Why do most Irrlicht3D Projekts look bad?

white tiger · Post by **white tiger** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 12:54 pm

If not, then both scenes should look equal. Right?

Wrong. The .obj export export per face normals, the Ogre's exporter export smoothed per vertex normals

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 1:18 pm

well, I get lost with freaking internal stuff... an artist cares bout art, lol... But OBj coords exported from Wings, has an rea where list vertex as VN, which if I am not wrong, are vertex normals... Also, when helping for MIM exporter, and fsrad stuff for irrlicht, Murphy (the author of MIM format) told me wings exports vertex normals, while maybe max exports face normals....

question is...Are actually your face normals the resuklt of exporting smoothing *groups* (artist term). max use this term, mainly.

XSI and wings, I know they exported vertex normals, in our tests...i dunno...

i don't have an idea bout how blender exports normals...never model in Blender, only use it for render or animate, so, havent worked much withblender obj export...

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 2:23 pm

After a little more research on this topic I'm pretty convinced that it's a bug in the .obj loader in Ogre3d. The thing is that .obj has smoothing groups just as 3ds has - both are not supported in Irrlicht, but seem to be supported in Ogre3d. However, if the .obj format uses vertex normals in the file (which was the case here) this overrides any smoothing groups set previously. So no smoothing should occur with the given file. But I guess Irrlicht needs smoothing group support for the next time some benchmark is done, we won't be lucky every time without smoothing group support

Saturn · Post by **Saturn** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 4:09 pm

hybrid wrote:After a little more research on this topic I'm pretty convinced that it's a bug in the .obj loader in Ogre3d.

Do a bit more research then. There is no .obj loader in Ogre3d.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 4:59 pm

Then the question is how agi_shi could say it's the same scene. I thought he showed as the very same mesh twice, not the once same mesh. Question is then if he showed us the Ogre mesh all the time in the Ogre version of the picture

Ok, then some exporter used along the way until the .obj was created is wrong, or the .mesh exporter in case the cube was not meant to have smoothed normals. But I doubt the latter.

Saturn · Post by **Saturn** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 5:13 pm

I guess it is what white tiger said. The same mesh has been exported using different formats and the normals have been handled differently by each exporter. So agi_shi didn't try to deceive us or anything, he just tried to do a very naive benchmark and failed.

BlindSide · Post by **BlindSide** » Mon Aug 13, 2007 8:48 pm

I am wondering why no one else is bothering to do this benchmark properly =/

Maybe we are too stupid to use ogre?

(lol or we are just not childish enough to care...)

dejai · Post by **dejai** » Sat Aug 18, 2007 7:53 am

People do not have fantastic 3d programs for the irrlicht engine. They also are usually programmers not graphic artists

Cardinal4 · Post by **Cardinal4** » Sat Aug 18, 2007 9:01 am

dejai wrote:People do not have fantastic 3d programs for the irrlicht engine. They also are usually programmers not graphic artists

Why stereotype ourselves?

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Sat Aug 18, 2007 9:28 am

exactly, I freaking prefer not to know how he dealt with the mesh before exporting...

Either way, all the supposed proof was of soemthing that worked for me (smoothing normals) since 0.7, so..

There is no .obj loader in Ogre3d

what? That's a pitty, is too standard, and so much better than *.3ds.

yup, there are few artists around...

About expensive programs or not.. certain very expensive program I am remembering now, is not very good exporting OBJs, indeed...hehehehe...Indeed is quite bad in that.

While XSI and Maya(lol, obj comes from old Alias) tend to export it greatly...and as a side note, Wings3d, and XSI are better handling normals than Blender...have more features for that, more control. But the guy used blender to export the obj. Still, Blender gives you the possibility of very correct exports, but once again, i think a good benchmark is done with both artists and coding knowledge...anyway, even if this had been true, would not be benchmark but feature comparison, of a sort of external or not loader, or a "default settings" of it, comparison. Not a global comparison of anything.

yes, I must be bored this morning to write in this trhead.

Saturn · Post by **Saturn** » Sat Aug 18, 2007 11:00 am

vermeer wrote:
There is no .obj loader in Ogre3d
what? That's a pitty, is too standard, and so much better than *.3ds.

Ogre has no .3ds loader either. It only has a single format: its own .mesh/skeleton format.
This way it is assured that all features of the engine are supported by the mesh format. No "if you need feature XY you have to use format AB". Also .mesh can contain precomputed data that then don't need to be created each time it is loaded(edge list for stencil shadows, LOD levels, etc) And the format itself is very flexible in supported vertex layout, it allows three kinds of animations. (morph targets via buffer blending, morph targets via vertex offsets and skeletal animations)

The obvious disadvantage is, that you somehow need to create .mesh files. While difficult in the beginning, there are now exporters for most of the popular modelling programs. And if none is available you can always import an obj/3ds/whatever into blender and export to .mesh from there.
The .mesh exporters are of high quality now. For 3dsmax there is even an exporter with a viewport that shows the actual Ogre rendering of your mesh from within 3dsmax. Especially useful for tweaking material settings.

christianclavet · Post by **christianclavet** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 7:14 pm

I'm a Artist, trying to code!

(And coding very bad at the moment!

)

But i've seen that smoothing problems in my demo. I export in 3DS to Gile[s]. So I should try another format? (Read that Hybrid said that smoothing groups are not supported in .OBJ an .3DS at the moment.)

Since I export in .B3D. I don't thinks the mesh is affected, but could be when exported to Gile[s]. Seen some smooth applied to surface but not on others.

Perhaps there more artists on the Ogre forums. I don't think Irrlicht and Ogre could compare on such biaised factor. Art is art, for some it's good looking for other it's very bad. We can't compare that. Picasso and Renoir are not in the same category! I just think that Thread title was written to be provocative. I just appreciate the fact that AT LEAST he mentionned about the smoothing problem. Everything else is crap.

hybrid · Post by **hybrid** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 9:00 pm

The smoothing groups in .obj are not supported. But since .obj supports vertex normals they are not really necessary anyway. If you export using smoothed vertex normals smoothing groups are, according to .obj standard, ignored anyway.

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Sun Aug 26, 2007 10:40 pm

Yep, basically, vertex normals being supported, there's no need for anything else, the visual resut is the same than using smooth groups.

*.3ds is a terrible format, don't use it...

I have giles also..beware, I like privacy, and at least last ime I checked, the b3d file gets your full name exported in the b3d file...I guess intention was right, so it's known that that b3d is made with a valid license user, but even so... Is one of the reasons why i don't use giles now...Other than that, is one of the best Lightmappers ever.

About the smoothing...check if you reconstructed badly or something the normals inside giles. B3d format supports fully smoothing, I think.And is used by many lightmapping tools.

What i am eager is to put my hands on a version of the b3d Blender exporter once it supports lightmaps export from the bake feature of blender.