Torque 3D Development - Lighting, Terrain, and Cloth

#21 Yes damn it!
That looks realy good...

#22 IRC Hour Info

Just to let Torque 3D users know, the changes to the lighting system and terrain are being updated in the documentation as we speak. Sickhead has always been awesome at helping out with docs, so updating has been a snap.

Furthermore, Lara's videos have become a great asset for me to write docs on subjects she encountered first. Honestly, one of the best things that has happened to learning Torque is getting Lara to do these videos =)

#23 @Nicolas:

Quote: Can you be more precise about when, next week, will beta3 be available, because I will go and visit some customers next week and have been waiting for beta3 to show some Torque3D to my customers.

If I could be more precise, I definitely would. If only software dev were a more precise science...

#24 @Todd: Sorry, man! I forgot that the ripples were your work. Tom had mentioned that, but it slipped my mind at the time of post :)

#25 @Michael Hall: Nope, I didn't know that actually. I haven't seen this thing run myself, just that screen. We were originally talking about several different ways to achieve this, but I'm impressed we got this result from the simpler technique.

#26 And also praise should go to Jaimi McEntire who set us his original ripple effect code we're using. Sickhead just got it all implemented in Torque 3D.

#27

Quote:And also praise should go to Jaimi McEntire who set us his original ripple effect code we're using. Sickhead just got it all implemented in Torque 3D.

Little help from everyone! Nice. Thanks to Jaimi too.

#28 Man! I NEED to get this engine!

If only it wasn't so expensive! (not saying it isn't worth every penny).

I need to sell a game =(

Edit: I have a question:

Can I see a video of the parallax terrain? I want to know how it looks from different angles...

#29 Regarding the cloth - Does it conform to items in the scene? ie, what I'm asking is, is it possible to make a cape for a player, and not have it go through his body (within reasonable limits, of course) or a table cloth that would drop and drape? Can you shoot it? Can you make curtains, and have your player walk between them?

#30 I'm noticing what could be assumed to be a mesh-road icon in the toolbar. You'd mentioned decal roads and all that awesome jazz, but how are mesh roads going to be set up? Could they be repurposed to use for cave tunnels and the like?

#31 In my experience PhysX cloth is questionable for clothing, though you can probably fudge it well enough for a cape with the right kind of physics volumes on your character. Havok Cloth is much more useful for that type of thing though.

I'm diggin' the parallax terrain there.

#32 Again I ask:

Can I see a small video that shows the parallax terrain? I want to see it from multiple angles to know how it looks...

#33 Hope T3d beta 3 download..............

#34 @Brett: Yeah the aligned particle ripple did the trick quite nicely. I actually got the old TGE splash ring effect working -- with some help from James (from Sickhead) -- but that thing was horrendous with such pretty looking water.

That one simple addition takes fx wizardry for particles to a new level :D

#35 Very cool stuff overall, and a little curious about some details such as (if dif -> collada relates to Torque 3D portal system) and (how easy to add PhysX cloth to an animated character).

One question I bet I'm not lone is wondering about is the cross-platform support for Mac OS-X O:-). Not necessarily the highest priority immediate thing, but I am hoping it will be something Torque 3D supports very well out-of-the-box in the long-term (to easily compile and run on standard Mac OS-X systems: Mac Mini, Macbook, etc).

I'm personally considering to buy a Mac Mini and learn some XCode compiling stuff, just for use with Torque 3D (the Mac would just be a cross-platform compile/test machine btw). Hopefully this is intelligent, to help test (Mac OS-X vs. Windows, ATI vs. NVIDIA, AMD vs. Intel, DirectX vs. OpenGL, XP vs. Vista, etc)

#36 On PhysX cloth...

Quote:Does it conform to items in the scene?

Yes... to anything that has a PhysX collision representation.

Quote:is it possible to make a cape for a player, and not have it go through his body ... or a table cloth that would drop and drape?

Its tricky as Gerald says... but if your careful it could be doable. For instance if your cloth is much lower resolution than the objects its colliding against it can pass thru them. Also its very sensitive to high velocity objects passing thru it.

Quote:Can you shoot it?

We don't have that hooked up yet, but it would be doable.

Quote:Can you make curtains, and have your player walk between them?

For sure... the video didn't show it, but the player can walk thru the cloth and it pushes away.

Quote:how easy to add PhysX cloth to an animated character

We're not aiming to provide that feature out of the box, but it should be fairly easy to solve with a little code work.

#37 @ Tom: Can you use physx cloth on a players clothing(not like a cape)? Also, I know that the wind hasn't been added yet but will it react to wind as well?

#38 Starting to look promising :)

The cloth demo shows few issues with the shadowing - shadows sometime "lagging" behind the cloth object animation (like 1-3 frames behind, could be issues with physx integration or multi-threading synchronization if it's used in T3D) or it looks like cloth does not have shadows where it should be while moving (looks like some parts of the cloth do not cast shadows - normals calculation issues?).

#39

Quote:The cloth demo shows few issues with the shadowing - shadows sometime "lagging" behind the cloth object animation (like 1-3 frames behind, could be issues with physx integration or multi-threading synchronization if it's used in T3D) or it looks like cloth does not have shadows where it should be while moving (looks like some parts of the cloth do not cast shadows - normals calculation issues?).

Or maybe because there are *64* of them? Actually, I was getting like 100fps, and shadows looked fine to me in realtime. Might be the FRAPS overhead.

#40 Brett... what system spec do you run it on?