Journey Into 3D

It has been about six months since my last post, and a lot has happened with my development of Arillian. I was going pretty strong in my 2d development of Arillian, but it was very time consuming, and the optimization required for the approach I required I dont think would work well with XNA and by extension TorqueX (maybe pure directx though) .

In Diablo 2, they would stuff a character animation in 32 directions, into a roughly 80kb file. They would then blit it to the screen , similar to the XNA spritebatch render. Although I got my process to do something similar, it was still around 100 milliseconds, and the file sizes in XNA were getting fairly large. I also had a dependence on art assets from others.

After reviewing Titans Quest and Mythos Overworld a little more in depth, and having read some of the Diablo 2 developer comments, in addition to my above concerns, I have come to the conclusion that 3D is truly the way to go. With that in mind, I stopped my 2d development on Arillian. However, due to the way I set it up, I can still use the core engine peices I have built to date. From this point, I decided I needed to do the following:

1) Identify the New Pipeline
2) Choose a 3d Program that supports the pipeline
3) Learn the 3d program
4) Build a simple character, export via dts into the TorqueX engine

Identifying the new pipeline

The first thing I did was try to identify the new art pipeline. I asked on the 3D modeling forum about that, and got some good replies. From what I gather, the pipeline looks like:

1) Model
2) Texture
3) Rig
4) Animate
5) Export to DTS/DSQ

Choose a 3D Program

I then began to look at the various 3D packages that might support that. I tried the following:

1) 3DSMax - Apparently this is the big daddy of all 3d packages. I tried the evaluation, and even bought several good books on it, and did online research on it. I liked the interface, but the price tag makes this unavailable to me.

2) Maya PLE - Similar to 3DSMax, eexcept I didnt buy any books for it. I really liked the interface of it as well. The price makes this unavailable to me as well.

3) MilkShape - I tested this out, but didnt care too much for the interface. Sometimes there are programs that you just get a feeling about, and I didnt have a good one with milkshape, maybe it was because I had evaluated 3DSMax and Maya PLE before this.

4) XSI Foundation - I liked this one as well. The interface took some getting used to, but in order to get the full suite of functionality, you had to get the upgrade. The foundation though looked like it would be the only thing required for the level of stuff I needed to do. All that for 500$, this was the first one I found that I might actually spend time on and use.

5) LightRay 3D - I didnt like the interface. I have heard good things about this program, but it did not stick well with me. To be fair though, I did not give it as much time as the others.

6) LightWave - This was the last one I tested. I had Blender , Modo, and AC3D (suggestion from a poster) up for testing as well. Something stuck with me on Lightwave. The interface to me was intuitive. The list of features would let me handle the above pipeline, and they had a very robust DTS exporter (by Gnometech).

Learn the 3D Package

I chose Lightwave out of my 5 month evaluation period of the various programs. I have learned quite a bit about it, and the hotkeys have become second nature to me so far. The showtool was also written with a lightwave like interface. I downloaded the trial, and bought :

Essential Lightwave 9

The video tutorials are excellent, and I learned about the various approaches to 3D modeling at a high level:

1) Polygonal Modeling
2) Spline Modeling
3) SubDivision Modeling
4) MetaBall modeling

I did my first model with purely polygonal modelng approaches via the video tutorial :



I am currently learning about the spline modeling approaches. The thing that I really liked about this book and in particular Steve Warners website,was that the it explains things fairly well. I assumed that when modeling, you used one approach, and only one approach, I now understand that you can use a variety of modeling approaches, on the same model, dependent on the situation. There is a ton to learn, I am only on chapter 8 , and there are 27 chapters, and tons of video tutorials. I also picked up Dan Ablans book on Lightwave, and will go through that one as well when I am done with Steve Warners.

There seems to be a very strong lightwave community out there, and I even found some good links here on the Torque site, such as Andy Hawkins post here:

Lightwave Rigging

If the URL fails for whatever reason, the url is:

http://www.garagegames.com/index.php?sec=mg&mod=resource&page=view&qid=10098


Build a simple character, export via dts into the TorqueX engine

My current goal, including learning Lightwave , is to build a simple character, do some basic animations, export it to DTS/DSQ, then import it into Torque X. Once this basic peice is working, I want to see if I can implement a C# version of the hiding meshes resource:

Hiding Meshes resource

The Hiding Meshes approach looks exactly what I want to do for character customization.After I get the basic flow down for creating and exporting/importing, I will begin to work on this. I understand the basics of whats happening in the code , but am unsure of how the setup of nodes, mounts, and the like is setup in Torque X. The character I am building will be a block man for testing purposes. I dont know if I need a segmented model, a continous one with parts defined, or what not. I will figure it out in time.

One thing that I want to make clear, is this will still be a isometric viewed game. I want to implement the game as a 3d world, but use a isometric camera view for the game, similar to titans quest and mythos overworld. Ok, Thats a lot of writing :) Until the next update!!