LOD in Milkshape?

#1 As far as I know, it's still currently unsupported. Someone is going to have to implemented it in the exporter (hoepfully).

#2 Crap. LOD is almost essential for me, I was really hoping to be able to use higher poly models up close. Are there any documents on the DTS file format anywhere? Right now Torque doesn't seem all that useful unless you have a Windows machine and three thousand dollars to throw into Max. My Windows machine has been put out to pasture and isn't even on a desk anymore. I can convert models using Milkshape but doing any long term modelling on that machine would have to be followed by a trip to the chiropractor.

#3 yep the only "full featured" exporter is for max 3 or 4, and it is buggy and requires a $100 third party plug in to do LOD even then!

Lightwave Dave said something about supporting LOD in the LW exporter he had written but I have not seen anything else about it in months.

#4 Lightwave is still a really expensive program. As I said in another thread, what we need is a standalone OBJ > DTS convertor for static models and a standalone MD2 > DTS convertor for animated models. That would allow almost literally any modeller to be used for Torque. I think it would be nice if GarageGames would invest some money into making those two things happen. I apppreciate and respect what Jeff and the guys have done, but it seems a little silly to offer a game engine for $100 but require $3000 software to fully exploit it. And equally silly to have an engine that runs on Linux and Mac OS but REQUIRES a Windows machine to do any meaningful development at all.

#5

Quote:yep the only "full featured" exporter is for max 3 or 4, and it is buggy and requires a $100 third party plug in to do LOD even then!

Just curious, what are you calling it buggy? For me, it works all the time, but I have been hearing alot of people calling it buggy. If I knew what these bugs were perhaps I could do something to either get them fixed or explain how to avoid them.

Also, MAX 4 no longer requires the Multires plugin, as it is built into MAX. It is also a misconcpetion that it is required to make LOD. The Exporter generates static Levels of Detail using Multires, but one can create each detail level by hand if they wanted to.

I am not a milkshape user, so I don't know how to set it up there, but shouldn't one be able to generate static levels of detail in Milkshape by cloning the model and reducing the detail manually?

#6 Reducing the level of detail manually from Milkshape would be a big 'ole pain in the butt. I was going to use Blender and/or Electric Image for the creation of the actual models. Both of those programs have support for decreasing the polygon count of a model. The problem is there doesn't seem to be a way to tell the Milkshape exporter that you are using levels of detail.

#7 Hmm.

Perhaps someone with MAX could set up a liitle exporting shop just to export other peoples models? If someone had the models complete with all the UV information, setting it up and exporting in MAX would take no time at all (5 minutes).

If I had the time to do it, I would export shapes for others.

Note that this would not work for character shapes.

#8

Quote:Both of those programs have support for decreasing the polygon count of a model.

So does Milkshape. It's under the options tab. Sure it's not as robust as 3DSMAX or the like, but for $20 it works very well. Joe you should check it out. Someone with your expertise might be able to push it far. ;)

#9 I forgot about that, still how do we export the LOD information to a DTS from within Milkshape? That is still not possible, correct?

#10 Right. Someone needs to build this into the exporter. There's also many other things it could use. If you read the msExporter_readme.txt:

Quote:Issues & Future Developement
----------------------------

- Split off the DTS SDK into it's own library and continue to refine
it's functionality and API.

- Triangle strips. This is probably the biggest outstanding issue.
Every mesh triangle is emitted as it's own triangle strip. This is
very bad :( Triangles need to be stripped by material. Support
should be added to the DTSMesh class.

- Detail support. Need to add support for progressive meshes. The
DTSMesh class should automatically produce decimated sub-details
based off the original art.

- DSQ exporting. DSQ files are essentially animation sequence files.
They only contain animation sequence information and can be loaded into
a shape at run-time. The same DSQ can be loaded into multiple shapes
allowing animations to be shared.

- Multiple collision meshes. The exporter currently selects the first
mesh named "collision" as a collision mesh. The torque engine actually
allows multiple collision meshes per shape and the exporter should
export all meshes named "collision" as collision meshes.

- Billboard meshes are mesh which the Torque engine automatically
rotates at run time to face the camera. There needs to be some way
of marking meshes. This could be as simple as naming them "billboard".

- Alpha BSP (or ordered) meshes. Alpha textured triangles need to be
rendered in back to front order at run-time for them to render correctly.
The dts file can contain BSP tree meshes used for this purpose.

- Better material support. There are number of material features (besides
animation) which MS doesn't support, these include multiple UV mapping
options, environment mapping flags, addative vs. blended alpha, etc.

#11 That is correct. Only Max or Lightwave's exporters do LOD.

Eric

#12 Another thing to note is that Milkshape doesn't support sorting (SORT::) of translucent objects like the others. You may have to do the sorting manually via code (don't even know if this is possible), so your foilage and other translucent objects will look screwy. ;)

If I had the time to learn programming, I'd have taken this on long ago as it has been a hurdle for me using Milkshape. But my plate is full and learning scripting is my next step. :)

#13 Well this was usefull information for me, now I don't have to hack with Milkshape anymore.. I was wondering where those DSQ files of mine went... but realized that milkshape exporter doesn't export them.. well those are very important so..

Well Me and My group have ambitions, so we just have to invest in MAX and a modeller..

#14 Tyler: You can do sorting via special material names. There's a section in the docs about it.

#15 Where? I don't see anything regarding sort in the special materials section of the MS docs. Are you talking about the mesh option flag? Otherwise I have no idea what you're refering to. The MS exporter doesn't support alpha sorted meshes according to the current task listing. More info would be helpful. Thanks. :)

#16 Sorry... my mistake. I could have sworn it was in there, but I must have confused it with the Max docs.

Sorry to get your hopes up... :/

#17 Now that milkshape will export LOD usng the dts plus exporter .dll...

To make LOD for a model in milkshape to export for tge do you make the LOD a mesh thats a copy of your current mesh and just name it according to naming convention (LOD#) and then hide it... or do you need to make it a seperate .ms3d file... ?

#18 Well if you don't mind spending $60.00 getting Kenneth Finney "Advanced 3d Programming All-In-One" has tons of helpful stuff including using LOD's with milkshape

(edit)- sorry i meant to also answer the question..The one catch with milkshape is that you can't assign LOD# like LOD 1, LOD 2, etc. Milkshape doesn't recognize this. However you can use pixel values like LOD38. So if you were only having 2 LODs for a barrel and you wanted a new LOD established when zoomed out at pixel height 40 then you would change the original to meshes from ex. (cylinder0, top0, bottom0) to (cylinder40, top40, bottom40) and if you wanted you could leave the new mesh with the 0 just as long as your last LOD has the lowest value. Im think you have to have the last one at 0 because when you do a new number your telling the export that the LOD is visible till that pixel number and then jump to the next one. Oh..I almost forgot...after you have your different LOD meshes im pretty sure you just hide them and save in one bundle and when in torque and the pixel height gets down to your specified number it will change the meshes.

(edit:man i suck at forgetting things)-i believe when you go into export your lods in dtsplus you will assign your highest pixel LOD as LOD0 and so on. Next lowest LOD1. If that makes any sense.

#19 I have Finney's excellent work.. (only paid $49 for it).

I was just uncertain if they were stored inside the model or as outside files.. he isn't too clear on making them with the models and exporting.. your right though.. they have to be named name0-name# with the higher number being displayed closer to the camera.. ie. mesh50 would be displayed fairly close and mesh2 would be pretty much out of sight.

thanks for the quick reply.. got me back in the book and on track.. easy to get lost in the info jungle here.

#20 No problem...i understand. Really, i do.