Need models for an Community Project.

Steel Style · Post by **Steel Style** » Thu Apr 02, 2009 11:16 pm

Hey guys, some of you may ever know this idea I talked about it on the irc channel, and it's about creating an Irrlicht community project. This one will work much like a benchmark at the start and after a good way for us to work together on one goal doing render optimization.

I know this idea about doing culling like the one of Halifax, Nadro and others always kept attention. We ever see it an the submission for Google Summer of Code. But what about it now ? Since we are many of us wanting to work on the same thing but with our live have too less time for finding bugs of rare issue or even for doing an such work, I think that we could reach our hand together for the same goal. And I think that after finish that it's will be able to fit Irrlicht or IrrExt.

So actually this idea is still discussed and all we want is to find the proper model for building this town scene.

Here what kind of style we aiming for this town

from http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/lin ... licht.html first link of my google image search for Irrlicht

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Thu Apr 02, 2009 11:31 pm

To clarify, we need a scene (.irr) which represents a large game world and runs very slowly on most people's machines. This scene can later be used to benchmark optimization techniques.

Some ideas-
* Large meshes that can be replaced with lower LOD representations at a distance
* Meshes that contain too many mesh buffers, so they can be optimized into fewer buffers
* Repeated materials throughout the scene, so large segments can be joined together
* A large world that covers lots of distance, so we can explore culling techniques, streaming loaders, etc
* At least some buildings with insides and outsides (even if they're all the same), for portal and occlusion techniques

...other ideas?

christianclavet · Post by **christianclavet** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 2:34 am

Wow. This is really interesting.

I could try to build this into Hammer, export it as an OBJ, then set the pieces in a IRRscene.

For the theme, Im interested in doing the "SPACE 1999: ALPHA BASE"
Could this be ok? Got interested in this TV Show architecture lately, and I'm sure I could replicate this look in low poly. (This TV show was aired before even STAR WARS existed! It inspired movies like 2001, Star Wars, Star Trek:TNG)

If you have a specific set in mind, I could easily switch to it by sending me the "architectural theme" and ideas. I'm not stuck on this idea of doing the moonbase alpha.

This could be created in "areas" in Hammer, then I could export thoses areas (obj) and connect them in IRRedit. I will try to see if I could do some lightmapping (3DS or Gile[s]).

If we could have a updated BSP loader that load Hammer scenes, this could be a lot quicker (All lightmaps are already pre-calculated in the BSP as HDR and standard with reflection cubemaps), also I could put "AREAPORTALS" brushes entities into the scenes that could be used later when portal culling implementation tests will occur (could interpret those areaportal to define the proper "zones" in the map.

Is this urgent? This could take me 2-3 month.

Here what the base look like from the exterior:

Another shot near to the landing bays:

Here found a representation of the interior of the base.

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 4:25 am

christianclavet wrote:I could try to build this into Hammer, export it as an OBJ, then set the pieces in a IRRscene.

Is this legal? It might go against the terms of Hammer. If not then I don't see any problem with this.

christianclavet wrote: For the theme, Im interested in doing the "SPACE 1999: ALPHA BASE"
Could this be ok?

I was thinking more along the lines of an RPG village like the image Steel posted, but with high resolution models and lots of clutter.
We could do it as a community project and store it in irrext svn, the scene wouldn't have to look amazing, we can use a mixture of artistic styles, model formats, materials and so on.

However, if you really want to create a space base with large internal areas, this would be a cool alternative

Mel · Post by **Mel** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 10:58 am

Do it with QuArK, it can export directly to Q3BSP maps, if you have the Map compiler that comes with GTKRadiant, all of those are free tools

And i particularly find quite useful QuArK. It allows for a great flexibility in the building process.

http://quark.planetquake.gamespy.com/

http://www.qeradiant.com/cgi-bin/trac.cgi

We could first set the kind of environment we want, just to avoid people having spaceships and farm cabins in the same stage XD

christianclavet · Post by **christianclavet** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 12:53 pm

Yes, that's perfectly legal. Hammer (Source SDK) is only producing the base mesh. For re-using the BSP I don't know. For the artwork, it will be insiped by the TV series so there should no problem there as I've seen mod inpired by Star Wars, Stargate, etc...

Since you'd prefer it look as RPG; then i'll check for getting reference on a RPG village. Time to check back LOTR again.

Thanks for the info Mel.

My first models then will be BSP (Quake III). I can export it from Hammer then do as Mel says, import it in Quark or GTKRadiant. (or build it completely in them, still I'm much faster to Hammer)

We could then check for striping area apart, since IRRlicht will load the BSP as a single mesh. (I think)

Mel · Post by **Mel** » Fri Apr 03, 2009 5:58 pm

Or surround the meshes we want to export, for example, a tower, a wall, a house, a bridge, etc... with caulk textures, and create small units that would be built together to create a bigger stage inside Irredit, as far as i know, irrlicht ignores the faces that use a sky shader, for example, and that could be used to our advantage.

Katsankat · Post by **Katsankat** » Sun Apr 05, 2009 9:00 am

Would it happen on the moon or anywhere else... does it matter?

Before anyone spends 6 months to build a town, may one suggest to firstly write
occlusion techniques, THEN test them on towns larger and larger, to finally call an artist.

There is more than enough in the media folder to create a large
map of 20.000 castles and 300.000 faeries attacked by huns and ninjas.

xjiro · Post by **xjiro** » Sun Apr 05, 2009 5:45 pm

christianclavet wrote:Yes, that's perfectly legal. Hammer (Source SDK) is only producing the base mesh.

very illegal

Steel Style · Post by **Steel Style** » Sun Apr 05, 2009 5:54 pm

Also it's seem that those kind of mesh will not let us doing dynamic mesh lod since it's based on edges detection, and since the smallest part are box, we could'nt get a lot from it, but it's will work for the others technique I guess.

So I think it's better to have conventionnal mesh, from Blender or another modelling software.

robindegen · Post by **robindegen** » Sun Apr 05, 2009 6:03 pm

christianclavet wrote:If we could have a updated BSP loader that load Hammer scenes, this could be a lot quicker

with a little trick this is not so difficuled. I have hammer 3.4 set up to export bsp's to irrlicht without a problem. I found a .map file convertor on the web that was part of an older game's sdk. It converts the valve hammer .map format to that of the quake .map format (as outputted by for example gtkradiant). I set this tool up as my $csg_exe, and q3map2.exe as $bsp_exe. When i click run map, it will first convert the map file, and then feed it to q3map2. This works perfectly. The only thing that i still need to do is create an .fgd file for hammer with all the quake objects like lights and such. If you want to know more, let me know. You can mail me at

robindegen AT gmail DOT com

Mel · Post by **Mel** » Sun Apr 05, 2009 7:24 pm

QuArK do export directly to Valve220 map format, Quake map format, can create BSP's directly, sending the maps to Q3MAP2 and is totally free, what is the trouble with Hammer?

Anyway, although the current support for QIII BSP's is quite good, i think that for portal occlusion, Irrlicht should have a native way to do it, not just another conversion from the Quake BSP format.

IMO, in this meaning, Irlicht should be capable of converting .Map files. Not just a .map loader, a sort of "plugin" that made the compilation process that generated lightmaps, geometry and portals, in a suitable way that irrlicht could handle easily, instead of just loading a QIII map geometry.

bitplane · Post by **bitplane** » Sun Apr 05, 2009 8:03 pm

Did anyone read the Source SDK license agreement? I'm betting you can't use Hammer to make maps for other games/engines

xjiro · Post by **xjiro** » Mon Apr 06, 2009 1:36 pm

bitplane wrote:Did anyone read the Source SDK license agreement? I'm betting you can't use Hammer to make maps for other games/engines

yes

xjiro wrote:
christianclavet wrote:Yes, that's perfectly legal. Hammer (Source SDK) is only producing the base mesh.
very illegal

christianclavet · Post by **christianclavet** » Mon Apr 06, 2009 5:11 pm

Wow! Thanks for the info! i'm very surprised by this! How could they ask this from user?! I really don't understand.

I'll have to check that. Using it for creating a base blockout should still be ok (since it will be exported in OBJ format and worked further in a modeling application).

It's very bad, that we can't use the BSP files directly.

I'm checking for RPG references. I'm thinking about LOTR castles, fortresses and towers. Once I found interesting pictures that could be cool to create, i'll post them in this thread this week, and if this is ok for you, I'll start modeling on those concepts.

The final models will be modeled in 3DS(myself). Im faster in Hammer, but I think I will only use it for reference prototyping (testing the size of the mesh with the player, and proportions) then rebuild around the shape in detail in 3DS. From then, I will be able to isolate elements and export them in another format to be included in a IRRscene.

For the first references I've gatered:
Here are some quick pics i've found now:

From the first references I have, building a Hobbit styled house could be cool (Inside, outside will need to have be build with a hill since it's somewhat underground)

We could also want it to be completely seen from outside. Since we use this for inspiration, we're only constrained by the "RPG" theme, so we can do what we want... Could be interesting to see references pics for RPG buildings and environnements if you have some. Could spark interesting ideas.

EDIT: Guys! Were did you found that it's illegal to use HAMMER to build meshes!!!??

It's forbidden to re-use models since they were created by others. But I didnt found any info that It was forbidden to use our OWN stuff created in the editor for another environnement. If you can I'll need some proof of what you said. Does someone also have infos about opening their .BSP (created by the enduser)?