maybe the size of your mesh then, try tweaking that value on the tab where you load the mesh, that could work too, twosided faces tend to fuckup shadows aswell
hehe yeah kinda did play with most things including that one, did get different results, but just different faults im afraid,, ill try it some more tomorrow when im not so tired thanks for the help
man this is really awesome guys - i'd like to thank perna, EQ, mark and johny and any other 8 monkey lab primates for releasing this to the community! great work
- i had a question
would it be ok to point to this from to other forums (like GA and others or would you like to keep it just within the polycount community?) if brome hasn't already leaked it's secrets :P
.. I think my inner child just had a "NINTENDO SIXTY FOOOUUURRR" moment.
I love it when stuff like this is free to use. Thanks guys, you deserve success.
The only issue that's come up so far for me is that I can't set the background color of the material editor for my screenshots. I would prefer a mid-gray instead of black for showing off artwork on a more neutral stage.
Oh, and as was mentioned the top right 'X' not closing the window is strange.
I also can't find a good way to 'reset' or 'clear all' without closing everything down and restarting? It's quick enough to do I spose, but is there another way?
Also, I turned down the difficulty in the cfg file but making art didn't get any easer . Bug?
I also have an issue creating materials: clicking new mat and giving a name creates a .mat file fine, but it doesn't appear in the material list, and clicking add mat and selecting it doesn't do anything. However, if I create a second new material, then try to add the first one it works, but the second one can't be added until a third one is created.
I'm running into issues now with smoothing looking very messed up using anything other than 'simple' materials (phongsimple or skinsimple). I can post a screenshot if needed. I'm going to try pulling my obj into maya and re-exporting it with the maya exporter.
[edit] I have the sinking feeling that the maya plugin isn't going to work on my 64-bit maya. Here's a screen of what happens when I switch that middle building's material from phongsimple to phong:
EQ: Some weird stuff in the samples pack you released, for example why is the normalmap 4096x4096? It was clearly baked at 2048x2048 and up-scaled...
Also, why do the normals for the little painted thingy look like this:
Those normals don't make any sense, surely they should be a perfect match with the underlying shape and just have bumped-out edges, currently it seems like that patch of normals is pointing closer to straight out horizontally instead of curving around?
The diffuse and spec are really nice though, and in general it's a great looking gun. Dunno why you have that giant 50mb 4096x4096 TGA bloating the download size though, it looks identical at 2048x2048, and is only 16mb at that size.
Edit: After playing around with the editor and viewers a bit more, it's certainly capable of producing very nice previews.
The light / sky examples are really nicely set up, they make stuff look nice. Although that sunny one blooms like crazy, can barely see anything when that's used, it's just all yellow/white glow!
However, there are a lot of things about the UI that really aren't very good. Sliders everywhere with numbers next to them, and no way to manually type in a number? I played around with the Mesh Scale slider and couldn't get it back to 1.0 ... it kept sticking at 1.01...
I got a crash after going to the Material viewer, then clicking Back To Tools Menu, then clicked on the Sky editor. Didn't happen 2nd time round though.
Are the textures compressed at all here? It doesn't look like it... so while it's nice for showing off high-detail stuff, it's not actually an accurate preview for how it's going to end up when seen in-game? Or are you not compressing any textures in this engine (i can't believe that!)?
I'm getting really nasty banding artifacts on all sorts of surfaces, too. It shows up very clearly on lighter surfaces, noisy/darker diffuse textures seem to hide it a bit better. Is that just my graphics card or something? I can get a screengrab if you don't know what I'm talking about.
Also, having a console running in a separate window in the background is so 1990s!
Then again, so is not being able to dynamically re-size the window, and editing .cfg files to do this is so ghetto... also clicking the X in the top right to close it doesn't work
Oh shit, 4096? Man that is pretty stupid, i think i was doing some experiments, converting OS to TS, and just did a test to see if a larger image produced less artifacts. I'll fix the file and re-upload. As far as the sticker thing, i remember bumping it out looked really cheesy, like way too thick. So i played around with some various stuff and that was what i remember looked best at the time. Sometimes things don't have to make perfect sense to look good. Really i think i just wanted to change the light direction, to give it a slightly different material read. Not having gloss maps makes stuff like that a pain.
There is an option to compress textures(may be broken) we turned it off by default because it makes it a pain to update textures(need to load and compress for every reload). I think you can turn it on by default in one of the .cfg files.
Banding artifacts are a known issue, likely not only on your end/card. I think there is actually two issues, one that is related to shadowing, and another that is related to cube-map filtering, that sort of stuff is a bit harder to notice in game tho. Try opening up the console "~" and doing "set render.shadows.res 4096" and see if the artifacting gets better, also play with the shadow distance(set it to the lowest value before it goes away).
The rest of the stuff i agree with, and most of it really drove me nuts during production, but small team etc, what can you do? The numeric input is the worst, you can nudge the sliders tho(arrow keys), so give that a try. And yeah, some of the sky's are a bit overexposed, there are a few settings to tweak with the bloom in the post editor if you like.
THERE ARE SOME NASTY SHADOW ARTIFACTS WITH THE SKIN MATERIAL, sad but true, not really anything that can be done about it.
Some other things that will give strange results:
Unwelded UV's (modo's OBJ exporter loves to randomly do this).
Objects that are way huge
Turning off culling. If you need to turn off culling, manually duplicate your double-sided faces instead. Turning off culling in general is a bad solution anyone, because one side will be lit incorrectly.
Figured out my disappearing triangles issue, I guess it was sorting. Broke off the fins then reattached them in the modeler and it works. I feel like less of a newb now. This fish is 40 feet long!
Shadows break completely if you turn culling off for double-sidedness, resulting in mega banding artifacts. (Though I could probably make the fin bits a separate chunk in my example.) Would be nice if it remembered directories so when you go to change the sky you don't have to navigate back to them after choosing your textures elsewhere. Beyond that, this is totally amazing..!
Rad bag. Shall be excellent for Dominance War, et alia.
man this is really awesome guys - i'd like to thank perna, EQ, mark and johny and any other 8 monkey lab primates for releasing this to the community! great work
- i had a question
would it be ok to point to this from to other forums (like GA and others or would you like to keep it just within the polycount community?) if brome hasn't already leaked it's secrets :P
Sure, i mean its a public release, we cant very well moderate who has access to it.
Figured out my disappearing triangles issue, I guess it was sorting. Broke off the fins then reattached them in the modeler and it works. I feel like less of a newb now. This fish is 40 feet long!
Shadows break completely if you turn culling off for double-sidedness, resulting in mega banding artifacts. (Though I could probably make the fin bits a separate chunk in my example.) Would be nice if it remembered directories so when you go to change the sky you don't have to navigate back to them after choosing your textures elsewhere. Beyond that, this is totally amazing..!
Rad bag. Shall be excellent for Dominance War, et alia.
Look above for solution to the culling thing.
If you click the little arrow in the file dialog box you can bring up previously loaded skys pretty easy. Same with meshes, textures, etc, it will give you a list of the last accessed appropriate files.
I'm running into issues now with smoothing looking very messed up using anything other than 'simple' materials (phongsimple or skinsimple). I can post a screenshot if needed. I'm going to try pulling my obj into maya and re-exporting it with the maya exporter.
[edit] I have the sinking feeling that the maya plugin isn't going to work on my 64-bit maya. Here's a screen of what happens when I switch that middle building's material from phongsimple to phong:
Maya plugin wont work for 64bit no, you need to make sure you have a normal map loaded if you're using PhongEnviro instead of Simple, Simple is the only material type that will work with just a diffuse texture.
The only issue that's come up so far for me is that I can't set the background color of the material editor for my screenshots. I would prefer a mid-gray instead of black for showing off artwork on a more neutral stage.
Oh, and as was mentioned the top right 'X' not closing the window is strange.
I also can't find a good way to 'reset' or 'clear all' without closing everything down and restarting? It's quick enough to do I spose, but is there another way?
Also, I turned down the difficulty in the cfg file but making art didn't get any easer . Bug?
I also have an issue creating materials: clicking new mat and giving a name creates a .mat file fine, but it doesn't appear in the material list, and clicking add mat and selecting it doesn't do anything. However, if I create a second new material, then try to add the first one it works, but the second one can't be added until a third one is created.
Yeah seems to be some issues with creating materials still, dunno. Try save as instead of new, that was always my work around for this long-standing problem.
Instead of hitting X you can open up the console "~" and type quit or exit.
Clean mat list will get rid of everything not in use.
EQ:
Just curious, do you use .obj from modo, or do you import your modo file into max/maya then use the exporter??
also, has the exporter been tested on 64 bit systems? I'm having some trouble in Maya 2008 when attempting to click on the check box in the plug in manager window.
Generally i just export straight from Maya, but if i was going to use the OBJ function, i would import into Maya, make sure my normals were correct(hard edges etc) and make sure my UVs were welded, then export OBJ.
I've tested the exporter win xp64, but maya 32bit version.
Finally got a chance to fire this up at home and giver a test. pretty simple to get objects in and create materials, took me less than 5 mins to figure out what most of the stuff seems to do.
the only thing that really bugged me was when you click a slider and then after adjusting it go to orbit and the silder value changes sometimes if you didnt click off it to deselect the slider. also the not being able to type in specific values is minor but would be handy.
thanks again for releasing this, its a dope addition to the CG arsenal, I'm sure tons of people will benefit from it, even HR ppl who will soon be getting tons of pure eye sex jammed in their face.
Unfortunately, I got the OpenAL error too. I downloaded the latest fix posted here, and finally it loaded... but not RIGHT. I see what must be the start-up screen, but no text shows up, only blocks where letters should be. None of the buttons that appear to be there work. Even more alarming, it makes weird beeping noises as it tries to start up...
Help??
Yeah, so I'm reposting this in hopes that it receives help this time... :P
Thanks Monkey Lab'ers,
Reading the posts, the tools seem to come with a standalone viewer. can the model view be saved out as an executable for sharing?
Can skinned animations and or turntables be loaded?
Thanks Monkey Lab'ers,
Reading the posts, the tools seem to come with a standalone viewer. can the model view be saved out as and executable for sharing?
Can skinned animations and or turntables be loaded?
No executable.
You can export skinned and animated meshes from maya, but there is no documentation for this, so you'de have a hard time getting it to work.
I ran into a bit of trouble while trying this thing.
At startup, it gives me this error
Mesh: base/prop/tool/furniture/chinacabinet.mesh, Chunk ChinaCabinetShape is using a snikked material but has no skinning data! Fix this!!
It does the same thing for each of the models.
And once I click on the Material Editor window, the window just turns completely black, and that's it. Hitting space to toggle any form of menus etc. isn't working. I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, so I thought that might have something to do with it, setting the compability mode to Winxp sp2 and running as admin doesn't change anything though.
This viewer seems like a really nice tool, so I'm hoping there's a solution to these problems
Hey didnt see this, beeping usually means missing files, maybe corrupt installation?
Tried to reinstall... still the same problem. But what's weird is that when I install, it doesn't show it as installing today, but still the date and time from yesterday. I looked through the control panel install/uninstall program list, and it didn't show up there either...
So I don't know what's going on, but at this point I'm wondering if this isn't a problem with the program but rather with my computer illiterateness.
Halp, where iz this "power" button? Canz I sew it on?
I think I wrote a script a while back that sets the model to be smoothed with a vertex normal map, I'll have a play later tonight and see if that helps things.
I ran into a bit of trouble while trying this thing.
At startup, it gives me this error
It does the same thing for each of the models.
And once I click on the Material Editor window, the window just turns completely black, and that's it. Hitting space to toggle any form of menus etc. isn't working. I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, so I thought that might have something to do with it, setting the compability mode to Winxp sp2 and running as admin doesn't change anything though.
This viewer seems like a really nice tool, so I'm hoping there's a solution to these problems
Cheers!
those mesh errors shouldn't really be a problem, i think that happens in everyone's build(non fatal errors).
What video card do you have?
Oh btw, just sort of a general message, if i'm not getting back to people about technical problems(crashes, glitches etc) it just means that i dont know of a work around/solution. But Andres and Jeff(8ml programmers) are looking at these threads, if they can find solutions/fixes they will post. So please be patient guys, these things can take a while to track down.
About the videocard, I'm using "Asus GeForce 8600GT". I've had some issues with Maya's viewport rendering, saying that the High Quality rendering mode is not supported by the graphics card. I'm not too good with these kind of things, so I'm not quite sure what the problem is. Now that you mention it though, it seems like the issue might be caused by my graphics card.
Hold shift and left click to rotate the sky around the vertical axis, other axis are locked I'm afraid.
Use control instead of shift to give a rotation speed to the sky
breakneck, that looks like the problem I was having. Try creating a new material, then adding the old one again. Seems to be a viable workaround most of the time for me.
Replies
No error message, just the usual 'blah blah.exe has stopped working' etc
Using Vista 64, admin account
- i had a question
would it be ok to point to this from to other forums (like GA and others or would you like to keep it just within the polycount community?) if brome hasn't already leaked it's secrets :P
I love it when stuff like this is free to use. Thanks guys, you deserve success.
Wow disregard this I was a dumbass trying to run the viewer with AA/AF enabled in Catalyst :E
Thanks for the great viewer, produces awesome results for free!
The only issue that's come up so far for me is that I can't set the background color of the material editor for my screenshots. I would prefer a mid-gray instead of black for showing off artwork on a more neutral stage.
Oh, and as was mentioned the top right 'X' not closing the window is strange.
I also can't find a good way to 'reset' or 'clear all' without closing everything down and restarting? It's quick enough to do I spose, but is there another way?
Also, I turned down the difficulty in the cfg file but making art didn't get any easer
I also have an issue creating materials: clicking new mat and giving a name creates a .mat file fine, but it doesn't appear in the material list, and clicking add mat and selecting it doesn't do anything. However, if I create a second new material, then try to add the first one it works, but the second one can't be added until a third one is created.
I'm running into issues now with smoothing looking very messed up using anything other than 'simple' materials (phongsimple or skinsimple). I can post a screenshot if needed. I'm going to try pulling my obj into maya and re-exporting it with the maya exporter.
[edit] I have the sinking feeling that the maya plugin isn't going to work on my 64-bit maya. Here's a screen of what happens when I switch that middle building's material from phongsimple to phong:
Is there anyway to display wireframe over the textured model?
Oh shit, 4096? Man that is pretty stupid, i think i was doing some experiments, converting OS to TS, and just did a test to see if a larger image produced less artifacts. I'll fix the file and re-upload. As far as the sticker thing, i remember bumping it out looked really cheesy, like way too thick. So i played around with some various stuff and that was what i remember looked best at the time. Sometimes things don't have to make perfect sense to look good. Really i think i just wanted to change the light direction, to give it a slightly different material read. Not having gloss maps makes stuff like that a pain.
There is an option to compress textures(may be broken) we turned it off by default because it makes it a pain to update textures(need to load and compress for every reload). I think you can turn it on by default in one of the .cfg files.
Banding artifacts are a known issue, likely not only on your end/card. I think there is actually two issues, one that is related to shadowing, and another that is related to cube-map filtering, that sort of stuff is a bit harder to notice in game tho. Try opening up the console "~" and doing "set render.shadows.res 4096" and see if the artifacting gets better, also play with the shadow distance(set it to the lowest value before it goes away).
The rest of the stuff i agree with, and most of it really drove me nuts during production, but small team etc, what can you do? The numeric input is the worst, you can nudge the sliders tho(arrow keys), so give that a try. And yeah, some of the sky's are a bit overexposed, there are a few settings to tweak with the bloom in the post editor if you like.
Some other things that will give strange results:
Unwelded UV's (modo's OBJ exporter loves to randomly do this).
Objects that are way huge
Turning off culling. If you need to turn off culling, manually duplicate your double-sided faces instead. Turning off culling in general is a bad solution anyone, because one side will be lit incorrectly.
Figured out my disappearing triangles issue, I guess it was sorting. Broke off the fins then reattached them in the modeler and it works. I feel like less of a newb now.
Shadows break completely if you turn culling off for double-sidedness, resulting in mega banding artifacts. (Though I could probably make the fin bits a separate chunk in my example.) Would be nice if it remembered directories so when you go to change the sky you don't have to navigate back to them after choosing your textures elsewhere. Beyond that, this is totally amazing..!
Rad bag. Shall be excellent for Dominance War, et alia.
Sure, i mean its a public release, we cant very well moderate who has access to it.
Look above for solution to the culling thing.
If you click the little arrow in the file dialog box you can bring up previously loaded skys pretty easy. Same with meshes, textures, etc, it will give you a list of the last accessed appropriate files.
Maya plugin wont work for 64bit no, you need to make sure you have a normal map loaded if you're using PhongEnviro instead of Simple, Simple is the only material type that will work with just a diffuse texture.
Yeah seems to be some issues with creating materials still, dunno. Try save as instead of new, that was always my work around for this long-standing problem.
Instead of hitting X you can open up the console "~" and type quit or exit.
Clean mat list will get rid of everything not in use.
Just curious, do you use .obj from modo, or do you import your modo file into max/maya then use the exporter??
also, has the exporter been tested on 64 bit systems? I'm having some trouble in Maya 2008 when attempting to click on the check box in the plug in manager window.
I've tested the exporter win xp64, but maya 32bit version.
My first experience with this toolset! Its so punk its error message is just a stern look.
After developing a similar toolset for the last 2.5 years it'll definitely be interesting to see how you guys have approached it.
the only thing that really bugged me was when you click a slider and then after adjusting it go to orbit and the silder value changes sometimes if you didnt click off it to deselect the slider. also the not being able to type in specific values is minor but would be handy.
thanks again for releasing this, its a dope addition to the CG arsenal, I'm sure tons of people will benefit from it, even HR ppl who will soon be getting tons of pure eye sex jammed in their face.
Yeah, so I'm reposting this in hopes that it receives help this time... :P
Hey didnt see this, beeping usually means missing files, maybe corrupt installation?
Reading the posts, the tools seem to come with a standalone viewer. can the model view be saved out as an executable for sharing?
Can skinned animations and or turntables be loaded?
No executable.
You can export skinned and animated meshes from maya, but there is no documentation for this, so you'de have a hard time getting it to work.
At startup, it gives me this error
It does the same thing for each of the models.
And once I click on the Material Editor window, the window just turns completely black, and that's it. Hitting space to toggle any form of menus etc. isn't working. I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit, so I thought that might have something to do with it, setting the compability mode to Winxp sp2 and running as admin doesn't change anything though.
This viewer seems like a really nice tool, so I'm hoping there's a solution to these problems
Cheers!
Tried to reinstall... still the same problem.
So I don't know what's going on, but at this point I'm wondering if this isn't a problem with the program but rather with my computer illiterateness.
Halp, where iz this "power" button? Canz I sew it on?
Works fine if I export them from Max
Aside from that, it all works very nicely. Needs gloss maps, though
Thanks Earhquake, it's actually pretty intuitive to load anim. great job.
!
[ame]
hit ~ then, hit tab!
now how to git the rest of the commands cut off by the UI? :poly122:
most of these seem to need a level or player?
can we have a level? :poly124:
poke, poke poke...
re: animation...
loading a skeleton will consistently crash me.
A work around I found is to...
switch to another tab like the "anim" tab
then switch back to the "file" tab and then load the skeleton
Modo does pretty terrible stuff with OBJs, and doesnt really support smoothing in any conventional way, so i always import into max or maya first.
I think I wrote a script a while back that sets the model to be smoothed with a vertex normal map, I'll have a play later tonight and see if that helps things.
those mesh errors shouldn't really be a problem, i think that happens in everyone's build(non fatal errors).
What video card do you have?
Oh btw, just sort of a general message, if i'm not getting back to people about technical problems(crashes, glitches etc) it just means that i dont know of a work around/solution. But Andres and Jeff(8ml programmers) are looking at these threads, if they can find solutions/fixes they will post. So please be patient guys, these things can take a while to track down.
just tried it out and cant believe how straight forward the UI is. great job guys and thanks a lot for sharing.
only issue i had was that i couldnt minimize or maximize the window or even resize it, but thats not a big issue.
About the videocard, I'm using "Asus GeForce 8600GT". I've had some issues with Maya's viewport rendering, saying that the High Quality rendering mode is not supported by the graphics card. I'm not too good with these kind of things, so I'm not quite sure what the problem is. Now that you mention it though, it seems like the issue might be caused by my graphics card.
thank you very much!
Use control instead of shift to give a rotation speed to the sky
the other weapon in the sample set loads just fine with materials. . .
*edit* sorry new to posting pics, how to i get it to resize? and it the glass looks like poo with out my opacity map