Oolite Bulletins

Work's paid for a 2-day intro to 3DS Max - and all I can say is "WOW"! Awesome - absolutely no good for what we want to use it for (low-poly (sub-1000 if we can get away with it)) 3D models to be used in purpose built/designed military simulators but hoping the biped animation stuff we just started tonight before calling it a day and will be doing tomorrow will prove useful to animate some of our CGF Infantry Units - especially as 2009 has the Openflight (.flt) plug-in. Hoorah!

Was shown how the reactor cloth works today - now that's a seriously cool piece of number crunching!

I believe Max has tools for generating low-resolution versions of models together with normal maps, parallax maps and ambient occlusion maps to make them look like the original. Hmm, I wonder what that could be used for. ;-)

Two days seems a bit short, though. Adobe gives you thirty…

I work in a computer lab with approx. 30 different art, texturing, GIS, terrain building, modelling, 3D rendering packages, plus about another 30 Synthetic Environments applications, mapping tools, Constructive Simulations, Semi-Automated Forces (SAFs), etc, etc. I'm supposed to be a jack of all trades master of none - it was two days or nothing - I opted to take the two days - they're leaving behind the CDs with their normal 7-day intro stuff on it to play with in my own time (not that I have any...). I'm still to get any time to play with M$ ESP (and I'm lecturing on it in the New Year), only finally getting to do some good stuff with VBS2 (Oxygen2 now there's a nightmare of a proprietary 3D modelling tool)...

My life at work is fun, but frantic.

Ahruman wrote:

I believe Max has tools for generating low-resolution versions of models together with normal maps, parallax maps and ambient occlusion maps to make them look like the original.

Random note to passing OXPers: AMD/ATi’s Normal Mapper does this too, for free, but is command-line based. I’ll be fiddling around with this and working out appropriate settings/workflow for Oolite before 1.73.

DaddyH....that sounds like one of the coolest jobs ever.

there's also Nvidia's oddly named 'Melody' - just mentioning it as it might get overlooked as a normal mapping tool because of its name.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/melody_home.html
It's Windows only though

Progress report:

• ATi’s thing runs on Macs (yay) but requires a custom file format (boo). The only provided way to generate this format is through exporters for 3DS and Maya.
• Nvidia’s tool can open OBJ files, but crashes when trying to do so on my system. Could be it doesn’t like VMware.

The silver lining is that ATi provides source code (although it’s pretty horrible source code). This means a tool for creating the custom file format is feasible, as is integration into the rewrite of Dry Dock I’m secretly working on. No time estimate on either, though.

• The good news is, I can now export NMF (ATI Normal Mapper format) from the Secret New Dry Dock™.
• The bad news is, this uses code from the ATI Normal Mapper source, for which no license is specified. That means that I’m not actually free to distribute this working converter.
• The also bad news is that the new Dry Dock uses Oolite’s mesh code, with its vertex and face limits, so isn’t actually useful for converting high-detail models.
• The flip side of this is that it gives me an extra reason to fix Oolite’s mesh code so it doesn’t have arbitrary size limits. Also, if the licensing issue is resolved it would be trivial to put the NMF converter into Oolite test releases as a command-line option. This is only one of the many synergies that will arise from a version of Dry Dock based on Oolite’s mesh code! Oops, my hair seems to be getting pointy.

(If you’re wondering why I didn’t write Dry Dock that way back in ’05, it’s because Oolite didn’t have a mesh class; it was integrated into Entity. I refactored that last year or so.)