~Kitasia
The First Step
Today I decided to try out my new tool and make a foot. Everything feels so sophisticated now : )! What you see is a foot made up of about 133 triangles. I don’t think there’s a good reference as to what my poly count should be so I’m really just following my gut. I kinda cheated in the image by having per-pixel lighting enabled but I wanted to get the full effect. This style of lighting is expensive and I’m really skeptical of its use.
Next is one of the main reasons I avoided 3D, texturing. When I make it out of that nightmare, I’ll move on to the entire body. Worst case scenario, I have to set the texture of each vertex 1 by 1.
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about 5 months ago
With a per-pixel shader one can have a foot that is a box with single-segment chamfers (totally 44 poly’s, relatively quick to plot) and it looks round considering the foot is quite small compared to the screen. Though the normals need to be re-normalized in the shader, and I’m not sure how fast Xbox 360 does that – But I would guess it is faster than uploading multiples (x limbs, y characters) of twice as many vertices per render through the CPU – if vertices are animated in byte-code C#
But I guess you upload vertices to the shader’s memory once – If so I also heard people say large batches of vertices can achieve similar-to-perpixel smoothness quickly.
If you want quick texturing I’d say you can program-”project” a texture on top of the foot for example, and one under the foot, (like stickers) by dividing the foot into two meshes. And in the seam between those meshes one can alpha-blend between those two textures.
(I tried that that in a level modeler, but I’m so lazy I haven’t implemented the blending yet : )
about 5 months ago
Vertex shading isn’t bad, it’s not as though I plan on having things zoomed in this closely. If I find that I’m able to render lots of polygons with little to no cost, I just may smooth it out more later and use vertex shading. There are lot of things I want to attempt with graphics right now so pixel shading is something on the back burner until I have an idea of costs.
I had a similar idea to that with textures. My best texture idea thus far is texturing a box with 8 points, place it over the object and then project all the coordinates to the where the normals of each vertex hit the box. That has its own set of problems so I’m still thinking of other techniques.
What I won’t be attempting is UV unwrapping. That seems very very very time consuming.
about 5 months ago
Yeah vertex shading works well in most cases, especially for matted surfaces like clothes and fur.
If you ever think of fur effects, I wanna recommend an article I bookmarked:
http://www.xbdev.net/directx3dx/specialX/Fur/index.php
It looks great and the code seems simple, I know I wanna try it sometime : )
about 5 months ago
Ah! Curse you Jimma! Fur shading didn’t even come to mind. : D
I was really hoping to keep things simple seeing as this was my first time taking a real approach at 3D but that does look interesting and simple to implement. I may just take that detour.
Thanks!
about 5 months ago
: D
I should learn to keep my mouth shut sometime. I am actually telling myself to make code more and more simple.
Anyway, that xbdev dude is like my new role model, seeing he wrote multitudes of articles like that.
about 5 months ago
Why do you find texturing the main reason to avoid 3D? Or did you mean implementing it in your tool?
Automatic UV texturing is as far as I know always been a problem as there are many ways to do it. Take a look at Maya (the lite version should also have it) and just try to implement one and see how it turns out for you.
Although I don’t have long history of modeling (hell, I write code) but what I know from friends and colleagues is that most of the time you will need to move UV one by one to get the right result
about 5 months ago
I’ve always found texturing in my own tools to be very problematic. The idea of unwrapping uvs and drawing on to them is simple enough though.
Currently my plan is to export my models into a program called Wings3D, set the UVs there and then import my model back into the program. Blender was my first choice before I realized how odd it functions. 3Ds Max would’ve been perfect if it wasn’t so expensive.
UV unwrapping isn’t perfect but setting the vertices one by one isn’t ideal in many cases.