More detailed meshes

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 9:53 pm

Make a program that takes a detail mesh of 1 million to 8 million triangles and raytraces it to produce a normal map which can be applied to a in-game mesh of 3,000 to 12,000 triangles to make it look super next-gen.

Anyone think they could do it?

monkeycracks · Post by **monkeycracks** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 10:05 pm

It's called Blender I think?

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 10:25 pm

Wow Blender as in the modeller like Blender 2.43 can do this?? If so how.

Or do you mean a seperate program named Blender and if so where can I get this progra.

Also can this program be used with Irrlicht to produce next-gen looking graphics.

Midnight · Post by **Midnight** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 11:22 pm

lol

you couldn't render that. I think he was being sarcastic kinda.

not real-time anyways.

I think the point was thats animation tool you're speaking about.
rendering/animation/modeling

you don't do that with real-time 3d renders yet. besides you need to invest in a 3d scanner thats human sized first. that is if you want any real detail.

go look at the videos on youtube about ps3 and xbox360 and the sports games like basketball... you'll find what is nextgen... but it's not the engine that limits irrlicht.. it's the equipment of the people buying or using your product. or basically yer friends crappy pc your testing with lol.

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 11:44 pm

So how much would a 3D scanner cost? And yes the way I describe above is how Unreal Engine 3 does the texture. For example in Gears of War. The main character's mesh is only about 5,738 triangles, but then they made a 3 million triangle detail mesh for his clothing and everything and then they had unreal engine raytrace which produce a normal map that was applied to the 5,738 triangle mesh to make him look super detailed in real-time.

monkeycracks · Post by **monkeycracks** » Mon Apr 30, 2007 11:54 pm

Seemed like Blender did that using something called Baking? Hell I don't know, I don't model.
Just throwing it out there.

Basically, anything you model is exactly how Irr is gonna display it. So just go from there

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Tue May 01, 2007 12:03 am

monkeycracks if you have not seen the posts where I have explained the detail mesh provides a NORMAL MAP which would be very hard to produce by drawing.

monkeycracks · Post by **monkeycracks** » Tue May 01, 2007 12:22 am

I didn't say you had to draw it

sRc · Post by **sRc** » Tue May 01, 2007 12:28 am

lol is everyone on the same page here?

http://amber.rc.arizona.edu/lw/normalmaps.html for anyone whos lost (heck I know I am in this conversation, and I know exactly what he's talking about) Doom3 for example uses this, and possibly use these exact plugins since they used Lightwave for the modelling

anyway, Blender IIRC has some functions for making normalmaps.

white tiger · Post by **white tiger** » Tue May 01, 2007 10:06 am

Make a program that takes a detail mesh of 1 million to 8 million triangles and raytraces it to produce a normal map which can be applied to a in-game mesh of 3,000 to 12,000 triangles to make it look super next-gen.
Anyone think they could do it?

IF i have understood your question (and i'm not sure), i know a program called melody by nvidia

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/melody_home.html

It takes 2 models, one high poly and one low poly, and make a normal map wich make the low poly model look like the high poly model. HOpe that help

vermeer · Post by **vermeer** » Tue May 01, 2007 11:00 am

er...hum.

Oh,well.

The 3d scanner solution is cool if you have an amazing budget (in case there's any) for your projects. And that counting you bought the right one.

I prefer to model by hand

If you have the skills (I have 'em

) , you can do the workflow which inho makes more sense: Model in an amazing organic modeler (I am considering we're taling bout characters, buildings have a dozen other workflows and tricks) , like Wings3d, Silo, Max 9, Maya, for the base simple model, that is, the 5,000 tris model. Imho you still need one of those for that accurate modelling, imo, not as fast and not same cntrol to do this Zbrush, but is doable with it too. Your wings3d(or whatever) mesh, you can now Uv map it. Once you have this, you can build from that base mesh , a crazily heavily detailed mesh, with wrinkles, scratches, loads of mesh detail, etc, in Zbrush , or Mudbox. And indeed, these days you could also do it with Blender sculpt mode. Or Silo 2. You can then, use a tool like melody, but there are others (for those not having shader 2.0 card) like orb, ATI normal mapper, and several others, that will allow to generate, from the high res mesh version, a baked bitmap (ie: a tga) , with certain charcateristics (a normal map, is like a 3 color gradients representation on how lights atack that volume, I think ) , that is applied to the original mesh of 5,000 tris. The generation of the normal maps, yep, could also be done by blender, but I think 2.43 did only have yet support for flat surfaces normals maps only...Of course, you can allways do the hi resh details in Blender, and use an external tool liker orb, to generate th normal map tga.

The engine, if has support of normal maps , or parallax maps, will load that 5,000 tris mesh, looking like as if it were the 1 million tris version... (I forgot to explain the texture proccess, but that'd be a whole chapter ..as best result is also achieved adding also specular maps, and other channels, and as texturing and uvmapping is really complex for normal maps proccedures... )

I have a feel Mudbox has a better UI than Zbrush, and a hope that...Blender can be used if not now soon (i dunno) in an art pipeline to output crazy-res modelling details...

blender can bake everything into a bitmap, since recently.One of them is lighting, it can do lightmaps fairly well.

omaremad · Post by **omaremad** » Tue May 01, 2007 7:30 pm

I think i saw a DIY laser scanner using a webcam and a laser pen (software is called david and is free) but its too impracticle to clean up the meshes by hand. Probabbly will be better just doing it by hand like vermeer said, that way you will have clean meshes probbably in a faster tme.

Halifax · Post by **Halifax** » Tue May 01, 2007 8:17 pm

white tiger wrote:
Make a program that takes a detail mesh of 1 million to 8 million triangles and raytraces it to produce a normal map which can be applied to a in-game mesh of 3,000 to 12,000 triangles to make it look super next-gen.
Anyone think they could do it?
IF i have understood your question (and i'm not sure), i know a program called melody by nvidia

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/melody_home.html

It takes 2 models, one high poly and one low poly, and make a normal map wich make the low poly model look like the high poly model. HOpe that help

Yes white tiger and The Anaconda you are on my same page that is exactly what I want. And yes I really don't believe in 3D scanners unless you are making simulators with hundreds or thousands of models that have to be true to their respective forms otherwise all the "next-gen" games out there like Gears of War and Resistance modelling is done by hand or by reference from concept art.

But yes thank you guys so much white tiger and anaconda.

Catprog · Post by **Catprog** » Tue May 08, 2007 3:09 am

Cheap 3d scaner
(webcam + right angled screen + laser line)

http://www.hackaday.com/2006/12/21/lase ... -a-webcam/

IPv6 · Post by **IPv6** » Tue May 08, 2007 7:31 am

JFYI: There are a bunch of tools that can produce normal maps for flat textures (procedurally generated). For example brick wall (bricks will be "carved" in the wall), woods, soil and whatever. I used to use FilterForge for sometime but finally stopped with MaPZone 2.5 - it`s freeware and can do everything (including normal maps generation out of the box), with big predefined texture library.