Horde3D

I have a character(rigged/physique), that was exported from Max, loaded up in the engine, and for the most part it seems to look pretty close to how it does in Max. What I have noticed, is that upon exporting or converting(not sure which), the model is sliced up, I'm guessing based on materials, those faces that belong to a particular material are sliced(could be wrong). However, for this particular character, the crotch area, is screwed up, screwed up in such a way, that one I have overlapping faces, that intersect each other(see image).



I'm guessing, but is there a way for the converter, not to slice up the character, or would you recommend, exporting as only one uv-unwrapped with one texture/material(currently it's a multi-sub)? I know there is a -noopt option to the converter, but it doesn't seem to improve matters or make matters worse. I would hate to have someone redo the mapping, especially if it wouldn't fix the issue.

Thanks again

I haven't really progressed much on this issue, stuff that exports and works fine in my legacy engine, causes issues with Horde3d. I would like to switch to Horde3D, as there is quite a bit of work involved if I wanted to upgrade my current engine to some of the features that Horde brings.

Another problem, I have attempted to fix is the back of the model's right leg, as see in the picture below.




I have spent quite a bit of time lately, searching all over the forums, for other people with similar issues, and I found some code updates, that someone had posted (I think swiftcoder). I went ahead and made all of his changes, it really didn't solve my particular issues, but it didn't hurt anything. One thing I did do for fun was to turn on software skinning, and I had some major bone issues with her feet, flopping all over, I wasn't quite sure how to turn on software skinning, here is how I did it.

Horde3D::setNodeParami(p.node, ModelNodeParams::SoftwareSkinning, 1);


I keep thinking that perhaps I should have the artist use one material, and just uvmap the character, to see if it fixes any issues, but time is short atm, and I'm starting to get frustrated with a few of these nagging things. The problem is I'm not good at max to help the artist, I'm just the programmer.


I have even fetched Beta 3, and exported with it, and had the same problems.

Usually, multi-materials in Max should not cause any trouble. So it should not be necessary to redo the uv mapping.

Concerning the software skinning: You have enabled it in the right way but you need to select a shader that does not do skinning (e. g. standard shader in Beta2 or disabling the Skinning flag in Beta3), otherwise the skinning is done two times and the animation looks wrong.

Did you use the very latest svn revision for testing? There have been a few Collada bug fixes related to skinning very recently. Please try to bring your model in one of the sample applications (using sn head revision). You should also try to reload the Collada file in your DCC app to make sure that the Collada file is not corrupted.

I appreciate the reply, the software skinning thing makes sense now. I think there is a bug in the Collada exporter, combined with some wierd physique things on the model, that are tripping it up(looks fine in max). I managed to export it out, with unwrap3d (of all things), into the program, and then from there export it to .dae, surprisingly all the issues are gone. Of course there is an issue, and I can't seem to fix it, basically when looking at the model and zooming in somewhat close, pieces of the model clip out early(when they shouldn't), I tried playing with the clip planes, but couldn't seem to solve it. It almost seems like a lod type thing, and switching to LOD's that don't exist, but I thought LOD was new to Beta 3, and I'm using Beta 2. I dunno, I'm pretty stumped, hopefully some light turns on soon

When you use hardware skinning, the model and mesh bounding boxes are currently not updated. This could be the reason for the wrong culling. You can confirm it by using software skinning and checking if the problem has gone. A workaround for this in the future could be to compute the maximum bounding box of the model for all animations in a preprocessing-step.

Well, solved, not really, sort of worked around it The software skinning thing did seem to fix the bounding box issue, but it was so much slower, I'm intriqued by the discussion about the software skinning being optimized. I found what seemed to work, was taking the unwrap3d plugin, exporting out of max, and then reimporting back into max. What this does is take the physique data, and converts it to skin, it seemed a bit more happier with skin data, as apposed to physique data.

I had a couple issues before this with normals, and being inside out, those were addressed using the 'box' trick. If you look closely, there are a few issues(and especially walking around), where you can see issues with the characters. Basically, in these screens some of the characters didn't go through the export/re-import (trick). I think since I heard that physique was sorta on the way out, that I will advise to use skin instead, as it's more common amongst other software, like perhaps maya,lightwave,so on.

In the future, I might take our engine's exporter, and spit out Horde format, as it's pretty solid, however, I like Collada, as it's common across many other software packages. I think it's nice to have one format that you base conversions from, however, we are sort of at Collada's mercy if you will, and I don't really like that much either. I see myself, getting into Blender at some point, as I believe it can do all that's needed to make quality models for real-time games, as I have 0, I mean 0 interest in pre-rendered material anyways. Besides I'm a bit peeved that all competing products end up as Autodesk whatever, is Lightwave next?