Morph System now in DTS - create Patch?

#1 David,

Please get in contact with me via e-mail. My e-mail is beng@garagegames.com.

Ben

#2 This sounds great. Would the morphing be like flexing your arm and your bicep contracts?
If so, that's great and would explain why I can't get my gamespace model to do it in Torque.

#3 It can be - You can make a muscle morph and then animate it to move when the arm is flexed.
Morphs can also be used to make a mouth talk, facial expressions to change, eyes blink, things to jiggle, etc. Bones and morphs together can do amazing things. I had to have them for my game.

#4 Thanks David.
Using morphs would make the models more life like. Hopefully they wouldn't be a big performance hit.

How well do the morphs and LOD work together, or does it matter?
If it matters and if the morphs do have a performance issue, could there be a morph version of LOD? (ex. stop doing morphs if detail level is too low)

#5 Morphs are very fast and only hit the affected points, so a morph that moves two points to make ears grow is very,very fast.

Since morphs tend to be smaller movements than bone movements, my current implementation only uses the morphs for LOD 0 (highest). If you are drawing lower detailed objects, the morphs would probably not be visible, so they are skipped. So there is NO runtime impact until the model is close to the camera. And only if the morphs are used in the animation currently running.

I can change that if needed, but it seemed reasonable at the time. :)

#6 Actually, thats great.

Hopefully, you can twist Ben's arm and get in a new DTS format that TGE 1.4 can use. ;)

#7 Whoa, this sounds sweeeet. :D

#8 Twist? I helped him with every forum post on the subject. :)

Of course, whether any exporters will support it is an altogether different question.

#9 Ben's aiming it for 1.4, if everyone agrees. It will also be available shortly as a code resource as soon as I get some instructions written up.

Who will support it? Who knows! But I wanted it for my own game, so at least my exporter (ToolBox) has it. It has a switch to select standard DTS or this new morph format DTS export.

The new map2dif tool got me on a roll. I always had problems getting map files I exported to compile with the old one, so I had given up on Torque for a while. TGE also has a higher learning curve than other systems, but it does more. My game involves a lot of outside for flying creatures and Torque is the engine for big outdoors (and more so coming up).

With the new map2dif, I was able to link it into ToolBox, so when you export, it puts the set of jpgs in the same folder with the map file, then runs the map2dif on it. So I just hit export and then open my game and place my new objects (I export into the game interiors folders).

I just finished adding the ability to tag bocks for all the special types for DIF export, including the path nodes and tonight I added a text string to my lights so I can export all the different light types if you bother to type the name in, else you get a standard omni_light for each light. I can only display 8 lights in OpenGL, but the editor allows you to add and export any number of lights for Torque.

With all the non-standard texture sizes, I'm about to add a texture resize function (I use it internally to resize for the OpenGL display).

ToolBox also exports Wad2 (like Quake and 3DGS) and Wad3 (halflife) and imports them by breaking them out to individual tiff or jpg files in your texture directory so you can apply them in ToolBox. (Very handy!) On export, all applied materials are either made into a wad2 or 3 or a set of jpg files for torque.

My personal goal is to make a game using nothing but TGE, ToolBox and Photoshop. (This really points out anything I have missing in ToolBox.)
The morphs was the main thing I wanted to add for my animated models, as using bones to make models talk usually looks pretty rough. The ones I've seen were not that great.

My game is my hobby work and ToolBox was originally done as an OpenGL example app to get work after losing a job when I couldn't show previous OpenGL programming. I've aimed it at doing games and Poser models. since that is what I play with(it is still the only modeler than can import and move the joints just like Poser and create new models and export back to Poser format).

The nice thing about writing your own app (and the nice thing about Torque) is that you can go in and add anything you want to it. I want a texture resize function since I'm too lazy to go over to photoshop to do it all the time. I added an uncompress function to convert compressed Poser files to clear text without having to leave my app. And I've gotten a lot of good suggestions from folks that have been added to the app, mostly depending on whether I understand it and can figure out a way to do it. So Torque is my kind of toy!

#10 Great stuff, Dave.

What you're doing, is an example of what I think that Jeff T. et al dreamt when they started GG. (Besides loads of Torque games to play.)

I wish I had the patience to do some of this.

#11 I wish I had the patience for modeling!
I go and add some new widget to my application rather than work on the model I'm supposed to be building. I started to make models and I've built an entire 3D modeler instead, while my models ares till half finished. Everyone's patience is different!