Ts Or Gs?

#1 Not that I know of, since the DTS exporter works with both.

#2 Thanks David. I just wanted to make sure I wasn't overlooking some features of gamespace. :-)

#3 Hello Alex:

I have been using gameSpace for some time now and recently just purchased trueSpace through one of the various special pricing packages that Caligari always seem to offer. I guess I'd recommend trueSpace if it is an option for you (especially if it is available at a sale price) since it is the complete, full-featured package. The trueSpace 6.6 package I bought a couple of days ago was one of Caligari's 'weekend specials' and included the game plugins such as .map and .dts exporters for Torque. It seems that finding specials on Caligari's website is sometimes a difficult and quite serendipitious challenge, so it may be worth just contacting them directly to see what they can offer you in terms of a trueSpace/plugin package.

Hope this helps!

Patrick

p.s. I'm not sure if the special $299 deal I got is still available (and if it is... for how long), but here is a link (near the bottom of the page):

http://www.caligari.com/store/special/wknd_111904.html

#4 One cool thing about trueSpace over gameSpace is that the physics engine in trueSpace is very powerful and since the resulting animation from the TS physics simulation is "baked" into keyframe data, you can easily fake alot of very cool physics based animation effects.

#5 Matt, definitely. I am totally new to truespace but I watched a bunch of demos and tutorials and the things that really blew my mind were the physics demos and the inline rendering, and the texture baking abilities as well. not to mention the magic ring and other modeling tools.

I am still a Blender fan, but I am not one of those who uses software (open source apps) solely on ideological grounds. I just wanna have fun and truespace is fun.

#6 The TS physics simulation sounds great. But regarding the texture baking, in GS it stores the textures as one image per poly. Which is the opposite of the 'one image per mesh or model' that I want. So does TS 6.6 have better texture baking than GS?

#7 Paul, re: texture baking it seems that TS 6.6 does exactly what you describe: 1 texture per poly, and it warns you against running it on high poly meshes.

But at least we can export models w/ multiple image textures. How many textures in a .dts file before Torque crashes? :-(

I wonder if there is a plugin to assemble together these "compute textures from illumination" .jpgs? You could assemble them together in gimp or photoshop...

#8 Alex, yeah I don't know about assembling the textures. Seems unlikely. It would be nice to use GS and its procedural shaders and renderer to generate a nice, single texture map. I haven't had any luck finding a tsx plug-in that did usable texture baking either. Have you found anything?

I get the feeling that more than a few textures for a main character type dts is not good for performance. (But I'm more familiar with Blitz3d where it seemed even more important to limit textures.)

I was, or am, interested in using radiosity to bake in a nice texture but from what I could tell, had to go with a big 3d package like Lightwave or 3ds Max. ??

Paul

#9 TS 6.6 can bake the textures w/ radiosity. (still 1 texture per poly though). I posted on the caligari forums asking if we can generate 1 texture somehow.

#10 Yeah, I'm not too hopeful though because of the TS/GS warning about baking with a lot of polys.

Checkout this Lightwave tutorial on baking a cow. :-) Now that's what I want to do, but it looks like I need to sell a few of my toys to buy Lightwave or XSI or something similar - a little more high-end product.

www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/rendering/lw_baker/lw_baker_cow.html

I'm interested in the texture baking process but haven't seen a lot of coverage or support in lower cost indie-style products. I looked at Gile[s] which is apparently just a great lightmapping tool but it doesn't use your original UVs when producing its lightmaps. So I don't see that it's useful for baking radiosity lighting and procedural shading into a model.

And I've also heard the argument that lightmapping is good only for static scenes and not models that are moving. But the realism that's added to a model by doing some radiosity/global illumination seems very attractive to me, along with the ability to use procedural shaders and an initial high polycount model to more automatically produce a nice looking texture map. My 2D skills in PhotoShop are limited so I'm looking for a good 3d, procedural, lightmapping-style of producing better looking models. At a hobbyist/indie price. :-)

#11 Not to keep this thread off topic, but Softimage XSI 4 has a render to texture option that bakes the lighting into one texture and preserves the original UV's of your object.

XSI foundation is a steal at $495 and right now it includes 5 DVD of training videos on learning the features of XSI. There is also a fully functional 30 demo version that you can download to try it out. Right now we are in the middle of writing the DTS exporter for XSI, its worth a long look for anyone who hasn't checked it out yet.

#12 Thanks for the Softimage info Matt. I have been thinking of XSI, just waiting to try the 30day demo until I'm able to buy. And I guess waiting for your XSI DTS exporter. I bet with that price and capability, we'll see XSI become a popular editor for Torque content.

#13 Matt was right - the texture baking in Softimage XSI is pretty cool. After the XSI exporter is done, then we will be able to texture all game models/characters in XSI with procedurals, decals, bump map, "render tree", etc. and then use the "RenderMap" feature of XSI, which is great because it produces 1 texture for the whole poly mesh and preserves UVs (unlike Truespace's 1 texture image per poly).

XSI is so awesome- at $495 you get a killer tool plus loads of docs and DVD tutorials.

Truespace is still good to have around though for it's loads of poly modeling widgets and it's rigid body physics. Other than those 2 things, XSI foundation is a much better better tool at about the same price point as Truespace.