3D in Visionaire V4

Hi,

I open this thread to talk about 3D in Visionaire.
First questions and bugreports.
Is this ok?

My first question: How much is there a limit for polygons fo a charakter?

I belive the polycount is limited to user's computer's specs mostly. Most games these days uses 30k at max, but that's mostly for very detailed and large characters. If you're going for a simple human being, aim for 10-15k with 2048x2048 textures at most. Of course it all also depends on the amount of characters on screen. You gotta share your polylimits with all the characters. Currently I'm working with 8k polies per character and it looks good because the characters can never be seen from close up.

I'm currently trying MakeHuman->Blender->VS with some success although the model flips for some reason but looks fine in Assimpviewer

I already contacted Daniel (who implemented the 3d characters) to have a look into the forum. I guess he's busy at the moment but hopefully he can help out soon... if the model is working in Assimp viewer it's fine, then it should be possible to display it in Visionaire as well.

It could be Blender's exporter so its more likely just a work flow issue
the model does show but he's flat on his face with the shadow directly under him

Good evening, everyone! Thanks for starting a thread for the 3D model support! Hopefully this will help to keep track of the most important issues. To answer the first question regarding the polygon limit, there is none other than the hardware limits. On older cards (read: very old cards, from 8 years ago or so) you only had 16 bit index buffers for geometry, which naturally limits all geometry to about 65k vertices each. On newer video cards, this limit is gone, making it theoretically possible to use multi-million polygon characters in Visionaire, haven't tried it myself though. I'd like to note that polygon limits in games mainly exist for two reasons: loading time and rasterizing time. Since the characters are the only rasterized objects drawn in the game, you will hardly ever use the GPU to capacity. Half-way decent video cards of the last ~3 years have no trouble processing several million polygons at 60 frames per second. Thus, the only thing you should keep in mind is the loading time, which also involves some geometry preprocessing.

As for the second issue: I once encountered the problem with character models being rotated by 90 degrees to the front. I think it was when I exported a model from 3ds Max. The only significant difference between the Assimp Viewer and the implementation in VS is that the Assimp Viewer is based on Direct3D, which uses a left-handed coordinate system, as opposed to OpenGL, which uses a right-handed coordinate system. If there's a problem with model rotations, it is most likely an issue with the definition of the coordinate system (although this should actually only invert the y-axis). I don't know if you can specify the coordinate axes in the exporter in Blender - can you? There is already a global scale value for 3D models in the editor, maybe we could also include 3 optional rotation angles if this is a problem that cannot be solved (conveniently) in the 3D programs.

It does a left/right handed option also an axis choice, I'll have a play later and see what happens.
Its actually very close, the animation tracks work, as do textures, I just need the lazy bugger to stand up lol

But rotation angles would be good, what would be good is a 3D view along with the properties view

mOfl,

What program and file type have you used to export animated models? I got my model exported through 3DS Max 2012 and opened in Visionaire using .3ds file format. The character seems to be posed as in the first frame but other frames doesn't work at all.

A few years ago I was making some tests for 3dRad and they use the .x file format as well, I use maya for my 3D work and there was a guy who made a plugin that worked great for exporting animated meshes in .x, BUT he abandoned the plugin a long time ago and i think it only works up to Maya 2010 (some people claimed the plugin doesnt export animations in maya 2011 and up).

I remember it being hassle free and it was quite easy to just export the animated character, if somebody could continue updating it it could be a great option for those using maya (and 3dmax trough an fbx export to maya).

This is the link for the plugin

http://www.chadvernon.com/blog/resources/cvxporter/

There's exporters for Blender and C4D that have been abandoned for years which is a shame

@Hasuak: The *.3ds format only supports key-frame animation, which Assimp (and thus VS) does not. Assimp will only read the first frame of the file. Since key-frame animation is baked and therefore rather unflexible, newer file formats only support bone animation. If you already have your animated model in 3ds Max, you can try to export it to Collada *.dae, DirectX *.x or MD5. I used both Maya and Blender to export animated models to *.x, but I don't remember if this was with shipped or third-party exporters. I also tested *.md5 with some publicly available models.