Sea Waves

[Legacy_Vipre]

               The clouds not "rock[ing] back and forth along with the ocean" ruins the illusion of the ship rocking though it does create an illusion of sea swells.

If you have the sky-sphere rocking one direction and the water plane rocking the opposite it should create both illusions at the same time and with half the rock. That or just make the player seasick.'>
               
               

               

                     Modifié par Vipre, 26 mars 2012 - 10:42 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_lordofworms]

               seeing the two side by side (I dl both) I cannot really choose. I think the skysphere one gives more of that Motion sickness effect, great for setting specific instances of sea travel.
but the one without your custom sphere, also is good and gives the sense of just 'sailing' ...

I think I would add both of these, an adventure at seas start with the no custom sphere, and when you run into a storm,load the skysphere one(with all sorts of dark ominous sky)...

you really do inspire people here. Since your thinking and manipulation of the nwn engine is always so cool and outside of the box...and best you happily give out all the hard earned work like you were handing out candy at Halloween.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Jenna WSI]

               I'm really impressed. Didn't think NWN was even capable of this.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_ShadowM]

               Damm cannot get the texture motion to work in gmax uggg. where joco to fix it for us gmax users. If anyone can get it to work let me know. I guess I have to do my work without it and them maybe have one you add the rotation.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               Sadly animated meshes don't work in gmax and I guess there's no way to make them work with scripting.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_KlatchainCoffee]

               I was going to say something about using both, but lordofworms said it all for me.

OTR - thanks for doing this stuff & for showing the way to taking a nwn sea adventure to another level.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

Zwerkules wrote...

Sadly animated meshes don't work in gmax and I guess there's no way to make them work with scripting.

I haven't tried scripting them, I don't think anyway, but here's how to make an animated mesh in GMax from scratch.  Works fine.  Check this out and see if you're doing something differently:



I'll bet you're clicking on the AniMesh modifer after setting the number of samples?  It blanks out the number of samples and you have to re-enter it.

File outputted from the demo:


I'm stil working out some more ideas so I don't have anything more yet.  I encourage everyone to play around with this themselves and see what they come up with.  Post screenshots or videos!  If any modder needs help with the basic effect, just post what the problem is and I'll see what I can do to help.  But I'm almost a  fish out of water in GMax.  Very used to Max.

Thanks for all the positive comments!  '>

I don't have a response yet to some of the suggestions, but I will reply when I do.  You guys rock!
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 27 mars 2012 - 05:20 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_Zwerkules]

               Thank you for the tutorial, OTR. Adding the animesh works in gmax. If if save the scene and load that instead of exporting it as a mdl file and importing it, maybe I can work with animeshes. I haven't tried if they export, but importing a model with animeshes doesn't work. The modifiers on the animeshes are gone. Not only the animesh one, but also the Aurora trimesh modifier.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_ShadowM]

               No, I can animate the mesh. I talking about the texture (See Baba Yaga's excellent demo of the effect here and Bannor Bloodfist's tutorial on reproducing the effect.) The one that make the texture move. It seem like it will not export that kind of data in gmax. Thanks for the mesh demo though that nice. '>. Well my idea was going to do it with a skin mesh give you more control on the waves and allows you to match up crest emmitters to match up the animated water better. '>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               @Zwerkules - Oh!  AniMesh won't import back into NWMax.  Animesh is a one way street like that.  The reason why is that no information is stored with the vertices to explain how they got like that.  Does this suck on some level?  Yes.  But in return you get the ability to capture the effect of any modifier or modifiers.  This is some powerful black magic.  I've captured exotic and intensive things like cloth modifiers, no problem.  You can stack 15+ modifiers on a mesh to achieve the desired effect (if that's what you want) and then bake it down to AniMesh.  And you can tune the number of samples you use so your exported model does not necessarily export to a large file.  Compile that model and sometimes you can halve the size again.  The scrolling texture model below, uncompiled, is just 19k.

@ShadowM - Take a look at this video for scrolling-texture animesh in GMax:



I'd really like to see how you do that with skin mesh!  In my mind I know what you're talking about- and it looks cool- but I haven't been able to make it look in Max how it looks in my mind.

You can download the output from that video (including the texture) here:


NOTE: In my demo video the texture's scrolling does not play back perfectly smoothly.  This is because my animation frame range is 100 but my animation only runs to frame 90.  It plays back perfectly in-game.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 27 mars 2012 - 09:09 .
                     
                  

            

[Legacy_ShadowM]

               Thank you, I was adding the Animesh first and that seem to cause me all sorts of problems but like in your video if I did Xform first it worked better. Now I dealing with the out of memory error, but if I keep the samples down I can get it to export. Now I just have to match it up skinmesh animation better with the boat and do some emitter test. I was suppose to mess with this stuff this weekend but could not resist '>
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_ShadowM]

               ok here a link to module / hak / gmax file with some emmitters attached. They need work but just more work in progress stuff.
LINK
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_lordofworms]

               Hey ShadowM. Just letting you know that link is unavailable. Says 404 forbidden for myself when trying to follow link. just FYI.

I have been messing with this concept myself and should have something to show by the end of day.
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_lordofworms]

               one question/thing maybe someone more knowledgable in setting up scrolling textures can help answer.

I been messing with this idea for several sea variant tile features based on the microset. (medium/low/high pitches, side-side rocking,etc)
the only problem I seem to run into is the scrolling texture always seems to 'skip' when transitioning from end frame to beginning frame.

when I autokey from beginning I am setting .25 for each block of animation (i am using 4 keys currently) (1 at 45, another at 90, another at 145, and lastly 189)

from what i understand I want it to start at 0.0 and then through the course of the animation end up at 1.0 for its v coordinate in UVWxForm.
how can I get a smooth transition from frame 189 back to frame 0.
it seems that autokey kinda jumps the UVW xform a bit so that when going through the frames , frame 0 is at like 0.0025 instead of 0.0 for its v coordinate.
any advice?
               
               

               
            

[Legacy_OldTimeRadio]

               

lordofworms wrote...
I been messing with this idea for several sea variant tile features based on the microset. (medium/low/high pitches, side-side rocking,etc) the only problem I seem to run into is the scrolling texture always seems to 'skip' when transitioning from end frame to beginning frame.

You're trying to do this as a tile animation, is that correct?

when I autokey from beginning I am setting .25 for each block of animation (i am using 4 keys currently) (1 at 45, another at 90, another at 145, and lastly 189)

You can get away with using less keys, though in some circumstances Max/NWN will guess incorrectly about which direction things are moving and you'll have to use a few more to clue it in.  If you look at the last video I posted, you'll notice I don't lay a key down at 0, my first key actually goes down at frame 45 (of 90 frames) and GMax/Max automatically places they key at frame 0.

from what i understand I want it to start at 0.0 and then through the course of the animation end up at 1.0 for its v coordinate in UVWxForm.

Yep.  For the most basic kind of animating like this, that's right.

how can I get a smooth transition from frame 189 back to frame 0.

Could it be that the length of the animation you define in the tile base does not have the correct frame range?  There is also the possibility that the frame range for that animation is hardcoded by the engine.  I'm not sure if that's the case or not.

it seems that autokey kinda jumps the UVW xform a bit so that when going through the frames , frame 0 is at like 0.0025 instead of 0.0 for its v coordinate.

In most cases this is due to having set the frame range wrong in the tile's base.  However, if you attempted to reimport the animation back in via NWmax (which is bad, don't do that), NWMax will adjust your animations so that your animation actually starts at frame 10 or something like that.  This can throw things off.  NWMax was built with some ideas about how things should be done and it appears that (on reimport) it tries to fit things into that mold.  In this case IIRC, the reasoning behind NWMax mucking with the animations on reimport (if that is, indeed, what you're dealing with) has to do with NWN always needing a key of some sort at frame 0 and the convention of starting animations at frame 10.  I'm not sure if that accurately reflects how the NWN engine works, today, but some of these issues were reported in the distant past and it appears that some functionality may have been implemented in NWMax to account for the behavior.  All of that is purely if the issue you're dealing with involves getting screwed keys on reimport of animesh.

I also saw the above behavior when reimporting animation keys which were simply baked starting at frame 0, so it's not just animesh.
               
               

               

                     Modifié par OldTimeRadio, 29 mars 2012 - 05:34 .