B3D files needed!

Hi all,

Has anyone got any spare .b3d files I can mess with?

I'm after both static meshes and animated/skinned meshes.

Something with bumpmaps would be esp. groovy.

Try some of psionics models, Mark.

www.psionic3d.co.uk

Are you testing B3D support for Max3D?

Thanks!

Yep, I'm doing b3d/skinning support.

The skinning code is there, just don't have any loader for it.

http://www.glimmergames.com/temp/1.rar

( You'll need to right-click and save as because my server doesn't have the right MIME settings for rar's. )

There's two skinned models, each of which has one animation. I didn't skin them myself, but I'm fairly sure that they have weighted vertices, so they should be useful for testing purposes.

ill see what i can find. ;OP

Yay, phase1 complete!

A few issues that affect both Psionics dwarf and Gabriels Bowling gal:

* Lots of bones! Both of these have 40+ bones, which seems like a hell of a lot - is that normal?

* Lots of bad geometry! Both blew up when it came to stencil shadows, which require very accurate geometry. Will have a closer look but not sure what to do here.

Mark, try animated B3D from P.A. Phann, balchak..its just excellent

opps...here is the link..

http://www.filefactory.com/file/95c94d/
or
http://showfile.file.sc/9424/R3AgOfrq/balchak.htm

Hi,

Wow, thanks for that, very cool model!

Unfortunately, it still has a lot of bones (most yet at 59!) and some bad geometry.

Mark, I have some animated (highrez) models, no bumpmapping, but that can easily be added. Do they have to be closed?

Erm what are you up to Mark?

Mark, maybe you can post data about number of bones you want to, so some nice character can be created and posted here..

No , that's not normal and is way over the top ( for Blitz3d anyway)- the bone count in the dwarf model can be reduced considerably by removing the bones from the beard and hands. It also has a lot of open faces.
Just download the trial of PaceMaker - import any static mesh and use the option to create a procedural skeleton - this only has about 16 bones - use autoassign for the vertices et voila - as many boned .b3d as you like.
The demo is fully functional and lasts for 7 days but you are welcome to a free key if you find it useful.
http://webzoom.freewebs.com/smiff/blitz/pacemakerr.zip

Ah, so thats who "." was, Smiff!!!

It depends what you're using them for, but I'd say yeah.

I can get some Collada files off Martin if you want.

whats the prefered number of bones for B3D anyway??

That's easy: "Minimum amount of bones that gets the job done"... if you don't need fingers then don't do them (huge savings in bonecount).

Designing rigs is an artform itself and/but you need to use more complex rig than than the basic rig sometimes. We have used at work 90+ bone rigs and everyone of them was really needed for some purpose.

Mine is just a standard biped rig, so it's pretty normal. Entirely necessary? Perhaps not, but I suspect it's going to happen quite a bit.

No surprise here on the stencils. Unless you have an entirely enclosed model, some engines have problems with stencils volumes. I don't know how you go about "fixing" this problem without fixing the models, but I do know that some engines ( TrueVision for instance ) don't suffer this problem even when the mesh has issues, so there evidently is a technique.

Hi,


The more the merrier! And yes, models should be 'closed' - ie: a single surface with 2 polys per edge and no lonely edges.


Thanks, I'll take a look at this.

The bone count issue relates to using shaders to do skinning - each bone takes up shader storage and >32ish bones blows the limit on my 'lower end' (6200!) card here when transforming both vertex position and normal/tangent (mat4+mat3 per bone). Just transforming position works for now...

I can probably help here by splitting models up into smaller chunks that require fewer bones per chunk, with a worse case of 4 bones per vertex per triangle meaning shaders will need to be able to handle at least 12 bones. Don't like the sound of generating this split though!

The bad geometry affects stencil shadowing done with the GPU. Stencil shadows done with the CPU are much less fussy as I can add a few tweaks to allow for bad geometry. I can probably improve the GPU version somewhat, but I suspect it'll always be much more sensitive than the GPU one.

The bummer about the CPU version is that it can't be used with a 'morphing' shader running on the GPU - which currently means skinning.

Mark, check my blog, see 315b, I reckon it'd be fair if that could be animated in your next gen. I can make that in DirectX version if youywant to have a play. Post comment at blog if interested (I'll see it first others won't). Next gen really should be able to get that going properly (swash plates etc), or it's a dead loss from my perspective really.

In Game Programming Gems 6, sect.5.4 there's an whole article devoted to the splitting of boned meshes.

Mark - if you want to test some complex vertex alpha and UVW that works in Blitz3D then download the ALE demo. It has a .b3d and a .x landscape mesh with textures included. ->
http://www.dyvision.co.uk/ale.htm