[NightFright]

Well, I don't know for you, but with the settings from build #154 and before, the surface looked so shiny, I thought I would slip on it... xD It was definitely not what it should be. ^^

[Roma Loom]

That's very strange, because specpower 0 specfactor 0 should should give complete absense of specular effect. This is what it looks like for me with zeros:

[NightFright]

Weird. In my E1L2 and in some conversions, this is so shiny that it actually hurts the eyes. I am using latest EDuke32 snapshots and all...

[Night Wolf]

Holy crap that devastator looks amazing.

Edit:

Out of curiosity is it at all possible to animate the devastator like this?

[Tea Monster]

Holy crap Roma, that looks sweet!

The HUD pistol animations are nearly done. I'll download the latest snapshot and get some testing going.

[Roma Loom]

ozz, on Aug 22 2010, 10:17 AM, said:

Holy crap that devastator looks amazing.

Edit:

Out of curiosity is it at all possible to animate the devastator like this?

Yes. I was just lazy to add it. Also it needs specmap fixed in some places.

[NightFright]

Oops, I didn't realize that screenie actually showed a new weapon model as well! xD

[Tea Monster]

Having some strange behaviour with spec and normal maps.

[Roma Loom]

Try to run it through md3compiler's normal rebiuld and see what happens. There are huge problems aswell on any model exported from 3ds max at my side ans Spiker has reported those problems too. Looks like md3 exporters screw the face normals. And actually md3compiler is not an option too. But at least it fixes most of the model's surface.

[NightFright]

I don't know if n/s maps now work for HUD weapons, but you can always provide usual (Polymost) skin so it can be tested quickly. Also, we would need those skins for Polymost compatibility later, anyway. But nice work on the pistol, as far as I can see. Looks much closer to the original sprite now. ^^

[Master Fibbles]

I think the newest version of eduke32 does support HUD lighting. This was posted in the eduke32 thread.

[Tea Monster]

They do work. (Thanks Roma!).

[Roma Loom]

These messed-up face normals started to piss me off long ago. I've tried everything, like exporting to ASE and then feeding it to md3compiler and still no luck. The so called "smooth groups" are lost after the export. I'm still wining about it in #Eduke32 channel and convincing Plagman to write an ASE2MD3 converter or something. Hope the users of Blender are able to export meshes into ASe format.

[Tea Monster]

Roma Loom, on Aug 23 2010, 09:32 AM, said:

These messed-up face normals started to piss me off long ago. I've tried everything, like exporting to ASE and then feeding it to md3compiler and still no luck. The so called "smooth groups" are lost after the export. I'm still wining about it in #Eduke32 channel and convincing Plagman to write an ASE2MD3 converter or something. Hope the users of Blender are able to export meshes into ASe format.

We have a pretty good ASE converter for Blender.

Any hope of getting Plagman to support ASE directly within Polymer?

[Plagman]

If you don't get proper normals by converting your ASE to MD3 using the compiler, I don't understand why a dedicated compiler would improve the situation. Are you regenerating normals from the compiler after doing that? Of course that would reset everything, since smoothing groups are only in the modelling program and are lost whenever you export to anything, after that it's just one normal per face (or per vertice).

[Tea Monster]

the compiler has a 'fix normals' button that seems to fix a lot of problems. I don't know how Polymer works in detail, but I'm supposing that if the normal were really 'flipped' then we'd see a hole in the model. It might have something to do with the angle of the normal. Unfortunately, I'm not that up on the math of what is going on under the hood.

I know when I export an obj from Blender that it has 'correct' normals and can be displayed in X-normal or 8Monkeys engine and look fine. When I export an MD3 from Blender, it looks like this in the npherno compiler


After you hit repair normals, it looks like this:

[Plagman]

Sounds like the MD3 exporter you're using just doesn't bother exporting any normals. It wouldn't cause any geometry flipping (the triangle winding order does that), just bad lighting and parallaxing. Regenerating the normals in the MD3 compiler should work fine; you won't get any advanced smoothing group stuff going on, though. It has an option to avoid smoothing across UV seams but that's about it.

And for the problem Roma Loom is having, apparently his ASE exporter properly exports normals but the MD3 compiler doesn't read them when importing ASEs, so it doesn't help.

[Tea Monster]

Plagman, on Aug 23 2010, 01:39 PM, said:

Sounds like the MD3 exporter you're using just doesn't bother exporting any normals. It wouldn't cause any geometry flipping (the triangle winding order does that), just bad lighting and parallaxing. Regenerating the normals in the MD3 compiler should work fine; you won't get any advanced smoothing group stuff going on, though. It has an option to avoid smoothing across UV seams but that's about it.

And for the problem Roma Loom is having, apparently his ASE exporter properly exports normals but the MD3 compiler doesn't read them when importing ASEs, so it doesn't help.

I'll have to try it with yours. The handy thing is that the 'new' one imports MD3's as well, which makes placement of things much easier.

Any chance of going over to ASE or some other modern format?

EDIT: Pistol is working now. I have to mess with the defs, but its getting there. I still don't like the way it treats specular.

[Night Wolf]

That's looking great!

[Stabs]

too cool for school, cant wait for these new HRP weapons

have you considered making idle animations similar to how gordon would play with his guns in half-life?

[OpenMaw]

DanM, on Aug 25 2010, 12:28 AM, said:

too cool for school, cant wait for these new HRP weapons

have you considered making idle animations similar to how gordon would play with his guns in half-life?

Not really that simple. Half Life would randomly select the animation to play. In Duke, the animation on the 3D models is all run together.

[Tea Monster]

I have thought of it, but it isn't really possible as far as I know unless you mess with either the source or the cons.

[Spiker]

Actually the idle animation is very easy to do and looks much better and smooth than multi-frame based animation. I even had this animation for my shotgun and although it looked good I did not include it because it would be the only weapon that uses it and md3 file would be much larger.

[NightFright]

I think the pistol skin could be a bit brighter in color. Other than that, it looks great!

[Plagman]

Tea Monster, on Aug 23 2010, 01:52 PM, said:

I still don't like the way it treats specular.

Any specifics? Did you tune the specular material DEFs using the corresponding override cvars? Is there a specular map?

[Jokke_r]

Think the hand to gun size ratio is off, although it might be due to the FOV i don't know...

[Night Wolf]

Jokke_r, on Aug 26 2010, 01:41 AM, said:

Think the hand to gun size ratio is off, although it might be due to the FOV i don't know...

Well Duke is a Unit.

[Stabs]

nothing major in terms of idle animations like duke polishing his gun but just some slight movements so the gun isnt so rigid would probably be more feasible and look nice

[Roma Loom]

Plagman, on Aug 25 2010, 06:03 PM, said:

Any specifics? Did you tune the specular material DEFs using the corresponding override cvars? Is there a specular map?

I have a feeling it's just about face normals that have been "autorebuilt" in md3compiler. Once any "hard" edge is "smoothed" in terms of vertex normals that share this edge the spec begins to act weirdly in such spots.

[Tea Monster]

It has this strange plasticky feel that seems to ignore the spec map (yes, there is one). I haven't really had a lot of time to play with it. I'll put a different spec map on it and see if there is any change in the way it looks. The normal map seems to be working OK. I can't see the writing detail on the side of the pistol, but the inner ridge on the back of the slide is visible.

On a side note, can we please put the texture quality slider on 'full' as a default for eDuke32? It really messes up the look of the PHRP and I imagine most people aren't going to find it until they've played for quite a while. It's probably going to screw up normal maps as well.