Wall Worm Anvil

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Wall Worm Anvil

Postby shawnolson on Tue Feb 14, 2012 2:29 am

I've loaded a new version of Wall Worm Tools tonight. In these is a repackaged tool that I'm now naming Anvil (as a play on Hammer). It is the evolution of the Displacement Tool but since it's evolving past just displacements, I needed a new name.

OK... so here is where it stands. It now has a full-featured VMF exporter*. The asterisk is because I have not yet figured out how to translate UVW mapping of faces into the format needed for VMF brush sides (the same dilemma that's been around in the displacements for a while). I'm getting closer to a solution but still struggling. Several people have been helping me look into it.

So here are some of the really cool things about this new VMF exporter barring the UVW dilemma:

3D Skyboxes can be designed as extensions of your scene/level at full scale and along with your level. It means that you don't have to wait until all the level is designed before moving to the skybox and rescaling, etc. All you do is tag the skybox items as belonging to the skybox with the Skybox Add button.

The exporter will export brush geometry. Simply tag the brush objects with the Brush Add button.

Convexity point and brush entities get exported.

All WW models.

Skywriter Sky.

Also... the exporter will collect any of these valid objects from XRef Scenes in the current scene.

ANyway, even without UVW on brushes, you may find this a convenient way of getting your level and models into Hammer. As soon as the UVW is finished, there will be even less reason to use Hammer. And I've been petitioning Maple3D to add entity input/output. If added... you may never see me open Hammer again! :)
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Re: Wall Worm Anvil

Postby Terr on Thu Feb 16, 2012 1:28 am

If you aren't already reading FGD files, I have an ANTLR grammar for it.
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Re: Wall Worm Anvil

Postby shawnolson on Thu Feb 16, 2012 2:57 am

Terr wrote:If you aren't already reading FGD files, I have an ANTLR grammar for it.

Thanks for the heads up and offer :) As it turns out I actually just spent the last couple days building a FGD parser to accomodate an interface for Entity I/O.

At the moment, the main help I need is figuring out how to translate the UVW coordinates of a face + extra offsetting at the texture level to translate into the uaxis/vaxis of that face in the VMF. I have a thread over on the CG Society forums, on the Area forums... and on the Steam forums. I haven't really gotten anything that computes (though I think that there are some good clues in the Steam thread). My guess is that there is some mixture of a couple "simple" numbers into a simple formula to solve that... but you kind of have to know all the mathematical functions, what they do and when to use them, to make it actually simple. You know... like cos() and dot() and tan() and eatPi(). At this point I'm just trying to solve it with brute force and random manipulation of variables...

Then again... I could pick up a trig/geometry book and try to refresh my mind a couple decades... but I'm just as interested in doing that at the moment as pulling clumps of my beard off and shoving the hair in my eyeballs :P
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Re: Wall Worm Anvil

Postby Terr on Thu Feb 16, 2012 6:10 pm

Alas, my matrix-foo isn't good at all. I'd probably end up trying to run lots of super-simple VMFs through compilation, and trying to see how outputs differ.

BTW, I'd keep an eye out for the next time Valve does some SDK update which removes/blanks/screws-up the SDK configs, if you're using them to determine the set of relevant FGDs. Valve's strategy seems to be that the SDK (or tools within it) "fix" the configuration files when it or a sub-application is run. When that happens with PackBSP, some users interpret it as a failing in the program itself rather than Valve's slapdash patching system.
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Re: Wall Worm Anvil

Postby shawnolson on Tue Feb 21, 2012 3:36 am

I've updated the VMF Exporter today. It fixes a bug with any brush entities as well as makes the textures one step closer to accurate. They should have correct translation now... though rotation and scale are still not correct.

Also fixed WWMT proxie rotations.

And added an Entity I/O interface.

Here's the changelog.
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Re: Wall Worm Anvil

Postby shawnolson on Sat Mar 03, 2012 8:42 pm

Updated today. UVW is now correctly exported... along with other updates. See the changelog.

Enjoy :)
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Re: Wall Worm Anvil

Postby shawnolson on Sun Mar 04, 2012 12:22 am

And here is a new video giving overview of the way the WW VMF Export system works. Things are exported as brush geometry if they are in any layer named "Convexity Walls" or "Convexity Floors" or when you tag them as brush geometry with Anvil (There are also Macros for that function if you want to bind a key).

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Re: Wall Worm Anvil

Postby shawnolson on Fri Mar 30, 2012 11:53 pm

In the version I released a couple weeks ago, I introduced a bug with proxy orientation in the VMF exporter. That's fixed today along with new exporter features... presets, compile options and settings saved in current file.

Sorry for anyone who may have had problems with proxies in the last update... I was unable to work in Max much the last couple of weeks and didn't find the error until today.
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