White specks... ?

[GameCreator]

So, after hours of searching and playing with settings, I finally got my DirectX mesh animating into a modified example program. Yay! And it's beautiful, except that there are these mysterious white specks in places.



More than that, while the arm waves, that one leftmost speck moves back and forth. Does anyone have any idea what those are a result of and how I can get rid of them? (When I rotate the mesh the specks rotate as well.)

As possible helpful background, I exported a Max 9 bipeded/physiqued mesh and saved it with the DirectX viewer. If anyone needs more details, I'd be happy to supply it. I even have a screenshot of all of my Pandasoft settings, if that helps anyone, though in the DirectX viewer it looked fine (except that the bones were visible).

Thanks in advance for any help/suggestions!

[Catprog]

Have you tried seting setDebugDataVisible to false?

Model is a IMeshSceneNode

Code: Select all

	Model->setDebugDataVisible(false);

[GameCreator]

I just tried it but no luck.
I thought I'd throw the code in here as well at this point. (It's 99% from the example.)

Code: Select all

int main()
{
	IrrlichtDevice *device =
		createDevice( video::EDT_DIRECT3D9, dimension2d<s32>(640, 480), 16,
			false, false, false, 0);

	device->setWindowCaption(L"Hello World! - Irrlicht Engine Demo");

	IVideoDriver* driver = device->getVideoDriver();
	ISceneManager* smgr = device->getSceneManager();
	IGUIEnvironment* guienv = device->getGUIEnvironment();

	guienv->addStaticText(L"Hello World! This is the Irrlicht Software renderer!",
		rect<int>(10,10,260,22), true);

	IAnimatedMesh* mesh = smgr->getMesh("panda2dx.x");
	IAnimatedMeshSceneNode* node = smgr->addAnimatedMeshSceneNode( mesh );
	node->setDebugDataVisible(false);
	node->setAnimationSpeed(2000);

	node->setMaterialFlag(EMF_LIGHTING, false);

	smgr->addCameraSceneNode(0, vector3df(-10,250,-150), vector3df(0,105,0));

	while(device->run())
	{
		driver->beginScene(true, true, SColor(255,100,101,140));

		smgr->drawAll();
		guienv->drawAll();

		driver->endScene();
	}

	device->drop();
	return 0;
}

[Acki]

No, I think this depands on your mesh...
Maybe you could make a download for the mesh, so we can check this ???

[GameCreator]

Definitely.

direct link
or
site with link on it (in case direct doesn't work)

The file includes:
IrrlichtXFileTest06AnimatingRenamed.max
texture.bmp
panda2.x (exported from Max)
panda2dx.x (saved from DirectX viewer - this is the one loaded by the program)

[bitplane]

looks like a bug in the importer, large sections of the mesh are missing.
thanks for posting your mesh.



moving to bug reports

[Strong99]

those parts doesn't seem to have any kind of material on them... so the x importer does't show them.

[Acki]

Well, it seems that it's a fault by the exporter (maybe together with the importer)...

If I load the mesh into Milkshape it's OK (unfortunately the animations are not imported to Milkshape from an x file):


If I re-export it from Milkshape to DX8 it's also OK in Irrlicht (but no colored faces, only textured and without animations, but that's normal):

So Milkshape has no problems with importing the geometry and it exports it correct for Irrlicht !?!?!

[GameCreator]

bitplane and strong99, the "large sections of the mesh" I'm guessing you're talking about are the bones. I specifically don't want those displayed so that's perfect but I believe they're supposed to be exported from Max so I did. (Otherwise it gave me errors and didn't even animate in Irrlicht.)

DirectX mesh view displays and animates it perfectly, except that it shows the bones, but it has no specks.

Here are my Pandasoft Max .X export settings. They were taken from another thread and seemed to be the only combination that got animation to work correctly in Irrlicht.



Thanks all for taking a look. Much appreciated.
Any other ideas? I'm worried that once I actually make more complex characters that are heavily animated that there will be more specks and they will animate more. Also, I didn't say this before: I'm using the latest Irrlicht version.

[sio2]

When I export from Max I collapse the stack (if needed) and hide stuff I don't want exported.

[GameCreator]

sio2, thank you!! You solved my problem indirectly, I think.
The problem was that I didn't hide the biped. I'm pretty sure it still exported them (otherwise, when I uncheck that export option, it doesn't animate) but hiding the biped got rid of the white specks. It also doesn't show up in the DirectX meshview any more with the mesh.

Thank you to all who participated in this thread. I'm sure Irrlicht could still deal with this issue better but I've found a solution. I'm tempted to write a tutorial for everyone as in my search I saw a lot of threads of people asking how to do this.