phy.exe does produce a working dynamic physics mesh exactly like the one posted by MG (torus with green physics mesh) when placed in the 2.26 Sandbox. However, attempting to use those files in the 2.3 Editor does result in the phy file being overwritten by a collision tree version generated by the Editor and dynamic physics does not work. However, creating the two files using the 2.3 tools works too, creating an identical dynamic mesh that simply surrounds the torus shape. So using the tools from either version appears to work for the respective versions. I don't understand why its not working for Volker.

Who knows! Things appear, things disappear with often no explanation

I guess the answer to that is 'you pays your money you takes your choice'. If Josh were to have to provide the level of support I guess you are looking for to every one of his customers he would need to employ at least a couple of developers in order to provide that level of support. That now puts the cost of the product up substantially. Josh does not refuse to support the product, it is in fact very well supported given the fact that he is a 'one man show' and has to address bugs and issues reported in the product, provide baseline documentation and tutorials and continue core development of the product. If he were to give the product away will you pay his wages (support his development and living costs) for the foreseeable future. How does that work? Like most things in life, the service you get is commensurate with the amount you pay. No one is saying there is not room for improvement but your expectations need to be realistic.

Again, this is a forum of Leadwerks users and people will respond if they can and when they can, but there is never a guaranteed response. I think given the cost of the engine you are probably expecting too much in terms of the level of support. If I was licencing the CryTek engine @ 50000 euros or what ever then I'd expect someone to be at the end of a phone to answer my every question as I get up to speed. For a $200 engine you are pretty much on your own apart from minimal documentation and community support. People will help but sometimes we might need a bit of a nudge to get us to respond as we all have busy lives and Leadwerks development projects too! The search facility is your greatest friend as most questions will have been asked before. I do know it can be frustrating at times and the documentation could be better but it's human nature, as you yourself pointed out, to contribute to the documentation once our projects are complete. Most of us havn't got to that point yet! Good luck and by all means keep asking questions if you cannot find the answers.

I'll do some more testing myself tonight when I get back from work as I'm somewhat surprised the 2.3 Editor will entertain phy files produced in 2.26 but find it hard to argue with the pic you posted MG. That clearly shows an active dynamic physics mesh. I have every version of LE from its initial release archived away so accessing 2.26 shouldn't be an issue. It's interesting that using the 2.3 tools you get the same as us, if it wasn't for that pic I'd have said the Editor is seamlessly handling the rejection of the old phy file format and autocreating a collision tree mesh, but then the object wouldn't be dynamic. I'll post again with the results following my tests.

Very interesting ... so is this using the latest version of the newton dll as I thought the phy files had changed since 2.26 and would no longer work in 2.3?

Ah ha, thanks Lumooja. Thats starting to make sence now!

This is really strange! So your 2.26 generated object is definitely dynamic in the Editor (Sandbox)? I'll have to try it in 2.26 aswell, because thats the physics shape I would want generated and it may sort out some of the problems I've had generating physics meshes easily for my destructible objects instead of having to formulate collision primatives to do the job.

I have just about managed to rig the model using another skeleton and animations. There is a bit of fine tuning required on some of the vertex weightings but its practically there. Think I'll be writing to DexSoft tomorrow and asking for an explanation!

I couldn't help but feel MG when looking at your pic that it looked more like a collision tree physics mesh than a convex hull, so I tried it myself using Volkers obj model. Using the latest 2.3 toolset I converted the obj file to gmf and placed it in the Editor with no phy file. The autogenerated collision tree looked identical to the pic you posted. I then generated a new phy file using the obj file and obj2phy.exe and replaced the original auto generated one. I now get exactly the same collision mesh as Volker. Pic below (and the end of my picture quota by the looks of it ):

Yeah, I can merge the character animations in Fragmotion without any issue as they seem to have used the same skeleton for the human animation, the problem comes with the additional bones they have added for the weapon animation with seem to be placed differently in the skeleton heirachy in some of the animated models. They are generally named the same but sometimes one is the child of another, whilst on others not! As a result the weapon animation gets completely screwed if you combine the animations! I've posted a few screenshots to demonstrate this, if you look at the bone assignments on the right hand side you can see the different placements of the weapon bones from one model file to the other:

No worries, I'm in the process of re-rigging it as I speak but will be writing to Dexsoft to ask why they have done this. They have provided the original max files (one for each animation) and in about 7 different other formats. I'm not looking for anyone to sort this out, I really think Dexsoft should do that themselves, I just wondered if any one knew of a valid reason for supplying models in this way, they have never done this previously. It just seems bizarre to me!

Will try using obj2phy.exe in future. Thanks MG.

I recently purchased some animated human models from Dexsoft, all of which seem fine apart from their latest SWAT model. They appear to have produced an individual animated model for each seperate animation which I didn't really want, but when trying to merge animations into one I have discovered that the naming and placement of the bones for controlling the weapon are not the same between models making the merging impossible without messing up the weapon animations. I'm not very 'au fait' with the modelling and animation side, and would avoid it like the plague to be honest if I had a modeller working with me, but out of interest from those of you out there who are ... is there anything to be gained by supplying individual action models like this?

Characters/Creatures would be great.

I can't say I've experienced that before! I normally use png format files and so long as they are in the Materials folder under your 3DWS installation all is well. I can't see why bmp and jpg wouldn't work though but I'd avoid using compressed jpg textures myself as you lose overall quality of the image. Better to use formats that support an alpha channel too should to want to start adding transparency effects. So this is with the rendering mode set to 'Textured' and not 'Textured + Lighting'? Does the texture display correctly in the Texture selection box?

Leadwerks is a great engine and I would whole heartedly recommend it ... for $200 dollars you are simply not going to better it! To compare it directly to CryENGINE 3 is frankly insane and you should look at UDK before making a decision as, like the CryEngine, it has some wonderful tools the like of which you are never likely to see released for Leadwerks but a correspondingly high learning curve should you decide to go down that route. With Unity you'd need the professional package to approach the graphical quality of Leadwerks Engine and that's around $1500 if my memory serves me correctly. The graphical quality of Leadwerks is on a par or better than anything out there, the language support is good, the API is very good, the toolset is minimal but for a small Indie engine fairly representative. The documentation is minimal but sufficient given the great and very helpful community.

When you first create the terrain (with the Terrain Editing window open) it creates a default base layer for you and this normally is automatically assigned the currently selected texture in the texture dropdown in the main 3DWS window. If you change the texture whilst the Terrain Editing window is still open the texture on the terrain should change too. The base texture will cover the entire terrain. To add additional texture layers and paint these on you need to add additional layers in the Terrain Editor by clicking on the Layer Tab and clicking on the New button. Choose the texture you want for the layer from the Texture Dropdown and click apply. Now select Paint from the Tools section of the Terrain Editor and click on the terrain to paint the texture layer onto it. CTRL click will take it off again. Using this method you can build up layers of blended textures on your terrains. Hope this helps.

I get the same ... don't worry about it!

I've been blitting animated image sequences to planes for a while but this will make life much easier. Thanks for sharing the code.

I've had problems in the past generating phy files from phygen as it always seems to take the models origin into account so anything that is offset from the origin (for example your torus if it has its origin in the center) will generate a convexhull phy structure that covers the hollow space too. In fact even a simple square plane offset from its origin will generate a pyramid shaped convexhull with the origin as its apex. I've found phygen extremly limited in this respect.

Maybe because its a nightmare to get the models scaled correctly to use it ... it has no scaling facility in the application itself. Also, the verticies can only be tied to a single bone where as vertex weightings to four or more is common these days giving much more control over the mesh deformation. Having said that, I actually think the animations are very good!